Phantasy Star 4 Raja Solo (part 2)

[ladyabaxa]

When last we left Raja he had made it to Kadary. Thus began the grind outside Zio's Fort so he could survive inside Zio's Fort.

I quickly found out that Speards are made of 'hurt Raja'. They were the cause of plenty of deaths getting to Kadary and continued to be the leading cause of death once he was there.

The Tech Users, however, were a different story. I was worried about their Foi technique but Raja's high Mental made that a non-issue. Before I continue I need to discuss something more technical that is relevant and will continue to be relevant throughout the game. I have to discuss resistances. If you already know this or don't care about what's going on under the hood just skip this and scroll down to the next screenshot.

The damage values and success rates of techniques and skills are dependent on 14 resistance values, referred to as factors. These are, in order, factor 1/Physical, factor 2/[Energy, Radiation], factor 3/[Fire, Heat], factor 4/Gravity, factor 5/[Water, Cold], factor 6/Anti-Evil, Holy, factor 7/Electrical, factor 8/Holyword, factor 9/Brose, factor 10/Biological, factor 11/Psychic, factor 12/Mechanical, factor 13/[Efess, St. Fire], and factor 14/Destroy. Referring to Fresh Feeling's PS4 dump we can see what Raja's base resistances are.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
-----------------------------------------
02	02	03	02	01	02	02	00	01	02	02	00	02	02

Going down the list we can see he is vulnerable to factor 3, resists factors 5 and 9, and is immune to factors 8 and 12. He is thus weak to fire, resists water and Brose, and is immune to Holyword and mechanical. The Brose resistance is pointless since only the Brose technique checks against that factor. The same can be said of Raja's Holyword skill. In fact there are no enemy abilities that use either of those factors.

On the flip side however, you might recall I mentioned that Raja learned Holyword but he currently has no use for it. That is because Holyword tries to instantly kill one target. This is why one factor type is dedicated solely to Holyword - to specify which enemies it can kill. Resistance works as a multiplier in PS4 so having a resistance of zero means the equation multiplies by zero and is thus negated. All machines and most biological creatures in the game are outright immune to factor 8 so Holyword is highly situational.

For Raja, anything that deals factor 3/fire damage is a huge threat because it will get the x3 multiplier listed in his resistances. This is the game designers being consistent. Nearly everything that lives on Motavia resists factor 3 and is weak to factor 5. Conversely nearly everything on Dezolis resists factor 5 and is weak to factor 3. (This is what killed Gryz over and over again when he had to fight the Xe-A-Thouls.) Against the Tech Users this isn't a problem because Raja's high Mental is subtracted before the damage value reaches the multiplier.

Tech Users will heal themselves with Res when seriously injured but they were manageable thanks to the new Force Cane. At level 18 Raja started needing Gires to fully heal when his health was low but he could start surviving battles involving Speards. He still had some very close calls by beating some 2xTech Users formations at extremely low health. Fortunately locking them into Res loops and slowly grinding them down because the Force Cane could do slightly more damage then they could heal worked.

Scorpirus formations were still plentiful which is where Raja hit level 19 and learned Miracle. Miracle can revive any character from near death and provides a modest heal but the amount healed isn't enough to justify using it in solo play. It's not as if Raja has anything else to do with this tech pool then chain heal.

Then at level 20 Raja learned Seals. Seals has some immediate use but that use won't last long. There are plenty of tech using enemies scattered over the game but many of the later ones resist Seals enough that it's generally better to employ more lethal force.

At level 20 I decided Raja was probably strong enough to survive the climb to the top of Zio's Fort to rescue Demi. The Shadowsabers inside were grindable - casting Deban when they hit half life as depicted in the screenshot above and swapping to Airslash when near death. They don't have any other tricks so with Blessing up there was nothing they could really do to Raja.

Against Tech Users Seals made fights a breeze. Tech Users can't do anything but use techniques so once those are removed they're just sitting ducks. Raja needed to do this when there were 3 or 4 Tech Users because their Foi techs would add up in a hurry.

Rippers, however, with their Fire Breathing shoulders were the source of many, many deaths. (I know I keep going on about how much Raja was dying but the odds of him dying in a random battle were pretty high!) Raja couldn't do anything about Fire Breath except keep healed and try to kill them quickly. (Rippers and Shadowsabers can be killed with Holyword but since Holyword only targets one enemy at a time they still got plenty of chances to kill Raja, which they gleefully took advantage of.)

After enough tries Raja finally reached Juza...

Watch on YouTube

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQZhsP8kFpM

All the grinding was worth it as Raja finally won at level 39 with some close calls. Raising his Agility with all those levels was the primary deciding factor as it stabilized the turn order such that Gy only got to act first once.

After the battle Raja needed to take two steps to claim the Psycho Wand and initiate the cutscene that would spirit him out of Ladea Tower and back to Krup. It would have been infuriating to be attacked and killed in the two steps between beating the boss and opening the chest. (I haven't checked via the debug menu because I keep forgetting to but the game might disable random encounters when Gy-Laguiah appears.)

Of course there were plenty of failures. On one occasion Gy added some insult to injury by hitting Raja for precisely the 32 hit points he had left while Raja was trying to cast Gires. When I say that Raja needs a stable turn order I can't emphasize enough just how critical that is. He just doesn't have the hit points to scrape by otherwise.

Part One | Index | Part Three

Comments

[shining-armour.livejournal.com]

Looks like Raja has a very hard time here, A Spear did 56 damage to him, almost more than his average HP (was it 70 at that time ?), Why did a Flame Bolt from a forced fly do 228 damage to the Land Rover ? It usually only does about 60 damage, or is it because Raja is weak to fire (because he is from Dezolis which is a cold planet), and if he is the only character it triggers that off ? And wow, A Centaur did 82 damage! Almost his average HP, the Gy battle looked fairly easy though.

[ladyabaxa.livejournal.com]

I'm glad Gy looked easy. As Raja is my fifth solo run I've gotten a pretty good handle on that fight but it has been a massive stonewall before. Almost all the planning and pre-run battle strategizing for my runs centers around Gy-Laguiah now. I think Gryz had something like 30 deaths just to Gy-Laguiah.

As for the Land Rover I don't know. Fresh Feeling does list all the vehicle stats (http://www.wrftpb.com/psiv/txt/ps4-rides.txt) but the game could also be modifying things on the fly based on who's in the party. I honestly haven't paid much attention to how much damage different character solo's see when in vehicles.