Hi everyone been sometime I didn't post an LP, but I think this could interest some.
So sometime ago I did a full LP in French of FFVIII Reloaded a French Mod of Final Fantasy VIII, recently due to an idea of my part of willing to do a LV1 Run of this mod using a save editor to reset my level before each boss (without abusing it to get mid and high level stuff) mexico recently developped a alternate version of his mod where ennemies and bosses don't give any experience (Bosses give experience in the regular version of the mod) and characters start at LV1 this means we will not be able to Level Up but also GF will not be able to level up either so there will certainly be some major gameplay difference as some abilities might not be available, mexico also did some balancing so that LV1 playthrough can be done with minimal grinding, so before starting some few points to talk about :
-Knowing how FFVIII works you might think that this would make the game easier ? And you might be right, I want to say however that from the regular version of his mod mexico did a an excellent job at making sure that there is no way to get extremely powerfull magic before intended (or leveling up like crazy) and as such preventing the player to get overpower balancing the game's difficulty a lot (as well as providing a different experience between playing normally, avoiding experience and LV100 challenge (yeah because someone did it ^^)), however as this LV1 version is freshly new this will allows me to test out if the mod is indeed balance enough to maintain some challenge through the entire game even without leveling, so considere this as a testing LP as well as I will provide feedback to mexico which will lead up to potential updates.
-As mention on my previous LP this mod provide brand new sidequests with the original games content, so I will do them to.
So let's start out.
-As usual with this mod Summons start with no ability learned meaning we have to learn the Magic, Draw and Item abilities in order to being able to do anything than attack, it took 5AP each I'm using the Bite Bugs to learn them, have to be carefull tough we start with very low HP (223 for Squall and 216 for Quistis) so fighting 3 Bite Bugs can be dangerous at first, once we got the Magic ability things speed up as we start with 50 Fire, Thunder, Ice and Cure spells one Ice can one shot a Bite Bug, so learning Magic, Draw and Item (we could grind more but that would ruin the point, this version of the mod is made for no need to grind more than necessary each Junction to stats take 100AP so we're not going to worry about them for now).
-First change however to the regular version of the mod the Sources have been change as such the Source near the exit of the BGU has been change to contain Life spells, one of the source of the Training Part of the BGU has been made invisible and now contain Regen (not as usefull in this game as other FF but will have some uses), and one of the sources of Balamb now contain Blind spell (will prove usefull because we are in FFVIII ^^)
-After I go to sell the Occult Fan found in the BGU's library and Magic Stone that I have no use for now to buy some Potions (by the way Balamb shop only contain Potion, Phenix Down and Antidote)
-Time to go to the Fire Cave but before that I use a random encounter to cast Blind on Squall and Quistis.
Now this LV1 version of the mod has 4 major changes to the Fire Cave compare to Vanilla :
1- We can't choose the time, we have 20 minutes by default
2- We can't run from Random Encounters
3- The source that contains so useless Fire spell now contain Shell if you didn't grind for HP-J those are MANDATORY
4- We can save in the area just before Ifrit (just make sure to not save on your out of Fire Cave save cause we never know)
Now time to our old fellow Ifrit :
He has 1352HP at LV1, Ifrit serve as a tutorial to show you how bosses can be different from Vanilla FFVIII while he doesn't have much HP he is tough boss, this fight is in 2 phase :
-For the first half of his HP he will only use Fire which deal 70-75 damage and his Jump attack which deals around 90 damage, this first phase he isn't to fast and his attacks aren't to damaging, so just keep one character to heal and one to attack him with Blizzard spells, I throw some Scan to check his HP and don't risk limit to not trigger his second phase to early, when I'm about to trigger the second phase I put Shell on both character.
-Now the second phase begin and he starts by casting Haste on himself, so now he is way faster and able to act 2 time between our turns, not only that but he can now cast Fira, Fira is the reason why we need Shell without Shell it deals around 300 damage so that's a one shot and due to Haste giving him a high speed bringing back a character to life is very hard to do, now his Fira may give us one advantage with the Darkness statut to boost our Crisis Level we may have a chance to use our Limit Break, as for the healing if he does Fira I heal with Potion the reason being due to Shell reducing the power of Cure I need 2 Cure to heal Fira but I can't allow myself to lose potential Damage as the Shell can wear off Potion heal all the damage of Fira constantly, if I can't use Limit Break I simply use Blizzard, don't rely on Limit break tough as we haven't much time to trigger them before Ifrit's act again, if the Limit Break don't come up just forget about it and heal as we can't allow a death.
So basically the second half of his health is tough to take off I got really lucky at the end that he didn't cast a Fira just after the Shells wear off and that Quistis's Limit Break was strong enough to finish him off.
And so we got Ifrit and end this part.