Game:

Final Fantasy VI (1994)

Duration: 1:12:08

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1

You guys technically gave me a tie here (between Phoenix Cave and Owzer's House), and I chose to do the Phoenix Cave first because I thought that it would be more interesting to do things in that order. Note that I don't have eight party members, so I'm running through with three people on a team. I debated stacking the team that will fight the Red Dragon with four people, but decided against it because it spreads my equipment thinner and makes it easier for the Mus to tear me apart with 1K Needles.

However, I did stack the team that will fight the Red Dragon with my three highest leveled members (Celes, Sabin Edgar, otherwise known as team CES). There was no good reason to put Gau or Cyan on the Red Dragon team, but in hindsight it may have been better to swap Sabin and Setzer. In particular, I'm not a fan of the fact that Sabin dies in a hit from S. Cross, but more on that later. It's possible that there were some equipment conflicts that would explain my choice there, but it's hard to remember.

The navigation in this dungeon is surprisingly forgiving, but at this point the navigation is not a large logistical concern anyways. The spike traps can be circumvented by simply taking the hits and healing up, and the chests can be ignored, cutting the dungeon's length by a third probably. Most of the time my movements take me where I want to go, and despite being a cave it's relatively easy to visualize.

The main issue is simply dealing with the mess of equipment swaps that I need to make in the first half to stay competitive. There's a lot to remember, and therefore a lot to mess up, and that's even after I took steps to reduce the volume of things to remember (selling off stuff I don't need, organizing things so that most of my equipment swaps come down to repeating the same tasks, fighting a battle with sub-par equipment to avoid an equipment swap, etc). Overall, I only make one large menuing mistake in this segment, and a series of coincidences prevented that from affecting me. I'm glad that this is the only minisode where I have to make on-camera equipment swaps in a multi-party dungeon. I'd easily recommend skipping forward in the video for the last two equipment swaps; they take a while and there isn't much payoff.

As for the battles, they aren't as bad as they could be, but I still need to be careful. The Aquila shows up alone, and this makes it fairly predictable. Not that one even showed up anyways, so who cares. It's particularly lame with team CGS (Cyan, Gau, Setzer), where Cyan just depletes its MP with Mindblow turning the battle into a joke. Witches and Mus are both ripped apart by Celes, making the battles in the non-lava rooms generally a cakewalk for team CES. However, 1K Needles and Quasar from those guys threaten team CGS with their low HP. At least Mindblow generally incapacitates one per turn, lowering the odds of a wipe. I try to use Mindblow on the first turn on the non-lava floor for exactly this reason. It's hard to overpower the Mus and the Witches like team CES does because Cyan Setzer and Gau all have unreliable offense. Jokers and Revenants are just kinda there. With most of my characters having fire protection or decent magical defenses, they can't really do much.

The lava floor is where the tables turn and suddenly team CGS becomes more proficient. H-Bomb and Mindblow both destroy Ourobouros (not even going to try to spell that correctly) quite naturally, whereas with team CES I need to explicitly identify those guys and hit them with a Chainsaw/Aurabolt. Sea Flowers pretty much hit a wall on both Gau and Setzer, meaning they are unlikely to pierce Setzer's healing. On the other hand, they rip apart Sabin (gosh I hate Sabin's defenses), leaving it possible for team CES to get stuck without healing. Thankfully I can confuse them with Noiseblaster, but there are a couple issues. First off, this leads to me wasting turns in other fights using the Noiseblaster when nothing can be confused. Second, they come in large packs so many attacks still slip through. At least Edgar is relatively safe in these fights, but if he's left on his own he may be overpowered. Overall this strat works, but it's awkward. CGS rips Sea Flowers apart with Cyclonic/H-Bomb, although Cyan is pretty much deadweight as usual.

Overall the encounters here are somewhat manageable. Unlike the next several dungeons, the strategies for different encounters in the same area are somewhat synergistic, and the party members I am using are fairly well suited to the dungeon. Even Cyan's Mindblow and Empoweror have their place. I also have enough Fire/Thunder resistant equipment to go around where I need it to be. It wasn't the hardest dungeon up until this point.

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