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Fister Roboto posted:They have a lot of esprit de corpse. I was going to make that joke but I decided not to at the last minute. Incidentally, I believe the translation for these guys in official English releases is Royal Guard.
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Sep 11, 2014 15:05
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Lustful Man Hugs posted:This made my day. I was really considering naming him Batman, but I think I made the right choice.
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Sep 11, 2014 17:36
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In retrospect, you could also have named him Dio.
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Sep 11, 2014 20:28
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I like to think Vivian just completely forgot her brother even existed. I also like how the remakes don't even bother hiding who the dark knight is, using a slightly darker portrait of Stalin's for the Dark Knight's dialogue.
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Sep 13, 2014 00:14
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Mega64 posted:I like to think Vivian just completely forgot her brother even existed. The PSP version finally gives  Better late than never, right? 
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Sep 13, 2014 00:33
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Chapter 16: Family Ties Welcome back! Last time, there was drama!  This always gets me. Vivian has no reason to believe this, other than wishful thinking. Since the emperor is loving dead, wouldn't the spell be broken and he'd be all righteous again? Hell, we've never seen any evidence that the emperor can do this. I always think that maybe mind control was supposed to be a plot point since it's one in FF4, and FF4 might have borrowed a bit from this game, but later dialogue makes fairly it clear there is no mind control. Why even bring it up, game? I know, murderous magic cyclone, and this is what annoys me.  Anyway, so we've got a destination. But no idea how to get there; we've seen this castle, but couldn't enter. Hm. If we talk around, the game points us towards Paul's house. But we don't actually talk to him...  Look everyone, it's Cid!  You can tell he's injured, because he hobbles over to the bed. Rather than... just being in the bed.  Like in true FF2 tradition, we can't get anything without someone dying horribly for it. Anyway, we have the airship!  It's in Poft. We have to travel over there to get it. If I had to guess why the creators make you so this, it's to force you to fight at least some of the changed over world enemies; we're not going to be doing that for much longer. But it's really stupid, especially when you think about how the hell Cid got to Phin. Think about it. He wasn't there when we returned from Mysidia, so he wasn't in Phin when the tornado hit. Since he left his airship behind, that can only mean he loving walked to Phin.  All that nonsense aside, we've now finally got an airship... and there's only one new location this opens up. Woo. At least going back to Phin or Mysidia is a lot easier. Actually, if we were to head back to Dist, Richard would have a conversation with the mom and kid, giving the game one of the only moments where there's anything resembling characterization. Okay, I say that, but mostly it's Richard macking on the mom. But it's something. Since this isn't a story-oriented LP, we're just gonna run to the next dungeon.  And here we are. In order to enter, we just need to land on the very top of the castle.  And we're thrown right into it!  Oh, you thought I was kidding when I said Generals were random encounters? Fortunately one is easy enough to deal with. Like with the general fight in the whirlwind, we just need to land curse and we'll be okay. However, the issue will be surviving long enough to inflict the curse.  Oh, and wearing a full set of armor will be necessary. While I've been trying in vain to wear as little as possible to keep my evasion as high as I can, I simply need the defense. Besides, 61 defense for -10% evasion is pretty drat good anyway.    Oh and there was a trap door there for... some reason. That was a dead end, you know. If there was no trap I don't know how we could access anything else in the castle.  And right from where we started, there's a new piece of armor. This is the cuirass, so it's actually useful! It has the highest defense of any light armor of the game, with 43 defense. If I hadn't forbid agility increasing armor, this wouldn't be worth much, as the Black Garb has a defense of 40 and a host of awesome properties. All the Diamond Cuirass has going for it is three extra defense. But with the restriction, the second best piece of light armor I can use is the Black Robe, with 35 defense. Still, for the moment there's no way in hell I'm taking off the White Robe.  Stone Golem Rank 7, HP 1,800, MP 240, Attack Power 120, Attacks 7, Accuracy 95%, Defense 150, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 14-100% Stone Golems are infinitely more annoying than their little brothers, due to the fact that their weakness is poison. I have level 2 Aero. Yeah. Holy is actually my best bet for taking it down, and even then Holy does between 200 and 300. Also, it can attempt to cast stop on you, to no avail. Oh, I made an erroneous statement earlier, and I'd like to clear it up. I stated that magic defense does not defend against damage spells whatsoever, but that's wrong. It does, but in a less obvious way. Damage spells have a base attack power and a number of "hits", both of which are based on the intelligence or soul of the caster and the spell's level. I can't find a specific calculation, and I'm a little fuzzy on the exact mechanics going on here. Basically a damage spell cannot fail entirely, it will always do some damage unless the enemy absorbs the element, but magic defense can mitigate the damage done. I mention this because 14-100% magic defense are you loving kidding me?  Skull Rank 6, HP 640, MP 300, Attack Power 50, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Skulls are another enemy type that would be scarier if I didn't have status protection, as they also get Stone 16. Apparently it gets drain touch, and with 6 attacks that would be nasty, but it doesn't have attacking in its ability list. It'd have to run out of MP to attack, and with 300 MP (and being undead, so you can't drain it) that's unlikely.  Just as an aside, I've done solo runs of this game before, and I've done them both in the original game and the GBA remake. Now you'd think it's easier in the remake, and for the most part I'd say it is. However, sometimes multi-targeted spells will be single-targeted if you've only got one character left. This doesn't happen in the original at all; if the monster is programmed to use a multi-targeted version of a spell it will, regardless of how many characters are left. In the remake, it will change to a single-target spell... sometimes. Not all the time. It seems totally random and I haven't found rhyme or reason to it. In any case, the skull's ice 12 becomes single-target, and a hell of a lot more threatening. The skulls become one of the deadliest enemies in the dungeon because of it. Weird.  Dark Knight Rank 6, HP 1,140, Attack Power 85, Attacks 7, Accuracy 80%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-40% Hm, wait a second. Haven't we seen these Dark Knights before?  Why, yes, we have. They're a hell of a lot more managable now. They're not complete chumps, they get a fair number of attacks, but they can be cursed and blinded easily enough.  They can drop a bunch of pretty good stuff, including Yoichi bows, the best bow in the game. The Yoichi bow also casts multi-target Berserk 3 when used. Multi-target Berserk 3 is pretty flipping weak, though, and if you have any brains you definitely have a someone with a decent level of berserk by this point, unless you're deliberately restricting it. (In case you're wondering, I'm not using berserk procured from items, either.) Anyway, the first floor has two staircases leading. The first one you see leads to an hourglass, who cares, and the next leads onward. There's also a chest with garlic on the first floor, and I'm betting you forgot what garlic even did. Eh, that's okay, it's loving useless even early on.  And there's even more worthless treasure on the second floor! So the second floor is a bust, but on the third floor...  The Bolt spear is a good spear and casts a spell (whichever spell could it be) when used, but what's more interesting is the monster guarding it.  Shade Rank 7, HP 3,000, MP 240, Attack Power 120, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 8-30% It's a gh-gh-ghost!  The shade is at least a credible threat, unlike the living emperor. For a regular party, the nastiest thing it does is cast Death 8 on your whole party. Unless you got lucky with the lamia queen (phrasing!), you've only got one source of protection from death: the white robe. At least death is a generally inaccurate spell. The shade can also curse you. For me, the biggest threat from the shade is their attack. It's at least not a draining attack, but it does get 8 very accurate hits with high attack power, and it resists all status ailments. However, the shade only has a 40% chance to attack you, otherwise it'll cast death or curse. So in practice Vivian wins a damage race quite readily.  The stupid shadow doesn't drop a goddamn thing.  Agility up! In this game, it seems to either vomit agility at me or give me scraps. Sadly, for the moment, I'm getting scraps. Considering that we're coming up to the final dungeon, I'm a little concerned. Anyway, the spear is the only thing of note on the third floor. On the fourth, there's another pointless heart and valium.  In bottom left corner, there's a door that actually leads somewhere.  Treasure, and it's all staffs! There's another magic staff and evil stick, but also a new one! It's... greed? whatever it's the heal staff. However, the heal staff here works differently from FF1; when you hit someone with it, it restores HP rather than damage them. Apparently it's bugged; it's supposed to harm undead but actually heals them. I don't actually know, I never use it.  Okay, I have to admit an egregious failing on my part. This screenshot is from the fifth floor, and if I were to go left here there's a bit of treasure I would find. First off is the Sun Blade, third most powerful sword in the game and strong against undead, protected by a new monster. There's also a room with three elixirs. Now I don't need any of this, although I wouldn't mind the elixirs, but still I feel bad that I didn't grab it. I did realize later on that I missed something, but I elected not to go back. Honestly I was keen to get out of this dungeon.  Because of these fuckers. My strategy for dealing with these guys was casting curse on them one at a time. Why that? Mainly because it was reliable; blind, blink, or the Slow 9 from the thread would have helped, but I couldn't be 100% sure of the results. At the very least, single target Curse 7 pretty much always hits, and I know exactly what it'll do. A turn wasted could be deadly. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, I was still reliant on luck. Considering that they can kill me within two or three rounds, the last thing I needed was an ambush. (Although thankfully they only did around 500 damage on their surprise round.)  I actually end up popping an elixir to stop a damage spiral, something I'm not sure I've ever done for a random encounter in this game. It gave me enough time to slap curse on the other general, blind them both for good measure, and then I was home free.  Otherwise... Yeah, these generals are not loving around you guys. I ended up having to drink an elixir to get past three different general fights.   It certainly got down to the wire sometimes. Other than the generals, since I accidentally skipped the sun blade it's a straight shot to the end. The last bit of treasure is on the top floor, at the far left.  The other is a hellfire. Not worth risking getting into more general fights. You can see what looks like a throne room off to the right. It might be time to confront Stalin.   No matter, I am th- wait, Solo? Vivian what the hell are you doing? Is- is he dead? Are they all- holy poo poo Vivian.  ...  Ha ha! I am the emperor, back from hell itself an- oh, I'm sorry, was this a bad time? Eh, well, whatever, I'm killing everything now. Evil and all that. Well crap. Look I'll throw something at him and we'll escape on the wyvern, ok?  Vivian don't do a voice for him loving hell.  Thus the castle exploded and a bigger castle emerged in its place. HGTV's shows are really getting out there, I have to say.  Again, the game is nice enough to teleport us back here.  Well the emperor's back from hell and he's got a new- Okay Queen Bee I've got a question of my own. You're not blind, right? You're seeing what Vivian's doing, right? And you're okay with that? What is wrong with you- Vivian please explain why the dark knight is in my throne room. Well I was kind of hoping he could be turned to good and work with us. You want him to join you? ...yeah, sure. Go ahead. ... ... ...gently caress.And so, for the final dungeon, we've got Stalin!  Stalin has much the same problem as Richard, that is you don't really need another front-liner, and his evasion for this point of the game is poor. You could use Stalin as a spellcaster, and he has some okay stats for it, but no spells. At least Richard was around for a few dungeons and you had a chance to build him how you wanted. We've only got one more dungeon to go, although it is a doozy. Most people tend not to try very hard with Stalin, since your main team can definitely carry itself by now. Now that we're ready to go to the final dungeon, how do we get there?   We can't just land on the castle; we have to find this jade and get in through there. You can talk to a bunch of people for some hints, but Layla straight up tells you where it is.  So we have an idea for our destination. Before we leave, some housekeeping.  After selling off the rest of the crap and buying as many elixirs as I can with the money left over, this is the inventory I have. 10 inventory slots are permanently lost to key items; it would have been 12, but I didn't get the pass and Richard had the wyvern in his inventory when he died. Not that I need much inventory space anyway. I've got 11 elixirs in the main bag and the party is carrying 4 elixirs total. 15 elixirs should be plenty. Also, since Richard is dead, there's something we can do in Dist.  You don't have to had brought Richard here earlier to talk to them, although the game assumes you did. Use the Dragoon keyword on her and...   She gives you the Excalibur and leaves. Now, I was initially planning on skipping this, since I can't use this weapon, but I thought maybe it'd be worth some cash?  It mostly certainly is. The Excalibur gave me enough to get two extra elixirs, bringing the total up to 17. Sweet!  With all of that out of the way, we're ready to take on the jade passage. Yeah, the portal to hell is just a puddle; it's slightly more impressive looking in the remakes. Next time, hell!   Power +3, Agility +1, Vitality +9, Intelligence +5, Soul +5, Magic Defense +1, Cure +1, Ice +1, Bolt +1, Aero +1, Curse +1, Blind +1, Aura +1, Aspil +1, Drain +2, HP +380 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 06:13
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Wait, wait, waaaaiit. Is Stalin still alive? 
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Sep 16, 2014 06:52
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Stalin's on to Vivian's tricks. He needs to be distracted by monsters first.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:58
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This site seems to give a pretty good rundown on how magic works: http://guides.gamercorner.net/ffii/systems/ Except I think it has a typo in there. website posted:Damage spells work a bit differently than other spells. Their effects are not strictly based on successes - damage spells get a number of "hits" equal to the level of the spell plus the successes rolled. For instance, Fire 8 can score anywhere from 8-16 "hits." So damage spells seem to do automatic damage based on their level, plus another round of "rolls" equal to the spell level against the enemy's magic defense/evasion stat. So for something like the Golem with the 14-100% mdef, all the spell "rolls" will probably fail, but spells should still do damage based on their spell level *(1...2)*base damage. Or something like that.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:21
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HahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh Stalin you poor, POOR motherfucker, we hardly gave two fucks about you. Ah well, nice to see Stalin getting a couple shots in on Vivian before she rips his head off and drags his corpse around for story reasons.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:38
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Chapter 17: Vivian Conquers Hell All right you guys final dungeon time woo!  Like many early Final Fantasy final dungeons, FF2's last dungeon is basically two dungeons back-to-back. We start out in the Jade Passage.  Salamander Rank 6, HP 1,290, MP 300, Attack Power 100, Attacks 8, Accuracy 90%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70% They guys hit for decent damage, although usually only land a hit or two on Vivian.  Stalin actually lands a hit on them and gets to pretend he's contributing! He's trying to be like Vivian!  There can be only one.  Anyway, they also get a full party hitting Fire 16, and obviously Vivian mostly laughs that off. Actually, another Fire 16 hit for a mere 46, so you can definitely see the difference between additional hits of the spell missing and hitting. They're also weak to ice, but since our ice isn't that high a level punching is the better option.  Great Malboro Rank 6, HP 1,290, Attack Power 85, Attacks 8, Accuracy 85%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70% Final tier of the Malboro! Like the other Malboros, its attack inflict status ailments. But it doesn't just inflict one, it inflicts every temporary status ailment: confuse, mini, mute, stun, sleep and venom. Yikes! If Vivian's wasn't protected these guys might be an instant game over! Their actual attack stats are slightly worse than Salamanders', though, so with status protection they're not so bad. ...you know, I never thought that perhaps the White Robe would make the game too easy, but maybe it does? Hrm, it never occurred to me to ban it. Sadly, I finished the game already, but if I ever do this run again I'll think about it.  Abyss Worm Rank 6, HP 1,290, MP 370, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 90%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70% loving Abyss Worms. For the most part, you can coast through the game with low HP and high evasion, but the Abyss Worms gently caress that up.  They love, love this attack. Apparently it's a mind elemental attack? That's odd. Anyway, while under 200 damage is nothing to Vivian (although her magic defense deflecting some of those hits, otherwise the damage would be higher), it's not unknown to reach this dungeon with well under 2000 for a dedicated evasion tank, and any back row mages are likely to have far less. Also your magic defense levels would be much lower. With all or most of the worms casting that spell at once it's pretty devastating.  Vivian, on the other hand, is more concerned about their attack. Worse than that, these guys resist body and mind (and absorb death but who cares) so I can't blind or curse them. So while I do have ways of mitigating the damage, namely blink and multiple castings of aspil, that always takes a few turns to pull off, plus they take two or three turns a piece to kill. Always had a longer battle when they showed up.  Oh, and that dragon that was supposed to be Mysidia Tower's boss? Random encounter.  As you'd expect, all of the highest tier weapons are in this dungeon. Here we have the best mace/staff/whatever, with 90 attack. Considering it has a very low magic penalty, that's a decent attack power.  The second floor has a random rear end secret passage. Well, it's nice if you're trying to run through the dungeon faster.  Best knife! It's the worst of the ultimate weapons with 86 attack power. It's apparently strong against spell casters. Eh. Well, at least the spell casting penalty is small.  Blue Dragon Rank 7, HP 3,500, MP 240, Attack Power 180, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 150, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 8-40% And it's guarded by a monster! Blue Dragons are thunder elemental, which makes their weakness poison. That sucks. Curse works fine, though, so that's pretty much how that goes.  Magic Sucker Rank 6, HP 750, MP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Ice Lizard Rank 6, HP 1,000, MP 190, Attack Power 85, Attacks 7, Accuracy 85%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30% Oh my god gently caress these guys. Not the Ice Lizards; they do get Ice 16 and that can do some damage but they're nothing I can't deal with. It's the magic suckers. So do they drain MP per hit like the suckers did? Not quite...  First off, they love casting Drain 16 on you. It drains about 300, which isn't much on it's own, but if they all decide to cast it at once it's a real pain.  But the real kick in the pants is that they get single target Aspil 10.  gently caress. Even if you've got all your spellcasters with Aspil, you should bring at least an elixir or two along in case of this bullshit.  In addition to this, there's two hellfires in this dungeon. Who would ever be using these items this late in the game?  Sphinx Rank 6, HP 1,140, MP 370, Attack Power 85, Attacks 6, Accuracy 90%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-40% Sphinxes are the upgraded chimera type enemies. Does the blaze attack, the petrifying attack, you know how it goes.  They also do dispel 16, which would nullify Vivian's white robe advantage and make her susceptible to the stoning attack. In theory. Too bad dispel's broken.  On the third floor, we get change of scenery with this giant waterfall. When you walk under it, it does hurt you. I guess the water's going super fast I don't know with this game any more.  And we've got the best axe! With 95 attack it's better than most other weapon types, but the Excalibur has 100 attack and it's not even the best sword in the game. The Rune Axe just doesn't have that much going for it, just a strength against spell caster enemies and the ability to cast Fog. Whatever.  King Behemoth Rank 7, HP 5,000, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 8-30% Also you have to fight a king behemoth. Yeah, for some reason the fan translator didn't give the behemoth and the upgraded behemoth different names, so again I'm just using what the latest translation calls them. At least this behemoth can do some damage, but we've dealt with worse. It has no magic, and is susceptible to curse, so curse and blink and maybe blind for good measure and we already won. It can drop some cool stuff, including a Yoichi bow if I wanted another, but it just dropped money.  Agility! Yay!  At the very bottom, there's actually a shop in the middle of the waterfall! It sells spells that are forbidden in this run. And Flare. Woo.  Fiend Rank 6, HP 750, MP 300, Attack Power 60, Attacks 8, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-60% Fiends cast single target Fire 16 and single target Stone 16. Obviously the latter we resist, but the Fire 16 can be scary. If you recall, after the cyclone the enemies on the world map changed. In some areas the enemies don't change, they don't in Dist, but the area around Mysidia gets whole new enemies. Many of them are jade enemies, including the fiend. Apparently you can get encounters with 6 fiends, and if they all cast Fire 16 that'd put me up poo poo creek. In jade, however, they only show up one or two at a time, maybe with an ice lizard. That's not scary.  It's guess the door! And I got impatient so I'm just showing you the solution now.  In case you somehow didn't get a Yoichi bow by now, here you go. Although if didn't want to have to fight for it...  Red Dragon Rank 7, HP 5,000, MP 450, Attack Power 180, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 8-40% It really, really loved to cast its multi-target fire 16 on me. Barely ever used its actually kinda scary attack power. Whatever. Dead.  Also it dropped a holy lance. There's a holy lance in a chest on the same floor, though.   See? Holy lances have mere 90 attack power, and the only other thing it's got going for it is the ability to cast Holy 8. Lame.   There's the dragon armor, which protects against fire, ice, bolt, and poison. Considering how much enemies like throwing out high level elemental spells at this point that's not a bad set of resistances, but it's heavy armor so not the best. The aegis shield, however, provides resistance to body, mind, matter, and death in addition to having the best evasion bonus of all the shields. Pretty rad. If you've got a dedicated evasion tank with high agility and no magic these two items will replace the ribbon for them, so that's something.  More agility! This is the last one I get in the entire game. Goodbye agility gains. I will miss you.  By the way, this path to hell has a helpful inscription informing you of this fact. How thoughtful.  The defense armlet is basically the Pro ring from FF1. It's light, has no magic penalties so it's perfect for mages, gives a lot of magic defense, and protects against death. So this is definitely getting equipped, right? ...but the thing is, I don't need the death protection. The power armlet that Vivian's already wearing has the same small evasion penalty, a very small magic penalty (-2%), one extra defense, and a strength bonus. True, it doesn't provide as much magic defense, but that's a non-issue.  So I haven't described how magic defense's percentage is calcula- holy poo poo Vivian's got that much HP already? And that vitality! Erm, anyway, magic defense is 15% + vitality/2 + magic power/2 + equipment bonuses. Vivian's magic defense percentage is 71% before equipment bonuses. The white robe gives 21%, and the spiral headband gives +5%. That bring us to 97%. Yeah, I don't need the extra 21% the defense armlet gives. I'm sticking with the power armlet.  Blade  No, no, not that one! Blade Rank 6, HP 870, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 4-40% There we go. I was quite surprised to see this enemy; they commonly show up around Palamekia after the cyclone, but you have no reason to ever go there again, and certainly not on foot. They one show up in two floors of the jade passage, and they're rare. Huh. As for the enemy themselves, total chumps.  At the very end of the jade passage there's a teleporter, although for some reason in the original it's invisible. I don't know why.  And now we're in the true final dungeon. I actually warp out here to save. There's one enemy here I'm kind of scared of, and I'd rather not have lost all that progress. Once I've cleared jade out it doesn't take that much time to run through it again.  Also so I could have all the elixirs. In any case, the trip back to Pandemonium is pretty uneventful.  Although I start to realize holy crap look at that HP. You see, while I mention that Vivian can incapacitate enemies through a combination of buffs, status ailments, and MP draining attacks, that always takes a few turns to do. In the meantime, they get their licks in. I'm not in the habit of healing during battle unless I have to, so Vivian's getting HP and vitality increases in nearly every battle. At this point, I start getting mindful of how low my HP is when I end battles. Believe it or not, I'm trying to discourage HP growth. In any case, let's start going through Pandemonium.  First off, it's full of arches! They don't lead anywhere, but you will always think they do.  Oh look who it is. Is it time for some petty revenge?  Take that yo- oh, the lamia cast blink 16 on herself. At least Vivian can get through it, which is a little surprising. Nonetheless, the lamia queen poses no threat now.  They loved throwing defense armlets at me though. I ended up getting three from drops over the course of the dungeon.  Coeurl Rank 6, HP 1,000, MP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 7, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-40% I know it says Krull what we all know what these are. First off, they have a chance of inflicting KO with each hit. I believe it actually is death elemental, so I'm protected. At least, it never killed me.  However, their blast attack (I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be Blast 10) is non elemental, and cannot be protected against. Nasty! Or at least, it would be, if Vivian didn't have 10-99% magic defense. Blaster is also multi-target, so that kills its accuracy already. It never hit once.  Death Rider Rank 6, HP 1,290, Attack Power 120, Attacks 8, Accuracy 85%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70% Mythril Golem Rank 7, HP 2,000, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 95%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 14-100% The golem is like the others, high defense enemy with a weakness to a single element, in this case lightning. What we're concerned about is the death rider. I've mentioned them before, but you may wonder why I've gotten so worked up about them.  They have drain touch. They also get 8 attacks. If all 8 land, then they hit for half of your max HP and that's before you add in their base attack. Death Riders end runs. They ended my first run of FF2. While the Abyss Worms punish you for relying on evasion tanking too much, these guys punish you for not using evasion tanking. In addition, they cannot be blinded, cursed, or slowed (they can be turned into toads, though.) You either have sky high evasion, a high level blink, or get hit.  That being said... they really weren't that big a threat. That damage you see in that screenshot was the worst they ever did. They usually only landed one or two hits even before I cast blink, and after blink next to nothing. I was honestly flabbergasted; I remember other challenge runs of this dungeon being pretty hellish. What was the difference? Perhaps I just got that lucky with agility? Hm, they get 85% accuracy, which is fairly high, but not as high as other enemies we've seen. I've got 40% evasion, and the game just subtracts that from accuracy, so that leaves it with 45. With 16 evasion chances against 8 attacks, that means each hit basically rolls evasion twice. That leaves each hit with... about 20% chance to hit? That almost sounds kinda high for how often they actually hit. What ended up being the worst part about the death riders is that their defense is high and since they can't be cursed it took forever to beat them down. Although they're weak to fire, which I didn't realize while I was playing. Wish I did, would have saved some time. Oh well. Oh! I questioned earlier if Blink could raise your evade levels past 16 and if the game would let it. The answer to both is a resounding yes. I should have known this; a high level haste raises weapon levels above 16, so it's clearly possible. I guess I was mistaken because I rarely use haste. I'm curious to know what the limit is. Probably 255, and I imagine that's impossible to reach with in-games means. Although I believe haste and blink stack, so... I don't know. EDIT: Nope, haste does not stack. The limit for hits seems to be around 30.  Devil Mantis Rank 7, HP 1,290, MP 370, Attack Power 85, Attacks 8, Accuracy 85%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 5-70% Basically slightly stronger Fiends. Whatever. Actually, there is another mantis enemy that only shows up after the cyclone around the Mysidia area. Again, you have no idea why you'd ever traverse Mysidia on foot after the cyclone, but they exist even if I never saw them in this run.  This dungeon really likes teleporters, by the way. One sort of annoying thing is that you can't go back once you go through the teleport without the warp spell, or exiting out and coming back. Not that big a deal, but I guess if you realize that you missed something a floor or two back that'd be a pisser.  On the fourth floor, we have four doors each leading to an area with a treasure chest and a boss guarding that chest. I'm going to be hitting each of them, despite only wanting one of these treasures, so let's start on the far left.  They throw in a bunch of arches and a couple of dead ends to make it look more complicated than it actually is.  Wolf Devil Rank 7, HP 870, MP 300, Attack Power 70, Attacks 8, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 6-60% New monster! Like a lot of enemies at this point they've got a high level multi-target damage spell. It's only Fire 11, though, so it's pretty piddly in comparison. Really, if you can get past the Abyss Worms magic damage is not going to be that threatening.  The problem with these chests is that three out of four of them have Genji gear, and Genji stuff is rubbish. They do have insane defense scores, the genji gloves here have a defense of 45, which is better than most armor, and mind resistance, but they also have a evade penalty of -47% and a magic penalty of -100%. Yeah, you'd have to have a dedicated evasion tank to wear these while keeping some evasion, and they cannot be a spellcaster. Obviously Vivian will not sully her hands with them.  Zombie Borgan Rank 7, HP 2,500, MP 370, Attack Power 120, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 10-100% Each of these treasure chests are also guarded by a boss monster. Each of the four bosses are some of the few bosses that aren't random encounters, and other than Borgan they're all unique sprite. Howsabout that? Believe it or not, Zombie Borgan may be the hardest of them, at least for Vivian. He resists mind and body, so no curse, and since he's undead you can't siphon his MP away.  And his flare magic ain't nothing to gently caress with. Fortunately, he has a crippling weakness to fire so Vivian tears through his 2,500 HP in three turns.  Once we've got the gloves, there's actually something hidden off to the right.   The Masamune! The Masamune is the best sword in the game, except for perhaps the blood sword. Its attack power is 150, by far and away better than anything else. And like the Masamune in FF1, it's great for spellcasters, since it carries zero magic penalty (the only weapon in the game that doesn't) It has a +2% evasion penalty, most weapons apart from the main gauche and the defender only have +1%, and casts Haste 11 when used as an item. It's pretty darned good. This room is notable for the fact that the encounter rate is super high, and the monsters are ones we fought as bosses later in the game. There's the elemental gigases, the red and blue dragons, the roundworm, and the king behemoth. Honestly all of those are less dangerous than death riders or couerls for unprotected characters, so what is supposed to be a nasty surprise is a break. And now we walk out of this area, and then go into the second door from the left.  Beast Demon Rank 7, HP 1,000, MP 140, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 6-60% The worst thing they have is Stop 8. Sad.  Defense 30, evasion penalty -30%, magic penalty -60%, matter resistance. Comes close to being useful.  Tiamat Rank 7, HP 5,000, MP 450, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-80% Well, hello Tiamat! None of the other elemental fiends made it into this game, though. Like in FF1 she favors poison attacks, but also throws out fire, ice, and bolt. She's also still vulnerable to stone, but that's not unique in this game. Tiamat resists mind, meaning curse is out. She can be hit with body, so blind is still in, but blink will do the same thing so I don't see the point. None of Tiamat's spells will do much of anything, but I drain her MP anyway.  That out of the way, actually killing Tiamat is a bit of a chore. Vivian can scratch her, but doesn't do much damage. Tiamat has no elemental weakness, she absorbs fire, ice, bolt, and poison as a matter of fact, so either Vivian hopes to get high rolls on her attack or holys Tiamat to death. Vivian's rarely breaking 500 damage a round, so it takes a while. Still, once I've taken her MP and blinked Vivian, I can't help but to win. This... may end up being a theme. Once I exit out to the beginning of the fourth floor, I skip the third door and instead go through the rightmost door.  Defense 75, evasion penalty -79%(!), magic penalty -100%, death resistance. This might be the worse one of the set. By the way, wearing the full genji set gives you a total evasion penalty of 157. You cannot wear a full set without a shield if you want any evasion whatsoever, and you'd have to have a shield skill of 10 or higher plus evasion bonus from weapons and a high agility to get a halfway decent score. I guess it'd be decent set up if you had high evasion percent but low evasion level, but what do you do with draining enemies?  Satan Rank 7, HP 5,000, MP 450, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 8-70% Oh yeah and there's Satan. He can cast single target stone 16 and charm 16, as well as flare 16, but curse, blink, and aspil work just fine, so whatever. (Actually, this is another enemy that casts dispel 16, so if it worked Satan might be dangerous!) And now, let's go open the chest that actually has something worthwhile!  Excellent. It has a defense of 10, which is a little lower than the spiral headband she was wearing, but it resists all elements. This actually means I could equip the ribbon and swap the white robe out. While the +10 intelligence of the black robe or the 43 defense of the diamond cuirass sounds nice, I like the soul boost. Even if I'm not using the ribbon to get rid of the white robe, the protection from fire, ice, and bolt it gives is enough to keep it. Also +21 magic defense, no weight, and zero magic penalties. It's pretty great.  Astaroth Rank 7, HP 7,000, MP 540, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 8-70% The ribbon is also defended by a pretty nasty boss. It has fire, aero, drain, blind, and death, all level 16 and single target. Astaroth also gets drain touch, and really high accuracy! In a stroke of luck, Vivian got first strike and set up a blink immediately. Despite all of Astaroth's nasty attacks, it's perfectly susceptible to the holy trinity of boss crippling (blink, curse, aspil), so all it lands is a fire 16 and that's it.  And it drops a white robe. I... appreciate the thought. Admittedly, out of all the things it could drop, this is the nicest drop. The reason I saved the ribbon for last is that the teleporter that allows us to continue on with the dungeon is past this chest. (And dramatic tension, of course)  It teleports us to the side of the four doors and leads to-  Another teleporter! Did I mention this dungeon really, really likes teleporters?  By the time you make it to this point, you're probably gonna make it to the end.  The death riders stop showing up, and nothing really replaces them. The worst are the elemental gigases (I have no idea why the bombs are still showing up; they are beyond laughable at this point) and maybe the lamia queens and coeurls.  And there's no more decent treasure, either.   But plenty of teleporters! Gotta have teleporters!  Well, I guess king behemoths show up and that's kind of interesting. No I'm kidding they're not.  This room is kind of odd, in that it sort of resembling that one floor in the sky castle in FF1 that wraps around. I think that's what it's trying to invoke, anyway.  But it's actually just a big square and the teleport we need is in the bottom left corner here.  And now we're on the last floor. It's time for the final showdown. How far have we come?   This is the Vivian we ended up with, with no equipment boosts. As you can guess from her HP total, Vivian's best stat by far is her vitality. Keep in mind she started with 5, and there's no orb in Mysidia tower that increases vitality. She gained 76 points over the course of the game. Her soul is drat good for a character that's not a dedicated white mage, and considering that soul sometimes decreases power, her power stat ended up pretty great too. Vivian getting the power orb from Mysidia definitely helped. As for her agility, while it doesn't look impressive (dedicated evasion tanks usually end the game with 70ish agility) it's better than I expected. She only got 25 total agility bonuses from battle, the rest is either her starting agility or from Mysidia. But considering that she was running with less than 40% evasion for most of the game, and evasion percent is what determines agility growth, 50 agility is as good as I can hope for. Finally, I'm kind of disappointed in her intelligence score, especially considering she starts with 15 and got the Mysidia bonus. The game just kept marking her intelligence down. Oh well, she's not going to need it for this last battle anyway. As for her attack score, 111 is on the low end, honestly. With her strength, she'd actually have a higher attack score with a weapon. For weapons, if you're wielding it single-handed it's weapon's attack + half your strength. With the catclaw, the weakest of the highest tier weapons, she'd have 117 attack. Now if you do have something in the character's off hand the calculation is weapon + 1/4 strength score, and honestly you're more likely to be holding a shield or another weapon to bolster evasion. However, if we compare fists to the masamune, fists lose. Even if Vivian has 99 strength and level 16 unarmed (and gently caress grinding up to level 16 unarmed), she'd have 169 attack... and the masamune would have 174 attack if wielded with a shield or another weapon. The masamune is just that much better than every other weapon in the game. But we're not going to need that, either. We're going to do something... interesting for the next boss.  First off, true warriors don't need pesky things like special equipment or clothing, so it all goes off. I am taking those elixirs, though. Next, I grind a bit. I know, know, grinding in FF2. Don't worry, it was only to get Holy up to level 8. (And the stats I showed were post-grinding.) Mostly this was just to preserve my sanity a bit. Let me show you why.   The Motherfucking Emperor HP 10,000, MP 540, Attack Power 180, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 210, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 16-70% The emperor is one tough cookie. Lots of HP, lots of defense, high magic defense, absorbs matter and death while resisting every other element, and host of nasty spells. But here's the thing, while I can't curse the emperor, blinking myself and stealing his MP is still viable. With 540 MP aspil takes a few turns, but once he's out of MP, if I've got blink up the emperor cannot harm me in any way. While it would be funny beating on a completely impotent emperor, it wouldn't be sporting. So, new rule! Blink is now forbidden. As for Aspil, it actually doesn't matter. If I'm not using blink I don't want his MP gone. Why?  Because the emperor has loving drain touch, that's why. Not only is the damage pretty bad (especially since Vivian's not wearing any armor) but also drain touch does heal the attacker. It will only heal the 1/16th per hit, the base damage isn't counted, but for the emperor that means that it heals 258 per hit. That doesn't sound so bad, right? So here's the problem. With 111 attack and the emperor's 210 defense, Vivian can't scratch the boss at all. At best, she'll do 12 per hit. This boss fight requires berserk.  Or you fall back on spell casting. I think the designers expected you to bust out Ultima for this fight, but oops they broke it. So we have to use a different non-elemental spell. In case you're wondering, this battle is the entire reason I picked up holy. The emperor's high magic defense means that Vivian won't land additional hits of Holy, so the damage is around the 400 mark. 10,000 divided by 400... minimum 25 rounds. Yeah. Don't need drain touch undoing our progress. So any turn he's casting is a turn he's not using his draining attack.  Not that the emperor's spells aren't worth worrying about. Flare, while not OHKOing Viv by any means, does force her away from holying the emperor's balls off to have to heal every once in a while. Considering that I never know when the emperor's going to land an attack, and for how much, keeping my HP up was a concern. I generally never let it go below 2800.  And he gets plenty of status spells. Fortunately, he gets no spells that paralyze or insta-kill. Mostly they just cripple your attack power. Well, hell, I'm not using it. Viv already has 0 defense and curse doesn't hurt spell casting so just keep it, right?  Actually no, it does hurt spell casting. Thankfully, her level 3 heal removes it just fine.   Fortunately for me, the emperor really loved meteor and dispel in this battle. Meteor doesn't do a whole lot of damage, and dispel is just a wasted turn, so this helped immensely.  Blind also seems like a non-issue, but blind doesn't just reduce your accuracy, it also reduces your evasion. Yeeeaaah that's the last thing I need. If the emperor ever followed up blind with an attack I'd be up poo poo creek, but he never did. (Although it occurs to me that for whatever reason I never used barrier. Uh... pretend it was restricted for this battle! Yeah, that's the ticket.)  Also, he casts slow. That one I can ignore, since it doesn't do anything but reduce Vivian's number of attacks. A wasted turn for the emperor.  And he gained back like 700 HP. Glorious. I decided just to drink an elixir than bother with trying to heal up. I could potentially get caught in a damage spiral, and I'd rather not risk it.  STOP BLINDING ME SHITHEAD. Anyway, so you get how this battle went. I'll spare you the exact blow-by-blow; this battle was long. No seriously, I don't think you truly how long it was. For the most part, Vivian kept up pretty easily.  Except when the emperor got a lucky hit. Wow, exact same damage, too. Huh. That ate up my second elixir, so I was hoping he'd never get another hit like that.  And he didn't.   Not only were you beaten, Vivian beat you with basically one hand tied around her back. I hope you get noogied for eternity when you return to hell.  Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! You're alive?! ... ... ...you're scaring me. Let's, uh, go over here, Nellie.    It seems that Vivian's grasp of reality has broken entirely.  The end!  So, last thoughts. FF2 is a game I'm of two minds of. I just can't deny the game's myriad problems, and so much has been written about FF2's failings that I don't feel like I need to reiterate them.  And yet... it's a game I like. Hell, you've probably deduced through my subtlety that I've done FF2 solo runs before, so my love for this game is pretty obvious. Perhaps I'm broken in the head, or FF2's is just such an amusing trainwreck.  But you know what, there are legitimately good things to say about FF2, even if some of those positives are nullified by other problems. For one, it makes a lot of quality of life changes from FF1, and I don't think people give FF2 enough credit for it. Being able to save freely on the world map without using an item, having monsters-in-a-box rather than encounter tiles, having a different sprite for open chests, using MP over the very limited charge system, these are all changes that, for me, make the game a lot more playable.  Other than the agility/evasion debacle, the character building system is kind of fun. Yes, I think the much derided character building system is fun. There's always some enjoyment in building a team in how you want to build them.  It's really a shame that no other Final Fantasy really played with or refined this system, like they did with the job classes. Well, Final Fantasy didn't, but the head designer of FF2, Akitoshi Kawazu, went on to make the SaGa series, and you can definitely see the connection. Weirdly, I can't actually say I'm a SaGa fan. Maybe I need to play more of them?  So I guess I do get really annoyed when I hear people rail about how bad this game is, even if it is far from perfect. What really, really gets my goat is when people say that the best way to get through FF2 is to spend hours beating up your own teammates and abusing select-cancel. And then complain that the game is grindy. Well no loving poo poo.  I think people see that spells and character levels max out at 16 and think you need to have those levels by the end of the game. You don't. I had level 16 evasion through no concentrated effort of my own; to be honest, that just tends to happen for solo characters. While you may need to grind out spell levels every once in a while, don't go crazy and grind up level 16 fists against goblins. Believe it or not, the game is much more fun when you play it closer to how the developers intended you to.  The issue with FF2 isn't that it's hard. It's that the game is obtuse. Obtuse does not equal hard; once you understand the bizarre mechanics of this game, it's absurdly easy. For example, once you know that getting a high evasion level and percent is both fairly easy and makes you invincible to normal attacks, there's no reason not to do it. That's just one example out of many. FF2 is the easiest game people claim is hard.  Ergo, challenge runs! Sadly, this one ended up being a lot easier than I expected. I've probably done this run too many times. So I'm looking forward to my GBA run! The GBA version makes a ton of tweaks to the game, most notably that spell and weapon levels raise much, much faster, and it makes the game less of a slog. Unfortunately, many of the game's biggest problems, namely the evasion/agility problem and the poor dungeon designs, were not fixed. Some of FF2's failings are just too core to the game; you can't change them without making a different game. (Namely a SaGa game)  I've got one bonus update planned (just covering some bits and pieces here) and then we're done with the original game. Next up will be the GBA run, and the optional dungeon Soul of Rebirth. Stay tuned! Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Dec 8, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 01:39
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Congrats on finishing! Those Death Knights were a lot less threatening than I'd been expecting them to be. As for the Emperor fight...how much of a difference would your equipment had made, had you decided to use it?
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Sep 19, 2014 02:32
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Congrats on finishing! Those Death Knights were a lot less threatening than I'd been expecting them to be. As for the Emperor fight...how much of a difference would your equipment had made, had you decided to use it? All the status spells would have been wasted turns for the emperor, so it would have been a smidgen faster. With the exception of blind, they were mostly annoyances anyway. (It occurs to be that blind is body, and it wouldn't have been protected by barrier anyway. So I didn't lose that much by not casting it)
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Sep 19, 2014 02:34
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Nice work! I'm interested to see you cover the differences between the NES version and the GBA version, because holy poo poo did the GBA version get easy by the end. I think the Emperor managed to cast blind twice (ineffectively) before I killed him, and I wasn't using the Blood Sword.
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Sep 19, 2014 08:55
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Camel Pimp posted:The issue with FF2 isn't that it's hard. It's that the game is obtuse. Obtuse does not equal hard; once you understand the bizarre mechanics of this game, it's absurdly easy. For example, once you know that getting a high evasion level and percent is both fairly easy and makes you invincible to normal attacks, there's no reason not to do it. That's just one example out of many. FF2 is the easiest game people claim is hard. I personally always found that without select-cancel, my stats would plateau at a certain point (weapon skills especially). So then it feels like select-cancel is necessary because holy crap my Sword skill has been stuck at 3-07 for like fifteen fricking battles even though I've been chopping heads; aren't I supposed to be getting stronger? In reality, the Sword skill at level 3 in that dungeon may have been completely adequate, but fighting battles and not seeing any clear sign of progression on the skills sure gives the impression that I'm doing something wrong. Also, FF8 suffers from the same obtuseness - the gameplay things that people complain about most (e.g., Drawing, the uselessness of gaining levels) are pretty much the least efficient way possible of powering up your characters. But since the game doesn't bother to explain that there's a wildly superior way, it seems way more grindy than it is.
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Sep 19, 2014 16:44
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MagusofStars posted:I personally always found that without select-cancel, my stats would plateau at a certain point (weapon skills especially). So then it feels like select-cancel is necessary because holy crap my Sword skill has been stuck at 3-07 for like fifteen fricking battles even though I've been chopping heads; aren't I supposed to be getting stronger? In reality, the Sword skill at level 3 in that dungeon may have been completely adequate, but fighting battles and not seeing any clear sign of progression on the skills sure gives the impression that I'm doing something wrong. They make this worse by throwing a lot of high defense enemies at you early on. Several early bosses are almost invincible and even against random enemies like Soldiers most of your characters are going to have trouble dealing damage, which sends you the message that your weapon skills are inadequate (even though they're not really the issue.)
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Sep 19, 2014 17:09
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MagusofStars posted:I personally always found that without select-cancel, my stats would plateau at a certain point (weapon skills especially). So then it feels like select-cancel is necessary because holy crap my Sword skill has been stuck at 3-07 for like fifteen fricking battles even though I've been chopping heads; aren't I supposed to be getting stronger? In reality, the Sword skill at level 3 in that dungeon may have been completely adequate, but fighting battles and not seeing any clear sign of progression on the skills sure gives the impression that I'm doing something wrong. Right, this is down to the game being obtuse and also it trying to avoid you getting overpowered. Some RPGs (I know Persona 3 does this, for example) have monsters in chapter N give vastly less experience than monsters in chapter N+1, and then set up the player experience curves so that you can easily get to, say, level 10, but getting to level 11 then suddenly requires a lot more experience. Which functionally means that there's a soft level cap in each chapter. FF2 does something sort-of similar because skill gains depend on the rank of the enemies you're fighting, but because none of this is actually spelled out you have no idea why you aren't ranking up.
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Sep 19, 2014 17:10
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Gabriel Pope posted:They make this worse by throwing a lot of high defense enemies at you early on. Several early bosses are almost invincible and even against random enemies like Soldiers most of your characters are going to have trouble dealing damage, which sends you the message that your weapon skills are inadequate (even though they're not really the issue.) Yeah, I don't think the problem is the balance of character progression, I think there's a problem in enemy stat progression Physical attacks go from "useless" in the early game to "viable" to "The best damage dealing method", and then all the way back to Useless for the final boss (Assuming you don't Haste/Berserk spam) primarily because of the way enemy defense scales.
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Sep 19, 2014 22:48
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Certain weapon types get screwed over early on because of certain enemies having higher than usual defense too. You don't get a bow, dagger or staff with double digit attack damage until you have access to Mithril weapons, so if you're using one of those early on with someone like Maria/Vivian then good luck doing any damage to a Soldier, never mind a Land Turtle. Combine this with the second tier of each weapon type having 10% less base accuracy than the starting tier (Broadsword has 60% while the Long Sword has 50%, Axe has 55% and the Battle Axe has 45%, etc) and you end up with 'better' weapons that leave you less able to actually hit anything.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:09
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MagusofStars posted:I personally always found that without select-cancel, my stats would plateau at a certain point (weapon skills especially). So then it feels like select-cancel is necessary because holy crap my Sword skill has been stuck at 3-07 for like fifteen fricking battles even though I've been chopping heads; aren't I supposed to be getting stronger? In reality, the Sword skill at level 3 in that dungeon may have been completely adequate, but fighting battles and not seeing any clear sign of progression on the skills sure gives the impression that I'm doing something wrong. FF8 has quite possibly the easiest to break system of any Final Fantasy game. Literally before the first dungeon you can grind a couple battles against fish enemies, get their cards/drops and make Water spells, which you then promptly junction to Squall's strength and suddenly everything dies in one hit in all of disc one.
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Sep 20, 2014 07:30
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How Rude posted:FF8 has quite possibly the easiest to break system of any Final Fantasy game. Literally before the first dungeon you can grind a couple battles against fish enemies, get their cards/drops and make Water spells, which you then promptly junction to Squall's strength and suddenly everything dies in one hit in all of disc one. Then, right after you get Siren, you can refine life magic. Tents can be bought anywhere and refined into Curagas at a point where nothing even has second-tier magic. Junction them to HP and wreck everything with super-powered limits while still having several hundred HP like you're supposed to. Apparently many people didn't even notice that refining skills were a thing, though.
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Sep 20, 2014 08:36
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It's the most broken games that are usually the most fun, really. Looking forward to the GBA run. I played the PSP version a bunch of times last year and enjoyed the hell out of it, despite the tedium of how the extra-extra PSP dungeons are set up in that version. Which is a shame about that last bit because the idea behind the dungeon was awesome and was fun to run once you were actually in the drat thing.
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Sep 20, 2014 08:45
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meteor9 posted:It's the most broken games that are usually the most fun, really. I think it comes with the rewards. A perfectly balanced game would make you work for everything equally, but something like FFVIII would really reward you for trying different things and experimenting. The only problem is that it gets boring when finding just one way to break the game is sufficient to coast on it through an entire playthrough. Final Fantasy V avoids this pretty well - even with crazy powerful things like Rapidfire Spellblade, you'll probably still need to mix it up for multipart bosses. And those crazy powerful things usually aren't accessible from the very start. In this regard, FF2 also does pretty well, considering that the final boss no sells physical attacks the game has taught you work well against mostly everything.
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Sep 20, 2014 08:59
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Camel Pimp posted:
Oh god why
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Sep 20, 2014 10:40
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meteor9 posted:It's the most broken games that are usually the most fun, really. I have never actually played the PSP version, but the optional dungeon in the GBA version is quite different (it's not obtuse, it's just... bullshit.) How does the optional PSP dungeon work anyway?
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Sep 20, 2014 16:19
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All I remember is something about Key Words still having some use in the bonus dungeons.
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Sep 20, 2014 16:31
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Specifically there are three 'entrances' in a triangular pattern near Salamand, Bofsk, and Kashuan. One leads to a dungeon that's a few floors long, the next is a dungeon about twice as long, and the last is the longest at some number I've forgotten. The catch is that the floors aren't unique to each entrance, but are instead teleported to based on what keyword you feed the portal. As such you can actually start the dungeon at any point past getting the canoe (and kinda have to since every fourth-slot character has an almost-ultimate weapon from that dungeon and we all know how well people survive in this game), and as a result it will scale to your characters overall power, which is surprisingly decent. Completing a floor will generally grant an extra, non-plot keyword that's used to open new floors and occasionally progress what little plot there is to the dungeon. The tedium comes in two forms: a.) how much travelling you have to do to complete a full cycle of the dungeon, ending in that mountain between Salamand and Poft where you have to go down about twenty flights of stairs and then fight a superboss whose level is based on how many plot keywords you have, and b.) trying to keep track of what keywords you still need to get based on what floors have them and also whether or not you've used the correct keywords at the right time per character to get their weapon from the superboss. Using a guide cuts down on the pain quite a bit, but it's still a massive slog since you'll presumably run the dungeon fully about 8 times before you even get the Airship. And it's silly to put that much effort to equip a side character who will generally die in a dungeon or two, but as you mentioned the GBA extras, you'll know that for some of the characters that's still worth doing. This...probably doesn't explain it well.
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Sep 20, 2014 16:58
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Bonus Update: Vivian Kills Everything All right, so we've beaten the emperor, restored peace to the half of the world that still exists, and saved the day I guess. But I think we can do better than to just cherry tap the final boss to death. No, we need overwhelming force. So let's call this Operation: Punch the Emperor to Death.  First off, all the restrictions I've placed are gone. Grinding up weapon levels or toad levels would take too long and be kind of pointless, so instead I'm gonna pick up berserk. Go to hell, flare!  And I'm going to use that snazzy black ninja suit I kept around. This set-up brings Vivian's evasion to 16-57%. Nice! You might also notice the Masamune there. I'd rather not have to grind both Berserk and Haste, so the Masamune's level 11 Haste will substitute.  Oh and I finally completed my elixir swimming pool! Unfortunately, I ended up having to throw a few out. It turns out 22 (plus the six or so my characters are holding) elixirs is a bit excessive. With the prep out of the way, time to go back to the final dungeon.  And now begins the process of grinding a level 1 spell up to something useful. Now because Berserk is a low level spell, it'll get a decent amount of experience per battle. The calculation is rank + times cast - spell level + 3, and many monsters in this area are rank 6 or 7, so level 1 Berserk is getting around a minimum of 9 or 10 experience per battle. Still kinda slow, but it's gonna reach level 3 by the end with little fuss. I actually grind it up to 4, just to make sure Vivian gibs the poo poo out of the emperor.  Here's a sneak peak at what just a level two berserk can do; without it, Vivian does well under half that damage to Death Riders.  And combined with haste? Yeah, the results are nasty. Also, in case you were skeptical about whether or not you can buff something past 16, here you go. And speaking of haste, I was playing around with the Masamune's haste, just for funsies, when suddenly...  Where the gently caress is my masamune?  It's gone. So I guess it turns out that spells proc'd from weapons can break the weapon. Or I accidentally threw it away, somehow. poo poo. Okay, reset. Other than that unsettling development, the journey was uneventual. Vivian ended up with roughly the same stats as she had the main run, just with level 4 berserk, level 12 unarmed, one extra agility, and a little bit of extra strength.  You poor sod.  Vivian spends the first couple of rounds blinking and aspiling. The emperor takes a couple of aspils to drain entirely, but in the meantime he just fires off a few meteos and status spells. Since I'm wearing equipment for this battle, none of the status spells matter.  Excellent. Now that the emperor is completely impotent, time to apply berserk and haste.   And there was the wind-up, and here's the pitch.  Boom. Four more turns, and he's down.  That was oddly satisfying. Now that we've ripped the emperor a new one through reasonable means, you might be thinking, "how could we demolish him through unreasonable means?" Let's find out!  Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm not grinding that much. Even I have too much of a life for that.   There we go! Now that Vivian is a goddamn goddess, how much damage can she do with maxed out fists, strength, level 16 Berserk, and level 16 Haste?  Nice. Still requires two hits, though. Can we kill him even harder?  What do you say, blood sword?  That was two rounds; one to cast haste, the other to swing the sword. Yup. Actually, Vivian did so much damage it's not displaying correctly; I was confused at first, but the game is truncating the first digit, not the last. 16299 damage. We just killed the emperor so hard he's in, like, hell's hell's... cellar. All right, I think Mr Emperor is dead enough. Next up on our agenda: finding the Iron Giant. The Iron Giant is a rare enemy that only shows up in a few areas of Pandemonium. It's a bit like FF1's WarMech, although the Iron Giant shows up in more than one map.  The Iron Giant shows up in the fourth and fifth floor. The fourth floor is the one with the chests containing the genji gear. The fourth floor seems to be divided up in separate areas, not all of them sharing the same encounter table. Meaning the giant is in some parts of that floor and not others. But I know he's on the fifth, so let's just hunt there. Unfortunately, it has a less than two percent chance of showing up on either floor. Not quite as bad as trying to get a pink tail, but still a pain in the neck. So I had to spend a looooot of time trying to find this drat thing.  But this gives me a chance to talk about a very special magic scroll. The Charm scroll is absurdly rare; only two enemies, the Fire Gigas and the Thunder Gigas, drop it, and there's only a 5% chance for it to drop. Unless you grind drop the ones in Mysidia Tower, you're quite unlikely to get one before now. But since I got the scroll, if I'm stuck here looking for this stupid giant I might as well play with this spell. It got up to level 4, which should tell you how long I was searching.  But, oh, the petty revenge! Yeah, how do you like it? But it gets better.  Say, do you remember what property the Couerl's attacks have?   Oh that makes the whole frustrating hunt worth it. Anyway, I did eventually find the stupid giant.  Iron Giant Rank 7, HP 3,500, MP 240, Attack Power 180, Attacks 12, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 14-100% Holy poo poo twelve att- oh wait I can just use blink.  Yeah, if I do this run again I'm forbidding that spell. Anyway, the Iron Giant does have a spell, a poison spell, but the scariest thing about it is definitely the attack. It doesn't get drain touch, though. While it has a really high defense and resists all status ailments, it does have a weakness.  Namely, bolt and ice. Its high magic defense means we're not quite doing massive damage, but it's not a repeat of the emperor slog.  That was disappointing. The Iron Giant can drop any piece of the genji set, the aegis shield, or another excalibur! This giant was boring to the end and just dropped money. And with a unimpressive plop we're done with the original FF2. Next up, Dawn of Souls! Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Sep 21, 2014 01:43
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Camel Pimp posted:
There's something so satisfying about breaking a game this hard. 
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Sep 21, 2014 10:45
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Bregor posted:There's something so satisfying about breaking a game this hard. I'm not sure if breaking the damage display is better or worse then turning basically every enemy in the game into a frog like the last lp.
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Sep 21, 2014 14:59
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GBA Bonus Run Part 1 Welcome, everyone, to the FF2 Dawn of Souls run of the game!  Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls for the Gameboy Advance is not the first appearance of FF2 on western shores, not the first FF2 remake to be based on the Wonderswan remake, nor the first compilation containing both the first and second Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy Origins for the Playstation came to the US and PAL regions a year prior in 2003. Dawn of Souls, however, is notable for making sweeping changes to the gameplay of both games. The changes to FF1, such as replacing the charge system with MP, giving you more EXP and money per battle, reducing prices, and other re-balancing changes honestly make the game way too easy and subsequently boring. The changes to FF2, on the other hand, have generally been received quite well. Not sure if I'm a fan of all of them, but many of them make the game less tedious. Apart from graphical and gameplay changes, this version also adds in bonus dungeons. FF1 adds four dungeons, each of them semi-randomized. Each of them are linked to one of the elemental fiends. FF2 only gets one bonus dungeon, the Soul of Rebirth, and it, uh doesn't try nearly as hard. It's mostly notable for being kind of hard, especially early on. Since that's a good fit for this LP, and none of the other LPs have covered this dungeon, I figured why not add it in? However, to access it we need to play the game again. So let's meet our new heroes!  It looks like we're going with the It's Always Sunny in Palamacia team suggested by Fister Roboto. I, uh, have to confess I've never seen the show. I know, I know, I've just never gotten around to it. Also, six character limit forces me to truncate Charlie's name. Sorry.    We get a real intro this time around!   "...and launches his campaign for world conquest."     Oh Gordon.    Uh... that's the town the fan translation called Altea. Not, uh... the other thing. There's obviously some name differences between translations, although most of them are fairly easy to suss out, at times it can be confusing. Sorry. At least we're not bringing the Origins translation into the mix.   "They have lost their parents at the hands of the empire. And they are not free yet..."  After that intro, every else happens exactly the same. Grossly unfair battle, die, resurrected, whine at Hilda, and key word.  I will note that there's a little bit more movement during dialogue scenes in this version. You tend to see all of your characters during scenes, characters bow their heads and wave their hands, and whenever you talk to Hilda your party will all move back and bow. It's nothing fancy, but it's nice. Although for some reason they're always spotting Solid Snake.  But you don't really care about that. You're probably more curious about how I'm playing this run. A lot of runs were suggested, but the one that struck out to me was the one TheFattestPat suggested: TheFattestPat posted:How about a super awesome Treasure Hunter Adventure This and the "magic only" run had the most support. A magic only run would be very doable, if kind of boring and grindy at times. The treasure hunter run, however, sounds more interesting to me. That reminds me of the Living off the Land challenge Sullla did for FF1. A living off the land challenge entails buying nothing and surviving on pickups alone. Actually, that sounds really interesting. I'm doing that run instead. ...yeah, sorry. I never claimed this was a democracy.  A living off the land challenge is lots, lots easier in FF2 for multiple reasons. For one, we already start with equipment, and even if we didn't unarmed is always a viable option. Enemies drop items so we're not completely reliant on treasure chests. And most importantly we're not stuck in a no-magic variant, since chests and monsters drop magic tomes. However, there are a few things to note: until midway through the first dungeon, we have no magic since monsters don't drop tomes this early. In terms of what magic we can find, you can't buy most black magic anyway, and every single black magic tome can be found, so we're sitting pretty for that. White magic on the other hand... the only white magic spells we find are cure (only one tome, and we have to wait until Kashuon), blink, exit, and Ultima. This means: no life spell (Tiamat apparently drops a life tome? That's way too late to matter) and no heal/esuna. Fortunately, enemies tend to drop antidotes and eye drops, and we don't have a limited inventory in this version, so we're not totally hosed by poison or darkness. However, ailments like stone or curse will be a bitch because enemies don't drop those healing items, and there's very few of those items in the game. Phoenix downs will be a bitch, too. Only one non-boss enemy drops them, and there's only three in chests, at least in the original game. This version changes around some of the chests, though, so we'll see how that goes. With all this in mind, how will be build our characters?  Everyone more or less keeps the same equipment. Mac gets Charlie's shield, and Dee takes off her clothes. I'm going to keep Dee in the back, armed with a bow. She's going to be my main spellcaster once I've got spells. I'll have Charlie do some spellcasting, but Dee's doing the brunt. There's only one aspil/osmose tome in the game, barring any I get from drops, and since I can't build an elixir swimming pool MP conservation will be kind of important. There are a few enemies late in the game that drop ethers and elixirs, though, so that'll be helpful. Since magic will be kind of tight, I'm keeping both Charlie and Mac in the front row. Mac will be my stereotypical warrior type, shields and heavy armor, while Charlie will be a jack of all trades. After we get our first key word and so some minor equipment shuffle, what else can we do in town?  This is about it. As you'd imagine potions will be our lifeblood early on, so I have to make sure to grab what I can.  I will note, however, that's it's too bad we're not buying anything in this version, because the prices have decreased dramatically. In the original, if you wanted to buy, say, a fire tome with your starting money you'd either have to buy it and nothing else, sell some of your starting equipment, or forgo it entirely. Here, however, you can buy fire, cure, and have some left over.  (Ignore the money total up top. That was an accident, and this screenshot isn't even from the main run.) It's not just spells. The phoenix downs were originally 5000 gil; their price was reduced by 90 percent. Obviously not all items were reduced equally. Elixirs are still the same price, for example. It's certainly nice that items are now reasonably priced, since money is usually tight early on, but it still feels a little unnecessary. Oh well, our gang took a vow of poverty so it doesn't matter.  Oh and Paul gets a unique sprite and a portrait in this version. Yay.  The ability to one-shot goblins at the start is really nice, although Dee can't quite manage that with her bow yet. Still, being able to kill three goblins in two turns is so awesome. Seriously, you have no idea how long it took Vivian to kill things.  After one battle, Charlie is midway through sword level one. Yeah. He only swung once. Early on, weapon skills level up stupidly fast, although they'll plateau around level 4 or 5. All three of them leveled up their chosen weapon in the next battle.  Like in Sullla's run, inns are in play for this run. Once Osmose comes around maybe I could dispense with inns entirely, but for now I don't see how that's possible. The trip to Phin/Fynn was uneventful. Charlie got an HP increase and Mac got some strength. Baby steps.  This version adds a little scene warning you not to chum it up with the soldiers. That's cool.  Three potions! Sweet!  BORGA- oh, "Borghen." I can't make that joke anymore. drat. Anyway, he dies, we get his ring, and head back.  And everyone gets another weapon level. Oh, I'll note that in this version, the game only counts actions you actually complete, rather than input. So this means select-cancel is no longer possible, but level three weapon skill before you get Minwu! You don't need it. As you can see, everyone's a little lagging in HP, but we make it back to town without incident.  Although this happens. In this version, everyone in your party gets regular HP increases, even if they didn't get hit in that battle. While hitting your own party members to increase HP is still viable, it's no longer necessary.  After the walk back from Fynn, we're on the pointless Mythril sidequest. Considering that we're vastly limited on healing for this run, having Minwu would be really, really nice. However, the condition I'm placing on myself for Soul of Rebirth is all the characters in it have to go in with their default stats and equipment. This means that Minwu has to die. Again. Don't worry little buddy. You'll eventually get your day in the limelight.  At least this time we can put him out of his misery quickly. There's not much to report about on the way to Salamand.  Other than Dee's "happy" face portrait is terrifying. Anyway, we're up to what I predicted was going to be the first stumbling block of this run: Semitt Falls.  And I had a right to fear it. Charlie already needs a potion, and I'm on the first floor. (By the way, when you see damage displayed in screenshots here, the HP total below is before the damage.) It doesn't help that I felt the need to grab the completely useless chests. They still have money in this version, although it's a higher amount. Another soldier sent him into the red again, forcing me to burn another potion. Two potions out of four just for the first floor.  However I'd say the attack I really feared was the bow. At least for attacks, Mac with his shield is building up some decent evasion percentage (the level is another story). But the bow will hit no matter what, and worse than that it'll hit Dee in the back. Even with a few HP increases her HP is sad. The party clears the first floor with one potion left. Against my better instincts, I go on to the second.  Hey look running worked hows about that?  Sweet, precious life blood!  Although maybe I should have used it so the soldier didn't bow Dee to death.  This was only a regular potion in the original game! Getting a Hi Potion (the fan translation called them X Potions, but this is more accurate) is pretty nice! Maybe this was a net gain? Well, let's see if I can get this party back to town.  Nope! In case you're curious, this version lets you save anywhere, but I'm gonna be using old school saving rules: only on the world map. Hm, I just don't see this working. Even if I run through the first floor and walked back, I still needed three potions to get past the first floor! Practice runs would result in a net loss. And I still need some potions for the snow cavern! I really see no way out but to get more potions. Thankfully, lots of enemies at this point drop them.  So... I grinded for drops. Yeah. Not proud. What's worse is that is that I spent a fair bit of time fighting and I didn't get anyway. The Vampire Thorn, the Queen Bee, and the Soldier all have a chance to drop potions, and other than the vampire thorn it's a 20% chance, but they wouldn't drop it. Or the game wouldn't put me in an encounter with enemies that dropped potions. I eventually gave up after only getting two potions and tried exploring the cave again. At least everyone got some HP and another weapon level out of it. That should help.  Also Charlie is starting to train his unarmed. Since everything levels so quickly early on, you can afford to train in a lot of different weapons. As you may recall, the two bosses at the end are hard to damage with physical attacks, so fisticuffs are my best option there.  I make it to the mid-way point without using any of my six potions. All right!  On the fourth floor, we have the first magic tome! I should probably turn back, but drat I want that teleport/exit tome. I had Dee practice with her magic a bit, but she didn't quite reach level 2.  Turns out she, uh, didn't need to. I didn't realize it before, but they re-did the unarmed attack formula. It was 8 * (skill level - one) plus 1/2 strength score. However, in this version you get plus 8 to attack even on the first level. Instead of the attack score of 2 Vivian was running around with at the beginning, Dee's unarmed attack power would start at 10. That's a huge difference. Admittedly stuff like the Masamune will still be stronger by the end, but this change makes fists way, way stronger. Now that I've got Teleport, I warp out and walk back to town. Much to my surprise Dee nor Charlie died on the way back, and I got Fire level 2! Perhaps my luck is turning around! One more run, we just have the Sergeant left!  And then the game hosed me. You see, since I killed the Land Turtle so quickly Dee didn't get an MP increase. And now I have to waste some of her very precious MP on a random encounter. I managed to run away from slimes once, but it's so unreliable and considering that HP's at a premium too, trying to run might be more disastrous than just fighting them.  But I ran out of potions anyway. poo poo. Well, the Sergeant only has 140 HP, so maybe I can blitz through it.  Yeah, uh, not quite. You see, they increased the Sergeant's HP! Son of a bitch! Dee does about 50 damage a round. Yeeeaaah I need the Sergeant dead quicker than that. Well, Charlie wasted the other fool, he can do the same here.  You know how I ran out of potions? It's almost as though the game knew it and went right after my most vulnerable and precious member.  This is how you can tell I'm getting desperate.  Didn't work. All right, do over.  Although that little failure gives me an idea... Another run through the cave that doesn't quite make it to the end nets Dee a loving MP increase. Hallelujah. Sadly, I only get one more potion on my way back to the boss, but at least I go into the fight with two potions. All right, let's go.  I don't know if level 2 teleport will actually work, but I just want to avoid a protracted fight.  And it does. That's... kind of disappointing, honestly.  Teleport has a low base accuracy, and Dee doesn't have a hell of a lot of spirit, but even level 2 teleport can wreck low level monsters. I'm keeping all the overpowered poo poo in play, at least until it bores me. Since Vivian ended up being a high defense/low offense kind of run, I'm hoping these guys turn out the opposite way. We'll see! Anyway, we've cleared the first major challenge of the game. In case you're curious, this is the state of the party:       And next time will be the next great stumbling block; the second real dungeon of the game. Woo! Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 22:39
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Wow, that's a remarkably brutal start. How soon do you get that Cure tome? It seems like a lack of replenishable healing is going to be a major problem.
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Sep 24, 2014 23:18
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And yeah, MP will be a total pain in the rear end to raise without Swap or Sap to drain MP quickly. You basically have to blow half your MP in a single battle, which is hard to do near towns without killing all the enemies first, and if you do that in dungeons then you have no MP.
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Sep 24, 2014 23:26
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It is intensely appropriate that Leon is Dennis, and it's intensely funny that you don't know why.
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Sep 24, 2014 23:43
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Aw darn, no treasure hunting adventure this time. Living off the land should be interesting, and I'm also very happy that Leon is Dennis.
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Sep 25, 2014 01:14
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bathroomrage posted:It is intensely appropriate that Leon is Dennis, and it's intensely funny that you don't know why. Charlie and Mac might be better switched, though. Still. Most important thing is correct.
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Sep 25, 2014 06:52
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Man, this page is taking a long time to load,
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Sep 25, 2014 19:52
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isn't it?
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Sep 25, 2014 19:52
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I thought it was just my lovely internet connection.
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Sep 25, 2014 20:02
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Camel Pimp posted:I thought it was just my lovely internet connection. I think it's because there's so many screenshots on one page.
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Sep 25, 2014 20:10
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