Continuing from the first half of the report, Bernie had managed to overcome the spellcasting twin terrors of Astos and Lich despite all of the various crippling penalties associated with the solo Thief. With access to the CANOE unlocked, he was now faced with the midgame troika of dungeons: Gurgu Volcano, the Ice Cave, and the Castle of Ordeals. It's nearly always the correct decision to tackle the short Castle of Ordeals first due to the treasures held inside and Bernie was no exception to that rule. He was close enough to Level 28 that I fought some more battles to cross the required experience threshhold for leveling (forcing a point of Vitality as usual via save-reload shenanigans) before heading off to the isolated northern castle. I found that battles on rivers with the CANOE were a surprisingly good source of experience for the moment, thanks to the Coral Sword being effective against everything that could appear. In any case, I saved outside the entrace with a Tent as usual and sent Bernie inside.
The Castle of Ordeals is indeed a short dungeon as mentioned above, however sometimes it can be difficult to navigate due to the enemies present. Medusas can petrify your characters, Mancats like to toss out repeated FIR2 spells, there are heavy-hitting monsters like MudGols and Nitemares, plus Sorcerers can show up with their insta-kill melee attacks. All of these threats were effectively defanged by Bernie's running ability though as he danced out of dangerous situations again and again. Trapped tile with MudGols guarding the Zeus Gauntlet? Run away at 97% success odds (yes you can run away from this fight!) Forced combat with Nitemares on the second floor? Run away again. Random encounter with Sorcerers pictured above? You guessed it. I didn't encounter any unrunnable battles while passing through the dungeon and Bernie's amazing Luck stat carried him past everything else. There was only one Zombie Dragon guarding the way out and the Dragon Sword hacked it to pieces in three rounds of combat, easy stuff. Bernie made it through the castle on his very first attempt while picking up all the chests - the power of running away!
Speaking of those treasures, the biggest prize was the Zeus Gauntlet which finally granted Bernie the option to hit more than one opponent at a time. It casts LIT2 when used in combat and came in very handy against all manner of swarming enemies with low health totals. I had to unequip one of Bernie's defensive items to fit the Zeus Gauntlet in an armor slot but it was well worth trading away 1 Absorb from the Gloves to gain access to Zeus. This was more than offset by upgrading from the Silver Bracelet to the Gold Bracelet found in one of the other chests, with Bernie now having a total of 27 Absorb from Bracelet, Buckler, and Cap. I also picked up the Healing Staff for future use down the road; it wouldn't become viable until after finding the Defense and opening up RUSE abuse but could be safely stashed until that point in time.
The Ice Cave was Bernie's next target, as always one of the most dangerous dungeons in the game. I thought that Bernie would fare reasonably well here, however, thanks once again to his peerless ability to turn into Brave Sir Robin and flee from combat. The primary threat in the Ice Cave comes from the various undead that spawn in great numbers and can inflict paralysis, afterwards leading to a slow and painful death. Bernie had some protection against that since his level was so much higher as a solo character as compared to what a normal party would be sporting. He had about 70 Magic Defense by this point which reduced the odds of getting stunned to roughly 15% on each attack; note that there was also a bug in the release version of Final Fantasy that allowed monsters to inflict status effects on missed attacks which has now been fixed by Ozmo. Long story short, the odds of getting paralyzed on any one attack were fairly low, but there were simply so many undead creatures prowling around that Bernie was going to need some RNG working in his favor to make it through.
The other big danger in the Ice Cave comes from instant death attacks. These come in several forms: Sorcerers with their insta-kill strikes, Mages who will almost always spam the RUB spell at the start of combat, then the Eye with its array of various one-shot kill moves. Bernie's answer to everything other than the Eye was to run away and hope to escape before the various deadly blows could land. I started a series of attempts of the dungeon at this point and Bernie had pretty good luck at making it up to the Eye. It was indeed possible to run away from the forced undead encounter on the bottom basement level which made things a lot easier. Bernie was stunned and killed by undead on several occasions, he was RUBed out by a Mage once, he was even hit by a Cockatrice petrification attempt one time despite the birds usually running away from Bernie due to their low morale. There were also two unrunnable encounters here, one against Wizards which was easily handled with the Zeus Gauntlet, and another against Frost Giants and Frost Wolves where Bernie had just enough HP to tank his way through to a win via normal attacking. While Bernie's luck wasn't perfect at dodging these threats, I'd say that he fought his way clear to the Eye about 30-40% of the time.
The boss that guards the FLOATER has about seven different instant death attacks due to its nature of being a Beholder ripoff from Dungeons and Dragons. It has higher odds to use the spells XXXX-BRAK-RUB and lower odds to use the abilities GLANCE-SQUINT-GAZE along with even lower odds to make a basic physical attack. XXXX would never kill Bernie since he had over 300 HP and the GLANCE-SQUINT-GAZE abilities had low odds to hit Bernie down in the 10-20% range but BRAK (70%) and RUB (50%) were dire threats with significant odds to succeed at wiping him out. Bernie's first fight against the Eye was ended by that very BRAK spell, the second time he fell to a low-odds SQUINT succeeding, and the third try was again the charm as Bernie's attack went critical to deal the pictured 173 damage and win the combat. Then I still had to make it out in one piece, fortunately with the trapped basement tile offering up a "Chance to Strike First" for a free retreat from the undead and then Bernie scampering away from every other encounter before anything dangerous could happen. All told, I'd say about a dozen total attempts were needed to make it through the Ice Cave which wasn't bad at all.
The FLOATER unlocked the airship and Bernie could now get down to the dirty business of looting all of the best equipment scattered across the second half of the game. I began by purchasing the BOTTLE at the Caravan and making the mandatory stop at Gaia for OXYALE. I purchased a ProRing here even knowing that one could be found for free in a later chest; Bernie already had more gold than he could ever spend so why not. The short Waterfall dungeon followed which has an incredible collection of prizes given that there are only six treasure chests inside. Bernie added the aforementioned Ribbon to his equipment setup along with the all-important Defense to allow him to imitate the Solo White Mage by putting up a RUSE evasion shield. I definitely wanted this on hand before taking on Kary and Kraken! Even the Wizard Staff might be helpful at some point if there was a monster weak against the Confusion status.
I included a picture of the Zeus Gauntlet at work as Bernie was making heavy use of it in combat. One of Bernie's biggest weaknesses had been his utter lack of multi-targeted damage and even fairly weak castings of LIT2 were great for clearing out big mobs. It also helped that this part of the game saw Bernie facing a lot of enemies vulnerable to lightning element damage between the Sea Shrine and the rivers that he was canoeing on. Bernie was also gaining experience at a fantastic rate as a solo character, often 2000-3000 XP per battle, and the leveling requirements never go above 32,000 in this game. I was still making sure to farm Strength and Vitality stat increases even though the time interval between the arrival of new levels had greatly diminished.
The Sea Shrine was the next underground area to be thoroughly ransacked by my solo Thief. The Zeus Gauntlet always destroys this area and it was a breeze to pass through even with a solo Thief. Bernie could even equip the Coral Sword and take advantage of the fact that virtually everything in the shrine was classified as an Aquatic foe for the bonus damage. It's bizarre how earlier dungeons like the Marsh Cave and Ice Cave are full of monsters that can wreck the party with status effects and then this lategame dungeon is full of complete pushovers; again, the developers really didn't know what they were doing when making this game. The only dangerous encounters were the ones that took place against Ghosts and then only because they were unrunnable battles where Bernie couldn't escape as usual. Anyway, Bernie continued leveling at a fantastic pace, sometimes gaining as much as 5000-6000 XP on each victory, while cleaning the place out of everything it held.
New acquisitions included the Mage Staff to provide castings of FIR2 in places where LIT2 from the Zeus Gauntlet wouldn't be effective. The only monsters weak against fire in the Sea Shrine were Ghosts but this item would be more useful elsewhere. Bernie also held onto a Light Axe which casts HRM2 in battle though I wasn't sure if there would ever be an occasion to use it. More useful was the Opal Bracelet which had an additional 10 Absorb over the Gold Bracelet and took Bernie up to a total rating of 37. He could push that up to 45 if I were willing to equip the ProRing which would be worth doing against Kraken. And, perhaps surprisingly, the most valuable treasure of all was this one:
The Power Gauntlet was a nearly-useless item in the release version of Final Fantasy as it was bugged and didn't cast the spell that it was supposed to produce... because the spell itself was also bugged and did nothing! This was the SABR spell which is supposed to, and now does, add 16 to the value of both Attack and Accuracy for the caster. SABR is a 7th-rank Black magic spell which can't be cast on an ally, only on the Black Wizard himself, which makes the spell fairly useless in any situation other than getting it for free out of the Power Gauntlet. It was exactly what Bernie needed to help out his poor offensive output, however, as one casting of SABR was equivalent to 32 additional levels of Strength gains (!!!) Bernie was hovering around 40 base Attack with the Coral or Dragon Swords equipped and the Power Gauntlet would increase this to a much more substantial 56 Attack along with picking up a fourth hit in the process from the extra Accuracy. This would make him at least somewhat comparable to the damage from a Fighter or Black Belt, and the fixing of the SABR bug represented the biggest advantage in using Final Fantasy Renaissance as opposed to the release version of the game.
It took several different trips through the dungeon to clean out all of the treasures from the Sea Shrine, at least in part because Bernie was leveling at such an incredible pace that I couldn't stay down there for long before having to exit. I needed to be able to keep save-scumming Strength increases on level up and that meant saving the game whenever Bernie started to approach the next XP target. I actually had to reset once or twice because he was stuck with unrunnable battles that yielded guaranteed experience and put him over the threshhold of the next level. Anyway, once that was finished I sent him back to the skipped Gurgu Volcano where Bernie gained another two levels opening up all of the treasure chests there as well. It was very easy to make it down to the bottom floor thanks to have most of the lategame equipment in Bernie's possession, setting up the next major boss fight:
I had avoided Kary earlier because she was a bad matchup for Bernie. Kary deals very heavy physical damage with an Attack value of 40 that can hit up to six times, plus another hefty 50 Absorb to cut down on the incoming damage from melee strikes. She also likes to spam FIR2 spells and eventually works around to the HOLD spell which could inflict a deadly paralyzation as Bernie had already experienced against Astos and Lich. My solution was to rely on the various lategame items-as-spells: RUSE cast three times out of the Defense to dodge Kary's physical attacks, the Ribbon to block most of the damage from her fire element spells, and then SABR from the Power Gauntlet to increase Bernie's own damage. He would have been dealing almost no damage at all without the help of the Power Gauntlet which took Bernie up to roughly 50-100 damage per round when not critically striking. There was some need for haste here as a successful HOLD spell from Kary would remove all of Bernie's RUSE evasion and leave him easy pickings for the fire fiend. Fortunately Bernie was able to land one crit for 200 damage and win the duel before Kary could make it to the end of her spell rotation where her paralysis move was a potential option.
Kraken was the next boss on the list who was handled with the same tactics as Kary. The danger here was the physical attack from the big octopus who can hit eight times at 50-100 damage per strike (before subtracting out Absorb). RUSE from the Defense was the order of the day once again and fortunately Bernie went first in the turn order on the initial round of combat to start getting his evasion shield in place. Kraken chose to squirt out some useless INK on that initial round of combat which basically ended the fight. He would land one attack on the second round and afterwards Bernie had enough RUSE evasion in place to lock out everything other than the 1 in 200 odds critical hit. Bernie made sure to employ another SABR casting out of the Power Gauntlet to buff his own attack, plus he could even get the +4 Attack by using the Coral Sword against an Aquatic opponent in Kraken. This was a very easy fight and I didn't even have to rely on the Zeus Gauntlet for LIT2 casts, Bernie's own physical attacks were more than sufficient.
One additional note on SABR (and the earlier TMPR spell): Ozmo has apparently made it possible to stack multiple castings of these spells in the 2.0 version of Final Fantasy Renaissance after only one such casting could be applied previously. I decided that I'd stick to that earlier restriction of only one such casting as the gameplay starts to break apart very quickly when the player can pile up multiplicatively-stacking castings of 16 Attack + 16 Accuracy. One such casting was already more than the solo Thief would have been getting in the release version of Final Fantasy where these spells didn't function at all.
Mirage Tower and the connected Sky Castle was the only remaining dungeon to be tackled before heading back to the Temple of Fiends. This was another place where Bernie found himself gaining experience at a breakneck pace, so fast that I often had to run away from random encounters to keep from hitting the next level up. In practice this worked out to gaining about one level for each floor of the tower, going in to plunder a set of treasure chests and then heading out to a place where Bernie could save to do his stat manupulation on leveling. (I also had to run the Waterfall again because I had stupidly forgotten to talk to the robot inside for the CUBE; not the first time I've made that mistake either!) There wasn't too much of interest in the Mirage Tower aside from Thor's Hammer which would occupy a weapon slot instead of the armor slot that the Zeus Gauntlet required. More impactful were the Black Shirt for castings of ICE2 and a ProCape for higher Absorb rating, both found inside the Sky Castle. Bernie could equip the Opal Bracelet, ProCape and ProRing, plus his trusty Ribbon to reach a total Absorb of 51 which is the best that the spellcasting classes can do. That setup required all four armor slots though so if I wanted to use the Power Gauntlet or Black Shirt, Bernie had to give up the ProRing or ProCape and drop down to 43 Absorb.
Somewhat to my own surprise, I didn't find myself using much of the offensive items-as-spells that I'm used to relying on with weaker classes. Bernie rarely seemed to need the Mage Staff or Thor's Hammer or Black Shirt, instead simply using his own auto attacks in most situations. He had gained a fourth hit upon reaching 96% Accuracy at Level 39 and most attacks were dealing about 150-200 damage. This was enough to kill almost any monster from a random encounter in two hits with decent potential for an attack to go critical and one-shot the opponent in question. The Dragon and Coral Swords both had 5% crit odds which translated into 19% odds to crit on one of those four hits, not bad at all. Thanks to my relentless Strength manipulation on leveling, Bernie had finally become a semi-decent melee fighter now that he was 20 levels higher than what's normally required to beat the game.
By now Bernie was rapidly closing in on the leveling cap of 50 without me making any real effort at grinding. I think he was Level 45 by the time that I had the Sky Palace emptied of its treasures and I decided to take the ten minutes required to hit Level 48 before venturing back inside to pursue the last fiend. Bernie's Strength was high enough to reach an Attack of 45 with the Dragon Sword equipped and then I knew that he would gain another 4 Attack for using his weapon against a "dragon" type opponent, plus the Power Gauntlet's SABR would kick in a further 16 Attack to take him to a grand total of 65. Furthermore, I had picked Level 48 deliberately as Bernie's Accuracy rating of 114 would be boosted another 16 points from SABR to a total of 130 where he would gain a fifth hit. Five attacks at 65-130 damage should be enough to cut through the beefy 80 Absorb (!) on Tiamat - that's right, Bernie was doing this fight for real, not trying to cheese the boss with BANE out of the Bane Sword. Let's go!
The math was sound, now I had to see how things would play out in practice. Bernie started the battle by RUSEing up with the Defense to lock out Tiamat's physical attacks, then buffed up with his one allowed casting of SABR and got to work. I found that his damage output was highly variable depending on how his attack rolls came out, with one round hitting 200 damage and another one dealing as little as 8 damage from what must have been terribly low numbers. On average, Bernie was dealing about 100 damage per round which would be sufficient to chew through Tiamat's 1000 HP in a dozen rounds at most. The real question was whether he could survive that long and it quickly became clear that the answer was a resounding yes. Tiamat spent fully half of her actions on useless melee attacks that always missed while her THUNDER-POISON-BLIZZARD-BLAZE abilities had their damage mostly blocked by the Ribbon. THUNDER hitting for 50-70 damage wasn't exactly trivial but it wasn't going to eliminate Bernie's 786 HP lifebar either. Then on about the sixth or seventh round of combat Bernie landed a 500+ damage critical hit and that was that, battle over. Victory on the first attempt in a very straightforward battle with no BANE cheese needed, excellent!
Afterwards, I polished off the last two levels for Bernie to produce the following Level 50 stats:
I talked at the beginning of this report about how bad the starting stats are for the Thief class. By way of contrast, these are by far the best stats I've ever had on a Level 50 character in Final Fantasy, which is not a coincidence as I did so much manipulation of the leveling process with Bernie. He gained a point of Strength *AND* a point of Vitality on every single level across the whole game, the two stats rising in tandem each time. I planned to stop forcing Vitality on the last few level ups and he kept gaining it naturally anyway, doing that three different times on his own. Since the Thief also gains a point in Luck on every single level, that was three of the five stats increasing 49 times in all! I also forced a bunch of Agility increases when I didn't have to increase Strength and Vitality, and then Bernie wound up with better-than-average Intelligence growth with me doing nothing to control that stat's increases. Overall, Bernie gained 49 Strength, 45 Agility, 28 Intelligence, 49 Vitality, and 49 Luck across his 49 level ups. That was downright insane even with my reloading abuse of the stat increases.
Perhaps the best way to highlight the stat gains is to compare them against the average stats for a Thief at Level 50. Average Strength at the end of the game is 42 which would translate into 6 fewer points of Attack. That's 6-12 less damage on all four hits and an even bigger decrease in expected damage after factoring in enemy Absorb - the Strength manipulation really made a difference. Average Agility is 46 and having nine additional points there meant 4.5% lower odds to get hit by every enemy attack, not bad. But the biggest increase above average was in Bernie's other manipulated stat of Vitality, where the average Level 50 result is 29 points and he had a whopping 54 points. This led to much, much higher health than normal as the Thief typically ends the game at about 660 HP while Bernie had just over 800 health. Having roughly 20% more maximum HP was a really, really big help for a solo character!
Bernie's endgame collection of equipment spilled over into the inventory of his dead party members who helpfully hauled around stuff that he couldn't hold on his own. I traded the Dragon and Coral Swords back and forth with the alterate weapon sitting in one of those extra backpacks. The Rune Sword did not wind up getting much use, even though there were lots of mage and magical opponents, simply because I didn't want to use a weapon with 2.5% crit chance as opposed to 5% chance, the crits were too important to lower the odds like that. Elsewhere, the Healing Staff and Defense were both mandatory for defensive purposes while Thor's Hammer fit neatly into the last remaining weapon slot. I would swap in the Mage Staff in areas sporting monsters with fire element weaknesses as needed. The Light Axe had never seen use up to this point in time and some of the other party members were similarly carrying the Bane Sword and Wizard Staff just for an oddball case which would likely never come up.
Defensively, Bernie ran his heavy Absorb setup as the default and could swap in the Black Shirt or Power Gauntlet as needed for boss fights. There was basically no situation where I would ever use the Zeus Gauntlet now that he had Thor's Hammer but I kept it around anyway for nostalgia's sake. Bernie of course did not have any spells as the Thief class never gets access to magic so there was nothing to be seen on that status screen. On then into the final dungeon, the Temple of Fiends Revisited:
There was little need to fight anything in the final dungeon since Bernie had already maxed out his level and there was no possibility of escape without the EXIT spell. Thus I ran from pretty much every encounter to preserve health and maintain Bernie's stock of 99 Potions. The fights where running is impossible really stood since Bernie was so good at dodging away from everything else, now that he had greater than 98% odds to succeed with each use of the Run command. These Worm encounters are one such unrunnable setup along with the infamous 2-4 Gas Dragon battle. I had the Black Shirt in one of Bernie's armor slots in case those dragons appeared but fortunately they never showed up on this first venture into the dungeon. Mostly Bernie was coming across these Worms (two of them in a row), then a group of Chimeras, followed by a party of Mages that tried to RUB him out of existence but of course failed thanks to the Ribbon, and then a Frost Dragon group where Bernie helpfully had a "Chance to Strike First" for the easy retreat. The Phantom had higher Absorb than I remembered or maybe Bernie simply rolled low on his damage output as it took about half a dozen rounds of attacking to defeat the thing, not that any of its instant death moves had any chance to succeed.
The Earth floor was packed with more unrunnable encounters against Earths which required spamming the Defense for RUSE protection and then healing up with the Healing Staff once the monsters could no longer hit Bernie. I prefered seeing MudGols instead because Bernie could simply run away. The revived Lich guarded the stairs down with an even more powerful selection of spells on hand:
Lich casts a spell 75% of the time and he always leads with NUKE in his short NUKE-STOP-ZAP!-XXXX spell rotation. The other three options were various types of instant-kill spells that the Ribbon preventing from hitting but I didn't want the undead fiend to rotate back around to NUKE a second time. There was no need to worry about stacking physical evade in this fight because Lich attacks so rarely, I simply had Bernie use the Power Gauntlet and then immediately begin attacking. This worked perfectly as his very first blow went critical and did 540 damage for the one-shot kill on Lich, excellent. Bernie could have survived two NUKEs and possibly a third but there was no reason to take needless risks.
The Fire floor is the easiest of the various levels in the Temple of Fiends Revisited with nothing here being particularly scary. Every random encounter here is also runnable except for the 3/64 battle against Fires which I've almost never seen across my many years playing this game. Bernie RUSEed up against some poor Agamas and healed off the damage from Lich with the Healing Staff, then ran from everything else until reaching Kary. Her physical attacks were quite nasty with six attacks at 60-120 damage and Bernie took several hundred damage before I could get the Defense evasion protection in place. Then it was a matter of SABR out of the Power Gauntlet again into more auto attacks until she was dead, fortunately not a battle that came anywhere close to Bernie dying. Having 814 HP made these boss refights considerably less stressful.
The Water floor genuinely does have some dangerous random encounters and Bernie drew one of them right out of the gate when he found himself up against five Waters. This is another unrunnable fight and thankfully I did know that ahead of time so I didn't waste any rounds trying and failing to retreat. The Defense was the MVP once again as Bernie managed to establish his evasion shield with about 280 HP remaining, whew, then he meleed the Waters to death until one remained and employed the Healing Staff to get back to full. Even with the emulator running at triple speed it took some time to restore 500+ health at about 15-20 HP restored per combat round. The following random encounters had Great Sharks or Lobsters and Sea Trolls which were easily avoided through running away.
Kraken is probably the most dangerous boss in the final dungeon outside of Chaos himself, entirely due to his insane physical attack which hits eight times at 70-140 damage apiece. My previous solo White Mage playthrough had seen Hope get smacked for 900+ damage before I could even do anything which wasn't a whole lot of fun to experience. In Bernie's case, he needed to drop one armor slot to free up space for the Power Gauntlet and I had the bright idea to remove the Ribbon to maintain the maximum possible Absorb from the Opal Bracelet, ProCape, and ProRing combination. This resulted in 50 total Absorb to knock Kraken down to 20-90 damage per hit which should be enough to survive. I initiated the combat, started spamming RUSE castings from the Defense... and Kraken responded by trolling Bernie with FOUR straight rounds casting LIT2 into his lack of lightning resistance with the Ribbon removed! 
The big octopus even got the doubled damage on a couple of those castings as pictured above. This was still much better than Kraken using his melee attack so the overall result was a win for Bernie but I couldn't help but shake my head at all those LIT2 spells appearing right after I removed the Ribbon, heh. Another straightforward victory and the last fight that Bernie had to take on before securing the Masmune.
The enemies on the Air floor hit pretty hard as well, especially a group of Vampires and Wizard Vampires that slapped around Bernie before he could make his escape. I had preserved 80 Potions in Bernie's inventory however and therefore it was a trivial matter to heal up after each fled encounter. The Masmune was waiting in the southeast corner and represented a staggering increase over Bernie's old Dragon Sword, going from 19 Attack / 15 Accuracy up to 56 Attack / 50 Accuracy. Bernie's base attack was now 83-166 damage and he picked up a fifth hit in the process, though the fixed critical strike chance on the Masmune remained the same 5% as on the Dragon Sword. (It has 20% crit chance in the bugged release version due to sitting in weapon index slot 40.) Bernie had been navigating the lategame fairly well with his humble old Dragon Sword so you can imagine how he felt with his damage output effectively doubled by the new weapon. I cut apart some Worms and Airs with the Masmune just for fun with Bernie one-shotting pretty much everything and hitting 400-500 damage per attack. Yeah, that should do nicely.
Tiamat has a vastly higher Absorb rating of 90 for her refight which meant that Bernie wouldn't be seeing those same damage outputs. I made sure to get his RUSE protection in place with the Defense and then spent the by-now familiar round of powering up with the Power Gauntlet before moving over to the attack. Tiamat was hitting Bernie pretty hard with her initial melee attacks before transitioning to her spellcasting and elemental abilities. Bernie's attacks were averaging about 300 damage and it wouldn't have taken long for him to down Tiamat's 1100 HP. However, on his third attack he landed this 877 damage crit and then his fourth attack had an even more massive crit that pounded out 1100 damage for a truly massive overkill. Wow, Masmune, slow down a little! Save some of that for Chaos.
Chaos is the final boss in Final Fantasy and would pose a fitting ending opponent for Bernie to overcome. This guy has 100 Absorb for defensive protection, a strong melee attack that forced Bernie to get his RUSE evasion in place, and a series of powerful spells culminating in CUR4 which restores him back to full health. My plan of attack for Bernie was to spend the first few rounds using the Defense to lock out Chaos' physical attacks, then the normal SABR casting out of the Power Gauntlet, by which time Chaos should be about to cast his CUR4. There was no point in attacking until the CUR4 went off as it would eliminate all accumulated damage, and I hoped that the timing would line up for Bernie to start attacking after getting his various buffs in place. Remember that there are no healing items in Final Fantasy stronger than Potions (which heal 16-32 HP) so Bernie effectively had no way to restore health once he started losing it. Bernie basically had to select the Fight command and hope for the best.
The other dangerous spell that Chaos can use is SLO2 which would knock Bernie down to a single hit and effectively cause an instant loss. Chaos has 50% odds to cast a spell on each round and the order is always ICE3-LIT3-SLO2-CUR4-FIR3-ICE2-FAST-NUKE. He opened the battle with three spells in a row, ICE3 into LIT3 into SLO2, and I was overjoyed to see the SLO2 miss at roughly 50/50 odds. This was perfect, Chaos was about to cast CUR4 right as Bernie was completing his RUSE/SABR buffs and about to start attacking. The next round began and Chaos didn't use CUR4, he used his CRACK ability at 25% odds. Then he followed that up with another ability in INFERNO, then a melee attack (the final 25% odds of what he can do), then his next ability SWIRL, and so on. Round after round went by and he still kept holding back the CUR4! I had Bernie attacking for lack of anything better to do and he was consistently dealing 200-300 damage per round. That damage was starting to accumulate as Chaos went past the 1000 damage taken mark, then 1500 damage taken as I tracked the fight's math in my head. Bernie was getting close to victory but Chaos could break out CUR4 on any round and eliminate all of the damage taken up to that point. Meanwhile, Bernie was slowly getting chipped down from accumulated damage taken and Chaos still had that NUKE spell later in his spell rotation. Why couldn't this blasted boss have just cast CUR4 immediately - this was getting much more dramatic than it needed to be!
For whatever reason, Bernie was an unusually clutch character when it came to timely critical hits. He scored them against Astos, he nailed them against Lich... and he pulled one final one against Chaos to seal the overall victory:
Game over, bam! 
1132 damage when Chaos had less than 500 HP remaining, another giant overkill. Why couldn't you have done that earlier in the fight, Bernie?! He had actually gone through almost 40 total hits without any of them going critical previously which had been pretty unlucky. As for Chaos himself, the boss went seven consecutive rounds with CUR4 as the next spell on the docket without actually casting it. Every single one of those rounds had 50/50 odds to use a spell in what turned out to be an utterly bizarre RNG sequence. This did not make the fight easier as I would have vastly preferred for Chaos to get the spell out of the way earlier instead of transforming every single round into a tense nailbiter. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for his counterstrike to appear and thank goodness it never did. What a weird ending to the game.
Bernie therefore defeated the Temple of Fiends Revisited on the very first attempt to close out a surprisingly pretty smooth solo run. I'm not sure how much of this was the solo Thief not being as weak as I expected versus how much of it was Bernie getting lucky with some excellent RNG against Astos and to a lesser extent Lich and Chaos. The only really tough part of the run was the slow experience grind leading up to the Marsh Cave and Astos, once Bernie made it over to the Earth Cave he was able to level up at an extremely fast pace for the rest of the game. All of the non-Astos bosses were readily beatable with proper planning ahead of time (i.e. lots of stat manipulation on leveling) and I found the solo Thief to be easier than the solo White Mage for much of the overall journey. I suspect that much of the reputation for the solo Thief being so tough is because the hardest part of the quest occurs so early on at the Elfland stage of the gameplay. If the player can get past the extremely difficult roadblock of Astos, the rest of the game opens up and nothing really stands out as being that bad. Having maxed out Luck for perfect running was legitimately useful and helped me more than I was expecting as the trademark Thief ability.
I think that the Thief class could be fixed with a few simple tweaks to make them more viable. If I were somehow balancing this game, I would give them double crit chance as an innate ability which would lean into their thematic nature as a backstabbing character and would have far more resonance in a world where the crit bug has been fixed. I would also fix their Accuracy / Magic Defense scaling by giving them +3 per level to match the Fighter and Black Belt, and then give the Thief one lategame weapon past the Coral / Dragon Swords so that the class isn't so crippled on equipment selection; the barely-used Vorpal would fit nicely here. This is probably the first time that someone has done the solo Thief using Final Fantasy Renaissance; the fixing of the crit bug made the game harder (previously the bugged Rune Sword had 13.5% crit chance) but this was offset by the Power Gauntlet and monster type weaknesses actually working so things may have been easier overall, I'm not sure. In any case, I had a lot of fun playing out Bernie's quest and I hope that it made for an entertaining read. Thanks as always for following along.
One final addendum: SirSystemError independently played a solo Thief game, also using Final Fantasy Renaissance, at exactly the same time that I did without either of us coordinating in any way. Here is a link to his written report which is well worth reading for the comparative perspective!
