Parting thoughts? Pfaugh. I'm not about to abandon this quest just because of a single balky RNG swing. Let's try this again.

I apologize for the egregious pun in the Red Mage names; I didn't even notice it until one of them got poisoned and Hart went before Soul. (Incidentally, I dislike shortening or compressing longer words to fit in the 4-character name space. Better to use names that naturally fit. I made an exception for Heart/Hart here, since the shortened version is a perfectly common name in real life, and I was running out of ideas for names for Ironcore warriors.)

This time I held my itchy speedup finger long enough to actually get a screenshot of demolishing Garland at level 1.

The first part of the game played out identically to the previous attempt. Level 3 at Pravoka, level 4 at Dwarf Cave, level 5 advancing to Marsh Cave, level 6 on retreat from clearing the north wing. I bought the same stuff as previously; good thing I took detailed notes.

The WIZARDs showed up in a count of only two, and fell easily. I didn't even bother returning to Elfland, just used the HOUSE from Marsh Cave before fighting ASTOS. And ASTOS even missed his RUB!

Although he took several rounds to kill - without Silver Swords, the fighters were actually quite weak against him, and most of the damage came from ICE spells.

Incidentally, my image timestamps show that it took less than an hour from game start to defeating Astos, with the emulator running at 2.5x speed most of the time. I can't play Civilization quickly at all, but I can rocket through Final Fantasy at world-class speed. :)

Earth Cave proceeded the same as before and needs no further ado.

In the battle for the Flame Armor, Gurgu Volcano threw this scary moment at me! The Red D BLAZEd Soul within TWO HIT POINTS of death!

And if half-a-party could beat KARY on the previous attempt, surely a full party could here. Right?

Well, KARY unloaded everything she had on the two red mages. She killed Hart in a single physical attack, then almost killed Soul the same way...

then finished the job with a FIR2.

Well, that meant she'd been ignoring the FASTed fighters, who took care of business.

So three hours later, I'm back for another shot at Ice Cave. This time I've got a plan.