My brother commented on yesterday's post about the 'infinite' victory Game Genie code and said that the thing he most remembered about it was getting a large number of rolls on the enemy loot table. There are some stupidly rare drops in the game and this was the first time we'd ever seen one of them. (Mage, I think.)
I mentioned that Rydia learned almost all of her spells via leveling but that's only true of white and black magic spells. Her call spells are learned in a wide variety of ways. She starts the game with one. She learns five more when she rejoins the party after growing up in the land of the summoned monsters. Most of the rest she learns by having the party defeat a legendary monster. Find Odin at the bottom of Castle Baron and beat him up to learn the spell. Brave Bahamut's Cave on the moon to learn that spell. Hit Yang on the head with a frying pan to learn Sylph. There are a couple spells that you can only learn by getting a rare drop from a random encounter. I don't think I've ever had Mage myself. I got Imp once from a monster in the final dungeon on the moon. Are there any other super rare drops? Lets see what gamefaqs has to say on the topic...
First of all it looks like every monster has a 5 in 96 chance to drop an item at all after you kill them. (Dr Lugae's second form has a 100% chance to drop an item as the only exception.) After determining that they'll drop an item there are 4 things they could drop. The first item has a 32 in 64 chance. The next has a 20 in 64 chance. Then an 11 in 64 chance. Then a 1 in 64 chance. The mage monster, for example, has a cure2 potion as the first three items on the loot table and the mage spell for Rydia as the last item. Which means that if you kill a single mage your odds of each outcome are...
5824 in 6144 (~95%) - no drop
319 in 6144 (~5%) - cure2 potion
1 in 6144 (~.016%) - mage spell
What?!?
How is that a sensible game mechanic? You fight mages in one dungeon. (The magnetic cave.) I can't find random encounter tables but it's a pretty short dungeon and you're probably only fighting like 5 of these guys in a given game. With 5 shots at the item you're at a mere .081% chance to get the item. How many times would you have to play the game to have even a 50% chance at getting it? 852. If you played the game 852 times and killed 5 mages each time then you're barely more likely to see the mage spell than not. How can this make sense? Is it really worth spending developer time on something that will come up that rarely?
This isn't the only item in the game with this kind of rarity, either... Here's a list of all the items that only come up in the 1/64 slot of a loot table...
Bomb spell
Medusa sword
Dragoon spear
RuneAxe axe
Artemis bow
Lilith rod
Cursed ring (I didn't know there was a cursed ring in this game!)
Crystal ring
Zeus gloves
Glass helmet
Imp spell
Mage spell
Pink tail
I've tried to get the pink tail before but now that I actually see the numbers behind it I'm pretty sure it's off the charts crazy to try for it. Estimates placed getting into a fight with the monsters that drop it at 1 in 64. I think you get to fight 5 of them at a time but that's still in the neighbourhood of 54528 fights before you reach a 50% chance of getting a pink tail. Holy crazy drop rates Batman!
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