Challenge dungeons!

After the main plot in one of the chapters of Final Fantasy 4: The After Years you have the option of running that character’s challenge dungeon. At the end of the challenge dungeon sits a treasure box which sometimes contains a piece of high-end equipment. You’re supposed to run the dungeon over and over again until you’ve gotten all the goodies and outfitted your characters well enough to go into the final chapters of the game.

Before you call that out as a pointless grind, you have to remember two key things: first, these chapters were originally Japanese cell phone games, meant to be played on the train or during Hilrarious Engrish Transration class or whatever. So playing the game as designed means you spend ten minutes running a dungeon and seeing what you get, not running the dungeon over and over for hours on end hoping you get decent drops.

Of course it was released as a WiiWare game in the US, where people play games in hours-long bursts during liesure time, which brings me to the second key thing: the monkeys over at GameFAQs have already broken their new toy and put up foolproof methods where you can game the system and guarantee a kickass chest every time you run a dungeon. You can usually have a fully-equipped team of level-capped heroes in slightly more than double the time it took you to finish that team’s chapter, which is pretty reasonable (and helps you ring out those last few droplets of value from your $3 purchase).

I’ve full-cleared most of the challenge dungeons now, and am pecking away at the last two. Here’s my take on each one:

Ceodore and Kain:
This is a pretty standard “survive to the end and beat the boss” dungeon. It’s probably the most difficult of all the dungeons. The level cap for these characters is 50 where it’s 40 for most other chapters, so you feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle for a while. Since you have three white mages in the group the designers felt justified by throwing things like Quake and Bad Breath at you constantly. It works, but the start is pretty rocky.

If you want all the best treasure, though, you have to play this dungeon a lot. The treasure list includes a full set of Diamond armor which three of your duders can make use of, which means going through the list three times before they’re all outfitted. The other little niggle I had was that one of your teammates is so overpowered compared to the rest that it feels like he does a lot of the heavy lifting, especially against the boss.

The dungeon only takes five or six minutes to run, so replaying it isn’t excrutiating as long as you use the RNG trick. (Which I won’t provide here. Get ye to GameFAQs.)

Rydia:
Rydia’s dungeon is essentially a re-imagining of the Sealed Cave as a maze. The path forward is blocked by a constant stream of Trap Doors and Evil Walls which you must dispatch. The final part of the dungeon has very, very tough monsters which will chew you up before a certain level. The final chest is guarded by a “boss and minions” style fight, where if you kill all the little guys the big guy rapes you cruelly. If you’ve ever played FF4 at all you’re used to these by now.

I liked this dungeon at first, but it started to wear on me after a while. In Ceodore’s dungeon you can run from every fight on your way to the boss if you so choose, but in Rydia’s many of the fights are forced. You have to kill something like six doors and three walls every time you go in. These are creatures Rydia fights earlier in her chapter, so they’re not even challenging, it’s just busywork.

On the plus side you’re only outfitting two characters so you can get away with only going through the treasure list once. Also, Rydia learns a spell that makes every battle in the place a joke. Run it on a moon phase that enhances black magic and you’re golden.

Yang:
There was a time I thought this was the worst challenge dungeon I’d ever seen. I’ve since changed my mind, but it’s still pretty bad. The dungeon is nothing but a long hallway leading to the treasure box with an extremely high encounter rate. That’s it.

Monsters get progressively tougher the closer you get to the box, and you can exit through a side door if you don’t think you’ll make it all the way. After a few aborted runs, though, both your characters will be one-shotting everything the dungeon can throw at you. From that point on it’s a matter of running from twenty fights, killing the few forced ones, and hoping the final box is something good. Because sometimes it isn’t.

I spent way less time here than I did in Ceodore’s or Rydia’s dungeons, but it felt like so much longer because it’s 100% grind. Nothing to learn, nothing to strategize, just go in on an attack-bonus phase and punch everything until the end. Boring way to cap off a boring chapter.

Palom:
Palom’s dungeon consists of about a dozen floors. Every time you go in the game picks three of these floors at random, and the pits you against the boss. The floors range in difficulty from piss-easy to brutal-spankin’-hard, but most of them are pretty cool and a few even have decent treasure before you get to the final box.

First off, Palom’s dungeon suffers the same problem Rydia’s does; at a certain level he gets an I WIN spell. Before that point many of the floors are impossible to get through, and after that every single fight in the entire place is completely negligible. There are no forced fights, though, and many of the floors can be completed literally in seconds, making this the shortest dungeon overall.

Until you get to the boss! The boss is a gimmick fight that takes a while to puzzle out. (There’s a save point beforehand, so don’t let this scare you.) The gimmick is nothing you haven’t seen before, but it’s new to FF4, and working out a good strategy to win takes some doing. First I found a clunky strategy that kinda worked. Then I found a better one that was much faster but required some mental notekeeping. By the time I was at the level cap and had most of my good gear I just muscled through with no strategy at all.

The problem with this boss is he has way too many HPs. It’s not a war of attrition, it’s “figure out the trick, and you win”. I think they should have let me win as soon as I figured out the trick. At lower levels killing the boss can easily take two or three times longer than it took you to get to him. At higher levels you’re just going through the motions. You only have to outfit two characters though, so you’ll only see him about ten times.

Edge:
The first roadblock to Edge’s dungeon is that it’s hard. You could grind past the difficulty, which is boring, or you could do what I did and actually learn the differences of all Edge’s ninja buddies. I mentioned in my last TAY post that I would never be able to keep these guys straight. Well, now I can, and it’s because the challenge dungeon forced me to swim or sink. Once I learned what my turn order was going to be, and which of my ninjas had the hold spell, and which had the blind spell, and which could heal, and which bands were good, etc. etc. etc. I had a much easier time of it.

The dungeon is a five-floor time trial. There’s the end box as always, but each of the four previous floors have good treasure as well. The faster you reach the end, the better your chances of getting something awesome. Of course you have no way of doing a fast run without some high-end gear and a few levels in your pocket, so the optimal strategy seems to be hanging out on one floor until you’ve grabbed the good treasure from it, then exiting the dungeon and running it again. Before long you’ll be blaring to the end box within a couple minutes.

This is probably my favorite dungeon. Having a full team of five is a nice refresher after so many groups of two. The final box doesn’t re-cycle through its treasure list like in some chapters, so there’s no pressure to run the dungeon dozens of times to equip five similar characters. Your fastest character has a spell that automatically runs from combat, so once you’re done with your levels there’s absolutely nothing standing between you and your prize.

The one downside is that each floor of the dungeon is a copy from a dungeon floor from FF4. Different monsters, of course, and a different overall goal, but it’s hard to shake that feeling of “wait, I’ve been here before” on your very first trip in.

Porom:
This is in the running for worst overall dungeon. For one, Porom is the only important character in her chapter. The other guys in your team are inconsequential and two of them are worse than useless because they can be one-shotted by most anything in the dungeon and just sit there sucking up your EXP. For two, the focus of the dungeon is shifted away from combat, so getting stronger or better equipped doesn’t make future runs easier or quicker.

Indeed, since your to-do list involves running across a wide area talking to a bunch of NPCs, there’s no efficient path at all. And just because there’s no focus on combat doesn’t mean it’s not present; you’re still going to get attacked every ten or twelve steps, just for good measure. Talk to all the NPCs within a fifteen minute time limit, and you get a prize. Yang’s dungeon you could at least muscle through.

After you learn the layout and what’s expected of you, you really only use up about half your timer. But that’s still seven or eight minutes, where every previous dungeon could be cleared between two and five. You don’t even get the visceral thrill of clobbering monsters like you do in Yang’s or Palom’s since if you stop to fight you’ll never make your deadline and, besides, your team is too weak to kick anything that resembles an ass.

Since you’re not fighting, you’re not getting EXP. Even if you were fighting, you’d be sharing your EXP with three pointless characters. So unlike everyone else’s dungeon where you’re working on your gear and level goals simultaneously, Porom has to tackle the two problems individually. Run the dungeon to get your equipment, then kill off the leeches and solo with her on Mt. Ordeals until she caps. All this for a character who will most likely be overshadowed by Rosa anyway. What fun!

Edward:
Eddie’s dungeon was very fun and clever… the first time I did it. Once I realized precisely what I’d have to do my heart sank through my stomach and splattered on the floor. This dungeon is based around money. There’s a box at the end with awesome treasure in it, but it costs 50,000 gil to open. The dungeon is littered with events that reward you with large amounts of gil, and a few places where you can lose or spend it. If you do everything the dungeon has to offer you make between 50k and 60k. This takes about a half hour.

You see the problem already: it’s going to take a half hour every single time you do it. The dungeon doesn’t get easier or faster, and you aren’t exploring or learning anything new on repeat visits. Play the same 30 minutes over and over. Forever. Oh, by the way, any money you make inside the dungeon vanishes when you exit. Have fun!

The most efficient path seems to involve going in with as close to zero gil as you can manage, trigger the few events that cost you money so you don’t actually lose any, trigger everything else, go to one of the shops and buy stuff until you’re down to 50k (can’t take the money with you, so you might as well stock up on Remedies or whatever), then open the final box.

The treasure list includes great gear for Edward and Harley, which is standard, but also contains things like Silver Apples, Soma Drops and Elixirs. These would be great treasures in anyone else’s list, but they’re painful in Eddie’s. I’ve since found that if you manage to stockpile 21 Remedies you can sell them all off for an instant 50k and open the box first to see if it’s something you want. If it’s not, you can reset and try again. Even if it is, though, you still have to run around and do everything in the dungeon in order to earn enough cash that you don’t fall behind on your next visit.

Lunarians:
Golbez actually gets two challenge dungeons, but both are extremely short and extremely easy. The optimal strategy for the boss of the second dungeon (which I deduced myself and then confirmed on GameFAQs) is to literally just sit and watch the boss die. It’s pretty hilarious.

The treasure list is split in half between the two dungeons, and you only have to outfit one character, so not only are repeat runs quick and painless but the treasure cycle repeats often enough to make grinding for things like Adamantine and Megalixers realistic.

So yeah, not great fun or anything, but at least it’s a quick run. It’s a B+.

The finale…?
So will the final chapters of the game have more challenge dungeons? God, I hope so. I want something that justifies all the hours I spent earning my uber-characters. Hopefully it’s something character-specific, like in FF4 Advance, so I don’t end up feeling stupid for gearing up Porom or Edward just to have them warm the bench for eternity.