Managed to beat the game though there were times when I felt like skipping ahead or abandoning it altogether. I started by making 1 character of every class and did not spend too much time rolling stats because I found the rolls very generous. The star of my team was the female elf ninja, Valcaria, who had max speed and accuracy. She went first every battle and more often than not killed something every turn. Next was Crystal the elf cleric who had the 2nd highest speed. Then Golden the female elf knight on the front line, Aevariel the male elf archer, Endora the human sorceress and last the slow poke me as the elf paladin.
I bought a couple of basic magic items; a staff, blowpipe and crossbow. Then I grinded to level 5 in the starting town (with much difficulty) and completed the dungeon, though I had to use the level 1 robber to open the door. I later found I could stack thief tools to get the ninja's thieving high enough. The enemies that do area damage are ridiculously overpowered because they can hit the same people more than once for massive total damage and even killing people that go to 0 hp. Damn sludge beasts, jugglers etc. My entire strategy centered around never letting any of those enemies get off a single area attack whatever it took; my own area spells, save state scumming and changing what my characters do to change the random seed and fleeing or avoiding the battle.
I went from town to town via the portals and poked around to see what I could do without leveling up any more. I did the earth town dungeon and but could not get past the traps without a death. I later came back with teleport and trained the ninja's thieving as high as I could. Got wrecked by the snow beast in the air town and decided to skip dungeons and go to the last town for the best training. There I got 2 hirelings from the jail there; a gnome cleric and evil female elf archer. I later kicked out the cleric for a level 6 dwarf ninja, who surprisingly kept up with the party damage wise.
Did the water town dungeon, then the air town dungeon. Found a fight with leprechauns that dropped 100k gold. Did it twice and ended up with 200k but could not get more than that. Infinite source of gold though, so I went and bought the best gear I could find and a teleport orb. Went past the snow beasts to get a ring with +15 AC. Went in again and got another. Repeated a dozen times or so until everyone was rocking AC in the 50s to 70s. Broke the game again.
Then I finished up the towns and started exploring the overworld and other dungeons. Did not take long to find a well that gives extreme stats for 1 fight with some conveniently placed extreme difficulty fights nearby. Infinite xp, broke the game again. My team went from about level 9 to 19 and I explored most of the map and dungeons. I then got bored trying to figure out what to do and started using a walkthrough.
I did many of the quests, finally got walk on water and lloyd's beacon and used the boosters to get everyone's stats into the 50s. Then I found the cuisinart and very quickly got everyone to level 76; a single cast of disintegrate was enough to win the fight. I found a massive bug which kind of prevented me from progressing with the story. I had only done the knight and archer class quests and needed to bring the hireling son to the king in order to use the time machine. But every time I went to the inn my 2 hirelings vanished and my archer and sorceress became hirelings, complete with their fee per day being the amount of gold they had. I was kind of bummed by that and it is the reason I got them to such a high level. I decided to make 2 new characters and deleted the barbarian. Xalveris the human ninja and Celestria the elf knight. While I had the party split I sent my knight alone to advance the story, did the cleric, paladin, ninja and knight (again for the newbie) quests, boosted up the new comers and then power leveled them on the cuisinarts with only the archer and sorceress as hirelings to help.
Now with everyone the same level I finished the game. Got owned by the mega dragon, disintegrated the 4 elemental lords and the final boss (seriously OP spell). Tried the final puzzle a few times before giving up despite the walkthrough telling me how to do it and watcher what passes for the ending on YouTube. I really have no interest in cryptography because I play video games to do things that I can’t do in real life, like delving into a dark and forbidden dungeon to fight fantastical creatures and find wondrous magic items. I would solve this puzzle by having the sorceress roll an intelligence check.
My overall experience with this game was mixed. I like the pen and paper D&D feel and the world, but so much of the game is mind numbingly tedious, poorly designed or outright broken. The worst part of the game was definitely the overpowered area attack enemies, which I can only assume is a bug, followed by the excessive overuse of battles vs large numbers of enemies. So many of those latter fights caused me to sigh and roll my eyes as I mash the attack button and say "wake me up when the battle is done", or load the state and avoid the battle. I tried the optional fight vs the 66 devil lords but there were over 200 of them! I also hated how powerful items had alignment restrictions that you had no way of knowing until you try to equip them. It really ruined the rush of finding a sweet item when there was probably only a 30% chance that the character could even use it, and I did not want to fool around with changing alignment. I suspect the SNES version is worse than the others.
