Got the final earth crystal: Dancer. Ugh.
I mean, it's not AWFUL, but my line-up is now Knight, Mystic Knight, Geomancer, and Dancer. And given that it's a #natural run, there's no job mixing. Faris is just a Geomancer, Galuf is just a Dancer, etc. There's no healing, and two of the jobs (geo/dan) are heavily randomized.
Well. It'll certainly be a unique play for me. :)
The bosses have gotten so much tougher. Archeoaevis took many attempts to get right, and I had to blow through all my elixirs to do it.
I almost gave up at the Purobolos monster. This mini-boss is a pack of about 8 bombs that keep resurrecting each other and one-shotting my party members with Self-Destruct. In my first playthrough, my black mage just took them all out at once. That's not possible with my current party-makeup. It's very geared towards single-target damage.
So I wiped and wiped and wiped. Was about to say, "Fuck it, just not meant to be." But then a light went off in my head!
I had my Mystic Knight, Lenna, cast "Silence" on her weapon. Then, she went in a circle, hitting each of the monsters once to silence them all, and then we kept going. As they got low on health, they tried self-destructing or raising their buddies from the dead, but it didn't work!
GET HUSHED ON. WOOHOO!
The party just grinded up a bunch in Regole, in Galuf's world, and met the moogles.
---
A quick note: I'm astounded by the impact this game still has on me. Not just the job mechanics - the character moments. The raw energy that the Big Bridge music gives to Gilgamesh! The humor with Faris!
But more than that for me was the emotional power that the game does with memory. I started tearing up playing the other day as Galuf kept trying to remember who his granddaughter was and failing. And I definitely teared up - hell, I cried - as the music box played in Lix and Bartz remembered his parents and his mother's death as a child.
Just... I like FFVI more than FFV, but it takes the #2 slot in my overall list, even above FFIV and FFVII.
