Curse the day they invented Quarto Puppets

I'm at the point in Final Fantasy IV:The After Years that all the tales are complete and I'm just playing the old waiting game. In the meantime, I found out that two of the characters that you lose in Rydia's tale are recruitable for endgame if you find three items. The first of which you find in a pot during the last dungeon and the last two are drops from some rather rare monsters.

To even find these monsters, you need to be in a specific room during the Waxing phase of the moon, this means that your black magic is weakened leaving you with pretty much physical attacks. These enemies are much tougher than anything you find in the dungeon and come in pairs. If you get back attacked, you're essentially screwed unless you can manage to escape.

The item drops are to my knowledge 1/32 chance and a 1/128. I figured that it would be nothing compared to getting stuff like getting the Sword of Kings in Earthbound: I was ready for the grind. After my third fight, I had the mythril bolt(the 1/32 chance item) and I had already figured that it was going to be easy. Three hours later, I hadn't even gotten another mythril bolt let alone the mythril nut that I was seeking. I wasn't very happy but I was willing to give it a little bit more time.

Now before I go any further in my description of the events, I think I should go through a few details about the characters that I wanted to save for endgame use. I'm referring to Calca and Brina from the first game. You get these dolls to use in battle and all they can really do is dance(which gives a random white magic spell) or jive(same only with blue magic). While you can get lucky and get something like a death spell or reflect on your whole party, the odds of getting them are so low that it's basically just a desparation tactic in battles. They do have an interesting band though, if you have them band together, they'll summon the big Calcabrina boss to do a random attack. These are usually elemental damage to all enemies, a physical attack to one enemy, a curaga type spell for your party, or if you get really lucky or unlucky, it'll self destruct. These are essentially novelty characters, they can be good at times, bu the odds of them doing anything good don't really amount to much.

Back to my story about the horrible grinding, another two hours had gone by and I had somehow broken the game to the point where I got 12 more mythril bolts in near succession. I thought it was kind of funny after having none drop for the previous hours. It was about 4 in the morning when I decided to quit for the night. I returned the next morning and booted up my quicksave to discover that the first enemy group I found dropped what I needed.

Sometimes I hate random number generators...

(by the by, I borrowed the Calcabrina picture from another blogspot, the lastest post involving game names and whatnot. It's an interesting read and I felt it only right to link to him since I borrowed the picture without permission. Sorry man, I hope the extra viewer or two will make it up to you.)

http://kidicarus222.blogspot.com/2009/06/its-secret-to-everybody.html