Facets (RPG by FarAwayTimesGaming) Full Playthrough

This is a playthrough of the game "Facets", an RPG Maker game made by FarAwayTimesGaming (AKA John Thyer). The game is designed as a resource-management boss rush. The idea is that rather than grinding fights for resources, you're given a limited amount of resources and need to figure out how to stretch them to defeat all the bosses. The mechanics aren't complex, but everything in the battle system has a purpose, and you'll want to use everything to its fullest. This game doesn't demand perfection, but it does demand care; if you go into the game expecting to hit stuff until it dies and heal willy-nilly, you aren't going to make it to the end. On top of that, the game's story is compelling, unique, and well-written, albeit sad. If this sounds like your thing, it's worth playing this game yourself. It only takes 2-3 hours if you have experience with RPGs (it's easy to launch the game too), and it can be found here for free:

https://farawaytimes.itch.io/facets

Timestamps for key moments, in case you don't want to watch me running around in the field:

Mimic: 10:46
Medusa: 15:34
Giant Worm: 19:09
First Flashback: 23:22
First Blood Bat attempt: 27:41
Successful Blood Bat attempt: 33:15
Lamia: 38:54
Carbuncle: 43:23
Second Flashback: 50:22
Sylph 1: 54:49
Sylph 2: 56:56
Sylph 3: 58:55
First Bahamut Attempt: 1:00:43
Successful Bahamut Attempt: 1:04:23
Third Flashback: 1:11:04
Slime: 1:17:34
Phoenix: 1:23:08
Final Cutscene: 1:45:13
Good Ending: 1:54:32
Hatred Ending: 1:56:09
Phoenix 5 Without Dream Catcher: 1:57:25
All Game Overs: 1:59:15

Let's get into the playthrough. I'll focus on the gameplay first to avoid any spoilers for people who want to read this part of the text before watching the video. This will be different from the challenge runs on this channel. Usually, I know everything about the fights, have a clear plan in place, and reset the fights until I get something I'm happy with. However, this playthrough is blind, so I'm trying to figure out what the best approach is on-the-fly and make educated guesses about what long-term decisions to make. This means that the run won't be that polished, but obviously that comes with the territory.

I chose Classic mode since I figured the game would be at its best when pushing me to conserve resources as much as possible. Looking at the Prepared mode right now, it seems that you start with ~one extra copy of most items you'd normally find in the game, and you get a ridiculous number of extra Bombs on top of that, which would all but trivialize the game. I also chose Wait mode since I wanted time to process the mechanics and make better decisions. This didn't stop me from choosing attacks too quickly on a few occasions though.

For a full breakdown of my choices in this playthrough, the bosses, and the story, please see this Google Doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W...

There's so much here that my usual trick of writing the remainder of the description in a comment simply doesn't work.