One of the things I noticed when I was reading about bugs in Final Fantasy IV was how many bugs revolved around a weapon I'd never used. This weapon is the Avenger and the reason I know I'd never used it is it automatically berserks the person using it and I'd have remembered using a weapon with that ability! Other than getting a pink tail I'd thought I'd done pretty much everything there was to do in the game at some point so I had to find out where this weapon was found...
It turns out the weapon is in the Sylph Cave which I've certainly cleared out every time I've played long enough to learn the float spell so I was confused as to how I'd never had it before. Is it hidden in some obscure chest? I didn't dig any deeper and figured I'd just put a thorough searching into the dungeon once I reached it. Well, last night I'd finally silvered up the Falcon (I always loved how the airships in this game were named after Star Trek and Star Wars) but didn't yet have the float spell. I figured I'd clear out the sealed cave in order to level up and Rosa ended up learning float off of the very first trap door. That settled that! Off to find the Avenger!
It turned out the Avenger was just sitting in a treasure chest in the loot room of the Sylph Cave. It was guarded by monsters (as were the other 5 chests in the room) and I couldn't see how I could have missed it every time I'd played the game to this point. Then I went to equip it and saw that it was greyed out. That's odd. I tried to put it on anyway and got the cryptic error message 'to equip'. Which made me remember a bug fix in a future version of the game where they fixed that very error message related to Cid trying to equip his 2 handed hammer... Avenger must be two handed! I quickly took off Cecil's shield and lo! I was able to put on Avenger.
There's nothing I can find in the game that would indicate this weapon is 2-handed. The icon looks the same as the other swords Cecil can equip. The error message if I even try to put it on is nonsensical. If I hadn't read about the bugs I wouldn't have thought anything of it again on this playthrough. No wonder I'd missed it in the past!
At any rate, I tried it out on the next fight. In reading about the bug I knew the berserk effect doesn't kick in until you're 'supposed' to get a turn and therefore Cecil should be put in slot #1 (the middle one). I rearranged my team to put him there and opened the next trapped treasure chest. It was a fight with 6 ghost things. I'd fought them before and it was a little rough. They (like almost all enemies) kill Edge in 2 attacks. I actually doubt they could kill Rosa no matter what they did but the melee people take a lot of damage from their spells. But with Avenger the fight became trivial. By the time Kain had resolved his first action the berserked Cecil had killed 3 of the 6 enemies. The end result had Cecil killing 4, Kain killing 1, while Edge, Rosa, and Rydia had to team up to take down the 6th.
Losing control of my secondary healer bothers me a little, but when it comes right down to it his heals suck compared to Rosa's. I'm likely better off using Rydia and Sylph/Asura as a secondary healer and just have Cecil kill everything in sight with the berserk weapon. He gets to go so much more often by getting around the ATB system. Another option would be to give up on jumping with Kain and give Avenger to him. But since jump gets around the ATB a little too that seems worse. (And I worry that I'd forget to unequip it before Kain turns traitor again and lose it forever.)
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