The Return of Solo

In the third world, the party loses Lenna for a fairly lengthy period of time. Naturally, this had no impact whatsoever on my solo run, hehe. The first encounter of note was a miniboss fight against a monster called the Antlion. Ordinarily this would have been a cakewalk, except that the creature also had the dreaded "Sonic Wave" ability, argh! That's one of the worst possible attacks for Solo. Each round, the Antlion had a 1/3 chance to use Sonic Wave, the other two choices being a normal attack and a special attack that did extra damage. Solo had to do the fight several times until he rolled lucky and avoided Sonic Wave. He only needed 4 attacks to kill the Antlion, so the odds of that were (2/3)^4, or about 20%. Not good, but easily doable with repetition.

The first real area was the Pyramid, which features a number of confusing traps and hidden treasure. This was one of the places I was really glad I had gone through previously with a non-variant run, so that I didn't have to be guessing what to do with Solo. Most of this area was pretty routine, except for one opponent: the Machine Head robots.

These are not really random encounters per se. Instead, there are about eight of these units that roam around on the fourth floor, and touching them initiates a battle. They possessed a number of strong attacks, the worst being "Missile" (essentially Quarter, doing 3/4 of current hit points in damage) and "Surge Beam", which as you may recall from the Sol Cannon fight does 1/2 of MAX hit points damage. The first two Machine Head fights saw Solo get extremely unlucky, and land the Missile/Surge Beam combo: instant death in two rounds. The odds of that happening were only 1/9, sheesh! Still, with a bunch of Machine Heads walking around, Solo was almost guaranteed to get unlucky at some point. After struggling for a bit, I hit on the best solution: run past the robots as fast as possible to the next floor, where there was a save point. Then Solo could return down a floor and take them on at leisure, clearing them out one at a time and saving after each battle. This worked really well, and I made note of it for future variant runs.

Solo came across two noteworthy items in the Pyramid. The first was the Cursed Ring, which has the highest defense of any accessory in the game at 20. Along with the Bone Mail, Solo could now take his Defense all the way up to 61! That's enormous in this game, due to the way the multipliers work (i.e., enemy Attack power is actually rather low, and relies on having a high multiplier to do lots of damage). The downside is that the Cursed Ring sets the wearer in permanent "Condemned" mode, starting each battle with a 50-second countdown to death. As bad as this sounds, it was actually quite useful for most random battles, which would be over in less than half that time anyway. It was not a good idea against enemies who could use sleep or paralyzation attacks though, for obvious reasons!

The other, less exotic item was the Guard Ring, which provided similar defense to the Angel Ring but also put Solo in permanent "Regen" status, slowly healing back hit points. This was another great general purpose accessory that would end up seeing a lot of use.

There is no actual boss in the Pyramid, but the game sets up one almost immediately thereafter:

Interesting artwork! I have to feel that would have been censored if FF5 had seen an American release on the SNES. Mellusion (listed in this translation as Merugene)'s gimmick is that she has an elemental weakness that constantly switches back and forth between fire, ice, and lightning. She will absorb the other two that she is not weak against, and changes it up frequently. Solo, not having any magic, just punched away mindlessly. Merugene rarely attacks (and attacks weakly when she does), relying on casting Fire/Ice/Bolt 3 to do damage. However, Solo was wearing a Wall Ring, which negated that completely! (Remember how I talked about the importance of securing a Wall Ring earlier?) This fight took a while, because Mellusion has a very high Defense and she was absorbing the attack magic that bounced off Solo's Wall. There was little danger though, and I would rate this a fairly easy battle. Easy since Solo had the right setup, of course.

After completing the Pyramid and Mellusion boss battle, the rest of the third world is completely optional. There are three other main dungeons, and a number of smaller side quests that can be undertaken. You get the airship back at this point, so (much like in the original Final Fantasy) pretty much everything remaining can be done in the order of your choosing, with one or two exceptions. The first destination for Solo to visit was the hidden town of Mirage. Like Lefein, this is sort of a secret area with the absolute best items for sale in hidden shops. I picked up an armor upgrade for when Solo wasn't wearing the Bone Mail, plus two more accessories: the Coral Ring (the item that defends against water attacks mentioned much earlier) and the Running Shoes (which put the wearer into permanent "Haste" mode). I swapped over to the Running Shoes for most default situations, as it sped up battles significantly.

The second of four major dungeons was the Solitary Island Temple. I decided I would do each of these areas with Solo, even though most of them would give him no benefit at all, just to get more practice for future variants. It would also gain him a few levels, which couldn't hurt. The dungeon itself was entirely routine, with nothing of interest to report. The boss was more noteworthy:

This guy Stalker (or Stoker in other translations) shows up in four different forms. You've got to hit the "real" Stalker, all damage directed at the others will miss, and of course he changes which one is the true form after each hit. For many classes, this would be a tedious process of trial and error. Solo could simply Kick away, and be guaranteed of hitting the correct one. That did less damage than punching, but better than missing entirely, right? I also sent Solo into the fight with the BuildUp ability, because Stalker always began on the far right side. That meant Solo could get in one double-strength attack for free without having to guess. After screwing up and getting killed on the first attempt, Solo did the fight with ease on the second.

Now in order to proceed further to the other optional portions of the game, Solo had to clear out the Fork Tower. This very cool dungeon forces you to split your party into two groups: one side of the tower only allows physical attacks, the other side only allows magic. Clever stuff. Naturally, the physical side of the tower was cake:

Solo torched the boss over there, the Minotaur, without breaking a sweat. If the battle was purely physical, he wasn't going to lose! Of course, that opened up the larger question: how do you do the other side of the tower? After all, Solo couldn't be in both places at once! In this case, I was going to have to use the other three party members to fight the boss on the magic side, Omniscient. But again, how do you do that with three characters pathetically low on level?

My first attempt involved sticking the Wall Ring on Cara and hoping that Omniscient (who will never attack, only cast magic) would reflect enough spells off it to kill himself. This didn't work too well, because Omniscient starts the battle with "Regen" and "Shell" status, meaning he was slowly gaining back hit points at a constant rate and all magic damage against him was cut in half. It still might have been enough to whittle him down over time, except that eventually Omniscient cast Drain (which apparently goes right through Walls) and killed Cara instantly. Urp.

OK, new plan. Relying on reflected spells wasn't going to be enough to get the job done. I was going to have to get the job done the normal way, by casting my own attack magic. But spell damage is heavily dependent on level (it factors into the multiplier, just like with punching damage) so there wasn't much that sub-level-10 characters could do. Except... there's a loophole! (There's always a loophole in this game.) The Dimensional magic spell "Comet" does damage completely independent of level. Here's the full formula:

COMET
Damage = ((50..200) - Magic Defense) * M, M = 8

Omniscient had a Magic Defense of 8, and the multiplier was cut in half because of his Shell status. That meant that Comet spells would do anywhere from 168 to 768 damage, in a straight random dice toss. Even better, at a cost of 7 magic points the spell was dirt cheap to cast, and thus friendly to low-level characters with few MPs. I turned the three girls into Time Mages, fought a few random battles to at least get them into the 10-12 level range, and then tried the tower again:

This worked out perfectly! Omniscient went down under a hail of Comets, and the three characters were never threatened even the slightest bit. Faris was killed twice and revived with Phoenix Downs, Lenna and Cara (wearing the Wall Ring) were never touched. I made another note to keep this trick in mind for future solo characters, should they find their way to this situation. (Interesting question: what to do if the solo character is a magic user, and the other three have to take out the Minotaur instead of Omniscient? We'll find out when I get there!)

Completing Fork Tower opens up the submarine, and access to the Great Trench dungeon on the ocean floor. This was very much not an area that Solo liked; the random enemies were all undead with high physical defense and dangerous abilities. One of them could paralyze Solo, another could cast "Condemn" and initiate the ticking death clock, and a third had the ability to cause an unblockable instant death attack. Solo had to do a lot of running in this area, wasting his time and money to little purpose. The floor of the dungeon was also packed with lava, much like in Gurgu Volcano in the original Final Fantasy, forcing heavy potion use. A thoroughly unenjoyable area to play.

There was one treasure of note here for Solo: an accessory called the Kaiser Knuckle. This item provides a modest boost to stats, but for the Monk job (or anyone using the "Brawl" ability), it produces a huge increase in damage. The Kaiser Knuckle adds 50 to the base attack value, which gets multiplied many times over. It was effectively like adding another 25 levels to Solo's attack! The one downside is that the situations where you'd most like to use it, like against bosses, are also the situations where accessories like the Flame or Wall Ring are needed the most. Nevertheless, the Kaiser Knuckle was obviously useful in a number of situations. Killing enemies in one hit instead of two did a lot to reduce damage in some areas.

The boss fight of this area was another of FF5's amazingly creative designs. It consists of a pig-like trio, each attuned to a different element: Phobos (Poison), Neregeid (Ice), and Triton (Fire). Each of the three is relatively easy to kill, but here's the trick: the three must all be killed at the same time, or else they will keep reviving endlessly. (Fortunately, they don't come back at full health though!) For Solo, the fight was deadly serious: killing any one of the three bosses would cause them to cast "Delta Attack" when they revived, an attack that stones one of the party members. That meant Solo, since he was the only one alive. And once he was turned to stone, the fight was over. In other words, he had to kill all three of the bosses at once, and get it right the FIRST time, or else be killed instantly by their Delta Attack.

Now the good news is that Solo could nullify all damage simply by equipping the Bone Mail (absorbs Poison) and Flame Ring (absorbs Fire and defends Ice), so there was no worry on that end of things. My biggest fear was Solo's innate Counter ability kicking in when I didn't want it to, and killing the bosses out of order. In the actual fight, I had Solo target the two bosses in the back row (Triton and Neregeid), while relying on Counter to do damage against Phobos, the green opponent in the front row who took full damage. This worked pretty well, and I had a table on my calculator keeping track of the damage done to each boss, allowing Solo to spread it around evenly to each target. Each boss has a little over 13,000 health, and once I got them all over 12k damage, I had Solo pause and wait for Counter to take out one of the three. I was hoping that it would be Phobos, so that Solo could Kick the remaining two for full damage. Instead, it was Triton in the back that attacked and died from the Counter. So now Solo has no choice, he has to fire off a Kick before the other two can react, and hope that he's balanced the damage out evenly:

Much to my surprise, it worked perfectly on the first attempt! I caught the two remaining bosses fading away into mist, just to prove that Solo landed the killing blow successfully on both. I really enjoyed this fight, and it was successful purely thanks to the planning ahead of time. I imagine other jobs that don't have to worry about "Counter" would have had an easier time of things, he he.

In contrast to the Great Trench, the final of the four main dungeons was a breeze and gave great experience. Istory Falls was full of melee opponents; the most dangerous caster was one who relied on "Doom", a poison spell that healed Solo to full instead of killing him! Thanks, Bone Mail! Solo picked up a couple of levels looting the treasures inside. This area had a lot of stuff that Solo turned up earlier in the game (like the Wall Ring, another Kaiser Knuckle, etc.) through alternate means. The boss at the end was one of Final Fantasy's famous summons, Leviathan:

This is one of only two battles in the game where the Coral Ring is absolutely necessary. It allowed Solo to absorb those Tidal Wave water attacks, so that they actually healed him! Leviathan actually had a strong melee attack as well, which forced the use of one Elixir. (No Bone Mail for this fight! Tried it once and Solo died because he couldn't heal himself.) Overall, a rather easy boss battle - *IF* you come prepared with the right equipment. Think I've said that a couple times before...

The remaining parts of the third world prior to the final dungeon mostly consist of short sub-quests, all of which are optional and can be skipped. In fact, without a guide of some kind, you probably wouldn't even know that some of them existed! I had Solo go after Odin first, a summon spell that most long-time Final Fantasy fans should be familiar with:

Odin's gimmick is that you have one minute to fight him, and when the timer hits zero, he does his special instant-kill attack that wipes out the party. Since time was of the essence, I gave Solo the Running Shoes to put him in Haste mode. That gave him enough extra attacks to defeat Odin on the first try, with six seconds left on the clock.

Then, because one useless summon spell is never enough...

Gotta fight Bahamut just for the challenge, right? Many of his attacks were fire-based, so I gave Solo the Flame Ring for this battle to absorb some of them. Like a number of other bosses, Bahamut's actions were scripted based on the number of hit points he had remaining. As his health decreased, the strength of his attacks went up, culminating in repeated uses of "Mega Flare", Bahamut's trademark super attack. Since Mega Flare would kick in once the big guy dropped under 10,000 hit points, the best strategy was once again to make use of Solo's BuildUp ability. I knocked Bahamut down to about 11k health, then initated a BuildUp attack that did almost 7000 damage. You can see one of the 3300 damage BuildUp hits in the shot above. That meant Solo only needed one more normal attack to finish off the dragon; he ended up taking a single Mega Flare shot (which did 2500 damage!) and won without issue. Another victory on the first attempt.

I should mention here again that boss fights in Final Fantasy 5 don't provide experience or gold, only ability points. For a character like Solo who had maxed out his job class, these fights were literally pointless, not even providing token paltry experience. But, of course, the challenge of fighting them was its own reward. I think that says a lot about the player - do you play the game to be given in-game rewards, like items, cinematics, and "story"? Or do you play the game simply because it is fun? I'm sure you can guess what my answer is, since I keep inventing completely unnecessary ways to make my favorite games harder.

That pretty much wrapped up everything aside from the final dungeon. The only areas I didn't send Solo into were the Phoenix Tower (where I would have to give away Elixirs to pass the dangerous Magic Pots, and gain nothing back in return - a bad investment) and the underwater ruin of Worus Tower, where Gogo and the mimic job were located. That was not an interesting boss fight, and there was nothing to be gained, so I decided to skip that one too. Now the only thing remaining was to buy more Elixirs (at 50k gold each!) and restock Hi Potions, before heading into the Cleft of Dimension for the final run.

This lengthy dungeon has the party revist tilesets from a number of different locations earlier in the game, with many MANY bosses scattered throughout. I knew that Solo would have to take a couple different runs through it to kill a few bosses, leave to restock potions, then return and go further forward. The first such boss was a woman named Calotisteri ("Wood Sprite" in other translations); her main attack was casting Drain over and over again. Of course, with the Bone Mail that merely healed Solo instead of hurting him, so this fight was incredibly easy. I didn't even have to swap gear, just fought with the normal setup.

The next encounter of note was against Apanda, a boss that is literally Byblos 2.0 with a nearly-identical set of AI attack scripts. Once again, I didn't swap equipment out (having just saved the game at a convenient save point) and fought the battle normally to see what would happen. Solo managed to dodge his nasty Sonic Wave attack, and simply wore the boss down with normal punching. Eventually, Apanda went down. I'd like to say there was a plan here, but there wasn't. Simple attacking got the job done.

Solo retreated back out to the normal world at this point to restock potions. He had gained a couple of levels in the process, up to 58 now. I had no desire to fight the super-boss Omega, because we all know what that would have looked like...

OK, back inside the Cleft of Dimension. The unofficial "middle" part of this dungeon is the Dimensional Castle, which hosts another save point (yay!) and a whole slew of bosses to fight. In fact, you have to kill the first of these bosses to reveal the first save point - and naturally the game doesn't tell you this. (Unless you have a guide, you have to learn everything in FF5 through trial and error.) Fortunately I knew where to go thanks to my non-variant runthrough, and that Apocalypse was the first boss to target:

Apocalypse is essentially an enemy Blue Mage. He can cast every Blue Magic spell in the game, which meant a wide variety of potentially bad stuff could be coming against Solo. I figured out early on that it was best to equip a Wall Ring for this fight, as it would reflect many, if not all, of the hostile magic spells. There was a host of bad stuff here: Dark Shock (level reduced by half, just like "Sonic Wave"), Condemn, Death Claw, White Wind (which would provide massive healing for Apocalypse), and more. I had to do the fight quite a few times until Solo managed to get lucky and dodge the worst of these spells. Since it was a fairly long walk to Apocalypse from the previous save point, this was a major pain in the butt. Finally Solo managed to get it done, in a fortunate battle where Death Claw (which has 80% odds to hit) missed and he killed Apocalypse with 10 seconds left on Condemn. Whew.

The new save point was a huge relief, as it meant a short walk to the next trio of bosses. Catastrophe was literally next door, on the other side of the same floor as Apocalypse:

His main attack consisted of casting "Earth Shaker", the spell used by the Titan summon, over and over again. Although this did a lot of damage, it was easy to work around and didn't present much of a danger. My real fear was his "Demon's Eye" attack, which caused petrification = instant death when Solo turned to stone! In fact, the first time Solo fought Catastrophe he used the attack at the very start of the battle, ending it in mere seconds. Oops, heh. The good news was that the boss only had 20k hit points, which wasn't a lot at this stage of the game - a mere four attacks from Solo at this stage of the game when he was using the Kaiser Knuckle. A couple tries saw Solo get lucky and avoid the Demon's Eye, then coast to victory.

Another boss was lying in wait in the throne room of the Dimensional Castle. Halicarnassus seemed pathetically weak at first, with Solo beating the living daylights out of her without breaking a sweat. Then when victory seemed to be in hand, she cast Holy:

...which did 9999 damage. Uhh... help? Looking at the AI scripting, it seemed that Solo had a grand total of six rounds of combat to kill Halicarnassus before she cast Holy and ended the fight. Could he pile up the 33k damage he needed to win in that span? Maybe. Solo was doing ~5000 damage with each attack, so it would be close. Unfortunately he had to use a "Maiden's Kiss" item on himself to heal frog status at the start of each battle, since Halicarnassus always opened the fight with a spell that turned him into a toad. I needed one of two things to happen: either for Solo to land some critical hits, or for Counter to kick in and get free rounds of combat that way. As it turned out, Solo got two Counter attacks on my second attempt at this battle, and that was enough to get it done just before a Holy spell would have finished him off. Another whew at getting this done without too much trouble. (Note: later realized I could have just given Solo the Wall Ring, which would have reflected Holy. D'oh!)

If that wasn't enough, there's a fourth and final boss at the end of the Dimensional Castle. Twin Tania has a number of middling damage spells to cast, but his main attacks are Tidal Wave and Mega Flare. Perhaps the "twin" refers to a combination of Leviathan and Bahamut's special attacks? Anyway, every single time Twin Tania takes physical damage, he has a 1/3 chance to counter with Tidal Wave. That's where clever use of accessories came in:

With the Coral Ring, each casting of Tidal Wave healed over 1000 damage! This is the second of only two battles in the game where it's needed, the other being against Leviathan earlier. What a lifesaver. As far as Giga Flare went, Twin Tania provided a "charging up" message to let Solo know it was coming, and allow him to heal if necessary. The attack consistently did over 3000 damage, so it was not something to fool around with. Overall, it took quite a few rounds to wear down the boss' 50,000 health. Two Elixirs got it done without undue trouble.

Solo left the dungeon for the final time to replenish potions and spend the rest of his accumulated cash. I ended up with 25 Elixirs for the final two boss battles. That would have to be enough - it could heal over 150,000 health! I can't imagine a situation where that wouldn't be enough healing power. Status attacks like Condemn and Sonic Wave usually proved to be the real danger anyway, not running out of hit points.

Necrophobia is the final boss before the ending showdown with Exdeath. He's actually an optional boss, but defeating him gives you access to a save point in the room just before the last battle, so it wasn't exactly a fight I could avoid. (I was anticipating the need for a lot of retries against Exdeath, to say the least.) Necrophobia's special ability is that he starts off the fight completely invulnerable. You must kill the four barriers that surround him before you can do any damage. The barriers themselves attack by reflecting Flare/Holy and Fire/Ice/Bolt 3 off of themselves; they are permanently in Wall mode, so these attacks can't be defended by equipping a Wall Ring. I gave Solo the Running Shoes instead to put him in permanent Haste mode, and that seemed to work well. Taking down the barriers involved drinking a couple of Elixirs, but was not all that tough.

The problem came when the barrier was removed and Necrophobia started attacking. He had this horrible ability to take two actions in a row, attacking or casting nasty spells. The worst combo was casting Maelstrom (dropping Solo's hit points to less than 10) followed by an immediate attack. No matter what Solo's health might be, that combo would always kill him! Now that combo wasn't guaranteed, but it was a likely result and not something Solo could count on dodging - at least, not without an endless amount of tedious repetitions. What was I supposed to do here?

Well, this is an optional boss, after all. Maybe Solo could just skip Necrophobia and go on to the ending boss?

Heh. Exdeath crushed that thought out of my mind real fast. (We'll get to the horrors of the last battle in a little bit.) I even used save states to play around with the Exdeath fight a bit, and I couldn't even get past his FIRST form, to say nothing of the even-more-dangerous second form. So this isn't going to work. Solo absolutely has to defeat Necrophobia and get that save point, so I can run many, many trial fights against Exdeath and grok my way to a successful strategy. What's the plan, chief?

In looking for answers, I came across a helpful suggestion in one of the FF5 online Walkthroughs. It suggested using the Magic Lamp to do damage against obstinate bosses. The Magic Lamp - of course!

The Magic Lamp is a unique item that summons espers to fight in battle, just like a Summoner would do normally. It starts with Bahamut, the most powerful summon, and moves down the list one at a time until ending up with Chocobo, the weakest. The Lamp has the nice feature of being rechargeable, if you take it to a certain spot in the Great Trench undersea dungeon. This can be a major pain, walking all the way down there each time it needs to be recharged, but it does open up a lot of possibilities for variant characters like Solo.

I didn't want the Lamp for the Bahamut or Leviathan summons. Their damage is based primarily on the Magic Power stat, and Solo (as a monk) had an abysmally low score in that category. His Magic Power was 2 - I had a Summoner in my non-variant run with a Magic Power of 71! It was kind of amusing to watch Bahamut appear and do a fraction of Solo's normal punching damage, hehe. Anyway, the reason why I wanted the Lamp was for the Golem summon, which creates an "Earth Wall" that temporarily absorbs all physical damage directed at the party. All I needed was for Golem to take the hit for Solo when Necrophobia's Maelstrom/Attack combo popped up. Absorbing just two of them would give Solo the time he needed to get the fight done.

So Solo walks all the way back through the entire final dungeon, and back to Istory Falls to get the Magic Lamp. Then he walks 3/4 of the way through the Great Trench dungeon to charge it up - the Lamp starts out lacking power. Now it's back through the whole final dungeon again to get back to Necrophobia, and all along the way Solo is fighting enemies and gaining experience. In the rematch, Golem worked exactly the way I intended, taking the critical hit for Solo that would have killed him. Game, set, and match!

Getting that final save point meant that the last battle could finally begin. Solo had a monumental task still ahead of him in dealing with the two forms of Exdeath. The first one, the "tree" form pictured above, was bad enough. This one had several different attacks that could instantly kill Solo: our old friend "Condemn" from the Exdeath fight at the end of the second world, and a new attack called "White Hole" that caused petrification and instant death whenever it was successful. And it was successful about 80% of the time. Solo had to get lucky and dodge these attacks to stand any chance of winning the battle; even with perfect knowledge of the AI scripting routine, there wasn't anything I could do. If Exdeath used White Hole (and he had a 1/3 chance to use it almost every round of combat), Solo was almost always going to die. The one thing I could control was Exdeath's use of Meteor. His programming switches when he has less than 10,000 health remaining, going into a pattern where each round had a 1/3 chance to Fight, cast Meteo, or do nothing. After learning this, I made sure that Solo always had full health upon dropping Exdeath under 10k health, so that he would survive a casting of Meteo.

Even with all the planning in the world, Solo usually lost to the Exdeath first form 7 out of 8 times. I wish I were making that up...

Nevertheless, with luck I could get Solo past the first fight. That's where the crazy battle against the second form came in:

Neo Exdeath, the second form, has four different parts. I snapped this picture during a Kick to showcase them. (I was experimenting at the time with a Kicking strategy. Yeah - that didn't work so hot!) The weird numbering sequence is due to the fact that I'm following the conventions in J.L. Tseng's guide that I linked to on the first page. Each of these parts has different attributes and uses different attacks. Part #1 is usually pretty inactive, its main attack consisting of something called "Grand Cross" which can inflict any status ailment in the game. 6 of the 18 possiblities were deadly for Solo, while the other 12 were pretty harmless. In other words, another gigantic dice roll in the final battle, woohoo! Part #2 was also usually inactive, with a lot of "Nothings" written in the AI script. Its one attack was something called "Almagest", a Holy element spell that usually did about 1500 damage to Solo. Not a great threat.

The other two parts were by far the most active ones. Part #3, the head up there in the front, was the physical attacker. It did nothing but attack nonstop, with its normal attacks doing a little over 1000 damage and its special "Vacuum Wave" attacks doing more than 2500 damage. This part had the highest speed and thus attacked more often than the other parts. Not to be taken lightly, even if there wasn't any instant kills there. Finally, Part #4 in the back was clearly the spellcaster of the bunch. Solo was used to dealing with its Fire/Ice/Bolt 3s, and the Flare/Holy spells, but Part #4 also had a small chance to cast the spell "Delta Attack" which you may remember caused petrification and thus instant death. The first time Solo fought Neo Exdeath, he was hit with Delta Attack right away and killed in seconds. Umm... fun? Even worse, Part #4 was in the back row, and took half damage from Solo's attacks, at least until he killed some of the other parts first. On that same note, each of the four parts had 50,000 (or more!) hit points, adding up to a grand total of 220,000 health across the four. With Solo's attacks doing a little over 3000 damage on average, that was going to be a lot of punching, with instant death attacks all over the place. Joy.

My two great concerns were trying to defend Solo from Grand Cross and Delta Attack, the attacks that could end the fight instantly. There wasn't much I could do about Grand Cross, as it could inflict 18 different status ailments. Delta Attack though... maybe I can stop that. It was reflectable by a Wall spell, so my first strategy was to use the Magic Lamp to summon the Carbunkle esper, who casts Wall on the party. This was actually semi-successful, and Solo managed to dodge a Delta Attack this way. However, Part #1 casts Dispel as part of its AI routine, and so any Wall from Carbunkle was extremely short lived. Equipping a Wall Ring was not an option either - Solo needed those Running Shoes to stay in Haste mode! Hmmm.

Soon I came across another, better solution. Tipped off by a vague post on a FF5 message board, I went back and re-examined the code on the four Neo Exdeath parts. As it turns out, Part #4 does not have the "Heavy" flag in the code! "Heavy" is a flag on pretty much every boss in the game, preventing them from a bunch of instant death spells that work against normal monsters. One of them is the Odin summon, for example. Does that mean that Odin would work against Neo Exdeath?! I had to test that:

I'm condensing many hours of experimentation into a couple of paragraphs here, so let me mention one other thing. I alternated between practicing boss strategies against Exdeath and grinding out additional levels for more total hit points and damage. Higher levels didn't do anything to increase stats, only shorten the battles via greater damage ouput, which meant less time exposed to instant-kill attacks. Whenever I would get bored of one thing, I would have Solo switch over to do the opposite. Best way I could find to kill time during what was often a tedious process of resets and playing around with tactics that proved to be dead ends.

Finally, I was ready to go for the ending run. I had all the practice I needed and knew exactly what to do with Solo. The first phase against Exdeath went remarkably quickly, the extra levels significantly cutting down on Solo's length of exposure to death attacks. Phase two against Neo Exdeath, destroy Part #4 with Odin via the Magic Lamp, then bludgeon Part #3 with fists. Solo spread out the damage against the last two parts, got them both under 10k health... and then was zombied by Grand Cross. Argh! Over 90% of the way there. Nevertheless, Solo had made it closer on that attempt than ever before. I could feel him closing the gap, right on the verge of taking the last step. Try it again, take out Exdeath, then Neo Exdeath Parts 3 and 4. Solo was landing all kinds of critical hits, meaning less time for Neo Exdeath to cast Grand Cross. I kept track of their hit points on a notepad, needing to ensure that they went down at the same time. Eventually, they were both under 10k health again. One more Grand Cross to dodge... and it comes up with "Mute" status! Totally irrelevant, woot! One more Kick to launch - score!

Solo successfully avoided three Grand Crosses in the last battle. Game over.

Playing through FF5 with Solo was an enormously enriching experience. I learned more about the first Final Fantasy with my original Black Belt Solo than I did on any other run, and it was a similar situation here with the Monk version. I picked up so many little tricks to defeat bosses, many of which I haven't even mentioned in this report. Future variant runs will be significantly less painful thanks to the hard work that Solo went through!

One thing that I hadn't expected going in was how much status ailments and various one-hit kills would end up being the main focus of Solo's journey. Bosses almost never defeated Solo through normal attacks or magic. No, it was inevitably the paralyzation/petrification/weak/aging/zombie/death/etc. moves that dominated my tactical planning. This leads me to believe that the Dancer job (the only one that can equip the status-protecting Ribbon item) would probably fare better than you might expect. Since physical damage was almost never an issue, I ended up keeping Solo in the front row for the vast bulk of the game. In nearly every situation, he would take less damage overall by ending fights quickly by staying up front, especially against bosses. Most solo guides suggested staying in the back row at all times, and that probably works for some jobs, but in my experience it's not a good move for the Monk!

A final picture of Solo and some stats from the ending sequence. The game tallies up all the abilities learned throughout its course on the right side of the screen. Since Solo never changed jobs, he ended up with exactly 7 abilities, the number provided by the Monk class. On the left side you can see his finishing level, hit points (boosted by HP +30%), magic points, and experience. I'm almost embarassed that I took Solo all the way to level 75, which is astronomically high for this game. Keep in mind, however, that at every stage of the game I was experimenting to determine solutions to various problems. I probably could have done the last boss at a lower level, but it took so much time and effort figuring out a correct solution to that nasty fight, Solo ended up overleveled. Given the fact that it took about three dozen tries to beat Exdeath at the end, I hope you can understand why I chose to go add more levels.

The reincarnation of Solo lived up to the worthy mantle of his predecessor. The quest was harder this time around - a lot harder - however he made it to the end with nothing more than two fists and a lot of determination. I hope you enjoyed reading this rather long-winded report (31 pages and 17,000 words in MS Word!), and maybe it will even inspire you to try your hand at FF5 as well. Thanks.

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With a new computer and new video software on hand, I've gone back and added a video commentary of Solo's final battle against Exdeath. Take a look above or at this link here!