Victory!
Last night my wife and I finally completed FFV! The battle against ExDeath and NeoExDeath went a lot easier than I thought it would, but it was definitely difficult to keep up with attacking and healing... in particular his White Hole attack that both kills and petrifies means that characters who died ended up needing two actions before they could be revived, not just one...
Ultimately, though, it worked out very very well and I kept up with all that was necessary to defeat him. Didn't even have any KO'd characters left over at the end.
I went through all the classes and made a list of those with innate abilities that would give me even the slightest benefit as Mimic or Freelancer, and had all my characters learn as many of those classes as I could on the way to ExDeath. So almost everybody had several damage-dealing, damage-avoiding, or other benefits in addition to their actual job and abilities. None of them completed all of the classes I had on the list, and I tried not to have any two learning the same thing at the same time because I still needed the range of abilities for the random encounters, so each had a different subset of innate abilities.
Some stats about my winning team (who were all Mimics):
1st pos</>ition: Lenna
Level: 45
Selected abilities: Blue Magic, +30% HP, +20% HP.
Mastered classes: Monk (for counter-attack), Samurai (for evade), Mystic Knight (for Barrier), Blue Mage, Geomancer (for general party benefit with avoiding floor damage and suchlike)
Special equipment: Thornlet
Strategy: Take advantage of the 4000+ HP I had thanks to the +30% and +20% HP to do the following: 1) wear the HP-draining Thornlet without worrying about dying; 2) use White Wind to heal the entire party up to full, even if Lenna's more than half damaged. Also, cast Big Guard at the beginning of the fight.
2nd pos</>ition: Romney (what I named Bartz, on a whim)
Level: 46
Selected abilities: XFight, +20% HP (I hadn't acquired +30% yet), Item
Mastered classes: Thief (for passages), Ninja (for two weapons), Hunter, Mystic Knight (for Barrier)
Special Equipment: none
Strategy: I made a mistake here, having forgotten I wanted to use MgcSword along with XFight. So Romney ended up being fairly useless during the battle except when he Mimiced other characters' actions. But it did give me a good character whose action I didn't feel bad about wasting on Phoenix Downing or Softing downed characters.
3rd pos</>ition: Faris
Level: 46
Selected abilities: XMagic, Summon, Item
Mastered classes: Knight (for Cover), Summoner, Blue Mage, Red Mage
Special equipment: Goldpin
Strategy: For various reasons, primarily because XMagic takes so long to learn, Faris ended up having almost no innate abilities (she also ended up dying the most frequently, probably not a coincidence). Since Faris is there to do spellcasting, I lowered her defense to take the Goldpin that reduces all MP costs by 50%. That let me use XMagic and Summon to cast Carbuncle and Golem at the very beginning of the battle (and again whenever needed), and then dualcast double Bahamut to do over 6000 damage in one turn. Then everyone else could mimic that dualcast for free!
4th pos</>ition: Cara
Level: 46
Selected abilities: White magic, Black magic, +30% MP
Mastered classes: Mystic Knight (for Barrier), White mage, Black mage
Special equipment: Goldpin
Strategy: Use white magic to Life2 and/or Heal anybody who needed it, attack with Flare and Holy otherwise. Cara had over 500 MP and didn't run out during the fight at all (whereas Faris had to be elixired one time).
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The ending of the game was awesome. FFV is now officially my favorite Final Fantasy.
On to FFVI!
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Originally Posted by Yerushalmi
