Classic intro, by the way. And classic music.
So I'm playing LFT again. I like FFT/LFT a lot but I'm not super proficient at it. I usually employ a brute force method of blasting enemies with the strongest physicals or spells at my disposal. I tend to just max out those damage skills as much as I can - for example, magic attack up, equips that increase damage and high MP at the cost of everything else. I usually get auto-potion for everyone. My normal physical progression is Squire/Knight -> Monk -> Lancer -> Ninja. I'll wave fist the christ out of everyone, then I'll get max jump and hop all over the place, and then just two swords everyone with ninja. Thief, Archer, Knight, Geomancer -- these classes never really get touched besides to unlock things that I like. With magic, I usually go Wizard -> Summoner and then go back and forth between them. Who needs anything else? I've never even bothered with Math because it just seems like you have to invest too much to do it.You can already blow things up by the time you get there. I rarely touch Priest because auto-potion seems to do the job, and I never touch Time Mage because it's generally easier to blow a hole in the earth than do anything involving status.
So my goal this time is to try and step out of the usual tropes that I walk into. I want to try unique classes -- not because they're different but because I want to see if there's anything fun that you can do with them. I want to see if you can efficiently kill enemies in ways other than slamming them with swords and spears, or with fire and Shiva. LFT is well-regarded thanks to its diversity of classes so this should be a pretty easy thing to do.
I like Archers in LFT and will probably play with them a lot thanks to their ridiculous Ignore Height. On the magic side I'd like to give Priests more of a whirl instead of relying on Item so heavily. Geomancer is another option I'd like to play with, along with Bard/Dancer, and Ness has convinced me to screw around with Mime, something I never do because I like progression in FFT more than anything and you can't learn anything in that class. It's the same reason I never touch monsters.
I'm more interested in finding combinations that work well together than individual classes, though. I want to know if Geomancer + Thief is a good fit, or if Dancer + Priest turns me into a healing god. These are things I don't really know much about. Maybe Monk + Time Mage will do good things. I don't know.
I'm currently in Dorter. I've lost a couple of times because of Archers and their ignore height being hell on this map. I feel like a noob who gets owned by Dorter and gives up because the game expects you to not suck. I really feel like you should be able to buy bows by the time Dorter rolls around in order to combat this - the only way to really deal with the ranged spam in this fight is magic, and wizards go down so easily. Plus you can already buy rods in Gariland, so why not bows? It's probably to be faithful to the original but Archers that can leap to the top of Dorter aren't faithful. :) (Well, and I guess it's called Gariland Magic City. whatever.) It's a large map so you can get killed and then run out of time pretty quickly.
I'll beat it my next try for sure -- currently level 3 with a Knight/Monk/Squire/Wizard combo. I shouldn't have much trouble so long as I have some revive options, and I'm struggling in that regard because of 250 JP phoenix down. Usually I have 90 JP Phoenix Down by the time I switch to Wizard but the higher JP messes me up a little. Yay LFT! LFT can be kinda rough in the early going just because of how things work out with the tweaks, but eventually it's a cakewalk just like regular FFT. I love LFT.
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xyzzy