The Shrine

Sooo these are the much advertised and talked about ruins that totally and utterly are supposed to own your face in. Let's discuss them shall we?

You unlock the ruins by beating the game, in order to unlock all 9 of the doors in the dungeon you need to beat the game once with each character(total of 3 times since you can't switch Cecil in and out).

Then you go down deep deep deep into the dungeon and every 5 floors or so you come across a trial, all the way until the final floor and the final trial.

Anyway I'm stuck on Kain's so I decided to take a time out to tell you what about it. These are mini-spoilers, but non-game breaking so feel free to stop reading.

The bosses in each of these rooms are basically summon monsters. Lunar Titan, Lunar Ifrit, Lunar Bahamaut, etc. They all have about....100,000hp or so give or take, and they're hit or miss on challenging.

The trials themselves stem from interesting, to difficult, to annoying.

I've only been there with Rydia, Cecil, Kain, Edge, Rosa.

Rydia was the first one, she had to retaim her summoned monsters.
Cecil was next, he had to prove his worth as a Paladin.
Rosa was 3rd having to prove her worth as a White Mage
Edge was 4th having to overcome many traps in a castle as a ninja.
Kain is 5th and is very, very difficult, not to mention it's a drawn out sequence to his boss, and it's increasingly demoralizing everytime you die. However they give his character some development, so no spoilers at all here

The floors inbetween each of the trials are pretty simple, you start off with the same monsters you fight on the moon and as you get deeper the monsters get slightly stronger, but then so do you so the difficulty is off-set by that.

The Lunar bosses themselves range from hard to insane. Cecil's for example is pretty much impossible to beat without Kain. Rosa, Edge, and Rydaia have generic boss fights, where if you stay alive you can win. Kain's....well...Kain is the one I'm stuck on atm, and it's very, very, very hard. My only advise for Cecil & Kain's events are to bring and save lots of Herme's Shoes, that or level to 99.

Da well, back to work!

Lunar Odin wasn't that hard, foo. Blink (or Edge's 'Image') comes in real handy vs. bosses who attack physically a lot.

I've only done Rydia, Cecil, and Rosa's trials. None of them have been terribly interesting so far (actually, Rydia's was just lame). Hopefully they get better.

Unfortunately I'm being sucked into Half Life 2 now, so I think I'm going to be taking a break from FF4 for a bit.

Finished the Dungeon tonight. If you want to be cheesey you can use all the grimgores you get to make the last boss EZ mode. It's hilarious hehe.

BTW, I tried using Image with Edge, it didn't save me from crap for Odin.

Twin's Trials = switching back and forth and opening doors for one another from opposite ends.

Yang = Fighting Monks.

Edward's = Releasing Souls with "Sing", and no, he's not useful, he still sucks, and I hate him.

Cid = Flying around the world on the Airship under a time limit.

Just thought I'd check, did anyone here manage to kill Brachiadoraus yet? I can do ok for the first couple of minutes, but once he goes into Globe 999 mode I'm pretty much screwed.

Yeah he's the real final boss hehe. It's just a matter of keeping people alive. Actually there's a cheesy way to kill him, if you throw haste on Kain and his weapon procs, it's GG.

I cheated and set the battle timer from 'active' to 'wait' so it was easy (he never even cast wall on himself). That was after losing five times, and Abel's Lance never cast tornado. The shield you get has some bomb stats... but once you can beat him, you're god.

I haven't gone into the Ruins yet, but I should hit them soon.

I beat the game with the standard party. Then I powergamed.

See, the "extra" character levels are not set until you go and talk to them in Mysidia. Then, they're set roughly equal to Cecil's level.

So I beat the game, walked back into the Lunar Subterrane. Saved, killed off everyone but Cecil, then had him wander around the Crystal area. Zemus's Breaths, killed solo, are worth 60K exp, and do nothing but Scan you.

Levelled Cecil up to 70 while watching some TV, and now the extra characters are nice and strong with much less work (the "normal" party is otherwise in the low to mid 50s).

Bit cheesy, but levelling all the characters up normally would take a while.

Interesting seeing the extra characters in action. Yang's solid as ever, Cid is a freaking tank, Palom is death incarnate (nearly instant 9999 damage Flare casts? Yes please), Porom is as solid as you could want from a White Mage. And Edward? Well, he's still flimsy as ever, but the fucker is fast (as in, twice as fast as equal-level Yang, and 3X as fast as Edge - admittedly, Edward has 15 levels on Edge).

Looking forward to taking Zeromus out a few more times, then seeing these ruins.

Tort, if you level them TOO much that place will be a breeze, I went around 60 and it was challenging, I'm 70 now and all the monsters die in 1 hit most of the time.

PS: Those Legendary Weapons they get are more trouble then they're worth on Zeromus ZG or whatever his name is.

I've beat all the trials but Kain and Edge's. Even got the Brachiosaur thingy on the first try. And yes, the weapon procs on Cecil and Cid's weapons can be detrimental on some bosses, so I keep Ragnarok and Thor's Hammer in inventory so I can swap if needed.

No, not especially hard at my level, but it's not like the rest of the game is.

FF4A is now complete. Shame there's no real ending to the Lunar Ruins, but eh.