Ice Cave finished, I now had free run of the rest of the game. For the moment, I was using the Silver Axe, Flame Sword, and both Ice Swords on offensive. Armor-wise, the Flame and Ice Armors boosted Absorb considerably, now reading 58/56/42/35. With the airship in hand, first trip went to Cardia to class-change into Knights:
Among the lowest levels I've ever been when class-changing. This party works well for the "get down to business" approach. Now I could actually equip that Zeus Gauntlet that I had been carrying around for ages! (Might as well, right? It's going to take up an armor slot regardless!) I ran the Bottle/Oxyale fetch quest, then headed to the Waterfall. No problems in that short dungeon, aside from this amusing screenshot:
What's that bat doing there? He he. 
The fighting gave good XP, taking everyone up to lvl 17.
I did the Sea Shrine in two trips, one for the upper treasure level and the other for the boss. The Sea Shrine is rarely a difficult area, and it offered no problems for this particular group. Now that all four fighters had excellent gear, the game was becoming routine and, frankly, a little boring. My only fear was poison from the Lobsters, and even that could be controlled to some extent using the Heal Staff.
Kraken went down in three rounds, never putting anyone close to death. Not very interesting.
Everyone was lvl 19 when I finished the Sea Shrine, and after running the SLAB/CHIME errands, my team was lvl 20 entering the Mirage Tower. This area did offer up a new challenge, in the form of huge packs of Catmen and their poison:
Poison, the eternal enemy of this variant. Spamming uses of the Heal Staff/Helmet helped somewhat in offsetting it, but only so much. My first trip into the Mirage Tower saw everyone get poisoned (and saw me take the above screenshot). I did manage to loot all of the treasure there successfully in one go. The second trip ventured up into the sky, where I grabbed everything worth taking in the Floating Castle. On that excursion, Da got poisoned on the way up, and he limped around in the back row for ages on end slowly bleeding out health. I kept him alive through HEAVY use of my healing items, but what a pain! While I might have gone ahead and finished the dungeon had everyone been healthy, Off managed to contract poison as well from a Manticore STINGER attack (heh), so it seemed more prudent to retreat and come back again.
The return trip saw Live and Off get poisoned immediately by a six Mancat, "monsters strike first" encounter in the Mirage Tower. Great. This meant that I had to use the healing items constantly, and reshuffle my formation after every battle. Still, everything was entirely routine until I hit a MudGol/Sorceror pack on the fourth floor of Floating Castle. Live was hit and died instantly. That meant I had only three fighters remaining to face Tiamat...
The fiend opened with Thunder, Poison, and Blizzard. Land took massive damage from the first two, because I stupidly forgot to transfer the Ribbon Live was wearing over to him. 
At least he was protected against Blizzard by his Flame Armor. Tiamat attacked in round four and did serious damage, only to fall in turn from Land's attack. A relatively short battle, with some serious pounding inflicted by both sides.
Clearing out the fourth fiend had put everyone in my party at level 23. Significantly lower than my usual run, so the "no sandbagging" approach was working quite well! Here's how I divided up the equipment:
The most important concern was how to split up the 3 Ribbons and 2 ProRings. (There are only two ProRings in the field, plus a third one deep inside the Temple of Fiends Revisited. I planned to skip that one, not worth the effort.) Since most instant death attacks target the front row first, I gave Live and Off the critical items. With the Ribbon + Aegis Shield combo, Da was similarly protected from almost everything; I think there are one or two "Stone" attacks that could get through, but nothing elemental or poison. Land was the odd man out, so I gave him defense against the two most common attacks (fire and ice), and could swap in Opal equipment if I knew lightning attacks were coming (ie Tiamat). Other than that, it was mostly just spacing out the equipment so everyone got a decent Absorb rating. Live, in the front rank, got the highest rated stuff there, ending up with 67 Absorb, while the rest stood at 51/51/58. I'm used to going through this dungeon with considerably less armor, or fewer characters, or both, so this was all gravy.
The rest of the stuff was sorted around the equipment. Land couldn't equip a Ribbon, so he went ahead and equipped a Heal Helmet instead. Da had to forgo the gauntlet spot to fit in the second Heal Helmet, which wasn't so bad as I didn't have a ProRing for him anyway! That meant that Off got the Heal Staff, because Live would be using the Defense (as the first character in order) in a healing situation. Similarly, I gave one direct attack item to each fighter: Land had no ProRing, and just equipped the Zeus Gauntlet. Off was forced to ditch his shield in order to fit the Black Shirt - sorry Flame Shield! That meant that Live and Da ended up with the Thor Hammer and Mage Staff, respectively. Finally, the characters in the back ranks got the better weapons, EXCEPT that I needed the Defense in the first rank to cast RUSE as needed. I also held on to the two Light Axes for no real reason. And that covers all the gear! Whew. Took a look time figuring all that out.
Plan for the Temple of Fiends was simple: get in, get the Masamune, and kill Chaos. I had 2 Tents, 5 Cabins, 6 Houses, 9 Heal potions, 4 Pure potions, and 5 Soft potions to play around with. Throughout the whole game to this point, I had used one Pure (in the Marsh Cave) and one Cabin (coming out of the Earth Cave). Both had been necessary to avoid party wipes. Looks like I could have been a little more aggressive in using some of those items! Better safe than sorry though.
OK, first trip down immediately ran into 4 Gas Dragons, who breathed Poison all over everyone. I hit reset and decided to ignore that little nastiness. (Too bad real life doesn't work that way...) Second trip went much better. The first few floors were uneventful, and the Phantom died on the first round without ever getting a chance to act. On the way back through the first floor, we hit a pack of four Frost Dragons... "chance to strike first"! Ha! Ran out of that one and never looked back. Lich did get off a casting of NUKE, the bastard:
That's a really bad roll too; max damage is 400. Good thing the enemies on the Fire floor are good for sitting around and restoring health with the Heal items. I had everyone re-maxed well before facing Kary. She attacked once: 4 hits, 84 Damage. Not all that dangerous.
I had a rough battle with 6 Waters (can't run from them!) on the next floor. Live got battered around a lot; fortunately the next fight was against Sea Trolls and Lobsters. Easy healing time. Kraken did 300+ damage to Live on his first attack, causing me to sweat bigtime. Then he cast LIT2 and INK on his next two rounds. Heh. 
I fought a final battle on the Water floor to heal and reset the counter before heading down the steps.
Of course I went for the Masmune. I love that sword, and I can never pass it up when playing. I did hit a group of three Sorcerors, but managed to escape cleanly before any of them attacked. Off had the Ice Sword, the weakest remaining weapon, so I gave him the legendary blade. 77 Damage and 129 hit percentage - enough for 5 hits! Yeah, that should work.
I couldn't protect everyone against Tiamat's BANE spell - only two ProRings and one Aegis Shield. I had to hope it would miss against Da, the unprotected fighter. Fortunately, it did, and that was the only drama in that fight. The Masmune did absolutely sick damage as always.
I had just enough Heal potions to bring everyone up to full health for the final fight. Heh, never imagined that grabbing those nine potions would make a difference! I stuck the fighters that mattered most (Off and Da) in the back two rows, where they would wield the Masamune and XCalber. Gave them both Ribbons and ProRings, naturally - their survival was about the only thing that mattered in this fight.
Chaos opened with CRACK, which fortunately missed everyone. I think it could have hit one of my fighters, the one with no ProRing, not 100% sure of that. Off's Masamune easily did as much damage as everyone else put together. The second round saw him use INFERNO, which is essentially FIR3. Live got the big hit that round, several swings going critical and doing almost 200 total damage. (Da did 3 hits, 8 Damage with Xcalber. What was that?!) Round three, Chaos used his first actual spell, ICE3, doing moderate damage to all. Next round saw LIT3, uh oh, getting close now to CUR4. Gotta hurry. Round five, Chaos used SWIRL, which did massive damage to everyone and killed Land! No Ribbon, no ProRing there. But that didn't matter, because Off did a sick 454 Damage attack, and Live finished off the boss:
Final thoughts... While far from the most difficult variant I've done, this was a lot of fun. Scratching and clawing for every little piece of gear in the early game was an epic experience. I've never been more happy to get the Short Sword and Iron Armor! Similarly, I'll never look at poison quite the same way again after being forced to go through the whole game without use of Pure potions. I definitely enjoyed the anti-sandbagging nature of this game as well, so much so that I'm probably going to try a low-level challenge later on. Thanks again for reading, and to T-Hawk especially for helping to inspire all of this.
