Kari 'Essentia' Johnson: I must have been insane to do this run. Final Fantasy VI/III was the first Final Fantasy I ever played, and it is and always has been my favorite game. Consequentially, I wanted to do a run on it, but there was already a segmented run on SDA; so I got the bright idea to try a single-segment run of this game. At first, I planned to follow the same route as the segmented run, but then I watched the TAS done by erokky, and I realized that there were many improvements that could be made, including not needing to level up in the dinosaur forest, not fighting the Magi Master, not needing to learn so many spells, and not having to get Locke in the WoR.
The hardest part of planning this run was figuring out which spells I needed, who to have learn them, and finding the fastest way to learn them. I did many test runs trying out different ideas until I came up with the plan that I used in this run. It isn't the fastest plan I came up with, but it's the safest for a single-segment run while still not sacrificing too much time.
Joker Doom is used a *lot* in this game. MasterZED has a lot of information on slots which was very helpful in this run. Basically, if you use an Echo Screen at the beginning of the battle, it sets it up so you can use Joker Doom. There are a few battles that don't allow you to get 7-7-7 even if you use an Echo Screen, though, including Ultros #4 and the 3 Tiers; however, there is still a way to do Joker Doom in these battles (see comments for the final battles). Other times, I use Vanish/Doom to make the battles go quickly.
This run was so long that I had to switch tapes twice during it. Since the in-game timer doesn't run when you pause during battles, I made sure to switch tapes when I was in a battle screen. The first time is just after defeating Dadaluma, and the second is when Kefka is turning the Espers into magicite in Thamasa. |
