We hack our way through the various monsters in the Moon Palace again. I’ve done this section before, and this time things go a little faster and a little smoother. After about an hour or so of fighting, we find ourselves ready to start the final sequence once more.

This time, I set the battle speed to its slowest setting. I’m hoping that the extra time will allow me to get in more attacks and heals, and stay on top of things in the fight.

And oh, yes, I keep forgetting to do this, but my party members are all clustered around level 60 now.

For the lack of a better screen shot, I’m tossing up a random shot from the English version of the Moon Palace that I found on the net.

Status: Ready Again, and Awake this Time

Well, I found the end. In more ways than one.

We reached yet another jump point in Final Fantasy IV’s Moon Palace, found ourselves at the bottom of a set of stairs. Standing at the top were Golbez and FuSoYa. Standing in front of them was the ultimate evil, Zemus. Golbez and FuSoYa waste no time in putting the big hurt on Zemus. With that the world appears to be saved!

But of course that would be too easy. From Zemus’ remains arises Zeromus, and bigger and badder version of Zemus. He quickly bats us down then dispatches Golbez and FuSoYa with ease. Our companions back on Earth send up their prayers, however, and we are revived for this ultimate battle. The world rests in our hands.

Unfortunately, I had the game set on its highest speed and I was nearly asleep when this battle started. Within seconds, the battle was out of hand. Zeromus hits hard. He hit much faster than I could heal. In short, he overpowered us in every way possible. Within a few short rounds, we were all dead. We never got close to beating him.

The bummer behind all this is that our closest save is more than an hour back, right after the Groundhog Day post. To take on this final battle again, we’ll need to slog our way through all this stuff again. Sigh.

Status: Bummed

Man, how far does this Moon Palace Basement go? I started with over 400 high potions, and I’m down to less than 100. Random encounters now are frequent and tough. I haven’t seen a save point for quite a while. Although the basement started as some sort of cavernous structure, we’re now in what appears to be a man-made palace. I think I’m on the twelfth level, and it’s starting to feel like we’re close to the end, but if we don’t find it soon, I’m going to have to start burning up magic points and elixirs. At the rate we’re getting hit, I figure I can last another three or four levels before I’ll need to go back to the top for a larger supply of elixirs and potions.

I really don’t want to fight my way through this again. I’ve come so far. I’m also scared that I’ll hit some boss battle that will wipe us out before we can save our game again.

Status: Confidence Waning

The Moon Palace’s Basement is such a sprawling place, and filled with such an amazing collection of bosses and enemies. Detailing each one of the boss fights would get fairly repetitive, but as we get lower, the random encounters are almost boss fights in and of themselves. On a couple of levels, we find ourselves battling robotic heads that put up a hell of a fight, and then randomly generated Behemoths, which are manageable now, but cause us to burn through our potions at a frantic pace.

However, I somewhere around the tenth level of so, we came to a series of three doors on our left. The first led to a badly needed save point, but the second led to yet another weapon on a dais.

This time we are attacked by some sort of floating death ball, which immediately casts a spell on us that sets a ten-second timer over all of our party members’ heads. When the ten seconds expire, so do everyone in your party. The first time I tried this, we all died perfunctorily. The second time, I was convinced I needed to attack faster, but we were unable to kill the damn thing before the timer reaches zero over our heads. The third, fourth, and fifth times, I played around with various ways to nullify the spell the thing casts on us, but nothing worked: dead, dead, dead.

Then I became convinced I could do something to prevent the ball from casting the spell in the first place, but that only lead to five more dead parties. Finally, I thought the only way to kill the thing would be to hit it hard enough to kill it before the timer ran out, so I started trying all sorts of ways to boost our damage output. Ten more tries later, I had ten more dead parties.

By now I was feeling like this was some sort of Final Fantasy version of the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, in which he is forced to relive the same day over and over and over again. Load, die, reload, die, reload, die, reload.

I got the bright idea to check the the third door, and got excited when we won two ribbons that “helped avoid various conditions.” Aha! I thought that perhaps these ribbons would prevent the deadly spell from triggering on a party member, but that hope was false and only led to a few more dead parties.

I resorted to all sorts of things, throwing everything I could throw, casting all sorts of weird spell combinations. Trying to turn the damn thing into a toad. You name it, I tried it. I even tried having Edge throw Excalibur at the thing, which actually did a ton of damage. Still, after each attempt, we only ended up as dead as the previous attempt. I was tempted to just pass the thing by, but I knew it would nag the hell out of me if I left it still alive, plus I wanted the weapon it offered. And so we continued to beat ourselves to death again and again against the thing.

And then, by chance, I tried chucking that damn Kitchen Knife from Yang’s wife. 9,999 damage! Whoa! Considering the actual damage might be much higher, I got pretty excited here. And sure enough, with two seconds to go on the counter, the death ball finally did the purple shake of death! We beat the thing! Yes!

I have no idea how many times I tried this. A conservative estimate would say 30, but I bet it was more like 50 times. Still, in the end I can sleep well, as we toppled the beast.

You’d think, though, after all that work that I’d have another story to tell about some great weapon. However, only Kain could equip the holy lance that we got, and on the whole it wasn’t as effective a weapon as the Defender sword he is currently equipping. Long story short: a whole lot of effort for a whole lot of nothing.

Status: Onward, Finally

This Moon Palace Basement is one hell of a huge basement. We got spun around a bit as we hacked our way through the sixth and seventh floors. By chance, we walked across some sort of invisible bridge, and this lead us on a winding path to a badly need save point. From there, we advanced to a room with a yet another sparkling sword on a dais.

We pick up the sword, and are promptly attacked by Dark Bahamut, who doesn’t play around. He blasts our party with a Megaflare to start the battle. Fortunately, all of our party members are able to take the hit, and after Rydia casts the healing Asura summons and Rosa casts her strongest healing spell, our party is in control of the fight. Dark Bahamut takes a lot of damage, but the fight ends a few rounds later.

With this fight, we obtain the powerful Ragnarok sword, which boosts Cecil’s attack level to insane levels. Very nice indeed! We’ll continue downward tomorrow.

Status: Killing Stuff with a Purpose