Now that our
Together Retro - Final Fantasy Spin-Offs month has drawn to a close, I'm carrying over
my progress in Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions into this thread, albeit slightly sooner than expected. In brief summary, I reached a point in the game where I overleveled my party into a corner. The difficulty of random encounters in FFt:WotL is scaled based on the party member with the highest level in your party (
regardless of whether or not they're in your active battle party). I had initially thought that this difficulty was based on the
average level of your party, so I experimented with filling half my roster with level 1 generics. This had no effect whatsoever. Taking level 1 chumps up against level 90+ monsters was even less fun than taking a party
barely capable of beating those odds. In a nutshell, I was losing far more random encounters than I was winning, and the amount of enjoyment I was gleaning from the game was taking a serious nosedive. Things were looking grim my friends.
But, being the stubborn sort that I am, I wasn't ready to throw in the towel. I vaguely recalled hearing about a 'de-leveling' trap that you can find in certain battlefields (turns out this trap is called a degenerator). My initial impression was that the occurrence and placement of these traps is randomized, and to be honest I have better things to do than wander around battlefields in FFT, searching for a trap that may or may not be there, while vastly overpowered enemies mop the floor with my entire party. Blech. But! After a little research I discovered that there's
nothing random about those traps! They will always be on the same battlefield(s) in exactly the same place(s). A glimmer of hope was born!
But … it was the merest of glimmers. I'd need to survive long enough to defeat all but one of those overpowered enemies, and with that lone remaining enemy I'd need to spam the Rend Power ability to the point where they were completely neutralized as a threat.
And so it was that we faced our foes across the windswept sands of the Zeklaus Desert. Standing in opposition were three minotaurs of various types, and three bombs of various types. Any one of these enemies was capable of one-shotting the lone white mage I brought to the party. The rest of the party could withstand two,
maybe three hits depending on how badly enemy forces spammed their powerful special abilities (which is typically every attack for the duration of the battle). I had one lone ace up my sleeve. Every member of the party (save for that one mage) was equipped with the Rend Power ability (i.e. Arts of War). And two of
them were equipped with pistols. Now … the pistol is a pretty crappy weapon in this game, a veritable pea shooter …
but it
does allow you to hit with Rend Power from a distance,
hopefully while keeping out of range of powerful enemy strikers. This was going to be …
a longshot (yuck, yuck).
This battle went forever and initially it seemed like defeat was inevitable. I had three KO'd party members. Of the two remaining, neither of them were ranged fighters or healers, and one was simply running for his life until such time that he could be adequately healed (which realistically wasn't going to happen). The other one was throwing phoenix downs at whichever body was closest to perma-death on any given turn, and hoping that the remaining enemy horde didn't suddenly figure out that
he was their gravest threat. Luckily FFT enemies can pretty reliably be counted upon to completely savage whomever is closest to death and in
this case that meant whichever character had been most recently resurrected (hey at least it reset the perma-death counter!).
Then … against all odds, my white mage got an active turn immediately after being resurrected. This allowed her to quickly teleport away and resurrect
another character. Soon enough we were actually getting people
healed up again. Rather than being in full retreat we were slowly shifting back into offensive mode. We had whittled enemy numbers down to a lone minotaur, and the ranged fighters had set about working him over with Rend Power. Against all odds … the plan was working. Soon that minotaur was only hitting for 150HP of damage rather than the 700+ that he had originally started with. Then 50 ... 30. And … eventually we had worked him down to 1 power. He was only hitting for 1 point of damage per round. And it was then that I sent Ramza to find that degenerator trap while remaining party members started using Rend Speed on that poor remaining minotaur (no but seriously screw him). After that it went off like clockwork. It took a while but I repeatedly stepped on the degenerator trap until Ramza had gone from level 95 clear down to level 60. And on that note, we finally sent that defenseless minotaur to the cow pasture in the sky.
I repeated this process for three more characters who were level 70 or higher. As levels came down the battles were easier. I was actually enjoying the game again. Hey, I think I put this one back on track! I thought I had completely screwed myself out of finishing the game, but at this point I think it should be more than manageable once again!
And that is the story of how I lost 35+ levels in Final Fantasy and walked away a happy man.
