Part 80: Walker, Texas Beekeeper

This is a half-blind LP! I am going to bring in research about FFV only when it's necessary for me to get over hurdles in this solo run. I'm going to talk about stuff with a lot of assumptions and guesses based solely on observations. This is partly for the challenge, partly in the interest of time, and partly . Feel free to correct me after things come up, as there are a bunch of people ITT that are way more knowledgeable about this game than me. I don't care if I learn stuff by reading people's corrections, so don't worry about that.

Walker, Texas Beekeeper

Decided to go with the solo Ranger. I didn't hex edit to unlock all the abilities, but I might later if that makes things more interesting with the weird combinations I can cook up. For now, I'm going to keep it to vanilla Ranger, at least until I master Ranger.

But first, a name.



Yes, you. We need a Ranger name. I thought of Strider, Danger, and Rick. But we're going to go with the most Ranger name in existence.







Hey, bebe.





Anyway, here's our first look at the Ranger:



Decent STR, good AGI, and meh STM and MAG. Weapons are going to be a problem for a while.

And here's our obligatory First Goblin Fight:



Walker is hitting Goblins for 6 per punch. The knife will hit for about 20. The Ranger is pretty simple at its most basic because of !Aim. !Aim is identical to Fight, except that it grants a 100% hit rate. Having not played the game in ten years, and playing this basically blind (at this point, at least; I'll bring in data tables and such when I get to a point where I need them), I was paranoid that !Aim couldn't crit or something else stupid in exchange for the hit rate. But it can crit and does the same damage as the Fight command, so there's no reason not to use it whenever you would Fight. I config the game to keep my cursor on memory so that I never go near Fight again, and we're off and running.

I'm not sure if it's the high AGI, something passive about the Ranger, or just the game in general, but I seem to be getting a ton of Preemptive Strikes in random encounters. If I'm not crazy and just imagining the high rate of them, that'll be useful to getting ina dn out of random encounters efficiently. We'll see.

I'm not a vet of this game, and the only JRPG I've solo'd is FFVI, so I'm a little overcautious. While I'm level grinding around Tule, I get this after my first 15 JP:





!Animals fulfills the game's promise of friendly woodland critters to help the Ranger. You seem to get a random draw of critters depending on your level, so the ability scales pretty well. I'm going to make generous use of !Animals until something better comes along, so I'll show off each animal as I see them for the first time. I test it out outside of Tule and the first one I get is:





Oh, that's cute. Squirrels. Great. I could have done 28 or so damage with !Aim, but these little--



Oh.

I see one more animal friend before I move onto the Wind Shrine:



Bees? Bees! BEES!



As you can see, the damage on this one (and Squirrel, for that matter) is pretty random. The Bee Swarm does less base damage but hits all opponents. The Squirrels hits harder but hits one thing. The other issue with the Squirrels is that they cannot hit flying enemies (as far as I can tell).



That's Walker randomly targeting one of the Killer Bees with Squirrels. That's the biggest downside of !Animals: random targeting. I'm going to use it a bunch because it's reliable (for the most part... see below) and it hits significantly harder than !Aim at least until I get decent weapons. I'll probably shelf it for the Sandworm, but otherwise it'll see a lot of use. And besides: what kind of participant would Walker be in Zerky!'s thread if he didn't use some random targeting?

Walker is doing at least 40 damage per !Aim by the time I level up and take Farris' dagger. I stock up on junk at Tule and mosey on over to the Wind Shrine. I try !Animals in the shrine to test if it is environment-dependent like Mog's dances in FFVI. The description seems to imply that. As far as I can tell, it doesn't. I keep getting Squirrels and Bees, even indoors. This place needs an exterminator. There's enough flying junk in the shrine and I do enough damage with !Aim, even from the back row, that I stick to !Aim through most of the fights in the shrine.The shrine itself is no problem (because I think I'm a bit over-leveled at level 7), except for one scary hit of Aero that does 2/3 of Walker's HP in damage. But he's a tough guy played by Chuck Norris, so he endures to run into this outlaw:



Wing Raptor does not appear to be flying, so I try out !Animals in an effort to speed things up. I get Bees...



Then I get Squirrels that miss. I guess birds can fly. WHO KNEW? (Previous fliers were drawn above the ground, with a shadow on the ground, so I thought maybe Wing Raptor was on the ground because he's not drawn that way. MY IMMERSION.)

Still, the Bees hit him for more than twice what !Aim can do, so I try !Animals a third time:



I know this little guy as a Lagomorph from Setzer's Slot in FFVI. It's a good thing I recognized him, because then I don't expect anything special. It doesn't do anything as far as I can tell, and I switch to !Aim to finish off Wing Raptor. Easy as pie. AMERICAN APPLE PIE.


Current Level: 8
Animal Friends: 3
Deaths: 0