Yes, I know this is not exactly my normal content.
One of my favorite things to do in my free time is take an old RPG (usually Pokemon) and play it in some ridiculous way that’s definitely not the intended strategy. Final Fantasy (the first game) has an interesting setup in that your classes are chosen deliberately at the start of the game. Due to the way things work, there’s a finite number of ways your team can be set up: ignoring spells and equipment, that number is a manageable 126. Since it only takes about six hours to play the game all the way through, I figured I could just go ahead and do all of them, with some ground rules to make things take a little less time.
- No grinding. I can go back to town when I’m out of supplies for progress, but I can’t just wander back and forth looking for encounters.
- Open all the treasures. I would do this normally until I learned where the useless treasures were anyway, but this gives me an excuse to get experience from encounters without going against the “No grinding” rule.
- No fleeing. There are exceptions for when a party member would get no experience and I’m headed back to town anyway, or when I’m spending all my turns healing (because everyone’s at low health) and feel pretty sure I’ll lose if this continues. Otherwise, this is another way to guarantee experience gain.
- These are deathless attempts. If I lose to an earlier encounter, I don’t like my odds with Chaos. Therefore, if a party can’t manage everything before Chaos, I’ll just go to the next one.
My method for team selection is just counting through them on a base 6 number system, skipping any teams that would be repeats: 1111, 1112, 1113, 1114, 1115, 1116, 1121 (skipped), 1122, 1123, etc. The way the classes are listed, they’re naturally in the order from most to least defensive. As the first two party members have an increased chance to be targeted (50%, 25%, 12.5%, 12.5%), this works extra well! This video compresses my first five attempts, mostly only including boss fights. The random encounters, at least at this point, are downed mainly by just spamming the Attack action, so it’s not very exciting. At least I put a counter at the bottom for you.
Generally speaking, I don’t expect any given team to beat Chaos. Chaos is a hard fight. What’s especially mean about the encounter is that you might have done perfectly fine with everything else along the way, but then you get to the end and your team just isn’t able to deal enough damage to win. That’s why I set it up as deathless attempts. I certainly didn’t expect to get a win without any way to use Haste, given Chaos’s tendency to heal while at low health, but for some reason he didn’t do that with team 5. I’ll keep a running tally of any teams that win. I wonder how many that will be?