I plowed my way through the final dungeon to the final boss who behaved differently than every other boss fight in the game in ways that made my initial plan bad. Unfortunately it took me a few rounds to figure out what was going on and by that point it was almost too late. It turns out the final boss has two tentacles which take actions as well and aren't taunted along with the main boss by my viking. They still follow the rule of one spell per monster no matter how many actions they take in a round but there are 3 monsters so they can cast three spells. One of the tentacles always seemed to cast a spell which did about 80% of my black belt's maximum health. The main boss sometimes cast a spell which did about that much as well. Eventually I realized the tentacles existed, just let my black belt stay dead, put a shield on the ninja, and just threw shuriken at the tentacle casting lightning. I managed to kill it but then timing worked out poorly and the boss got two turns in a row, used the massive AE both times, and managed to kill everyone.
I did learn that the protect spell is actually also the shell spell in this game. (It wore off of my viking in the middle of the fight and he started taking a much larger amount of damage from the AE spells.)
Ok, 3.5 hours gone... What to do? I decided I probably wanted to get my job level high enough on the viking to get into the 90% chance to land taunt bracket. So I spent a couple hours yesterday watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E while grinding on random idiots that couldn't possibly kill me. Then I started killing them off before my viking even got to take an action so I just decided to put him in tanking mode and taunt all the time. (Vikings are very slow so they go last but taunt is rigged to always go first so it isn't useless.)
I also knew in advance that my ninja was going to take a beating if he wasn't wearing a shield so I put the shield on and put him in the back row from the start. I also used protect casting consumables in the first round to try to cut down on the number of insta-gibs on the black belt. (Probably I should have changed to a different job entirely but I thought I could win as is.)
I get into the fight and it turns out the boss only starts casting his AE spell after he's taken a bunch of damage. Since I started the fight this time by killing the tentacles that never happened so they never actually cast enough spells in a single round to kill anyone. I had one scary turn where taunt missed and the boss almost killed my ninja (good thing he was in the back row) but other than that the fight was actually really easy.
There were a bunch of cutscenes after the final boss where we learned what all of the NPCs we met along the way were going to do with their lives. Nothing was learned about the four actual player characters. As far as I know they're just brutally powerful killing machines with no lives to return to. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them took over the world at some point. (Probably Bung...)
In all, a really great game. Part of me actually wants to start over again with a different party setup (all casters the whole way) instead of moving on to a different game. Also there's apparently a challenge dungeon that gets unlocked via the Mognet thing I didn't do so I kinda want to do that too. This is going to move to the top of the list of games played so far but I wonder how much of that is because of the changes made on the DS compared to the original game...
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