Revenge of the Hand: MacDaddy Mike's playthrough topic part 2

Also, this is going to be looooong, I only watched the first one or two vids yet.

I'm up to vid 9 out so far, by the by.

Quick, without looking, what DOES the back of your hand look like?

Playing every now and then, I did all but finish up preparations for the assault on Kefka's Tower. Magic all around, sans Shadow for the colosseum just in case. I finally picked up a Charm Bangle for teams without Mog in them and bet one of the two Heal Rods in the game for a second Magus Rod. The fight for it is against a Pug, who likes to counter every hit it takes with a powerful physical (blockable) and Step Mine (not blockable). From all the Veldt wandering I've done throughout the game, Step Mine does over 3300 damage. The options for beating the colosseum Pug are to kill it in one hit (not happening in a LLG) or turn it into an Imp to prevent it from casting Step Mine. This lead to Shadow learning his first spell. Slap a Merit Award on him and send him off wielding the Illumina, then hope for the best. The Pug has decent magic block so Imp may miss. Also, the brilliant AI may change the Pug back if it casts Imp again. Luckily, the Illumina using MP for criticals means it can drain enough MP to prevent Imp being recast.

I've also got most of the good rages from the WoR. The main one I'm interested in seeing is io's Flare Star. Training with the Cat Hood on Relm has delivered more GP than I know what to do with, so I'm well stocked on recovery items. I must confess, I do not possess "RckHrdAbs" so I bought a lot of Super Balls to throw around instead. I've never really tried them in battle and they might provide some amusement during the journey.

Each party must be balanced carefully for the Tower. Equipment will be passed around between teams a lot in order to maximize survivability. This means that

Also to be taken into consideration are the enemies each team will be facing. Most notably..

Tentatively, it's looking like the teams will be Terra, Strago, Gogo, and Cyan; Celes, Relm, Shadow, and Setzer; and Edgar, Locke, Mog, and Sabin.

So weird to not have Gau in the final battle to me, now. I almost always left him behind when I played this game in the past, but after seeing how great some of the Rages are I can't think of leaving him behind. I left Relm and Cyan behind for my recent playthrough, but without magic there's absolutely no reason to ever use Relm.

and I just can't have that. So I killed him. With Super Balls. 18 of them, in fact.

Atma has 55,000 HP, for reference.

It's blowing my damn mind that the Super Balls did an average of over 3,000 damage per ball in that fight. That's two or three Ultimas at level 6 right there! One of them did over 6,000 damage in that fight! The battle became a complete cakewalk by slowing Atma and then throwing Super Balls at him.

Man, my playthrough sounds way more challenging than these LLGs.

It really is a testament to how severe the magic block bug is and how ridiculously overpowered Economizers are.

Inferno has been defeated. It, Rough, and Striker are all vulnerable to Slow. Rough and Striker are also able to be stopped. Use Bolt 3 on Inferno and win. The most notable thing it did was use Delta Hit to petrify Locke. By not defeating Rough or Striker, it doesn't have a chance to unleash Meteor.

Skull Dragon was pumped full of Ultima until it croaked. I couldn't kill it before Locke died from being Comdemned, not that it mattered with Life3.

Only Guardian and the Goddesses remain. They'll be saved for another day.
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We just don't have any use for [classy head shots] and also, as people on Fark love to point out, we look exactly like Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. - Gabe

Hey, my dice rolls SUCKED.

I'm watching this and seeing 17,000 in one attack here.

Chrono Cross: I concluded whatever business I could on the Zelbess. As in, catching Fargo cheating, turning into actual quadra-ped cats, fighting the elder of Marbule. Forgot exactly how to recruit Funguy and Starky at this point. I've dropped by the outer Dead Sea to encounter the evil Masamune. I'm using Sprigg now to gather some possibly adequate doppelgang monsters to try and recruit Janice.

Hell, if this topic ends before I make any substantial progress in these two games, I'll just use DC's "What's your progress?" topic. I've been getting sick off and on (like, bed-riddenly sick), and split between 6+ games.
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Fair Lucrezia could not sate her appetite for lovers.
But I suspect she would be fine, with two or three more brothers.

I always get Funguy and the turnip guy mixed up, but one of them you get by using the Water Dragon's freeze breath on a burnt patch of land at Hermit's Hideaway and then coming back to plant something there...but I forgot what you plant. And Starky is found at the Sky Dragon Isle in...Another World, I think. If I'm wrong, then it's obviously the other one.

What's funny is that the "What's your progress?" series of topics was actually started by me back in, like, 2002, and after the first three or so I stopped making them and I think Bri took over since.

Tith, do it! Getting the bonus stages is tough enough, but beating them AND getting 100% on them is man-making.

Yes, especially the latter. I do remember getting frustrated with a few of them.

I bet she'll somehow know how to get that life in 2-3. And then she'll tell me that you can aim the Freeze Cracker.

That thing had an ending? I usually turn it off right after Omni-Slash.

On another note, I just finished my "No Lloyd" playthrough of Tales of Symphonia. I kept Lloyd out of my party whenever I could (meaning any time that I had more than 4 members of my overall party), and in any encounter when I was forced to include Lloyd I made sure to control any character but him, leaving Lloyd to the game's AI (except for the one-on-one against Kratos and some of the fights near the start where it's just Lloyd by himself). I was kind of annoyed that you had to keep Lloyd in the party in the fights with Yggdrassil and Origin, but other than that I had pretty free reign. My final usage percentage with Lloyd was 9.4%.

I have this game at #2 on my Top Ten list, behind Final Fantasy VI, but I seriously need to put it all the way to the top. I love this game so, so much. I always get a craving to play it, and the fact that I put it in my GameCube Send-off and played it five or six times in between that playthrough and this one...there's just so much variety and so much depth to everything, gameplay, story, characters, etc. The main villain is one of the better-written in the medium and every character in the game is so freakin' likable. The ending makes me cry, every time.

I played through with my main party being Zelos/Sheena/Presea/Raine, so I think I'm actually going to play it through again and this time use the four characters I neglected on this playthrough, Lloyd/Colette/Genis/Regal, and I think I'm going to control Regal when I do get him. I'm also going to try to get top affection with Regal, because he's the only character whose Flanoir scene I haven't seen, but moreso because I wonder how the scenes in Welgaia will play out if he's not there ('cause I always see the one with him, Presea and Alicia in the cells). This time I went for top affection with Raine, which was a little awkward when she started blatantly hitting on Lloyd.

Zelos/Sheena/Presea/Raine has been my favorite party to play through so far, and I didn't even miss Lloyd at all. Zelos is just too much fun to control, and his actions have so much fluidity to them, plus one of his EX skills allows you to do 6 melee hits before chaining techs, so there are a ton of possibilities for sweet combos. Sheena's always been a favorite of mine because she's fast and has good stun, and her Summons are always useful when I get them, though her poor defense is a setback. Presea is just a beast, and I prefer having three melee attackers in a party than two melee attackers and a magic user. Raine is a healer. You, uh...you're better off with a healer. I played the game once focusing on an all-melee party, and though it worked out I found it a bit of a bother later in the game.
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Mac plays the games he thought he knew (Current: Super Mario World 2-Yoshi's Island - SNES):
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/548-zsb/61122424