On day 19 of my Final Fantasy Marathon, I started a second playthrough of Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster and left off after visiting Falgabard.

Cave of Shadows

Today, I started with the Cave of Shadows. I took a party of three Dark Knights and a Bard into the Cave.

Unfortunately, I didn’t purchase nearly enough healing items for this party and by the time I got to the boss fight, I was completely out of potions. The Bard’s Paeon ability, which restores some HP to the whole party helps, but not enough.

I decided to ottershroom out of the cave to restock my supplies and build up my levels on the journey back to the boss fight. When I got there for round two, I was still struggling to survive the onslaught of quake attacks, so I did some grinding to boost levels.

This both helped in the normal ways and because the paeon ability restores more HP the higher your max HP and job levels are. After grinding out a few levels, I took the boss down, teleported out and switched my party back to their regular jobs.

Doga’s Grotto

I entered Doga’s Grotta with a party of Dark Knight, Black Belt, Dragoon, and Bard. Since I didn’t have the Evoker to cast Castrato this time, I used the shining curtains in the Doga phase to reflect his powerful spells back at him.

For the Unei phase, my basic strategy was to attack with the Dark Knight and Black Belt, Jump with the Dragoon, and have the Bard constantly using Paeon and supplementing with High Potions and Phoenix Downs as needed.

This was a much easier fight than the Acheron fight. Once it was done, I decided to head straight for Syrcus Tower, unlike last time, when I went after the hidden summons first.

Titan

My plan was to take down Titan, then go get the Summons and come back and do the rest of the final mega-dungeon. However, it was apparent this party wasn’t ready for Titan, so I decided to get the summons first.

Odin

I was concerned Odin would be a problem with no mage to cast thunder spells at him, but this was a pretty straightforward fight. I used the same basic attack, attack, jump, heal strategy to beat him that I used with Unei.

Leviathan

I had a bit more trouble with Leviathan. I got wiped on my first attempt, and since I had two party members close to their next level, I decided to grind a little and try again. The second attempt worked out, using the same strategy as the Odin fight.

Bahamut

Bahamut gave me quite a bit of trouble in my first playthrough, but I took him down on my first attempt with this party. The key to my victory was avoiding enough of the megaflare attacks with my dragoon’s jump ability to take him down once he starts spamming them, and the rest of the party had been KO’d.

It helped that my dragoon was equipped with the blood lance, allowing him to recover some HP on every attack. This helped keep him alive when he did get hit by the megaflares.

Titan part two

I headed back to the Maze to face Titan again. This time I beat him. My Bard’s Paeon ability had improved enough to be restoring 200+ HP to every party member, which helped the party survive the Quake attacks.

My Dark Knight and Dragoon didn’t do a ton of damage with their attacks. However, my black belt was doing 1100+ and carried the offensive load.

Earth Crystal Party

I used all the Earth Crystal jobs the first time, so this time, I decided to leave my Dark Knight, Black Belt, and Dragoon in their jobs and switch the Bard to the Devout job. The Bard was more useful as a healer than I thought she would be, but still no match for a dedicated white magic user.

It was about time to quit for the day, so I returned to the Nautilus and traveled to the mage town to purchase spells for my Devout and a handful of black magic spells I may want for the end game.

I then went back for the Invincible and parked outside the Maze. I am now eight hours and 29 minutes into this playthrough.