Status Chovus Aug 30, 2020
Beat using a walkthrough and maps, and drawing from my recent experience with Wizardry Gaiden 4. I read the manual and a couple guides to make an informed decision on my party. I learned of a trick to mix good and evil characters so I planned to make a full party of good elves with an evil thief to become …
Beat using a walkthrough and maps, and drawing from my recent experience with Wizardry Gaiden 4. I read the manual and a couple guides to make an informed decision on my party. I learned of a trick to mix good and evil characters so I planned to make a full party of good elves with an evil thief to become a ninja, 3 samurai with 1 or 2 changing to lord, a cleric and mage for fastest access to high level magic. I also made a bishop to stay in town and ID stuff. The only part of this that did not go to plan during the few hours I spent on character creation was a lucky roll that let me start with a lord! At level 10 the thief switched to ninja, and traps were annoying for the rest of the game. I can say that ninja is not as good with traps as thief. When cleric reach level 13 for the best spells I had her change to lord, and the mage changed to bishop at 13 after I made sure she learned teleport and enough other max level spells to be able to cast teleport 4 times.
Teleport was the main goal because this game is a huge pain in the ass. Navigation, limited inventory and having to go through so much of the dungeon just to get back to town. The beginning was running back and forth close to the stairs to grind the mage to level 2 for the map spell, which I save state scummed for infinite castings. Later the 2 samurai got it so I could be a bit more liberal. I explored about as much as I could of the first 4 floors before I went looking for a better walkthrough with maps. Yes that's better, I just want to zip around completing the stupid objectives with minimal fuss while I min max my characters to own the enemies. I absolutely hated the tedious aspects: constant save state scumming to ID stuff with the level 1 bishop, because it was faster to load state than cure afraid, scumming level ups for good rolls, basic navigation (I did get the item with infinite map spells but that should be a basic feature of the God damn interface), and managing the inadequate inventory space.
It did not take too long to get to the end once I could teleport around and had maps so I could go only where I absolutely needed to. I went through the gauntlet at the end using the pool on the final floor to keep everyone healed, which was very tedious. I used my own magic to heal up for the final boss rather than use the pool but kept a backup save state just in case. Then I fought the final boss and got wrecked in the first round. I tried starting the battle over multiple times and changing what everyone did. The problem was the boss uses high level hit all mage nukes, and comes with multiple random minions that also use hit all nukes. So on a good first round, the 2 characters with the most health would barely survive. Ok try a different strategy, need protection from magic. I had the lords and ninja fight while both samurai and bishop cast cortu for magic resist. I kept this up for a few rounds except the bishop summoned the gatekeeper, used the max level nuke all and put a fizzle field on the boss. This allowed the party survive, but I had to use 4 resurrections during the battle, save state scummed to make sure they actually worked of course. The fight had cacodemons and some weaker enemies. I focused on killing the minions first but at one point the cacodemons moved to the back and I ended up slaughtering the boss in a single round. Then I had to do some serious save state scumming to finish those caco bastards because they kept calling for reinforcements! It took quite a few tries for the RNG to swing in my favor and not get wiped out, since the entire party was low on health and out of spells. When I finally won, no one was dead! I would have accepted only a single character surviving.
My party:
Golden the good elf lord: level 13 with sword of master, knight shield, armor of master, bacinet, iron gloves and knight bracers.
Chovus the good elf samurai: level 13 with master katana, armor of defense, padded target shield, brass sallet, iron gloves and bracers.
Aevariel the good elf samurai: level 13 with sword of master, bushi scale, padded target shield, brass sallet, leather gloves and bracers.
Crystal the good elf cleric/lord: level 11 with light crossbow, armor of knights, tower shield, leather sallet, leather gloves and knight bracers.
Valcaria the evil elf thief/ninja: level 12 with silver hammer, bushi scale, padded target shield, leather sallet, leather gloves and ankh of youth.
Celestra the good elf mage/bishop: level 11 with staff of air, emerald robes, leather sallet, leather gloves and gold medallion.
The characters definitely could have used better gear and been higher level, but I did not want to grind that much.