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 Final Fantasy II is an odd duck. As the first of what turned out to be many sequels, it's a highly ambitious game with tons of interesting ideas and odd quirks. And it doesn't really work. I'll admit this upfront: while I am FFII apologist, at the end of the day, it's a game that's fundamentally flawed. The story is a nice attempt for 1988. but it's only a curiosity now. The character leveling is odd and unbalanced. And if you don't understand how some of the mechanics work it's a frustrating system. That being said, there's a weird narrative that's built up around this game. That it's an impossibly hard, grindy piece of poo poo. And that's simply not true. It doesn't hold up now, but most games of the time don't. For a game from 1988 it's a surprisingly lenient one. And for all the bullshit it has, the character leveling system can be oddly absorbing. Honestly, I find it a lot more fun to play than either the original Final Fantasy or FFIII.  Two LPs have already demonstrated how, with the proper know how, you can demolish FF2. Gabriel Pope's LP absolutely destroys the game's difficulty with a minimum of effort. Mega 64's a little more restrained, but by the end was mostly breezing through. So the goal with this LP? Let's make Final Fantasy II hard again. I originally thought a solo run would spice things up nicely, but I found that a solo FF2 run doesn't play that differently than a regular game. Therefore, we're adding a few restrictions to the list. -No insta-death spells. This means no Death (obviously) no Mini, no Toad (I'm sad too), just anything that kills an enemy instantly. Warp/Exit will still be allowed, but only for its actual intended function. -No Berserk or Haste. -No weapons or shields. We're gonna let our fists do the talking. -Update: As of the 9th update, all armor that increases agility or evasion is verboten. ...this is gonna be fun. Special Spoiler Warning Notice I do not care one iota about FF2's plot. I'm only going to mention it out of obligation. If you really wanna experience the story, there's two other LPs of the game you can read. They're good LPs. Therefore don't bother putting anything in spoiler tags. I won't. Table of Contents: Chapter 1: Pathetic Flailing Chapter 2: Cue the Rocky Theme Chapter 3: Powering Up Chapter 4: The RNG Gods Have Favored Me Chapter 5: Revenge Chapter 6: Castle Cashew Chapter 7: Time to Explode Things Chapter 8: Wandering the Earth Chapter 9: Tropical Vacation Chapter 10: Spelunking Chapter 11: On the Next Season of FF2... Chapter 12: The Rebellion Finally Does Something Chapter 13: Ghosts Chapter 14: Mysidia Tower Chapter 15: Ride the Wind Chapter 16: Family Ties Chapter 17: Vivian Conquers Hell Bonus Update: Vivian Kills Everything  GBA Bonus Run Part 1 GBA Bonus Run Part 2 GBA Bonus Run Part 3 GBA Bonus Run Part 4 GBA Bonus Run Part 5 GBA Bonus Run Part 6 GBA Bonus Run Part 7 Soul of Rebirth Part 1 Soul of Rebirth Part 2 Soul of Rebirth Part 3 Soul of Rebirth Part 4 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Oct 25, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 02:19
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Chapter 1: Pathetic Flailing First things first, we might as well begin as the game does: with this bit of exposition and then naming our hero and their corpse companions.  I named Firion Solo, after the Fighter in ddegenha's FF1's solo LP.  On that note, Guy's name is now Loq, after the Red Mage run of the same LP.  Leon will be Stalin, after Mega 64's FF3 solo LP  And finally Maria shall be called Vivian. Because I like naming her Vivian.  Final Fantasy 2 quite famously opens with an unwinnable battle. When you think about it, it's actually kind of a neat way to teach the player about the row system. If you'll notice, Vivian's standing behind all the burly menfolk. Unlike other games in the series where standing the back row decreases physical damage, here it completely prevents being targeted by normal attacks.  Meaning that this battle always has to take two rounds (well, in original, it'll often take three because enemies in the game can whiff hits on dead targets like you can). Once everyone in the front row is dead, everyone in the back row comes forward and inevitably dies. I figure I might as well mention this because you will never see it again for the rest of the LP.  Because this is a gameplay oriented LP, I'm not gonna bother transcribing text. For the most part I'm just gonna summarize. Like so:  : Hey I found these kids while escaping from the Empire. Could you make sure they don't die? : Sure.: Thanks.  Oh no where's my buddy Stalin?   Well we find everyone else. I'm certain Stalin is fine. Probably out there, doing very morally upright things.   : Hey can we join the rebellion?: No, you'll die. : Well, not all of us.: What?: Nothing.: You can go back to Phin if you want. : You mean the place we nearly died trying to escape from?: Yeap.: Okay. Oh, and we get a keyword. Occasionally people will drop keywords and you have to pick them up and throw them at other people so you can progress. It's a really vestigial thing. This sort of bizarre, pointless little gameplay detail is pretty common of early Final Fantasies, who loved throwing odd ideas here and there and seeing what stuck. (That's pretty much the design doc for this game, now that I think about it) Anyway, all we really needed was that keyword. But there's a couple of things here to note. The dude who healed us up is Minwu (he's called Minh in this translation, but I'm just gonna call him Minwu.) He's a future party member. He's the only one I'm gonna feel kinda bad about killing.  Also there's a Potion here. It does what you think it does. I will actually probably use this. That's... interesting I guess.  Here's the King. He exists solely to die later. I'm really not sure why the game doesn't start with him already dead.  There's Paul. He doesn't have a unique sprite in this version. He's cool; he's pretty much the only competent NPC.  And lastly here's Gordon. He is a future party member that I will relish killing.  Because of the sort of run I'm doing, weapon shops will be completely useless to us and armor shops mostly useless. I don't really want to buy items just yet, so we're only stopping off by the magic shop. Before we start shopping, we have to make the choice: who shall be our survivor?    A quick run down on these stats: Power adds to your attack and accuracy score, Agility determines base Evasion percentage, Vitality determines how much HP we'll get on a level up, Intelligence determines how strong our black magic is, and Soul is the same thing but for White Magic. There's no levels or experience points in the traditional sense; our stats raise based entirely what we do in battle. If we attack Power has a chance to raise, cast black magic Intelligence has a chance to increase... and so on. For most of these stats, it's fairly easy to understand. As for spells and weapon skill, they have levels; every time we use them they gain a small amount of experience. Honestly, if I was doing a less restricted solo run, the choice of character really wouldn't matter. I suppose Solo is the best choice, being as he's the most balanced. In all honestly, though, the differences between them aren't that big, and any deficiency they have would correct itself quite quickly. However, since we're doing this unarmed only, that changes things. Since Fists are so strength reliant, characters with low strength are going to have a hellish time starting out. You'd think this would disqualify Vivian, and would make either Solo or Loq the best choice. Not quite. You see, while Vivian will start out weak, once we get some strength and a few levels in unarmed, that's not going to be a problem. What will be a problem? Evasion. Unfortunately, it's going to take a bit of text to explain why I do what I do, and why this run's restrictions are so difficult. So strap in kids; even more text!  Agility and the Evasion are simultaneous the most important and difficult to understand stats in the game. Agility simply determines base Evasion percentage. That's all it does. So what does Evasion percentage do? It determines chance of evading an attack, obviously, as well as turn order. In addition to Agility, your equipment effects Evasion %. Heavy armor decreases Evasion massively, while light armor has much smaller penalties. Weapons and shields, on the other hand, add to evasion. The formula is level x evasion bonus of the weapon or shield. Most weapons have a evasion bonus of 1%, so that's a minor bonus. Shields, on the other hand? The worst shield, the Buckler Solo started with, has 4% evasion bonus. The best shield in the game has a ten percent bonus. It's not uncommon by the end of the game to have your shield level up to level 8 or higher if you're a heavy shield user. 99% Evasion isn't hard to reach. Fists, by the way, don't give any evasion bonus whatsoever. Without shields or weapons, we're completely reliant on our Agility score for evasion. Oh, but here's the kicker; Agility increases are dependent on our Evasion percentage. Absolutely nothing else. Basically if your evasion percent is higher than zero, you have a random chance on increasing Agility which increases the higher your evasion percent is. It is completely independent of your actions. So, why not just load up on heavy armor and tank every hit? This is a bad, bad idea. Not only does heavy armor carry some penalties not readily apparent, what will really end up hurting you in the end doesn't care one whit about defense score. I'll explain it once I get to it in the game; this explanation's getting long enough anyway. Tl;dr: Agility is more important than every other stat. Therefore Vivian's our choice.  Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's go actually prepare our character. Unlike FF1, we do start with some equipment. It's all getting sold, with the except of the Buckler Solo comes with and the Cloth armor Vivian comes with.  We end up with a little over a thousand gil, which is more than enough to get us started. Obviously we need at least Cure and one attack spell. I went with both Fire and Ice. Probably should have just bought one attack spell and spent the rest on items, but money will cease to be problem soon enough.  And we're ready to make our way to Phin. The game doesn't give you great directions to Phin, and there are two areas immediately adjacent to where we start out that have much, much higher level enemies. The game does not stop you from going into those areas nor does it indicate that these areas contain monsters that we can't beat. Go too far north? Die. Go too far west? Die even harder. I promise you everyone who ever played this game stumbled into those areas at least once. And the kicker is there are rivers that will block us... from going east. What's east? Slighter stronger monsters than the ones in the starting area. Final Fantasy II isn't the best made game, I'll admit that upfront. For this first part, though, if we just follow the river we'll be okay. We'll want to cross north and-  Goblin Rank 1, HP 6, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 0, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% First (winnable) battle! And the game actually shows me some mercy by pitting me against the weakest enemy in the game. That was mighty kind, since we're gonna need a few rounds to kill off our extraneous members.  I wasn't kidding when I said Vivian was going to start out ridiculously weak. When you're unarmed, attack power is strength divided by two (rounded down). Additional levels in unarmed add 8. Vivian starts with five strength, and there are no unarmed bonuses since it's at level one, so her attack power is two. As long as she doesn't miss, Vivian needs two or three hits to bring down a Goblin. And yes, even in this game you're expected to be one, maybe two shotting Goblins out of the gate.  Taking Solo and Loq down proved a bit annoying, even with their help, so I broke out the spells. Spells are the best source of damage we're gonna have early on. Spells always start at level one, and their MP cost is always the same as their level. Unfortunately, we only start with five MP.  There. Since I'm only a few steps away from town anyway, Vivian just wastes the Goblins with magic. Upon slaying them, I'm rewarded with 31 gil and stat ups. We gain some Intelligence and-  I explained all the main stats, but I didn't cover this one. Magic Power is a misnomer; it's merely determines how much MP you get when you get an MP increase. It's triggered by MP loss during battle. It works the same way as Vitality.   You get HP and MP increases the same way you get Vitality and Magic Power, by losing HP and MP during battle. One thing to note is that the game doesn't technically track how much HP or MP you lose in a battle. It just takes how much HP or MP you start the battle with and subtracts how much you have at the end. Therefore it behooves you not to heal during battle unless you absolutely need to. I should also note that a well known exploit is to hit your own party members to make sure your HP is low enough to trigger HP gains. Contrary to what you may hear, that's not very useful. There's a couple of points you'll want more HP, but what will really end up hurting me in the end isn't alleviated by having more HP anyway. (Besides, I'm gonna have plenty through normal play.)   Excellent.  We'll have to hit the inn before we actually start traveling, though. Rather than a flat fee, Inns charge based on how much HP and MP you're missing. It's 1 gil per 4 points of HP missing, and 1 to 1 for MP. If you're missing a lot of HP it's often a good idea to heal up before you go to the inn. Anyway, now our journey can start for real! It's only a stone's throw to our next stop, we run into the rest of the enemies around here.  Hornet Rank 1, HP 6, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 0, Evasion 1-10%, Magic Resistance 1-50% Hornets are basically Goblins with one key difference.  They have a chance of poisoning you when they hit. Well, I say "poison" but that's not quite correct. There are two versions of poison in the game; one that does not persist after battle and has a chance of going away on its own, and the other which persists after battle and won't go away until cured. Fortunately for us, Hornets inflict the former. Even with our low HP it's just a minor annoyance.  Most early game monsters have a change to flee, regardless of your stats. I know that the chance of monsters running goes up as you get stronger, but I could be wrong. (And I'm not sure what would directly determine that.)  I'd like to reiterate that we are that weak. After we win we get another HP up and Vitality up. Honestly, you should just assume I'm getting an HP increase every battle.  Legeater Rank 1, HP 6, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 0, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% And here is the last enemy type we have around these parts. They're pretty much like the rest. They have some resistance to some spell types we don't have yet. That's about it.  Unlike Final Fantasy I, all spells in the game can be single targeted or multi targeted. However, multi-targeted spells' damage or effectiveness is reduced by three fourths. It doesn't matter how many enemies are left. Hell, you can choose to use a multi-target spell on a single target! So instead of a one-hit kill spells are gonna be a two-hit kill. Still, with four enemies, it's better than trying to chip away at them with regular attacks.  The game has this cool little detail where sometimes you'll see an airship flying around the world map. Anyway, you'll see there's a town just a short distance north of Altea.  It has a name, but it barely matters. It mostly just sells what Altea sells, except it doesn't have a magic shop. Mostly it's here so you'll have a chance to rest at the inn and resurrect allies. (hah)  Phin is north of this town, but there's a huge lake in the way, so we'll have to go up and around the lake. Since we've got some HP under our belts it's tedious, but not difficult. One interesting thing happens, though.   We see our first instance of stats decreasing. Sometimes when you gain stats, there's another chance that another stat will also decrease. Intelligence decreases with Power, Vitality decreases with Intelligence, and Power decreases with Soul. It's fairly infrequent, but later remakes did away with this mechanic entirely.  Here we are at Phin! We can't even enter the castle, so we go to town.  Every single one of these dudes (you can't really tell, but they're soldiers) will kill us if we talk to them. We can enter some of the buildings and shops, but no one's in them.  And there's random encounters! (It's the same enemies that are on the world map) So Phin's kind of a shithole right now. So what do we do here?   Find a secret bar and get hammered. Of course.  Again, everyone except the guy behind the counter will kill us if we talk to them.  We throw our only keyword at this fellow with poor spelling, and he politely disappears.  Secret passages!!  With three Potions. That's... mildly useful.  Again, we use our only keyword on him.  He's the brother of the useless Gordon, fiancee of the slightly less useless Hilda, and-  BORGAN!!!!  Anyway, he gives us a ring and dies. This is all we needed in Phin for right now. Once we walk out of the pub we can just talk a few step to the right and exit onto the world map.  Now that we have the Ring, when we press Select + B, we open the world map. It has a weird pseudo sphere effect. You can rotate it around, but it scrolls so slowly as to be worthless. It's mostly good for getting a glimpse of your immediate surroundings. Later games just replace it with a regular old map. Which gives me the mental image of Scott taking a diamond ring and pasting a map on top of it. Anyway, the trip back is pretty uneventful an-  ...  SAVE THAT poo poo. (Oh, and this was the first Final Fantasy game where you can save on the world map, as opposed to needing an inn or to use a tent. Still don't have save points, though.)  Anyway, I also got an MP increase, but otherwise there's not much to say about the return trip. Let's report in with Hilda.  : Hey we got a ring from your dead boyfriend. Oh, uh, he's dead by the way.: Tha- thanks. Is there something wrong with your frie-: Never been better!: ...okay. Well, guess you've proven yourself. Anyway, we fell to the evil empire because we didn't have a particular metal. And that is the only reason. So fetch some, won't you? Keyword get! To get this super awesome mythical metal (which is totally not just for a bunch of early to middle tier equipment) we have to go to Salmando and find a man named Josef.  And also we get a new party member. More importantly than a new corpse, we get his canoe. I mentioned there was a lake that prevented us from going east? We can cross it now. As a matter of fact, there are only five locations on the world map we can't get to right now. I mean, technically. There are still areas on the world map that will kill us dead if we wander into them.  Even if we can't use him, Minwu at least has the courtesy to come with some nice stuff. The IceScyth has an odd name, and I believe it casts a single target level 16 Shell. I ended up selling it; I didn't remember what it did at the time, but honestly I probably wouldn't have used it anyway. The Copper (cuirass) and Ether are highly appreciated. There are actually an armor version and an cuirass version of the copper stuff, but this translation doesn't distinguish between them. The armor is heavy, worthless crap, but the cuirass proves us some defense and only lowers our evasion by 5. We can't really coast on evasion on this run, so we still need to balance it with defense. In any case, I'm gonna save killing Minwu for next time. For now, let's take stock of Vivian's growth so far and then sign off.  Power + 2, Agility +1 (YES), Vitality +4, Intelligence +1, Magic Power +1, HP + 49, MP + 11 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 02:22
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Chapter 2: Cue the Rocky Theme Welcome back. Last time we got a new method of transportation, and a new party member we've gotta kill off. Let's get to it.   ...okay, magic it is, then.  Even with magic, this is gonna take a while. Unfortunately, a bizarre quirk of the game is that characters in the middle two slots (namely Vivian and Loq) get targeted way more than any of the other characters. Also, you can't change what slot your character is in. So the enemies don't really help.  It takes five attack spells, and having to heal Viv twice, before Minwu got into single digits. Thankfully, Minwu saves me the trouble and finishes himself off.  It takes a few more rounds and another Cure spell to end the battle, but at least it was lucrative. She gets some vitality, loses that vitality when she gets intelligence, more soul, more MP, and more HP. After we top off at the inn, we head east.  Here's the lake I mentioned was blocking us off. Of course, I say that, but that's not strictly true.  FF2's world map is designed to make geography enthusiasts weep blood. You see that long stretch of the land in the top left corner and the one in the bottom right corner? Yeah, they connect. If you absolutely wanted to, you could get around that lake by going up into that corner, wrapping around, traveling all the way through the desert, and going west. You'd have no sane reason to do this, mind you, but you could. Rivers only block off three locations, two of which are in a way higher level area, and the other is the first dungeon. I'd like to reiterate that the design of this game is really weird.  But speaking of rivers, here's the canoe. Unlike FF1, you don't get into encounters while traveling the rivers.  Hey look, another town. And a boat. No, we're not actually getting a boat this early on.  It's a ferry. 32 gil is pretty cheap, even this early in the game, but Poft is pretty close by and we need to buff up anyway. This is Palm (or Paloom). It's got some new stuff for sale, but again the only one we care about is the magic shop.  We've seen Cure, but the other spells are new. Blink increases evasion, Safe is more properly called Protect and it increases defense, and Shell increases Magic Defense. Safe is glitched in this game, as it only effects the caster. Which is just fine for us, but while some extra defense that doesn't cost evasion would be nice, I'm not sure if it's worth the time leveling it up. Shell is much the same way; it could be useful, but it'd take too much effort to get there. Blink, however, is really useful, so we're buying it. Selling off the IceSycth gives me just enough to get it. After buying Blink and inning up, it's off to Poft. You just follow the shore line east.  Goblin Guard Rank 1, HP 10, MP 6, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 0, Evasion 1-10%, Magic Resistance 1-50% With a new area of the world map, we get some new enemies. Goblin Guard, or Guard Goblin, or Green Goblin, or Willam Defoe... whatever you want to call them, are a bit of a step up from Goblins. Also, we see that enemies, too, have a front row and back row. Like with your characters, front row enemies can attack and be targeted by attacks, while back row enemies cannot do either. Once enemies in the front row are killed, the enemies in the back can attack and be attacked.  However, magic doesn't care about row. Anything in this game that isn't a normal attack is classified as magic. Yes, using a bow is magic in this game. (When an enemy does it. Not you.) The bow attack can be a bit dangerous, as it ignores defense and evasion. If I had lower HP I might be in some trouble.  As long as there is another monster two rows ahead, an enemy is classified as being in the back row. You can use that to keep from being bombarded by too many enemies at once, although what's actually dangerous in this fight is the bow attack, so it doesn't actually help me here.  I cut that close, didn't I?  Sprinter Rank 1, HP 30, Attack Power 9, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 0, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 1-50% Sprinters are bastards.  They hit hard.  They evade a lot. And they have a lot of HP. Admittedly, I should have just broken out a Fire or something, but Vivian needs to train her unarmed skill. So Vivian spent way more time than I'd care to admit trying to punch out a drat bird. Oh, but that's not the worst of 'em.  Soldier Rank 1, HP 45, MP 10, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 9, Evasion 1-10%, Magic Resistance 2-50%  ...magic again, I see.  Here's the thing about magic. You'd think that since this guy seems to have a higher magic defense than the other enemies here, that he'd take less damage. This is not true. Magic defense protects again status spells. There is actually no way to reduce to damage from a damage-dealing spell except to have a resistance to its element. If absolutely nothing scratches its defense, magic will. This might come up a couple times in the game. Anyway, I take 'em out and move onto-  You are so mean, game.   Money and item drops work very differently in this game. Monsters have up to eight slots for drops, and will always drop one after battle. Both money and items are on the list of drops; a single enemy cannot drop money and an item at the same time. An antidote seems like a bad deal, but it sells for 100, which is better money than anything else drops. Besides, I can't cast anything that removes status ailments yet, so it's a good idea to have some on hand.  Anyway, here's Poft.  The game's a little confused here. We can ride the ferry back to Palm, but only if we rode the ferry to Poft. We can still totally pay for the ferry, but none will be out there. Jerk. In the remakes, at least, they don't let you pay for a ferry that's not there.  Oh, oh, this is an important thing. Here's the very first Cid of Final Fantasy!  This Cid, though, is kind of lame. Right now he just runs an airship taxi service. It'll take you to four different towns on the map. Handy, but too pricey to use right now. Oh, and the airship that we see every now and again is his. Just so you know. Other than that Poft is pretty much Palm again. It has the same spells anyway. Onward.  If we go east and then south, we'll reach the town of Bofsk (or Bafsk), which has some decent stuff to buy, but we can't afford it. So we go north until we hit the mountains, and then west.   Salamando! It has some new stuff for sale.  Including a bunch of spells I can't afford yet. Believe or not, the Life spell is still useful for a solo game, as it can insta-kill the undead. But we're not using those kind of spells, so that's a no-go. The Anti spell, properly called Sap or Rasp, decreases the target's MP. This would be kind of useful, if it a) was more powerful and b) wasn't bugged. Anti doesn't work correctly against targets with 256 MP or more. There's a spell later on that can take the place of Anti and works much better, although it'll be awhile until we get it. Warp takes you back one level in a dungeon, why would you ever need that, while Exit takes you out of the dungeon entirely. I can't afford Exit, and I'll be getting it for free soon.  Josef is apparently an important enough NPC that he gets a stalker. Good for him.  Hilda sent me. She wants Mythril. Gimme Mythril. No. There's some in the Semite Cave, though. Incidentally the evil empire keeping some captured townsfolk there. If you could take care of it that'd be great.And now we've got the location for the first dungeon of the game. It's gonna be a doozy. We're not gonna tackle Semite Falls right now, but let's at least find it.  Yeti Rank 1, HP 20, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 0, Evasion 1-10%, Magic Resistance 1-50% Around Salamando we have a bunch more snowy themed enemies. Yetis are pretty unremarkable. One important thing does happen at the end of this battle, though.  loving. Finally.  HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW, FUCKERS?!  Getting a level in unarmed does more than give me 8 extra attack power (although that's appreciated). It also raises the number of attacks. There's one aspect of the battle system I've failed to mention thus far. Each attack, in addition to its power, rolls a number of "hits." For attack, the game chooses a random value between your base attack and twice your attack power, subtracts the target's defense, and multiplies it by how many times it hits. That's why Vivian's attack power more than quadrupled. The whole "hits" thing is actually in every Final Fantasy in some form until 5. However, not every hit will connect. You may have noticed that there's another number for Evasion, and it rose and I haven't mentioned it.  There are actually two numbers associated with evasion; one is the percentage, and the other the count. The count determines how many hits you can evade. If you have 99% evasion, but one count, you can't evade multiple attacks if the enemy happens to get two or more. Unlike percent, evasion count levels. Every time you're targeted by an attack (you do not have to actually be hit) it adds to your progress. The game doesn't show your progress like with spell or weapon levels, and it doesn't even tell you when you gain a level. The latter, at least, is fixed in remakes.  From Salamondo, you just need to go west until you hit the river. Travel down it and-  Here we are! Next time, Semite Falls. Power +1, Vitality +4, Intelligence +3, Soul +1, Unarmed + 1 (FINALLY), Evasion +1, Magic Power +1, HP +60, MP +12 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 03:18
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Night10194 posted:Does punching ever actually become a good idea, or just somewhat tolerable to use? I guess you'll see over the course of this LP! But, to answer your question, on a character that isn't Vivian it's actually pretty good early on, since +8 to attack power is a lot right now. Early game weapons are pretty poo poo. Later on, though, not so much. Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 04:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Aren't those penalties strictly to spells that can miss (like the instant-death spells, Heal, oh yeah and Life)? As long as you stick to stuff like the damage spells and Cure, you can play a hybrid class just fine. Of course, that means you're splitting your turns between two different types of actions, which means (outside of solo play) that you'll be leveling up half as quickly in each, so in the long run it's probably a bad idea. But it can be done! Nope, it impact damage spells too, although not as badly. I don't know the exact math the game uses for damage spells on the top of my head, but I have done tests and it seems like heavy penalties will cut your damage by a fifth or fourth or so.
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Jul 22, 2014 15:32
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Fister Roboto posted:I'm pretty sure the penalties are a flat reduction to stats. The character screen doesn't reflect this at all, but if you were to go into a save with a hex editor you would see that a character wearing heavy armor would actually have negative int/soul. Fortunately the game doesn't go below 0 for calculating spell effects. If you were to test this out on a character just starting out, you wouldn't notice much of a difference because they're only losing like 10 int. But if you had a character with max intelligence and tanked it with heavy armor, you'd see a huge discrepancy. Oh yeah. I just don't know how the game calculated int/soul for damage spells. Okay, looking it up... the game adds 1/4 of the relevant magic stat to the power of the spell, plus int/soul can make the spell roll for additional hits. (Spells also roll hits like attacks do, but it's less obvious.) At least for damage spells, you will always do the base amount of damage.
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Jul 22, 2014 18:31
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Chapter 3: Powering Up Semite Falls. Let's go.  Semite Falls is our first major step up in difficulty. Now it's not because the enemies are that tough. The cave mostly has enemies we've been fighting, and even the new ones aren't that bad. No, it's just kind of long. It's five decently sized floors with two hard fights at the end (although one of those is optional.) If you're playing normally, Minwu helps ease you into this. He's got way more MP than you really need at this point in the game, and if you're really in a bad way, he already comes with Exit. I don't have that safety buffer at the moment. So I have to play fairly conservatively.  One of the first things you see in this dungeon is that blue block thingamabob. And everyone who played this game probably spent a good minute poking and prodding this thing before realizing that it doesn't do anything. What a tease.  Balloon Rank 1, HP 20, MP 10, Attack Power 9, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 0, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% And we see the first instance of the "balloon" type enemy.  Like the balloons in later games, they will attempt to self destruct. However, they'll attempt to do this even at full HP; it just won't work. So in practice they end up wasting most of their turns. In any case, the strategy is still the same as for every other balloon enemy in Final Fantasy; make sure to take them out in a single hit. Fortunately, Vivian can usually do that with her normal attack.  Although, hell, even their self-destruct spell isn't that dangerous. Self-destruct isn't reliant on the monster's HP total; it just does a certain amount of damage. As for the dungeon itself-   It doesn't start on a high note.  The second floor, at least, starts giving out slighter better stuff. For those of you who've never played a Final Fantasy game, Eye Drops cure blind. Nothing here causes blind, though. There are two more treasure chests on floor two; they're just potions. Still, while the floors are decently sized, they're not that big, and the toughest enemy we've got are the soldiers (which Vivian can at least scratch now.) You may wonder why FF2's dungeon design is so loathed, even by people who like the game.  And here is why. Only one of these doors lead anywhere.  The other three? Leads to something affectionately called the "ambush closet." You're placed in the middle of the room, and for whatever reason these rooms have the encounter rate jacked up.  This was just after two steps. You're usually going to run into one battle before you get out of the room, and it's not uncommon to get two.  The correct door, by the way, is this one. And I only realized that was the correct door after went into each and every other door. I've played this game many, many times before. I would have swore I had this poo poo memorized, but apparently not! Now we head to the third floor. Now-  ...you must think you're so funny, FF2.  Anyway, what's even more annoying about the ambush closets that they don't just show up a few times; every dungeon is littered with them. That door? Leads to an ambush closet. At least if there's a line of doors, one of them is guaranteed to lead somewhere. Doors by themselves, on the other hands, usually lead nowhere. The key word is usually. Some of them actually do lead to places you need to go, or really good treasure. There's absolutely no way to figure out which are ambush closets and which are important unless you go through all of them, or you have a map. Yeah, I can't even pretend to defend that poo poo.  And speaking of ambush closets, we have another game of Lady and the Tiger! And like last time, I choose tiger twice before I get the right one. (It's the leftmost door)  But hey! We found the captured townsfolk. The girl by Paul is Josef's daughter. I just thought you wanted to know.  Also it turns out Paul's gonna do our job for us! We still have to find the Mythril, though; there's two more levels to go.  I wasn't gonna push my luck. I probably could have gotten to the bottom; I've got that Ether from Minwu in case I run out of MP. But I really didn't want to risk it (and I wanted to save the Ether). Those two enemies at the end are very capable of killing me, and I didn't want to have to start from square one if that happened.  On my way out, I was a little surprised to gain another level in unarmed.  But not as surprised to find that I had quietly picked up another evasion level. (Ignore the attack stats; for whatever reason they don't immediately show up on your stat screen.) And in the next battle this happens:  Well drat. Now I've definitely got to run out and save.  And now I'm one-shotting Soldiers. How far we've come in such a short time! Anyway, along with saving, I might as well run back to town and hit up the inn.  Vampire Thorn Rank 1, HP 20, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 0, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% Oh, I never ran into these guys before! They, uh, exist. That's all I can really say. They dropped an Eye Drop.  One thing I like to do when I heading into town is to intentionally waste all my MP on one battle. While I'm going to get HP gains with decent regularity, because Vivian's chance of dodging attacks is pretty random, MP gains are much trickier to get. So I'll have to force them. That'll be why my MP total is going to have improved significantly by the end of this update, in case you're confused. After resting, I decide to hit up the item shop.  Each item shop in the game is exactly the same. They all have three people behind the counter, and they all sell the same thing.  X-Potion are actually what you'd call Hi-Potions. They don't restore that much, they actually would not full heal me, and they're also stupidly expensive. I just go for a couple of regular Potions instead.  These are all status restoring items. Crucifix cures curse, which is somewhat rare, Echo Screen cures Amnesia, which is permanent silence, Maiden Kiss cures toad, and Gold Needle cures stone. Echo Screens will be useful later on, the rest not as much.  The game also lets you buy the high end consumables from the get-go, but actually having the money for them is another story. Just in case you've never played a Final Fantasy: Phoenix Down cures KO, Ether restores MP, Cottage restores all HP/MP for everyone (alive) but only on the world map, and Elixirs cures all HP/MP for a single character. Back to the mines.  Queen Bee Rank 1, HP 30, Attack Power 9, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 4, Evasion 1-10%, Magic Resistance 1-50% Huh, there's a quite a few enemies I didn't run into first time around. Weird. Queen Bees are one of the first enemies in the game that inflicts permanent, honest-to-goodness poison. At this point Vivian's punch tears through these guys like tissue paper, so it dies before doing anything.  Ones thing I started noticing is that while my strength and attack power were rising nicely, I was getting a ton of intelligence losses. I must have lost four or so points of intelligence, and only gained one back. Also all of my spells were still at level one. How much intelligence had I lost any-  Wait, I gained another evasion level? And a level in magic defense? Magic defense levels in much the same way as the evasion count does; by being targeted by magic spells. Bow and self-destruct do count for this, by the way. In any case, I tried to use my spells a little bit more. I couldn't rely on them, as Viv's MP total is decent but not enough to be using magic in every battle. As long as I mixed some magic in that should stem the intelligence losses-  drat it!  Anyway, on the fourth floor there's one of the first decent piece of the treasure in this joint. For a full party this can be pretty useful; if you know it's here you can skip buying the Fire tome and save your money early on, or give it to another party member to have two fire casters. In my case, though, I'd rather just start leveling this spell as early as possible rather than wait to get it. (Of course, it was still at level one at this point anyway...)  Slime Rank 2, HP 10, MP 6, Attack Power 4, Attacks 1, Accuracy 50%, Defense 210, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% These enemies are far more likely to pop up on the last two floors on this dungeon. They apparently can show up on the early floors, but it's rare. Slimes here are pretty similar to slimes in later Final Fantasies; you can't scratch them with attacks, but magic wrecks their poo poo. Even a multi-targeted Fire 1 takes them all out. Slimes are also the first Rank 2 enemy we've seen. You may have wondered what "rank" means. Rank is used in the calculation for weapon levels, magic levels, evasion, and magic defense. The formula used by pretty much all of them is Rank + Times skill is used (or times targeted for Evasion and Magic Defense) - Skill Level + Multiplier. Weapons, magic, evasion, and magic defense all have different multipliers. Evasion actually has a negative multiplier, while the rest are positive. Once our skill levels get higher, we have to either use the skill a lot of times in each battle or fight higher ranked enemies in order to make meaningful progress. The fact that she has already has an evasion level of four probably tells you how much Vivian gets targeted in each battle.  In any case, here we are on the fifth floor. The Mythril is actually really close by, but there's a treasure chest on this floor that I really wanted to get first.    Land Turtle Rank 3, HP 140, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 35, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 2-50% Hey, Final Fantasy figured out monsters-in-a-box. How nice.  First off, regular attacks are right out. Honestly, the fact that I can hit it at all is kind of surprising. One thing you can say about going unarmed is that early on your attack power is much better. Early game weapons are really poo poo, and stat gains and levels don't help them as much. Weapons will start getting a lot better really soon, though, and fists lose their early game advantage. Unarmed will never do bad damage, but it just won't be that great.  For the monster's part, the land turtle is more than capable of bringing the pain. That's actually on the low end of what it can do; at least it didn't get both attacks off.  Fortunately for us, they have an ice weakness.  Even at level one, it only takes two ice spells to put 'em out. I have to admit; that went better than I had thought it would.  ...is it my birthday?! While I probably could go and beat the other nasty guy here, I'm using my new exit spell. I was probably being paranoid, but drat it, agility gain. Ain't losing that.  For whatever reason, the game designers felt they needed to make the exit spell carry a downside. I guess they thought giving you the spell so early on was too generous.  It's an annoyance, but not that big of a deal. Just make sure when you use it that you have at least some MP left for a cure spell, or some potions kicking around.  You can use exit in battle, and it actually acts one of the game's many KO spells. I just cast it here to demonstrate; I will never use it in battle again. (Hell, it's probably never going to gain a single level.) At level one, exit is a hideously inaccurate spell, as are most KO spells. Still, at higher levels KO spells, even Exit, gain enough accuracy to be pretty devastating. Seriously, read Gabriel Pope's LP if you don't believe how much a insta-death spell can utterly, utterly destroy the game's difficulty.  I finally got Fire up to level 2. Other than that, got some MP and assorted stat gains on my way back to town. Heal up, and then go through the mines for the third and thankfully last time.  On the way back, I got an level for ice.  And a level for cure. Whenever you use a spell from the menu, it always adds two points to your progress.  And of course the mythril we need is behind a door, with no indication that it's here. Of course.   Sergeant Rank 3, HP 140, MP 10, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-50% You might have thought that the Land Turtle's high defense was a fluke, but it wasn't. Bosses in this game tend to have sky-high defense; there's no way a normal party can even scratch this boss with attacks unless they had someone with high unarmed skill. Of course I say boss, but what this game does is pull later game enemies and just calls them bosses. Land Turtles will be normal enemies pretty soon, but Sergeants come from much later on. There's actually very few unique boss enemies. In any case, Vivian can do some damage with her attack, but it's not much. Best to stick with magic. Sergeants have no elemental weakness, so we just need to go with our highest level spell.  This guy doesn't gently caress around.  It's not a bad idea to get blink up, although I haven't described how blink actually works. Blink raises your evasion level, but not the percentage... at least, that's how I've been told it works. One would think that I would get absolutely no use out of Blink, since I'm never going to have a problem with Evasion level, but Blink at higher levels I swear does actually help, even with max evasion level and low percent. I wonder if it works differently at higher levels, if it raises evasion level past the max (I would think it couldn't) or if I'm crazy. Who knows?  Sergeants can also use the bow attack, which gives us a decent breather.  Even with it's high attack power, this wasn't too bad. I just had to make sure to keep healed up. The only stat gain I got from the fight is some MP, which is nice but I was kind of hoping for more. Oh well.  And here we go. Time to warp out and head back to town.  ...sometimes this game is really annoying. Next time, we're getting some super awesome Mythril stuff. No, really. Promise. Warning: not an actual promise   Power +5, Agility +2, Vitality +5, Intelligence -1 (Could be worse...), Soul +2, Evasion +2, Magic Defense +2, Magic Power +3, Unarmed +1, Fire +1, Ice +1, Cure +1, HP +154, MP+33 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Jul 25, 2014 01:34
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Bregor posted:Also known as "the Snow". ...and she even fights with her fists WHAT HAVE I DONE?! Simply Simon posted:loving Guy is more of a hero and a better character than Snow! "Binary difficulty" is actually a really good way to describe the game, now that I think about it. Coming up with challenges for this game is kind of hard; either it's "doesn't really make the game harder" or "nigh-impossible or just really, really tedious." ddegenha posted:I'm enjoying this, and just a bit touched (perhaps one manly tear's worth) by the reference... and even more amused by the fact that they were promptly killed off. The use of Stalin also brings back memories of how the guys in the single character challenge for FFIII ended up named after Lenin, Bukharin, and Trotsky. Thanks 
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Jul 25, 2014 16:48
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Chapter 4: The RNG Gods Have Favored Me Now that we've picked up the Mythril, it's time to walk all the way back to Altea. Yay. Nothing happens on the way, so let's just jump to the important stuff.  There's one character I didn't mention. There's an old man in the Altea weapon shop. You give him the Mythril and he makes stuff from them. That's it. That's all he does.  And of course we don't get any freebies. Don't be silly. In any case, the weapons are good (if expensive) and so is the shield, but the armor is heavy garbage. So this little fetch quest did not benefit us one iota. Excellent.  Oh and I picked up Bolt to round out my trio of elemental attack spells. Probably should have done that sooner.   : ...and I got the Mythril you were-: That's nice dear.I should have picked up the Warship keyword earlier, but I forgot. Oops. Oh well, it's really only relevant now anyway. We got our marching orders. Time to... hike across the world map again.  This time, I'm actually going to ride the ferry to Poft. One thing that really sucks about the early game of FF2 is that you have to traverse the same stretch of world map over and over and over again. What were once decently challenging encounters are pathetically easy, even with a solo character. The ferry alleviates it, but not by much.  As I mentioned before, the town of Bofsk is right of Poft. And that must be the   : I'm leading!Hilda mentioned a Dark Knight; if you come here earlier, you actually see him. Nothing happens when you do, mind you, but he's here. Also sitting on his rear end and barking orders, but in a... better way? Even under the tyrannical rule of the evil Empire, the shops in Bofsk are still open. So it's time for some shopping!  The Silver you see is in fact the Cuirass. It has the same small evasion penalty as the Copper Cuirass, but double the defense. Honestly, I should have gotten it sooner, since there was no reason not to and I probably could have scrounged up enough. The Bronze stuff is heavy crap, and even if we were using shields we'd have a better one soon anyway.  The spells they sell are kind of an odd bunch. Fear makes the enemies run away, Peep cures temporary status ailments, Heal cures permanent status ailments, and Mute silences the enemy temporarily. Heal is a must buy. The rest are rubbish. Peep (Basuna as it's known in later versions) seems like it'd be useful, but temporary status ailments tend to wear off quickly, and in a solo run any ailment that we'd want to cure would render us unable to cast anyway. Because temporary status ailments tend to wear off, this makes Mute also pointless to level. And Fear, like in FF1, is just dumb.  One thing that's annoying about both Peep and Esuna is that what ailments it cures is reliant on the spell level. For right now it only cures blind in battle. Moreover, in battle those two spells are not guaranteed to hit, especially if they're multi-targeted. So I'll have to grind the spell. Somewhat fortunately, since this is a solo run I don't have to bother getting the spell above level 3 or 4 since the statuses cured by higher levels of Heal either seal off spell casting or instantly game over me. Yay? All right, now we're ready to go blow up an a giant airship.  There's a fellow in the corner bitching about Borgan (understandable). But he's on our side and once we mention the Warship he lets us through.  The path to the Warship is basically a mini dungeon, and there's very little to say about it. It's only two floors and I didn't run into any new monsters. There is a new enemy here, but I never ran into it. Oh well.   The first floor has some weapons for us, at least. Both of these are actually inferior to Mythril stuff, although if we couldn't afford Mythril weapons they're not bad. Okay, the sword's decent. The bow is terrible. All bows are terrible. Yeah, that's all I can think of to say about this dungeon.  Hey it's  : Ha ha! You fool- oh, poo poo. : Anyway. The Warship is operational and you failed. I'm off to kill some nameless NPCs. Ta!: I get a line in this scene! Well son of a bean. If we go back inside and go right, where Borgan came from, there's a door leading to a room.  This treasure chest contains the Pass, which we will let us onto the Warship.  We don't need it. The pentagram is just a warp out of here. Not that it'd be all that hard to walk out, but if I don't have to I won't.  Probably should report to Hilda about this. Time to walk back. Again. Yay.  The bad guys wasted no time in using their Warship, did they? One thing that's notable about FF2's plot is how absurdly high the death toll is. Mega64 counted every single NPC and how of them died, and at the end concluded that almost half of the entire world's population dies over the course of the game. The GBA version actually bases its optional content around the game's death toll. I hesitate to call it dark, though, as "dark" assumes that we are shocked by this, or care in some way.  You will need to talk to Cid, preferably before you head back. He gives you the Sun Flame keyword which you need to get another important keyword. Other than that, the walk back to Altea is uneven-  Seriously, I've done runs of this sort before, and I've gotten to the Snow Cavern having only ever gotten two or three gains in agility. This is really weird to me.  Since King Gonna Die Anyway's on his deathbed, we have to give Minwu back. Good-bye Minwu. Even as a corpse you're more useful than most of the temporary characters in this game. Now, you're supposed to go talk to everyone. Cid tells you that you need to get the Sunflame to destroy the Warship, but to actually carry the Sunflame you need a torch that's in Kashuon Castle, but Kashuon Castle is locked and you can't get in without Gordon or Scott, but Gordon is missing(because he's awful) so you need to get the Goddess Bell but to get the Goddess Bell we- oh gently caress all that. I've played this game before, I know where to go. We have to go to Salamondo and talk to Josef. There, easy. So we're back on the road again. After some more pointless encounters-   Okay seriously what the gently caress.  In any case, we're at Salamondo. At this point sometimes starts to feel off. I swear I forgot to do something. Oh right. I'm missing a keyword. Because I forgot use the Sun Flame keyword on King Useless. And he's back in Altea.   GIVE ME YOUR KEYWORD.  All right, now we can continue.  At least, I'm gaining some experience for my spells and some stats along the way.  ...I'm convinced. The game is sentient. It's sentient and it's luring me into a false sense of security. What are you up to, FF2? WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?! So we got what we needed.  In order to get the Bell, we have to pick up a useless vehicle and a useless party member. Say hello to Josef everyone.  He hits things with his fists.  Josef also doesn't come with anything that great. The Leather stuff isn't that heavy, but it also doesn't really add a lot of defense. I don't see the point in losing two percent evasion for a point of defense. The Garlic is an attack item that only harms the undead. Oh, we haven't seen undead yet. We will. Don't you worry, we will.   Agility +4 (ridiculous), Vitality +1, Intelligence +4 (I might have overcompensated for last time), Soul +3, Evasion +2, Heal +1, HP +20 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 03:17
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I don't how to break it to you guys but I've already played quite a bit ahead. Still, I might make a slight change. It'll be a while until you see it, though. Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 01:27
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Chapter 5: Revenge Welcome back to Final Fantasy 2! Now for you viewing pleasure, epic punch off: staring Josef's face!   The judges are unanimous: Vivian, best at punching. So we actually have to go back to Semite Falls to get our new vehicle. Fortunately for us, it's right next to the entrance.  It's that weird blue thing!  And you still don't do anything with it. It's nice that Josef's ghost doesn't hold a grudge, though. After we pick up the Ice Sled, we go all the way north.  And here's what we needed the ice sled for. Also, this is the only snow field in the game and the only time we will ever need the sled. Yup.  Snowman Rank 2, HP 45, Attack Power 9, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 4, Evasion 1-20%, Magic Resistance 2-40% Snowman, like their yeti cousins, are uninteresting. They have a weakness to Fire. Even a multi-targetted Fire 2 kills 'em.  The snow field is big, but the encounter rate seems to be very low. The only thing in it is a cave at the far right side.   The Ice Cavern is a small step up in difficulty.  However, unlike Semite Falls Exit is disabled here. That's actually a little unusual for this game, so something must be afoot. In any case, if I want to resupply I'd have to walk all the way out, so I'm doing it in one go. Since we're a lot stronger now, that's not a such a tall order.  Deadhead Rank 2, HP 45, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 9, Evasion 1-20%, Magic Resistance 2-40% Zombie Rank 1, HP 30, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 0, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% Ghoul Rank 2, HP 60, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 4, Evasion 1-20%, Magic Resistance 2-40% It takes a while, but we finally run into undead enemies. The undead changed a bit from the first game.  This was the first FF where Cure damages undead. Life is also an instant kill, drain spells are reversed, and all undead enemies are weak to fire. All these things became staples for undead enemies in FF. Apparently the Ghouls have a chance to paralyses when they hit, but I never saw it. Believe it or not, even with only 22 percent evasion (17 when wearing armor) Viv dodges a decent amount of the time. Enemies tend to have low accuracy, and the absurd amount of evasion levels Vivian has tends to bolster her evasion. (I couldn't tell you the exact math going on, though.) EDIT: I can't do math but Fister Roboto can: Fister Roboto posted:With 7 evade and 22% evasion chance, she has an 82.4% chance to evade at least one successful attack, and a 47.8% chance to evade at least two. Nothing in the dungeon has more than two attacks.  Icicle Rank 2, HP 60, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 17, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 2-40% They're kind hardy, so Vivian needs to punch them twice, and they're super weak to Fire.  Grenade Rank 2, HP 60, MP 10, Attack Power 25, Attacks 1, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 2-50% The Grenades never seemed to show up by themselves or even in a small group. They're always in these big groups. Of course, in this group only the Guard Goblin and the Grenade can do any damage. Unlike their little brothers, they're much harder to one-shot (right now anyway) and their explosion hurts a lot more. All these enemy types are weak to fire (yes, fire) and lightning though, so that helps.  And FF2's streak of giving you trash treasure goes on strong!  Hm there's a door we don't go through. HM.  Sadly I can't say I get four (I still can't believe it...) agility ups in this update, but even one is a welcome surprise.  And the pleasant surprise train keeps on rolling.  Dual Head Rank 2, HP 80, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 50%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-20%, Magic Resistance 2-50% The real bastards here are the Dual Heads. They're one of the first random encounters that get two hits, and their attack power is pretty nasty.  This IceWind is on the third floor. It casts a powerful multi-target ice spell when used. This is actually useful for the "boss" at the end, but I can do better than to cheese a boss with an attack item. The third floor actually has a branching path. The staircase in the upper right leads to treasure.  But it's all kind of not great. Axes aren't that great if only because most of the good weapons are swords anyway, and there are very few axes in the game all told. Although if you're using them, and can't afford a mythril axe, this is okay.  Although I fight a Dual Head not too long after that gives me another one anyway. Go figure. Another chest is an antidote, which I'm really not needing, and the the last one is...    Since I just got that unarmed level, plus some strength, I'm back to mostly one-shotting everything. Not even a problem. The Mythril item we got was the mace. Maces (or canes; the terms are kinda used interchangeably in the game) are surprisingly decent weapons, but still not the best. After grabbing the treasure, back to the third floor, and we go down and to the left.  GUYS THERE MIGHT BE AN ENEMY WITH AN ICE WEAKNESS AT THE END OF THIS DUNGEON.  There's just a medley of weapons in this place, isn't there? Anyway, this mythril weapon is a spear, and spears tend to get overshadowed by swords too, although I'd say there's more good spears than axes in the game.   Shadow Rank 2, HP 45, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 9, Evasion 1-20%, Magic Resistance 2-40% On the fifth floor there's another weapon guarded by some undead, including a new face. Shadows can apparently inflict blind with their attack, but I never saw it. The Ancient Sword is neat, I guess. It can inflict Curse, which is permanent and pretty useful, but its accuracy is poo poo. And now that I think about I'm not even sure why I'm bothering to get everything when I know the bulk of I pick up over the game isn't going to help me. Habit? Speaking of which there was a mythril shield in the corner I forgot to get. Oops.   And suddenly, beavers.  This fan translation didn't put it in, but Loq is supposed to speak like Tarzan. It's because he was raised by animals or some poo poo. He's also supposed to have the ability to talk to animals, but this is the only time you ever see it. It's also the only time Loq will do anything interesting.  Or not. If you know there's a secret wall here you don't need that beaver to tell you. Besides, corpses can't talk to animals that'd be silly. This leads us to the last floor. There's not much there.  I guess I could have saved my money? (Because 400 gil's breaking the bank...)  Anyway, boss!  Adamantoise Rank 5, HP 450, Attack Power 50, Attacks 2, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 1-50% The Adamantoise is just a beefed up Land Turtle: same ridiculous HP, same weakness to ice.  It can hit hard, but at this point my HP is so high I'm just shrugging it off. What I was worried about was MP.  And I shouldn't have worried. Even with a mere level 2 Ice this battle's over very quickly. (Which is probably why I only got vitality out of it. Lame!)  It did drop a Diamond Shield, though. It's really too bad I'm not using shields; this is a nice get.  Believe it or not, I'm not gonna sell it. Why? Because of another aspect of Evasion I haven't mentioned yet. Evasion percent also determines chance of getting preemptive attacks, getting ambushed, and chance of running away. The thing is, as far as I can tell it's unclear whose evasion determines that. I've been told that Solo's evasion percentage, and only his, determines how often you get ambushed or ambush the enemy. Experience suggests this to be true, even when he's dead. I would think that I would get a massive hit to preemptive chance strike when Solo's dead, if that's how the game calculates ambushes/preemptive strikes. But I've played a few solo runs and I really, really think the game just counts his evasion and doesn't care if he's dead. At the end of the day I can't really prove it, though. Still, it couldn't hurt, so Solo will get any evasion boosting equipment that I'm not using. He'll be the prettiest corpse at the ball.  The area the Adamantoise was standing in front of has a plaque. Examine it and you just get the bell. Yeah, it doesn't say you got the Goddess Bell, but you do. Okay.   The game designers showed some mercy and put a one-way door leading to the first floor. Of course, if you forgot to get the bell (or didn't realize it was there) you gotta go through the whole dungeon again. Fun. The remakes at least make it so you have to get the bell before they let you walk through the one-way door. Vivian's almost out of MP and I don't really wanna use the one Ether I swiped from Minwu, so I'm glad it's over. Time to walk out.  drat it.  Borgan Rank 4, HP 240, MP 20, Attack Power 25, Attacks 1, Accuracy 75%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Hey, it's the first boss fight who isn't a re-purposed random encounter. Good job. Too bad he's a chump. I'd like to tell you that I killed him a single punch, but I didn't. Not that it was even remotely challenging; he never landed a single hit on me.  No, the bastard just kept healing himself.  But he can't hold out forever. Gravity bomb that, fucker.  But wait oh no   : *squish* Well that was a stirring dramatic scene I guess. It occurs to me that the original doesn't tell you why there's suddenly a boulder out for your blood. In the remakes Borgan, right before he dies, pushes it. What a fucker. Time to head back to Salamando, inn, sell off all the crap, and head to the item shop.  I have nothing to spend my money on for quite some time, so I figured the hell with it and picked up an ether and a cottage. Might as well. We don't have to report back to Hilda; we can just go right to Kashuon. But where is it? If we pay Cid he'll just fly us there, and by this point the 400 or so gil he charges is chump change, but I'll just walk. First, we go to Bofsk, and from there head south.  Kashuon is the middle of the mountain circle, surrounded by water. It's a bit of a hike, but nothing we haven't done already. No new monsters along the way.  Next time, Castle Kashuon.   Power +4, Agility +1, Vitality +5, Intelligence -1, Evasion +1, Magic Defense +2, Magic Power +2, Unarmed +1, Fire +1, Bolt +1, Blink +1, HP +154 Hm, I feel like I forgot something.  
Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 01:21
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Sketchie posted:You made a little typo with the VIT change. You only gained 5 VIT from the last update, not 25. Fister Roboto posted:With 7 evade and 22% evasion chance, she has an 82.4% chance to evade at least one successful attack, and a 47.8% chance to evade at least two. Nothing in the dungeon has more than two attacks. Thanks Crystalgate posted:The high evade number is carrying Vivian for now, but once enemies get a decent number of attacks, she's going to have a harder time without a decent evade chance. Yeah, this is pretty on-point. It's pretty smooth sailing right now, but don't worry, it'll ramp up.
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Jul 31, 2014 18:18
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Chapter 6: Castle Cashew Oh, well, there's the Sun Flame. But we can't just grab it with our hands. We have to get a special torch deep within the castle, light it, and then run it to the Warship. It's like the torch relay, but at the end instead of sports, people die.  We use the bell to unlock the door and-  Oh hi Gordon.  Bye Gordon. The only thing he had on him that was worth a drat was a Bronze Shield and two potions. The rest of his armor is worthless. Hell, even on a normal run he's usually not worth keeping alive; his stats are balanced and quite decent, but he doesn't have any spells or weapon levels. The first floors just has enemies that we saw in the last dungeon, and a Cure tome. The real dungeon starts on the second floor.  Ogre Rank 2, HP 100, Attack Power 25, Attacks 1, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-20%, Magic Resistance 2-50% If Vivian had less levels in fisticuffs or less strength Ogres might be a time sink, but she's one-shotting them without problems. They can hit for a bit of damage, I guess.  Wraith Rank 2, HP 60, Attack Power 9, Attacks 1, Accuracy 65%, Defense 9, Evasion 2-20%, Magic Resistance 2-50% I only encounter Wraiths once, however they have a drain touch attack, which is a very interesting and annoying mechanic in this game. But again, only saw them once and I don't think they ever hit me.  Wererat Rank 2, HP 60, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 4, Evasion 2-20%, Magic Resistance 2-40% Wererats would be utter pathetic if not for one thing.  They can poison you when they hit. And not that pansy rear end temporary poo poo. This translation doesn't actually give it a different name on your display, so that's really annoying. I think it does call it something different when it hits, but I don't entirely recall. (To be honest, I'm turboing through a lot of these fights, as they're mostly Vivian punching out each enemy one by one.) Poison would just be a mild annoyance if not for the fact that if you're inflicted with a permanent status ailment, and it's not cured by the end of the battle, you can't get any stat increases from the battle whatsoever. (I don't even think the battle contributes to weapon/spell levels.) This is why Heal is important, even if I had to cast it three times before it worked.  So, remember how I said they like to pull enemies from later on call them bosses? In this case, they pulled an enemy from the next dungeon. As random encounters they're rather annoying, actually. They require three Ice spells to kill, and I've only got 61 MP. They're also the enemy that can come even remotely close to killing us. Yeah, I'll be honest. This dungeon is just kinda... there.  I did end up burning an Ether, though.   First piece of decent treasure is also trapped, but only with Wererats. Why?  Wizard Ogre Rank 3, HP 140, MP 30, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40% You might have noticed that this game really likes to palette swap. Oh and hi Land Turtle. Vivian can just punch those out now.  Wizard Ogre just like to bombard you with spells, generally favoring Ice 5, although they can cast some status magic. All of the spells they use are multi-targetted, and from here on out most enemies that cast magic will cast it on your whole party. (Even on a single target.) As you can see, the damage it does is pretty sad. Even for a full party, it's not terribly threatening. For most of the game, magic damage (not statuses) is more of an annoyance than a threat. If nothing else, it helps to boost your the HP of characters in the back row. There is one oddity about getting hit with magic. There's a bug where if you're hit with multi-targetted magic, the game doesn't count it towards your magic defense. Instead Solo (and only him) will randomly gain Soul from it. The game designers did actually (kind of) compensate for that; magic defense has a large multiplier. Vivian's magic defense level is actually very high right now, all things considered. It's not uncommon to end the game with only level 4 or magic defense. The remakes fix this glitch, and the remakes from Dawn of Souls onward change the formula for magic defense. The PSX remake, however, fixes the glitch but keeps the formula. You tend to get sky high magic defense levels in that version.  Remember when Vivian could barely give a Goblin a paper cut? Yeah, those days are long over.   There's a treasure room on the fourth floor. The other two are the Mythril Sword and Axe, but the Werebane (or Were Mace but it's called the Werebane in all the other versions) is a neat find. Unlike the original Final Fantasy special weapon properties work, and this is strong against were beasts. So... that's something. Also it sells for a goodly amount and that's what's actually relevant for me.  The Wizard Ogres can drop several different spell tomes, although none of them are that great. Sleep is a temporary status ailment, so it's automatically not worth the time. There's one I did want, but it never dropped. Oh well.  This is on the fifth floor. Again, Gold Armor is heavy and worthless, but at-  Mine Rank 3, HP 190, MP 30, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 70%, Defense 25, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 3-40% They just love their monsters in a box, don't they? Mines are a substantial upgrade to the Balloon type enemies. Single target Bolt or Fire still does the trick, but I'd rather not spend the MP. Vivian's attack can sometimes one-shot them, but it's not 100% reliable. Either spend MP or risk getting blown up.  There's another treasure room on the same floor, but all it has is an Eye Drop, Echo Screen, and an Antidote. Not great.  Ghast Rank 3, HP 100, MP 30, Attack Power 25, Attacks/Accuracy 2-60%, Defense 9, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-50% Yup, more undead. They kind of end up running together, don't they? Other than their decent HP, and a chance to paralyze upon hitting (which I never saw), nothing else to 'em. Shortly after getting the Gold Armor, we go to the next floor and find the boss already.   Red Soul Rank 5, HP 540, MP 30, Attack Power 35, Attacks 1, Accuracy 80%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Red Soul is an odd little boss fight/random encounter they're calling a boss fight. It keeps throws out attack magic (multi-targetted, of course) every turn.  And it absorbs all elements. All of them. Including status ailment spells; if I cast Sleep or something it'd absorb that too.  It doesn't have a lot of MP, though, and it runs out in four turns. The Red Soul's attack power is not that great, and it only gets one hit, so there's no way in hell I'm dying to this thing.  The biggest stumbling block is the 40 defense. For armed fighters, even though you can finally get some decent weapons you're still not going to be doing a lot of damage. Spells are right out, although if you can get to Mysidia there's a spell that's non-elemental and can harm the Red Soul. But if you can get to Mysidia and back, you're beyond caring about a single Red Soul. At least with Vivian's unarmed skill, she can do some okay damage. It's not a short fight, but she takes the chump out with little difficulty.  Of course I made it a longer fight by spending a few turns practicing magic. Got an MP increase at least.  All right! Warp out!  Now we have to walk aaaaall the way back to Poft to catch a ride back to Altea to report back to the princess, right? Not quite. From the castle, just keep going down.   Say hello to the first chocobo of Final Fantasy.  We catch it, and now once we exit the forest we can ride it. Unlike later Final Fantasies, instead of running around really fast the chocobo disappears and reappears. Chocobos in FF2 are pretty limited; there's only one chocobo forest in the game, only one chocobo, and the chocobo is a one-way ride. Still, it's an easy way back to town that's random-encounter free. In this game they can't cross rivers, though, so I either have to get off at Palm to cross the lake, or go the long way. Ah well.  Before that, I grab two ethers and two cottages. That's a bit excessive, but I'm thinking I'll need them. Besides, that money ain't doing much else.   Ha ha, Hilda hates your stupid guts Gordon- wait, Hilda isn't actually supposed to be here. What did I- oh, I forgot to actually get the drat Sun Flame. ...  This LP is an astonishing monument to my forgetfulness.  And here's a short little cutscene I was supposed to get earlier. The Warship kidnapped Hilda and Cid, and then it parked its rear end somewhere on the world map. I was going back to Altea to get a NPC to tell you that, but you don't have to and I'm not going back again. Instead, we're hopping on the chocobo again.  There's two ways to get to the Warship. You can go north from Altea, past Finn into the area that would previously killed us. Or we can go south of Kashuon and past the desert. Normally you'd choose the first route; you're probably going to be in Altea when you figure out where the Warship is, and from there it's a shorter journey and the enemies along the way are easier. But from Kashuon it's faster to go by chocobo.  There's an arena and a castle in the desert, but we can't enter either one. The desert has much harder enemies than we have any business fighting, so there's no point stopping off here to check it out.  But the Warship is just a little ways past the desert. Next time, I do something incredibly foolhardy.   Vitality +4, Soul +1, Magic Power +1, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Ice +1, HP + 135, MP +12
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Aug 2, 2014 17:00
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Chapter 7: Time to Explode Things Welcome back. We've got a Totally Not a Deathstar to blow up, so chop chop!  Oh right. We're supposed to show him that pass we got at Bofsk, but I didn't get it. Uh... quick, throw a key word at him!  WRONG KEY WORD.  Captain Rank 5, HP 750, MP 30, Attack Power 60, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-50% We're, uh, not meant to fight this guy right now.  We're really not.  Okay, we need to do something about that. Does Blink help?  Nope! Well, maybe we can just go in, guns blazing and hope to win a damage race?  That is a hell no.  Eh, maybe we're just getting unlucky! Let's just keep trying! We can do this!  I'm not going to show you all my attempts (there was, uh, a lot), but suffice it to say; no, we can't do this. The Captain can simply do too much damage, and Viv's Cure doesn't come anywhere close to healing her entirely. I can hope it chooses to do the Bow attack more often, or that its attack keep rolling fewer hits, but Vivian just can't do that much damage. As you saw, her fists do around 60 or so, and her magic does about the same. The battle is simply going to last too long and luck simply can't keep me going for that amount of time. Hm. What to do? Do I go back and get the Pa- ha, no. That's quitter talk. Grind? Eeeh.... I'd really have to grind a long rear end time to stand a chance. I decided to walk back to the pitstop town right outside Altea. Mainly I did this to run into a specific monster, but it also gives me a chance to talk about some new enemies.  Big Bird Rank 3, HP 140, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-50% These are birds that are slightly larger than normal.  Mage Rank 3, HP 80, MP 30, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 65%, Defense 9, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-60% And these guys like to cast magic.  Like their ogre brethren, they prefer weak attack spells, but they sometimes break out status spells. Vivian's got decent enough magic defense to resist it most of the time anyway. Mages can drop some sweet spell tomes, but I'm not interested in what they have. What I need comes from a Wizard Ogre.  Bingo. Blind is actually a decent spell to learn. Blind is permanent, and the spell is quite accurate. But I won't be learning it at this time. I have another use for the tome. Anyway, this is what I was after. After I inn, it's right back to the warship.  Oh and I got this at some point. You use it and it casts a weak-rear end fire spell on all enemies. Worthless. All right, time to try again.  We're already starting off on a good note.  If you use a spell tome in combat instead of putting the spell on a character, you can cast one-time multi-targetted level 6 version of the spell. This isn't great, but I didn't want to have to go out and grind this spell up to the point where it'd work. The chance of it actually sticking is a bit spotty, but I've just gotta hope.  And it loving worked.  This fight just got a lot more manageable. We're not home free, though. We've still got to start the tedious process of knocking off 750 HP about 60 HP at a time, and the Blind doesn't incapacitate the Captain's attack entirely.  Occasionally it can still land a nasty hit, so I had to be sure to keep my HP up at all times. I should have gone into this fight with full MP, now that I look back on it.  But I did it.  Oh this wasn't the drop I was hoping for. Well I think I can live with that. Now let's WALK THE gently caress OUT AND loving SAVE!  We pop a cottage, and then once more unto the breach.  Unlike every other soldier, once we kill the guy protecting the entrance he's gone for good. What do you know, the game gave us an alternate solution to something. Good job FF2. (In case you're wondering, no, if you kill any of the other soldiers here they immediately respawn like everywhere else.)  From the base floor, we've got three different areas we can go to. Going down here just leads to a single treasure chest.  You have to go through a secret passage. Just walk through the wall. The Sleep Sword turns the enemies into pigs. Or it sends them to sleep, whatever. It has the same horribly accuracy as the Ancient Sword but inflicts a temporary status ailment. Lame.  And of course it's trapped. The blue one is the Sergeant we fought as a boss in Semite Falls. It can still do some damage, but we can one-shot 'em now.  Oh this breaks my heart. The mage dropped the Berserk tome, which some of you may recall is on my special restriction list. Berserk raises attack power. I may have mentioned that boss fights tend to have sky high defense; berserk is handy for getting around that. However, it doesn't take too many levels before single-targetted berserk gets drat powerful, enough to demolish bosses in three rounds or four rounds. That's not sporting, now is it?  After grabbing the sword, we go into the door in the top right corner of the base floor.  Stunner Rank 3, HP 100, Attack Power 17, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-50% This might stun you but stunners stun you.  Thankfully with only two attacks they only managed to stun Viv once. Obviously stun can be awful for single characters runs, but fortunately for me Stunners aren't that deadly a foe.  I guess I never did mention that bows are the only weapon that lets you attack from the back row. Which is why the designers made them lovely, I guess. The Blind Bow has even less accuracy than other bows, so it's extra not worth it.  Oh I've been waiting for you.  The Thief Glove gives you +10 to agility! Weirdly, it has weight, so in practical terms it's actually a +7 to your speed. Either way, not shabby at all! ...but it does have a downside, one we haven't really seen for this whole LP. You see, the Thief Gloves carry a stiff Intelligence and Soul penalty. Wait a second, you may be asking, how can that be? There's no indication of any penalty anywhere. Ah yes, welcome to another FF2 design oddity: invisible Int/Soul penalties. You see, all pieces of equipment, with a few exceptions, carry a penalty to intelligence and soul (it effects both equally). The Silver Armor we were wearing carries a -5 penalty. The Thief Gloves carry a magic penalty of -40. Yeah. Light armor, canes, and knives usually carry a very small magic penalty (although it's not zero), while swords, axes, and heavy armor carry a heavy penalty. Because the game makers hate you, the items that carry the worst penalty are shields and bows. One nice thing about going weaponless is that at least fists don't carry a magic penalty. Because a true wizard runs around naked punching things. I understand why this mechanic is in place, but the fact that the game never tells you that your equipment can negatively impact your spell casting, and in fact none of the documentation will tell you, is really, really lovely. At least the later remakes removed the int/soul penalties from weapons and shields. They apparently didn't remove it from armor, but the only piece of armor you'd want to wear that has substantial int/soul penalties is the Thief Gloves. All that being said, I'm still wearing them. I mean... +7% to evasion, man.  And just right across the Thief Gloves is the princess and the other jerk. Whaddya know. In order to get to them, you just walk up to the bars and break through them. I wouldn't expect Vivian to solve a problem any other way.  Once we talk to Cid here, we can no longer walk out of the Warship. (Someone is blocking the way.)  Nor Exit out. We've gotta to see this through to the end. There's two potions on the right end of this area, and after that it's back to the base floor.  Panther Rank 3, HP 190, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-40% Panthers are a bit annoying. They're a little too hardy to one-shot right now.  Also they can poison you, the fuckers. And it's real poison, too. (I think I'll call temporary poison "venom" because that's what the remakes do.) Because Heal's only level 2 and Vivian's magic power is in the shitter right now, it wouldn't loving heal the drat poison. And I forgot to bring a antidote into battle. drat it. Wasted that all MP and I can't even get any stat increases from the battle... Yeah, I had to drink up an ether not too long after. I only ended up using one, though, which isn't bad. Since you can't leave the dungeon after a certain point you really should bring at least one ether with you.  Anyway, the path to the engine is on the bottom right corner. It's probably obvious, but yes you do have to rescue Hilda and Cid before you're allowed the destroy the engine. It's always fun to walk all the way down to the engine room and then realize you forgot something. (Surprise of surprises, that didn't happen this time.)  There's a kind of nifty effect where it looks like you can see some soldiers on a lower floor. The effort is appreciated, if nothing else.  On the floor after the one, there's a cache of some pretty great treasures. The first one from the left is a Trident, a nice spear.  Oh and speaking of things that break my heart. The main gauche ("gouche" isn't a word, although urban dictionary will give you a definition) is a game-changingly good weapon. It's a knife that has the same evasion bonus as a low-tier shield. And since it's a knife, it has a low magic penalty like all other knives. It can be given to mages to let them have a source of evasion that doesn't kill their magic abilities. Or, if you prefer, you can dual wield it and make it a shield replacement. In this version, if you dual wield you don't actually attack with the off-hand weapon, but the evasion bonus will work just fine. Dual-wielding is fixed in the remakes, and it's pretty loving great, so the main gauche is still useful even when shields have no magic penalties. It's worth leveling knives just for this weapon. If this was a less restricted solo run, the main gauche would be end-game equipment. And I'm gonna sell it for 750 gil.   Gigas Rank 5, HP 750, Attack Power 100, Attacks 3, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Of course one of these had to be trapped. The Gigas is probably the closest this dungeon has for a boss. It may seem like the Gigas is worse than the Captain we fought at the beginning, but the Gigas only gets half the number of attacks. It's not easy, but we won't need any special preparation to kill the Gigas.  Although the Gigas does have better defense than the Captain, so attacking is a no go. The best Viv can really do is 100 damage with Fire 4. This'll take awhile.  Since it's only got three attacks, the Gigas usually ends up whiffing, but it pays to be careful just in case.  Still, it's a walk in the park compared to the Captain.  Oh, and the last is a helmet that increases strength by 10. It's heavy armor. Had to have at least one dud.  So this floor kind of weird maze. These soldiers act as blocks, so you have to walk around them. (No you still can't kill them and pass 'em that way. Only that one soldier.) It's pretty easy, honestly.  Eagle Rank 3, HP 140, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 2-50% My heart skipped a beat when I saw these guys, but then I realized they were just eagles and not cockatrices. Eagles are chumps.  Oh, and I got this neat little tome from a mage. Aero is actually poison elemental (it's called Scourge in the remakes). Poison counts as a elemental category of its own. Aero, though, is not a status spell; it's an attack spell. It cannot fail to hit. The spell can cause poison, and that can fail. Enemies with a poison weakness are rare, but it's worth it to level this spell anyway.  Past the guard maze is the engine room. Not a moment too soon, since I'm completely out of MP.   I feel like I should know you... are you a 20th century Russian dictator?! ...no? Well then I'm stumped.And now exciting escape sequence.  By which I mean it just shows your stationary character teleporting to each floor, like it's a vacation slideshow. At least the game doesn't make you walk out.   In another show of benevolence, Cid apparently stayed behind and then drops you off at Altea. How nice.  After a selling off a ton of fantastic stuff, it's time to quit.   Power +3, Vitality +2, Intelligence +1, Soul +5, Evasion +2, Magic Defense +1, Fire +1, HP +115, MP +55 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 01:57
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Chapter 8: Wandering the Earth Now that we done the thing, it's time to fall back to our stand-by; go back to Hilda who won't even mention what just-  Oh, nevermind, the king is dying. Awesome!   Well I'm dying. Probably should do something before I croak. First off; Gordon I'm putting you in a position of authority.  ... ... ...*ahem* Oh, and Minwu, go get the Ultima spell. And, uh... you. Go find the Dragoons. They were soundly defeated by the empire and their home razed. Therefore they'll be invaluable allies. Well, that's all I do. Bye. Bye-bye King What's-his-face. You will be... uh, remembered? Wait, where the hell is Hilda?  I'm certain nothing will come of this.  So we're getting our marching orders from Gordon now. Lovely. He just repeats what the King said.  But now Dragoon and Hiryuu are keywords. Yeah, this translation calls the Dragons Hiryuu. I get why they did it ("Only Dragoons can understand Dragons," yeah, kinda awkward) but it's not the best solution. Later translations call them "wyverns" so I'll be doing that. In any case, we have to make it to Dist. A townsperson will tell you it's on an island. Hm.  And conveniently there's some new chick in Poft offering a ride.  Surprise she's a pirate and wants to kill us.  Pirate Rank 1, HP 45, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 4, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-40% Oh honey.  Actually, you can help me. I want your ship. So... you're sparing my life?! ...let's go. Layla's not great, in some ways she's a little worse than Gordon, but out of all the temporary party members she's with you the longest. You kinda have to grow to like her. For us, she comes with something very nice.  The Goldpin gives an +10 to agility like the Thief Gloves, but unlike the Thief Gloves it doesn't give us a massive Int/Soul penalty. (It also resists lightning, but I don't care about that.) Since in this version bonuses from equipment do not stack, the Thief Gloves are worthless to Viv now. They move on to Solo.  So long and thanks for all the gear.  Buccaneer Rank 2, HP 80, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 2-50% Seriously these random-rear end pirates are better than yours, Layla. You sucked at this.  Killer Fish Rank 3, HP 100, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-50% On the sea we finally start to see enemies weak to Bolt. Unfortunately, since our Bolt is still at level 2 it doesn't help that much. Time to grind out Bolt a bit, I guess.  Sea Snake Rank 4, HP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 75%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Sea Snakes are a bit nasty. They're also weak to Bolt, but their high HP means that even a single-targeted Bolt won't OHKO them.  Oh! I missed you.  Getting to Dist is a bit of a pain. The ship starts in a enclosed area. In order to get out, we have to find this strait here and sail through it. Sail south from Altea, then sail east and you should find it soon enough.  From there you want to go south. Once you hit the top of the snowfield you're in the general area. Follow the coast east, and then south. Dist is really close by.  And here we are!    Inside there's a kid, his mom, and a dying wyvern. We have to grab a pendant so you can talk to it and do something for it, but we're not doing that today.  Instead, we're just raiding the castle. There's a lot of good stuff here, and no monsters to get in our way, so let's party!  Although for whatever reason there are still ambush closets in this castle. Why...?    Stop and Stone are just temporary status ailment spells (Stone is supposed to be "stun") so who cares, but the real prize is Curse. Curse halves the target's attack power and defense power. As you can imagine, this'll become very imperative for the bosses. If you're using Berserk it's pointless to level this spell, but Curse makes a half-decent replacement for it.  I wish I could tell you that we just got a unicorn out a treasure chest, but this a unicorn horn. Cures temporary status ailments. It gets sold.  drat.  It's a good sword. Does extra damage to flying enemies.  Again, I regret to say that the Wilson sisters are not in a treasure chest in FF2. It's an item you use in battle to temporarily raise your Soul to 99. Not bad, but...  So here's another annoyance with FF2.  Your inventory space is stupidly small. Oh, and do you see those items on the bottom? All key items. You never, ever get rid of them. Even the Sunflame and Egil's Torch which if you recall we threw into the engine of an airship. By the end of the game almost a third of our already small inventory will be clogged up with useless key items. This is why I fought the Captain rather than get the Pass; that's one inventory space that I get to keep. Our dead buddies, at least, can help lighten the load. In addition to the two item slots everyone gets, I can also load the useless equipment onto Loq or my fourth member. So in a solo run the item restrictions aren't as bad. Probably the nicest thing the remakes from Dawn of Souls onward do is remove the limited inventory entirely.  Does the same thing as the Heart, but for intelligence. And like the Heart, I just can't justify keeping it to clog up the inventory. Just not crazy on these items. The rest are just status recovery items, including a Gold Needle which is immediately getting sold. There's also a Phoenix Down in the castle; another item in our vendor trash pile. Thankfully Bofsk is really close by, it's directly west of the island, so let's go sell some poo poo off.  Look at all the money. I could buy an elixir now, but I'm gonna hold off. Since we're not gonna do the wyvern stuff right now, what next? Well, it's popular to go to a town called Mysidia around this time, since the boat allows us to make a shorter trip. Unfortunately, this means we have to sail past the strait again. Oh well, at least the encounter rate is much lower on the ship.  And the RNG gods have once again decided to bless me.  I went and labeled the towns so it's a little easier to read. (Also this version of FF2 doesn't actually mark Mysidia on the map) Theoretically you can reach Mysidia once you get the canoe; you just go left from Altea, and then all the way down to Mysidia. You'd also have to be crazy to do that. (And I've never done that. Nope. Never.) Now, at least, we have a boat allows us to park a little closer to Mysidia so we don't have to travel all that way. We're still a little underpowered for this area, but as long as we don't get certain monste-  Ghost Rank 5, HP 540, MP 140, Attack Power 35, Attacks 5, Accuracy 75%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 3-50% ABORT MISSION! ABORT MISSION!   Yeah. All right, reload and try again.  Big Horn Rank 4, HP 1,140, Attack Power 50, Attacks 4, Accuracy 85%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 6-30% Flier Rank 5, HP 750, Attack Power 60, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65% Magic Resistance 4-40% Wow look at that HP.  Admittedly, I hosed around a bit casting some pointless spells, but I don't know I could have beaten this encounter. They have too much HP and do too much damage for me to keep up with. Time to roll the dice again.  Imp Rank 5, HP 300, MP 100, Attack Power 35, Attacks 4, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-100% Werewolf Rank 5, HP 540, Attack Power 50, Attacks 4, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 4-40% There we go. Imps and Werewolves are still stronger than the monsters we're supposed to fight, but they have manageable attack and HP scores. Also I got a preemptive on this. I can do this!  poo poo. Yeah, there's the hitch.  However, if you input a command and the character gets confused before they act, they'll still do what they were commanded to do. All right, now all we have to do is wait out the confusion.  It helps that Vivian's really confused. Or hates Loq that drat much.  Before long Viv gets her head back in the game. It takes a while due to the Werewolves' high defense, but their attacks aren't that bad and attacking is all they do. Winning was inevitable at that point.  After that, I got lucky and didn't run any more monsters along the way.  Coming to Mysidia right now is a teeny bit of a sequence break. All the mages talk about Minwu and the seal on Ultima, which isn't important for us yet. Still, the designers probably thought most players would explore here around this time.  If you manage to get to Mysidia much earlier, you can nab some Thief Gloves before you're supposed to. Not bad. The Giant Gloves increase strength, but they're heavy armor. The Knight Armor is also heavy. The weapon shop also has some pretty good weapons. If you manage to get to Mysidia early enough, the weapons you get there can let you one-shot enemies until the Warship or so. It's not that infeasible to get to Mysidia before you get the boat, actually. If you copiously abuse the row system, and have one or two spellcasters with decent enough MP, it's difficult and luck reliant but possible. It's actually best to do this when you still have Minwu. However, the real reason we're here is...  The magic shop! All the other vendors sell the spells in Altea, Poft, Salamondo, and Bofsk. The guy in the middle, however, has new stuff.  These are all neat spells. Barrier protects you against certain elements, depending on the spell level. I haven't full explained element system. There are eight elements in the game: fire, ice, bolt, poison, body, mind, matter, and death. The rest are self-explanatory, but body, mind, and matter are all for status spells. At level 7 barrier protects against all of them except ice. It's supposed to, but the spell's glitched. Still, at level one it protects against matter, and at level 3 it resists mind, and those are the elements for the most dangerous spells in the game. Yeah, the elemental system is wonky. For example all of the KO spells, except death, fall into the same element: matter. Why have so many spells that do the same thing in the same category? Barrier gets bought. Wall blocks offensive spells of the equivalent level or lower. If you have a tolerance for grinding this can be useful, but at the end most enemies spells are level 8 or higher. Many are level 16. Despite what some people will tell you, there is no reason to grind anything to level 16 in this game. (Well, evasion is going to hit 16, but not through any special effort of mine.) However you can pull off an interesting glitch with Wall; cast it on a monster, then cast a lower level insta-death spell. While the game will say it fails, the animation will still display and the enemy will be die, regardless of whatever resistances the enemy has. We won't be doing that, sadly. I skip it. EDIT: Thanks to Gabriel Pope for correcting my mistake! Change, which you probably know as Swap, switches the caster's HP/MP with the target's. This has some applications for grinding; it's especially nice for grinding MP. But I'm not going to level a spell for grinding. Finally, Holy is a white magic attack spell. It's actually a non-elemental spell, despite the name. Holy has a high base attack power, but since it's non-elemental it can never hit weaknesses and that's when spells are usually their most damaging. Honestly, most of the time I'd never bother with non-elemental spells, but I have a specific purpose for it later. So let's get holy. And I believe that may be the last non-item purchase in the game. We've actually seen all of the towns in the game now. Finn will open its shops later, but other than that, there's only two other shops in the game and they're in dungeons. All the money I get from now on goes to ethers, cottages, and elixirs. There's nothing else I want in Mysidia, so let's try to make it back to the ship.  Bomb Rank 5, HP 640, MP 140, Attack Power 60, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 4-40% Weirdly enough, the enemies right around Mysidia are much easier than the enemies a little further out.  The Bomb's attacks can do some damage, but their self-destruct is piddly. Honestly, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to just multi-target a Bolt or something and just let them all blow up in your face.  Revenant Rank 4, HP 240, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40% Specter Rank 4, HP 300, MP 100, Attack Power 25, Attacks 3, Accuracy 75%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-50% And the good luck train keep rolling. While it takes a few fire spells to get them all down, none of them are as nasty as Ghosts. The Specter can cast some nasty stuff, but thankfully never even tried.  Made it to the boat! So now are we getting the pendant the wyvern wants?  Nope! There's a small island south of the strait. It's in the middle of nowhere, so you have to keep checking the map to make sure you're on the right track. No one tells you about this island at this point; it has something we have to get later. But we can now. This is the only real sequence break you can do in the game, and it's not much of one. But that's what we'll be doing next time. 'till then!   Power +2, Agility +2, Intelligence + 3, Soul +2, Evasion +2, Magic Power +5, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Bolt +1, Heal +1, Blink +1, HP + 62, MP +19 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 02:28
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Gabriel Pope posted:Wall isn't quite that buggy; the Wall glitch only works on instant death spells, because they remove the enemy from the battle as part of the spell's animation (which gets played for spells blocked by Wall.) If you just cast Fire or whatever on a walled enemy it will just show the fire animation and do nothing. Just instant death? I thought it worked for other status spells... I was a little foggy how the glitch worked, and I would have sworn that it worked for other status spells. I would have sworn I got it to work with curse or something, but my memory's probably off. Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 16:29
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Chapter 9: Tropical Vacation Welcome back! We're at some unknown tropical island, for no in-story reason, just because there's a thing I know we need later. Good enough!  Before we start, I want to make a little change. As nice as stuff like the Goldpin is, I've decided that getting agility bonuses will make this too easy. So, new restriction: no equipment that increases agility or evasion at all. The pin moves onto Solo (the restriction's only for Viv!), and the Thief Gloves are on the block to be sold.  Dual Zombie Rank 5, HP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 5, Accuracy 65%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Other translations call them Dual Deads, which is way more fun. Also five attacks gently caress me.  These formations are the most dangerous in the dungeon. With as many attacks as they get, it's not uncommon to eat around 100 to 200 damage for each Dual Zombie. In addition Vivian's attack power isn't quite enough to one-shot them, so it's best to take them out one by one with Fire.  Jelly Rank 2, HP 45, MP 6, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 210, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 2-40% Mallow Rank 3, HP 100, MP 45, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 210, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 2-50% Really, this whole dungeon is an MP sink. Jellies are weak to Ice and Fire, spells you've probably got decent levels for, and have low HP. Mallows, on the other hand, have a bolt weakness and can't be one-shot with Viv's current level of the spell. Each of these battles are just going to require a goodly amount of MP.  Niiice. You may wonder why I don't just run from those fights, or run from more fights in general. So FF2's also really annoying in how it handles running from battles. I've not seen any definite explanation on how running chance works, although it probably runs off Solo's evasion like preemptive strikes do. While I'm not sure else effects it, I do think enemy formations also impact run chance. I'm pretty sure certain formations, such as any with slime enemies, just forbid you from running entirely. This, right here, is why a no-magic run of FF2 almost impossible. (If you've managed to beat this game using no magic whatsoever, please, tell me.) You're gonna run into these guys, and you have to kill them somehow. With over 200 defense, though, attacks just won't do it, unless you have the masamune or max level fists.  There's not much on the first floor, mostly some rubbish treasure, but there's some gems in there.  And just some otherwise interesting items. Threads cast multi-targetted Slow 9. Slow does what it did in FF1, that is, it reduces the enemies number of attacks. Normally I end up selling this item, but I'm thinking I should reconsider. As you've been able to tell, the number of attacks the enemy gets is very important, so slow can downright cripple dudes. Unfortunately, we don't get the tome until much, much later, and I don't see the point in leveling slow and curse. But I could experiment with this item. Moreover, many attack items in FF2 have a random chance of being used up, rather than always being a one-shot. I'll have to think about it. (Fortunately, there are actually two Threads in this dungeon, so while I sold one of them I can always try out the other.)  Up on the second floor, Vivian finally gets her subscription filled. Actually, this casts sleep on the enemy. I'll pass. Right below the chest there's a staircase. This dungeon's quite sprawling, with lots of different paths. So let's explore this one.  On some parts of the dungeon there is this vine overlay. Considering how samey and cookie-cutter a lot of dungeons are in this game, I appreciate any effort to spice it up.  And at the end of this little diversion we reach... here.  The mask this dude mentions is actually what we can here to get, just so you know. Still no reason as of yet why we need it. Now you don't have to come here, it's a dead end, and most of the masked dudes just say the same thing.  But there is a shop. The demon axe and spear are useless; we can get much a better spear or axe in Mysidia for only a little bit more. The ruby cuirass is actually pretty nice, though. It's only got five more defense than the silver cuirass, but it has the same small evasion and int/soul penalty, and it's very cheap. Might as well buy it. (Yeah, I lied; there was one more non-item purchase in the game. Sorry.) The Earth Drum casts Earthquake 10 on all enemies. You can't actually cast earthquake any other way, and it does decent enough damage. And like the thread, it has a random chance of disappearing after use. We're getting one for free later on, and I'll probably never use that one. Since there's nothing else to do here, and I'm already out of MP (partially due to the slime enemies, and partially due to me trying to grind up all these new spells.) Let's exit out, save, pop a cottage, and start again.  And I immediately get into a losing battle with some dual zombies. Here we have a fine example of running not working.  Oops. Yeah, don't underestimate these guys.  Back to the second floor. Yeah, you'll notice this dungeon loves throwing duplicate items at you, even on the same floor. I guess I understand, you can't buy this spell after all, but do you ever need more than one Aero caster?  Same thing with Blind. I end up having Viv learn it; honestly I don't forsee it ever being that useful, but why not? At least the blind tome sells for a lot.  G. Toad Rank 4, HP 300, Attack Power 35, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-50% I have no idea what "g" is supposed to stand for. Giant, I guess. Anyway, they're weak to ice, and have kinda high HP. With three attacks they have better chances of hitting Viv, and they can poison you upon hitting, so they've got that going for them. Although they did hit Viv plenty, poison only hit once. A mild annoyance at best.  On the fourth floor there are four different staircase we can go through. The first one, directly south of where we can in, just leads to a single treasure.    ....okay. From this staircase we go directly right.  Tusk Rank 5, HP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 85%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Tusk! It's the big horn's little brother! And somehow, the little brother has a higher rank. Go figure. They're much like the toads; a mild annoyance at best.  And this is what's at the end of this path. Don't get too excited; it's just two valiums and an earthdrum. While that would make a rockin' party, not what we want.  One of them is trapped with toads and tusks, so that's... something.  It's a good something, that's what it is. Back down to the fourth floor. This time we want to go to the top left corner of the floor.  I actually already picked up one of these from a toad. It casts fear. Yeeeaaaaah not tempted.  Changer Rank 3, HP 140, MP 80, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-40%  Changer's big gimmick is casting Swap on you. With Viv's 6-48% magic defense it's fairly unlikely to hit.  It's not impossible though. The changers have 80 MP, so it's not an awful trade-off. Although I had to spend most of that healing up again.  Enjoy this rare shot of running actually working. Anyway, back again to the fourth floor, and to the left. This time we're finally moving forward.  One last bit of treasure on the fifth floor. At least it's not another valium...   And we're at the end of the dungeon finally! You know, some people have mentioned that this dungeon's difficulty is more suited for this point in the game, which is why I'm doing it. (Also because I can.) While you can do the dungeon now, you're actually expected to do it after the cave at Dist, the colosseum after it, and the liberation of Phin. Hell, it probably expects you to do it after the castle dungeon. This... doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, it's rather long, full of MP-draining slime enemies (ended up using two ethers!), and the Dual Zombies can be kind of nasty, but right now it's only a slight bump up in difficulty. It's kind of weird that this dungeon is so easy. I'd venture to guess that this dungeon's difficulty is more suitable for this part of the because you can easily stumble upon it when you first get the boat. Which is what I'd guess if this were a sane game. Not in a game where you can easily fight mid to late game enemies right out of the gate. So I ain't got a loving clue. I think you might have guessed that the design of this game often makes no sense. Anyway, our boss is an enemy we've seen before.  Big Horn Rank 4, HP 1,140, Attack Power 50, Attacks 4, Accuracy 85%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 6-30% Big Horns are a bitch to fight in a group, but by itself it's nothing. We've fought worse.  It's really not worth talking about.  And here is the thing we came for. And yet another inventory space that I'll never get back. Yay!  And once again the game designers give you a bit of a break, in case you had no MP for exit or something. All right, now that we did... the thing, next time we'll finally go and do what we were supposed to do.   Power +2, Agility +2, Vitality +6, Intelligence +5, Soul +6, Evasion +4 (!!!), Magic Power +1, Fire +1, Ice +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, HP +340, MP +21 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Oct 9, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 06:12
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Crystalgate posted:15-22% evade gives an average of 3,3 successful evades. In practice, it translates to a bit worse than that. Enemies have already gotten the number of attacks needed to pierce that, but so far the evasion is enough to mitigate most of the damage. It's up to getting more agility now. You mention that, and it kind of gets me wondering whether or not Slow would be a better status ailment to level than Blind. I never usually bother with Slow because I never get it in a regular game, since you get it so late. Hm... anyone here ever use Slow much in a playthrough?
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Aug 16, 2014 17:24
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ManxomeBromide posted:At the end of the game on Gabriel Pope's LP, the best evade was only 9 (though admittedly 9-77%, so expected number of evades was still higher). There's only two enemy with more than 8 attacks in the game. One is the General with 10, and the another is the Iron Giant with 12, and that one's the "Warmech" of the game. If you have a really high percentage, you never really need more than 8 or 9 evasion. And I'm not sure what you mean by that second sentence. Evasion only protects against normal physical attacks. Anything that's not a normal attack is classified as magic by this game. (Unless you meant something else?) Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 02:47
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Chapter 10: Spelunking Now that we've taken that little detour, let's actually go where we're supposed to go, shall we? Before we go to Dist Cave, item management time!!!  First elixir bought! Also two ethers and a cottage. That out of the way, to the cave. It's directly north of the castle; can't miss it. Dist's enemies are mostly the enemies you saw around the Warship, but there's a new face.  Stalactite Rank 4, HP 240, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-40% Stalactite are one of the few enemies in this game weak to poison. With level 1 Aero that means nothing to me, and they're pretty uninteresting otherwise, but hey, poison weakness.  Cave time! Right from the get-go we've got three different staircase we can go down, so we're heading to the upper right first.  Seriously, someone on the dev team must have thought this was the funniest thing.  And we're done already! Well, not quite, but we do have walk back to Dist to talk to the wvyern, and come back. There's not really a point is Exiting out, so I just walk.  Oh, there is something I wanted to mention and I forgot to. We've seen Revenants before, another one of the nigh-indistinguishable undead, but they have a special property that I forgot to mention before. Now, Revenants have an attack power of 40, and Viv has a defense of 15. Even with a high roll, they should do 65 per hit, tops. What's going on? Drain touch, that's what's going on. You see, physical attacks that drain HP work... interestingly in this game. For every hit that a draining attack lands, it does an additional 1/16 of your max HP in damage. That's added onto the base attack power. And that's max HP, not current HP. And the draining property ignores defense completely. One sixteenth of Vivian's HP is 69, so this would quite handily explain the numbers seen. With low numbers of attacks, this is hardly that big of a deal, but later on there are enemies with lots of attacks and drain touch. They make your life hell. This, this right here is why you can't just tank it in heavy armor and abuse yourself to astronomical HP.  Holy poo poo they really don't want me to leave do they? Once again, what was once a boss is now just a random encounter like it ain't no thing. Thankfully, we now have the curse spell, which, if it hits, makes these guys cake. Unfortunately, it's still only level two and Gigas's have 4-40% magic defense. Not quite foolproof yet. At least Viv can scratch them now.  Oh and this is what the wvyern wanted us to do. Anyway, let's get our cottage on and then back to the cave! This time, we head directly south of the entrance.  In case you were curious, this is how much damage Vivian can do when curse manages to stick. Normally she does around a hundred or so. Curse is quite nice.  Soul Rank 4, HP 20, MP 80, Attack Power 35, Attacks/Accuracy 1-70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40% These guys are pretty much just like their older brothers, the red soul (yes we're gonna fight red souls as a random encounter later, don't play coy.) They absorb all elements, so you have to kill them with attacks. Unlike the red soul these guys are far easier to kill. Also unlike red souls they have a half-decent amount of MP.  And that's all they do. They do nothing else, unless they're out of MP. One problem you could have is that all of them are going to cast the same spell, every turn, and if there's a lot of them in a formation they can wear you down. In this case, the only way I could lose to them is if I was not paying any attention whatsoever. I still lose more HP than I'd like, though.  Great Ogre Rank 4, HP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40% These guys are, uh... the upgrade to the regular ogre, I guess. Yeah. They drop the winged sword sometimes. That's something.  This path basically just leads to a dead end treasure room. What goodies await us.  Heavy, worthless armor. Yay.  Guarded by a giant turtle army. This isn't hard by any stretch, not anymore, but it's gonna be a long, tedious battle.  Curse alleviates that quite nicely. (In all fairness though, she can actually now do damage to this guys, although nowhere near a one-hit kill.) The other chests have heart, elder IQ, and-  If you're crazy enough to fight the Captains in Phin early on, they can drop Flame Bows. They're really good if you can snag one that soon. Well, good for a bow, anyway. Since this is a dead end, and I don't see the point in walking back, time to exit, cottage, and go back in. You know, I do feel it's wasteful to use so many cottages, especially when Bofsk is fairly close by. On the other hand... why should I care about being wasteful with purchasable items at this point? On the third trip in the cave, we take the lower right stairs.  Wow this is outdated as hell. I can't imagine you'd ever have any characters still using mythril armor at this point, and even if you did, you'd probably have the helmet by now. (There's also some armor just a bit north to complete your lovely, outdated mythril set.) Anyway, we have two stairs to choose from here. The one you see in the screenshot leads to treasure, so treasure we go for.  Oh, that little black smidgen on the bridge is a gap and you will fall if you step on it. I believe you land in the area with the Knight armor and the other poo poo treasure. No point in doing that now. There's a chest with some mythril poo poo, and also-  Do you remember how I said Wall would be a good spell if you could ever be bother to grind it up to absurd levels? Yeah, this casts level 16 Wall. It only casts it on the user, but that's ideal for this run. The question won't be if I use this, but when.  You may be starting to wonder if I'm really going to show every single agility gain I get in this entire game. The answer is yes, yes I will.  Going back to the previous floor, we get a magic staff. It casts multi-target bolt 5. Yeaaah not that good, although magic procured from weapons doesn't break the weapon, so that's something.  Green Soul Rank 4, HP 6, MP 60, Attack Power 25, Attacks 1, Accuracy 70%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40% Also it's trapped with a monster that-  Heals you. Yeah. At least the dev's stupid sense of humor finally benefits the players. They will actually attack if they run out of MP, but they get one 25 power attack. Nooot scary. Anyway, the exit we need is left of this chest.  This time, we're on the other side of the bridge.  On the next floor we get this... thing. It casts multi-target Aero 16, so I have no idea why the fan translator chose that name. Probably just gonna sell it.  And finally, we have the return of the beloved "guess the right door" game. I missed you.  It's this one. (Surprisingly I only made one wrong guess.)  But of course we need a boss.  Chimera Rank 5, HP 640, MP 80, Attack Power 60, Attacks 4, Accuracy 75%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50% How many of chimera spawn is a little random, between two to four I believe. Obviously, we hit the middle result. EDIT: It's one to four.   This is all they do. Nothing too bad, but with their high attack power an unlucky roll could put me up poo poo creak. With their HP the battle miiight last long enough to let that happen.  Love you, curse. Yeah, this gets won pretty easily.  And we're done!  And the wyvern is dead. I'm certain you cared greatly. Not much to do at this point but sell off all that excess poo poo.  I don't know if I can stress how money has become such a non-issue. (Yeah, I buy another elixir, along with two cottages.)   Power +2, Agility +1, Vitality +6, Intelligence -1 (drat it!), Soul +4, Magic Power +1, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Aero +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, Barrier +1, Blind +1, HP +232, MP +43 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 01:48
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Chapter 11: On the Next Season of FF2... Now that we've done... er... I have no loving clue what we really accomplished. Anyway, time to report back in with... urgh... Gordon.  Oh, we actually have to talk to Hilda anyway.   Ah, now we're getting to the famous "Solo gets seduced by an evil-"  Wait, what?   what  ...I have so many questions.  Whatever it's boss fight time!  And we're basically already dead. You see, in this game, sleep doesn't wear off when you get attacked. It'll just wear off randomly, like any other temporary status.  Wow, uh... I was not anticipating this. I didn't even get off a single attack.  The Queen Lamia can also confuse you, but honestly that's the least of my worries. If Vivian's confused, at least she'll actually complete her last inputted command. No, it's her normal attack I'm concerned about. Okay, she has sleep touch, but why so much damage? Now, I don't usually look up anything while I'm playing, certainly not boss stats. But I had to here. Queen Lamia Rank 7, HP 1,290, MP 370, Attack Power 50, Attacks 8(!), Accuracy 95%, Defense 50, Evasion 2-75%, Magic Resistance 7-40% Oh. 8 attacks. That explains it. Okay, so we're going to have to do something about this.  Best I could do with what I had was the Mirror to block the confusion spell, and Thread to lower her number of attacks. While her magic defense is high, the thread casts Slow 9, and that should get through it.  All the prep in the world doesn't help if she kills me before I can do anything. We have to actually hope for her confusion attack, since her regular attack seems to always inflict sleep.  But I got it off! So we're home clear?  Not with 8 attacks we're not!  Oh, and if I even do manage to get a turn in she casts this. It's actually very rare, but when she does you can forget about attacking. Vivian actually does decent damage, about 200 or so, and magic doesn't come close to that. Dick move.  I'll admit I'm shooting myself in the foot a bit. For this attempt I didn't bring the Mirror in, and while Confusion isn't that big a deal, that means more turns where I can't hit the boss.  Okay confusion is occasionally a bit of a problem, although that happened less often then you'd think. The other bad choice I made was not wearing armor. I kind of figured that the evasion bonus was more important than 15 defense, but 15 defense matters a lot here. It lowers the lamia's max damage from 800 to 680. Not insignificant. Still, when the boss is incapacitating you every other round or so, taking less damage from it is prolonging your inevitable loss rather than preventing it. The problem with the thread/mirror is that it takes two turns to set up, where it was often hard to get even one action in. And at the end of that it's not even that reliable! If I could get blind or even curse to stick it would alleviate the problem significantly, but their levels are still pretty low and with the lamia's magic defense meant that was... unlikely. I was starting to get really frustrated. I've played this game before! I've played solo runs of this game before! Why am I having so much trouble with this boss? This is worse than the drat Captain, and the Captain was optional! I had to think up a better strategy. And then I realized; there was a very simple solution to the problem. Both sleep and confusion are mind elemental, which barrier protects against. There was a slight issue, though.  You need level 3 barrier to protect against mind, and I've only got level 2. It wouldn't take very long at all, but that would necessitate a bit of grinding. Yeap, I had to grind to get past the lamia. Less than ten minutes worth of grinding, but grinding none the less. I had to grind in FF2. My shame is endless.  Aside from a level in Barrier, I unceremoniously reached max evasion level. Honestly, it's not going to help as much as you'd think, but any help is more than appreciated. All right you bitch, let's dance.  Unfortunately, barrier has a chance of missing, and sometimes not all the resistances hit. One note about barrier in this version; the elemental resistances it displays are incorrect (there's no such thing as "critical hit" defense). It actually will work backwards; level 1 barrier shows as giving ice defense, and you're supposed to get ice defense from level 8 barrier. (Supposed to. You don't. It's bugged.) What you need to do instead is count the number of messages. I only got two messages, so only matter and fire defense. Yeah, I died on this attempt. You know, I wonder if the backwards messages of barrier are the game's fault or the fan translation's. I actually think it's probably the game. I've been looking through Mega64's LP, but I don't know if he actually used that spell in that LP. Hm. Well, at least it gives you some clue what resistances hit; the remakes don't tell you at all. Anyway, on my second attempt all three levels hit.  gently caress you. After using the thread to mitigate the damage, there's no more real threat in the fight. Thankfully, she never used blink, so victory followed pretty soon after. And what do I get from the fight?  You know what, gently caress you Final Fantasy 2. Yes, I know that this is the most statistically likely possibility, as it's a 60% chance to drop money. I also know that Final Fantasy 2 is a cold, unfeeling program and therefore cannot care if I call a bastard. But I don't care. gently caress you Final Fantasy 2. Do you know what else this fight can drop? A ribbon! A motherfucking ribbon! Or a protect ring! Or a diamond cuirass, which is not as good as those two, is a drat nice piece of armor. Instead you give a bunch of completely worthless money. Can't even buy a single elixir. gently caress you. ...I've written way too many words about this goddamn lamia.  Oh, and the princess wasn't secretly a necrophiliac lesbian lamia the whole time; the real one's being held prisoner by the bad guys.  And for her rescue we get Gordon back for two seconds because I guess he's her love interest now. Poor Hilda.  Gordon is somehow alive with 0 HP. I end up going to the inn before I leave, so Gordon gets his HP restored. No zombie Gordon, sorry. (And if we do get zombie Gordon he's not immortal or anything. One hit and he'll lie back down.) All right, where is Paramekia? Well, I've actually shown it to you before. Remember that giant desert south of Kashuon? It's in there. Fortunately, with a boat it's much easier to reach. Let's start by sailing east of Altea.  I will never get sick of cruelty to Gordon.  Unfortunately, no matter what we do it's a bit of a hike to the place. I could park the ship around Kasuon and ride a chocobo down to Paramekia, but I'd still have to walk back. Really, no time saved. So, instead I park right under the strait, right where there's a huge break in the mountains. Also, new enemies!  Antlion Rank 5, HP 370, Attack Power 50, Attacks 3, Accuracy 75%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Well, enemy. I only saw Antlions on the way. By now, those stats are really mundane. Apparently they have a paralysis attack, but with three attacks they never hit anyway.  And here's the arena! See, told you I've shown this to you before. We can now enter it.  It's the emperor quick get 'em!  Of course not. Instead, we must fight-  Oh that's adorable! I don't wanna kill it!  Behemoth Rank 6, HP 1,620, Attack Power 85, Attacks 3, Accuracy 95%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 4-50% Okay, less adorable. Funnily enough this game actually give you proper boss music for this fight despite it a) being an utter joke and b) not a unique monster. In all fairness, you'll only see the Behemoth around Mysidia, and it's a very rare encounter (I think I've only seen it once or twice in the wild).  All it can do is attack, so I went about piling on the status ailments. It's really unnecessary; even though it has high accuracy, with three attacks it's unlikely to hit. All I really need is Curse to make going through the behemoth's admittedly hefty HP go quicker. No, I think I just wanted to blow off some steam. I was gonna rip this fucker's head off.  Sometimes I've just to indulge myself...  The poor bastard only managed to hit me once.  Behemoths don't drop anything. So worthless.   WHO'S NEXT?! Uh... no one. You won.  What, seriously? Lame. Uh... you want Hilda now? Oh right. Fooled you. Well, nuts.  No bars can contain Vivian!  Scratch that, for once Solid Snake will break someone else out of jail.  I have no idea what Paul'd thank us for since every time he shows up he does our job, but whatever. We're free! This is actually kind of a dungeon area, but it's only two floors and super small. No big deal. There's some treasure to the right.   ...look, the joke isn't funny any more. Stop doing it!  Column Rank 4, HP 240, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-40% I wouldn't bother showing this encounter, but there's a new enemy. A new enemy that also isn't worth talking about. But it's there, being new, guarding a worthless antidote.  There are several doors on the upper part. The one we need to continue is to the far right, but one of these contains some treasure. Unfortunately, I didn't remember which one.  Sorcerer Rank 4, HP 140, MP 60, Attack Power 25, Attacks 1, Accuracy 70%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-60% Wizard Rank 6, HP 540, MP 190, Attack Power 40, Attacks 1, Accuracy 75%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 4-60% Oh gently caress me. Both of these new guys are nasty. Both of them know some horrible status spells, and 540 HP for a spellcaster? Ouch.  But it wasn't the sorcerers and wizards that gave me a hard time. It was the good old captain.  gently caress.  By the way, this was the correct door. All it has, though, is an ether, elixir, and a cottage. None of which I'm really lacking for...   They show you a bit of mercy in this room by putting a ton of secret passages in it. I'll be using them, as I'm pretty keen to spend as little time as I can on this floor.  This is why. I use the thread on them, and I managed to scrap out a victory.  And I got the death spell! Even if I wasn't doing a no insta-death spell run, I wouldn't bother with death. Weirdly enough, the death spell is your worst option for insta-death. Death has an element all to itself, and a lot of creature resist or are immune to it. Worse than it, it's really inaccurate. Why bother?  : Hey Hilda I've got your dead boyfriend! ...man, that's really a problem for you, isn't it?: ... ... ...look, just give him to me. We'll find our way out.: If you insist. Well, that was even more useless than normal, Gordon.  There's another secret passage here. All right, almost home free!  Almost...  drat IT.  drat IT.  Sucker Rank 4, HP 300, Attack Power 35, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-50% On my third run through, I never ran any of those wizard and captain encounters. I did find these guys, though. Suckers actually have an MP draining attack. It works like drain touch, that is, each hit does 1/16 of your max MP (The base attack just does damage). Annoying, but thankfully they only get three hits. Pretty weak otherwise. They're weak to ice, so that's... something.  Point is, I got out of there alive. There's no random encounters on the top floor, so I can just walk out in peace.  SAVE.  Ray Rank 5, HP 450, Attack Power 40, Attacks 4, Accuracy 75%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Other than a new enemy, nothing else to say about the trip back to the boat. Next we... go back to Altea and report with Hilda and/or Gordon, I guess? That'll wait. Let's just end this train wreck.   Power +4, Soul +2, Magic Power +1, Evade +1, Bolt +1, Curse +1, Barrier +1, Blind +1, HP +42, MP +23 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 02:28
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So with Agility of 28, what are your odds of getting an AGL+ at the end of a fight? Seems like that's going to be more and more of an issue as time goes on... The issue is that, as far as I can see, no one actually has the formula. This romhack readme claims that it rolls a random number between 1 and 255, and if that number is less than one fourth your evasion % you get some agility. If that's true, with 28 evasion percent (this requires not wearing armor) one fourth of that is 7. 7/255 chance, or around a 2% chance. Not great. Although with 99 %, it seems to be around 9%. A significant increase, but not completely ludicrous. Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Aug 20, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 03:18
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Deathwind posted:Wouldn't it of been a better idea to just buy and use a barrier book instead of grinding? Possibly, but I already had the spell and it was pretty close to level 3 anyway. (Although honestly I don't actually see needing the mind protection in the future, but I have it if I need it.)
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Aug 21, 2014 03:34
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Oh and I also forbid and armor that increases agility as well because it's clear that I hate myself
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Aug 23, 2014 18:55
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Chapter 12: The Rebellion Finally Does Something So... this time do we go and talk to Hi-  Nope! So she gets rescued and immediately launches an attack? drat. Where the hell was this Hilda the whole game? Was Hilda a lamia the whole time, and this is the first time we've actually seen real Hilda? I'm liking this new, useful Hilda. Just kidding, this is the only proactive and useful thing she will ever do in this entire game.  And Hilda just took the rebellion and parked their asses here. It's actually up to us to go to the castle, and kill the leader inside. Well, they'd cleared the way, since you can't enter the castle until now. So point one for Hilda and the rebellion. The only point they get. (Well also the whole saving your life at the beginning of the game I guess.) So anyway there's no point in going into town unless I really wanna kill some Captains (and this is the last time we have this unlimited supply of Captains to kill) so let's just go to the castle and-  Oh. Thanks game.  Layla's back. Woo.  Flower Rank 5, HP 540, Attack Power 40, Attacks 4, Accuracy 80%, Defense 40, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 3-50% So this castle has random encounters, so it's kind of a dungeon, but not really. You can explore and get all the treasure now, but there's no point. Once we kill the leader, the encounters are gone, and we can grab the treasure unmolested. You'll still run into an encounter or two getting to the leader. Oh, and here is zombie Layla.  And there was zombie Layla.   Gotus Rank 6, HP 2,000, MP 80, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 90%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 5-40% Gotus is, at least, respectable as an opponent. He's better than a behemoth. He mostly just attacks. His attack power isn't bad, but curse and blind help cut that damage down (it also helps that his magic resistance, while good, isn't sky-high.)   Unfortunately, he can boost up his attack stats.  Gotus did spent most of his fight missing, but when he hit, he hurt. Fortunately, with Curse on him, Vivian does around 360 a hit or so, up to 500. Doesn't take too long.  Got a few nasty hits on me, but nothing too bad.   Now that we've won, encounters are gone in the castle, Phin has been liberated, the rebellions' purpose has been fulfilled, and Hilda has regained her throne. All from fighting an enemy that isn't even a unique enemy. Yeah, there are Gotuses later on the game. Oh FF2....   Oh course we're not done yet. Remember how the king asked Minwu to grab the totally awesome and useful (and not bugged and lovely) spell Ultima? Yeah, we gotta go check up on him. Which just means we're going on a quest to get the Ultima spell.  Hilda drops a ton of key words on us. If you remember, I nabbed a black mask earlier. Yes, this is what we needed it for. It's a little complicated; we need a white mask and a black mask to open a cave to get us a rod to enter the tower. At least we've already done a part of this quest. Where's the white mask, then?   And this is what we actually need from Hilda. Now Gordon will tell you if you talk to Paul, he'll tell you where this secret passage is. But if you already know, you don't need to ask. And also screw Gordon I'm not talking to him.  Before we go do that, let's check the town out. Since Phin is no longer occupied, it's a normal town (the last we ever see in the game) and the shops are fully functional now.  The weapons and the armor are mostly stuff we've already found before. The only thing worth buying is the Quartz Cuirass, but we're gonna get one for free later anyway.  The spells are nice... if we could have gotten them earlier in the game. Except Dispel; it's supposed to remove elemental resistances, but like in FF1, it's bugged and doesn't work. Mini is another insta-KO spell, but one of the few KO spells that are white magic. Fog casts permanent silence, which would have been nice, but soon enough we'll have a better solution. Slow we've already seen; reduces number of enemy hits. I grab Slow, mostly for shits and giggles. Honestly, while I get decent use out of the thread, I probably made a mistake here. Slow is kind of redundant with Blind, and it's in many ways worse since it's less accurate and gotten later. On the other hand, slow is white magic, which is good for Viv. It's been hard to gain much intelligence since every time she punches something a brain cell leaks out. But nothing reduces soul, and her soul score is quite decent. Also Blind is a flat 40% reduction to evasion, and Slow reduces number of attacks based on how many levels of it hit. If I get super grind heavy with Slow it's a more useful debuff. And then I realize the enemies I'd really want to use this on resist both. So who cares really? ...oh yay.  We also missed a buncha treasure in the castle, so let's get that.  And also admire the lovely Chekhov's mirror they had installed.    And enjoy this treasure room full of spells that do the exact same thing. At least Death works on a different element, but Break and Toad have the exact same element. Yes, Toad is a KO spell. No, it's not a KO spell when used on you, but it is when used on the enemy. It's a really good KO spell too; it's the most accurate one in the game. The only reason to have both Toad and Break in the same room is a) if you wanted to have two casters of KO spells (although they're both black magic) or b) to trick people into using the shittier spell. I'd be remiss to mention that in the remakes of FF2, they added a mini game similar to the one in FF1. In the snow fields, if you press a and b 22 times, you play a memory game. Why do I mention it now? If you play this game with level 16 toad, you can get the masamune and other nice stuff from it. Although if you have level 16 toad, you barely need a masamune.   Most of the treasure chest are trapped, and those monsters don't go away once Phin's been liberated. At least this chest is only trapped with trash monsters; the game devs are mean, but not that mean.  Also trapped, but with a team of far scarier Sorcerer's and Sergeants. Now Aura is an... interesting spell. I thought it was bugged and didn't work, but according to this site while the eighth level is bugged, the spell does work. It boosts your attack against specific enemy types. Honestly, I never use this spell and I never notice it's effects when I have. I sold it. I'll run into it again later in the game, though; maybe I'll play around with it? If nothing else, I doubt I'd have to put it on my special restriction list.  There's two secret passages on the second floor here, but they just have the werebane and the giant gloves, both of which are kind of not great this point. Since we've looted all we can here, let's continue on with the plot train.  And here's the secret passage. You can tell because it's the only piece of wall with a keyword/item prompt. Throw our relevant word at it, and move on through the secret door.  Right before the entrance to the dungeon, they sneak a little hidden path here.  Told you we were getting one for free. It gives 22 defense; pretty good! Also, free, so you can't argue with that price.  We also get the gold armor, which is both heavier and has worse defense. Just to rub it in on how bad heavy armor is in this game. (The other is a gold shield, which is okay.)  Anyway, dungeon!  The first two floors have nothing but really lovely treasure. None of it's trapped, at least!  Brain Rank 5, HP 240, MP 100, Attack Power 40, Attacks 4, Accuracy 75%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Brains are basically grown up Changers. Same love of the Swap spell, although theirs hits more often. At least they leave you with a decent 100 MP, but I've still gotta spend a ton healing back up, so it's a major drain. I actually end up using an elixir because of these jerks. A faux pas I will never live down. Thankfully they only show up on the first two floors. Other than the brains, there's nothing else to say about the-   By this point, I was getting paranoid. I mean, I remember this dungeon not being hard at all, but if I hosed up at any point the game was certainly not going to be this generous the next time around. FF2 only seems to have two modes; bending over a bar stool presenting like a mandril, or bending me over that bar stool. Usually it's pretty clear when it's entering the second mode, but the game surprises me yet. ...yeah, I'm just going to deflate your gleeful, voyeuristic schadenfreude right now; I don't die. Sorry.  Mantis Rank 5, HP 750, Attack Power 60, Attacks 5, Accuracy 75%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% By the third floor, we finally get a tough enemy. Basically these guys hit you hard. They have an ice weakness, but I've only got level 4 ice. I would two of those to kill one. It's not that much faster than punching them to death. Other than the mantises, though, none of the random encounters are even remotely scary, and the mantises only show up on the third floor anyway. Honestly, maybe the tropical cave does fit after this dungeon. It's longer and more complicated, at least.  Man, this bar stool's getting a workout today.  First piece of decent treasure! It's got the same evasion bonus as the diamond shield, but protects against ice rather than lightning.  But the flame armor protects against fire. That's confusing as hell. Also it's heavy. Boo.   Oh the blood sword.... you funny little thing. It's trapped with a kinda trash encounter, but it's a great weapon. You know how drain attacks add 1/16 of your max HP per hit landed to the damage? The blood sword has the same property. Now the blood sword has some steep penalties; it has the worst base attack of any weapon, worst accuracy, no evasion bonus, will heal the undead, and it completely kills your int/soul. But give it to a dedicated sword user, and it wrecks any high HP enemy. Oh, and any HP drained (but not the base attack) is given to the attacker. The blood sword is well known for how absurdly powerful it can be. The blood sword isn't the cheapest way to get through the game, but it's up there.  The fang casts confuse 16. Honestly, it might be useful? I never use the drat things, and I'm pretty sure I sold this one, but there are some enemies later that drop it so if I really wanna use one I could.  Really, one of the few things to note about this dungeon is how most of the floors change color.   GChimera Rank 5, HP 750, MP 140, Attack Power 60, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Hey, a new, actually interesting enemy. Hows about that? The, uh... well it's the orichalcum dagger so I'm calling it that. Anyway, it has better attack power than the main gauche, but it doesn't have the evasion bonus, so gently caress it. As for the ...Ghimera? Great Chimera? As for the red chimera, it's pretty much like the previous chimera with one major difference. It has a petrifying attack. Much to my surprise, it never used it. It is a rarer attack, but still. Actually, this encounter also can be from one to four. You know, one of the enemies guarding the blood sword can petrify as well, and it didn't, despite me loving around in that fight. I'm presenting so many opportunities for the game to gently caress me over, and it's not. It's a dangerous game we play, me and FF2.  Now it's time to play the guessing game, EXTREME edition! It's outta control!  Fortunately, this is one time I do remember the correct door.  And that's it. There's no boss; the red chimera/s are as close as it gets to a boss. There's a warp out at the end, and we're done. That was astonishingly painless. Next time, we found what the hell to actually do with these masks.   Power +5 (wait, seriously?), Agility +4 (seriously!?), Vitality +4, Intelligence +1, Soul +3, Unarmed +1, Magic Power +1, Magic Defense +1, Cure +1, Blink +1 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Aug 24, 2014 15:43
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Falconer posted:Death Knights/Riders/whatever are pretty dangerous but unless the RNG hates you there won't be more than one or two of them at a time. They also don't show up until the final dungeon; by that point Vivian would probably have a decent level Slow spell that would lop off some of those eight hits. Plus, outside of their high defense (120 points) Death Knights are pretty easy to deal damage to (1/70% evasion, weak to fire damage) so Vivian should be able to kill one well before she gets too beat up. Death Knights resist body, which is slow's element.
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Aug 28, 2014 22:57
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Chapter 13: Ghosts All right, now we've got the masks, we've got to figure out what to do with them. Since Minwu headed off to Mysidia, this seems like a good place to check. Since we're a bit stronger now, it's no longer that big a deal getting there, as long as I don't run into Ghosts.  Vampire Girl Rank 5, HP 540, MP 100, Attack Power 40, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% I do run into a new enemy, though. Like all late-game undead, they have drain touch. They can also confuse you, although they use a multi-targetted, weaker form of it. Their attack is nasty, but not enough to overwhelm me, and their confuse hardly hits. Could be worse.  In order to find out what to do, you need to talk around in Mysidia.  There's also a bookcase, which will give you a bit of backstory for pretty much all of the key words in the game. Nothing mind-blowing, but at least the game's attempting to flesh out it's meager world.  Inputting "mask" gives you a strangely translated riddle.  So what does it all mean? There's a downward staircase in the middle of town. We go down and go to this statue.  Then throw the white mask on it. By the way, we don't actually lose the white mask. It will remain in the inventory, haunting me, making so I can't carry that one extra elixir... And so, what do we do now?  We head to dungeon a little south of Mysidia. Again, in this version the game does not mark it on the map.  Pudding Rank 5, HP 370, MP 80, Attack Power 40, Attacks 4, Accuracy 80%, Defense 210, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 3-50% I'm kind of surprised they took so long to show up. Puddings are the toughest slime enemies, with a pretty hefty HP total. They're also only weak to fire, so using anything else just prolongs killing them. Not difficult in any way, but huuuuge MP sinks.  Malboro Rank 5, HP 750, Attack Power 50, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Yeah, I know it says "Molbor" but you know what this is. Actually, these Malboros aren't quite as bad; all they have is a paralyzing touch they didn't hit all that often. Beefy as hell, but nowhere near as nightmarish as you think. (Usually...)  And nothing else interesting happened along the way. Dungeon crawlin' time!  This dungeon is mostly a series of walkways, with rooms below. Also do I spy treasure?  I'm starting to kick myself for the "no agility boosting equipment" rule. The Black Grab is a fantastic, fantastic piece of armor. A defense of 40, agility +10, no weight, magic penalty of 1, and matter resistance. Well, with no weight I guess Solo can have it so it can minimally impact my chances of getting ambushed/ambushing enemies. Yay.There's also a goldpin on the floor, just to rub it in. But where we want to go is all the way to the left, down, and to the right.  Solo, what are you doing here? I killed you.  No, it's an... evil doppelganger. Okay. Anyway, if you didn't put the white mask on the statue it would push you away. Since we did, it's immobile and we can put the black mask on it. And of course we don't lose the black mask either. Anyway, onward!  Cockatrice Rank 5, HP 370, Attack Power 35, Attacks 4, Accuracy 70%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50% Oh gently caress. Anyone who knows anything about Final Fantasy probably shares my sentiment. Cockatrices are known for petrifying you, and this game, their regular attack has petrifying capacity. Of course, I say that, but... it never happened. Once. They did hit me, but the stone effect never went off. Viv's not wearing anything that protects against matter, I never cast barrier with these guys, nothing. It just... didn't hit. They again, with only four attacks they usually only landed a hit if they landed a hit at all.  Oh, and I told you Red Soul's would show up later on. Slime type enemies are really common in this dungeon too; I started to get really liberal with the spells at this point. I stopped keeping track of how many ethers and elixirs I used.  This dungeon has a couple of secret passages, like you see here on the second floor.  Eh. Spears are okay, their main distinguishing characteristic is that their int/soul penalty is slightly less than swords while maintaining comparable power. It's still a -40 penalty, though, so it's still pretty bad for spellcasters. Although, you can buy a flame spear in Mysidia.  The Power Staff, by contrast, has one less attack power and only a 20 int/soul penalty. (The 20 penalty is actually really high for a staff; usually it's only 5.)  I forgot where the exit to the floor was, and just decided it was probably easier to warp out, save, rest, and go back in. Probably a little paranoid on my part, I'll admit.  By the way, the way to the third floor is behind a door in the bottom left corner.  Another secret passage!  Woo.  You know how I said the Malboro had a paralyzing attack that didn't connect all that often? Well, once in a while, it does.  And when it does, the results are... messy. Crap. Well, I'm glad my earlier decision was retroactively prudent.  Anyway, you want to go to the left, down, and then up around. Along the way you'll find this pretty good axe (but it's still an axe you can buy.)  It's just trapped with bombs. Whatever. Moving onto the fourth floor, it's pretty straightforward.  Although these fellows are now random encounters. Like with the cockatrice I was always afraid they'd petrify me, and like with cockatrices they never did. At least, as long as I manage to get one round in I can cast barrier for some peace of mind. It's nice that matter resistance is first on the list.  In addition to a single treasure chest with a potion (at least it wasn't trapped) there's some door roulette.  You wouldn't miss much by skipping it. Other than a (for me) useless gold needle and phoenix down, there's the silent bell. It inflicts silence... the temporary version. So, so useless.  Poison Toad Rank 5, HP 450, Attack Power 40, Attacks 4, Accuracy 75%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50% But and I found an enemy I hadn't seen yet. How about that? Also, why is the background a forest? Other than that, it's on to the fifth floor. Just rolling along, huh?    But there's the rub. I don't know if I've fully establish what bastards ghosts are. First off, they have pretty high HP totals at 540. They get 5 attacks, and they're draining attacks.  Also, they get tons of nasty spells. This is one of the few times I've ever seen my characters get hit with mini. Mini is like toad; when you cast it on the enemy it's a one-hit kill, and when they cast it on you, it reduces your stats significantly. However, mini is actually temporary, so that's not so bad.  But no, this is the real dick move. First off, it's level 16 and it's single targeted. Unless you have resistance to the element, you're gonna get hit with it. But what about getting resistance to stun? Well, stun is body elemental. Barrier doesn't protect against body until level seven. There's no equipment (yet) that protects against it either. It's not the most common attack they have, they have a 10 percent chance of using it, but with over 500 HP the battle is definitely going to last long enough that it'll happen a few times.  Oh and they have single target Aero 16 too. Lovely.  Time to do this all over again! Well, maybe if I try the ghosts again I can get lucky and win?  Ha ha. No. They killed me immediately. All right. Again.   On my fifth attempt through this cave, the game starting getting... generous.  You know what, FF2? I don't trust you. Yes, I know this will force another run through this drat cave. But that's fine; I've almost got this place down to a science. If this stupid game killed me after two agility gains I was gonna burn this whole thing down and I'm taking you bastards with me.  This time, I'm skipping the drain tome. Yeah, it's cowardly, but I don't really need or want it.  As a matter of fact, I'm skipping all this poo poo. The treasure chest on the bottom right is a mini tome, and the four up top are all potions. You can only access that area via secret passage, and I'm just not in the mood to go looking for it. gently caress it. Let's just get through this poo poo already. I'm almost to the end anyway.  Motherfucker.  Everyone's been talking about how the only thing that'll kill Viv is insta-death attacks. Here's the thing: at this point in the game, most insta-death attacks that enemies use are level 6 multi-target spells. Vivian has level 7 or 8 magic evasion, which means she has a decent, if not 100% chance of dodging it. Moreover, since barrier gives matter resistance on its first level, I can pull that out. No, stun kept killing me. While Vivian's evasion can keep her alive for a decent number of turns, in the right circumstances (say, an encounter with four hard-hitting enemies) the enemy will beat her to death long before the ailment wears off.   On my seventh run through, the game got generous yet again. At this point, I just want to be done with the cave. If I were to lose 2 agility, so be it. Wow, mood swing.  But lo and behold, I made it. So what's at the end?    Treasure! The Crystal Rod is what we need to open Mysidia Tower and continue with the game. We also get the Aspil tome and Drain tome, and I didn't even need to fight ghosts! All right, now let's warp out, save, and never discuss this again. I end up having Viv learn both aspil and drain, but aspil's the one I really want. Now, drain does what you think it does, and unlike drain touch it's not percentile based. Sad.  Aspil, or Osmose, absorbs MP from the enemy. Which is already a nice thing, but here's the kicker; it will steal MP from enemies that don't have any MP. You know how the only thing we really need to buy anymore is elixirs? We don't even need to buy those any more. Even more than having an unlimited MP pool, this spell is useful in other ways. In other FF games (I'm thinking 4 in particular) enemies cheat when it comes to MP. They can cast spells for free, even if those spells need MP when you use them. FF2 enemies play by the same rules you do. No MP, no casting. And, in case you needed a reminder, anything that's not a regular attack costs MP. The spell doesn't drain much MP now, but with a bit of training it'll get more potent. The maximum amount of MP an enemy has in this game is 540, so using Aspil to seal off spell-casting is a very viable strategy. It just needs to be leveled high enough. The only enemy it won't work against is the undead, since the effects are reversed like with drain. With this spell in my belt, I've pretty much got all the spells I want. There are more spells we haven't seen yet, but I really don't foresee needing them. Viv's only got one extra spell slot anyway. In any case, after going back to town and hawking off all the trash, it's time to sign off. Next time... Ultima?   Power +2, Agility +4 (Sweeeeeet), Vitality +5, Intelligence +5, Soul +3, Magic Power +5, Magic Defense +1, Fire +1, Blink +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, Barrier +1, Blind +1, HP + 343, MP +51 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Aug 29, 2014 01:20
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Crystalgate posted:The gameplay is only solid if you know the game mechanics, otherwise FF II can get rather grindy. For example, in most games defense triumphs evasion, but in this game it's the opposite. People who don't keep their evasion up may start to grind their HP. Then they hit draining enemies and now that doesn't work anymore. That will work until the endgame, though. Honestly the first time I played the game, and I didn't really know the mechanics, it wasn't a hard game at all until the end. (The final dungeon actually made me quit my first play through.)
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Aug 30, 2014 06:49
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Chapter 14: Mysidia Tower All right you guys. No foolin', no bullshit, we're going to go to Mysidia Tower and get Ultima! We already passed the tower on the way to Mysidia; it's on an island surrounded by a mountain ring. Fairly easy to find. So let's-  But first, pointless ship wreck sequence out of nowhere.  Okay, it does have a point, mainly to shuffle a party member out.  This is a mini-dungeon with really nothing to it. Damage floors return from FF1, and they work the same way; you lose 1 HP per step, and you can't get into a random encounter while on a damage tile.  Manta Ray Rank 5, HP 870, Attack Power 70, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Electric Fish Rank 5, HP 540, MP 80, Attack Power 60, Attacks 4, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Also, new enemies! All the enemies here are new, and fresh faces are appreciated! The manta ray is kinda tough, and the electric fish absorbs bolt. That's all there is to say about these two.  Sea Dragon Rank 5, HP 870, MP 80, Attack Power 70, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-40% Sea Dragons are a little more interesting. They're pretty buff, as their stats are pretty much the same as the manta ray.  Also, their wave attack is a damage spells that's actually kind of scary, at least for a characters with lower HP. At this point, you start seeing more damage magic that actually is worth a drat.   While this area's pretty short and uninteresting as a whole, at least there's some pretty great treasure. Both the power sash and the spiral headband are very lightweight, with the power sash having a -5% penalty and the headband having a -2% penalty, increase strength by 10, have very low magic penalties, and provide a resistance. The sash protects against body, and the headband against mind. Yeah, it's at this point that the game decides to vomit all the good equipment on you. Still, not the best we'll find this update.  You know how I said this area was short? It's three floors long, and the middle floor doesn't even have encounters; it's just where the people are.  And the game doesn't tell you this until now, but what happened is Leviathan swallowed us. Yeah, try not to think about any of this too hard. So I guess next time we see Layla she'll be mysteriously older and forgotten her white magic.  Oh, and another lightweight strength boosting armor to round out the set. This piece protects against poison, which is less awesome than body or mind protection, but still decent. For the first time, we have a full set of armor. While the total magic penalty comes out to about -5% or so, hardly worth worrying about, the total evasion penalty is -10%. Hm. I can live with that, but it's not... great. Eh, there's gonna be even more equipment down the line very shortly, so we're not wearing it for long.  Oh and hello important character blocking the way. You can throw some key words at him, but in order to progress we have to flash our crystal rod.   Meet our next party member/murder victim.   Uh, I'm right here...Hey, for once I don't have to write in Vivian being hideously insensitive.  Honestly, Richard's probably my favorite fourth slot party member outside of Minwu. Yeah, he suffers from being a front-liner when you really don't need another front-liner stealing previous evade experience from your permanent characters, and his own evasion is poor. But he's at least a decent front-liner with good weapon levels. Oh, and this fan translation is the only one I've ever seen get his name 100% correct. Character limitations make his name "Ricard" in the recent translation, which is perfectly fine. The Origins translation named him Gareth, and the NES prototype translation named him Edward. I do wonder if the prototype FF2 was polished up and released if FF4's Edward would have had a different name change. Huh. Anyway, moving onto the next and final floor of... Leviathan's stomach. (He has a tiered stomach? Yeah, again, try not to think about it too hard.)  I'm at the point where I really don't need to kill the new meat myself anymore, but...  It feels dishonest if I don't.  And the game really, really starts throwing a ton of awesome new swords at you all at once. There's also a diamond shield on this floor, and it's trapped with red souls for some reason.  Just for your information, I started really throwing around spells willy-nilly at this point. Mostly due to the fact that MP is meaningless to me now, and also because I wanna train my spells, mostly aspil. You may see a pretty marked increase in spell levels, and that would be why.  Anyway, here's the ship, and the boss we gotta fight.  Worm Rank 7, HP 2,000, Attack Power 120, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 100, Evasion 1-10%, Magic Resistance 4-50% The worm has no gimmick; it's just a beefy monster that hits hard. It gets a decent number of accurate attacks, so it will land a few goodly hits, at least before Curse and Blind. It's not really worth discussing otherwise.  Well, that was pointless. Even though that was a barely a dungeon, I went back to town if only to unload all the useless crap. I would really recommend doing that before Mysidia Tower.  After all that, all you have to do is walk up and you automatically use the rod to enter the tower. Now, you can freely enter and leave the tower, but the game does make you sit through that little animation every time you re-enter. A slight annoyance, but oh well.  Mysidia tower is a pretty memorable dungeon, at least it was for my first playthrough of this game. At about 9 floors it's the longest one in the game so far. It's also full of treasure and nasty ene-  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu- Wait, the Power Sash gives body resistance.  Hm. He he. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. AH HA HA HA!!!!!  Anyway, for whatever reason the first floor has three chests with worthless canes. But in upper middle of the floor, behind a secret passage, there lies a true catch.  The White Robe may end up being endgame equipment. How awesome is the white robe? While it only has a defense of 30, which is good but not great, it's one of the few pieces that doesn't penalize magic at all; as a matter of fact, it gives a +10 spirit bonus. Most importantly, it protects from body, matter, mind, and death. The only status ailment it doesn't protect against is poison, but the power armlet does so I'm covered there. I'm now completely immune to status ailments. (Well, actually, I think there might be one exception.) Now, some people have been saying that with 16 dodges (and the game's random generosity with agility bonuses) that I'm unkillable. That's... not quite true, but not entirely false. Enemies start getting a lot more hits from here on out, and with low evasion percentage Vivian simply won't dodge every single hit that comes her way. But she'll dodge a great many, and even with high attack power most enemies shouldn't overwhelm her. Although, honestly, I may be surprised; even after all this time the game will sometimes still do that. That being said, draining attacks are still a major problem, and there are some nasty enemies with drain touch down the line. (Mainly Death Riders, but they're not the only ones.)  Moving on, the second floor introduces us to the gimmick of this tower: "themed floors." For the next two floors, the background is red, all the treasure is fire-related, and there are pools of lava. It feels like I shouldn't insult you by stating the obvious, but we all know what the theme is: the loss of innocence.  And speaking of the treasure, there's three pieces on the second floors; the other two being the flame lance and the flame shield in the northwest corner of the floor. We've seen all these pieces before.  I wasn't kidding about the pools of lava, and apparently neither were the creators. Well, hey, no random encounters. And as you can guess, another round of guess the door.  This is the door.  And it just teleports you across the room. Okay.   You know how I mentioned how the game loves to dump a bunch of swords on you at this point? Well, here you go, second new sword within twenty minutes of gameplay. There's also a flame armor across directly right of the helmet. Like the shield, the helmet provides ice resistance, not fire. But the flame armor provides fire, remember, and oh who cares you shouldn't use any of that crap.  After each set of themed floors, there's a miniboss.  Fire Gigas Rank 7, HP 1,800, MP 240, Attack Power 100, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 100, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 4-50% All of these mini-bosses are gigases, and they all follow the same template. In addition to a healthy attack score, they've got more up their sleeve.  Their fire spell is pretty drat nasty for a magic attack. They also get a spell called "Rock 9" but choose not to do it in this battle. One nice thing is that all of the elemental gigases are weak to the opposite element, in case you're having a hard time scratching them with attacks. But I only had level 4 ice to work with, so curse + punching was the faster combo. Regardless, I took the gigas down pretty easily.  And now we move onto the next themed set.  Guess the theme, children. The staircase below just leads to some more treasure.  On these floors, our damage tiles are just... water. Well, considering the whole ice thing it's probably really, really cold water.  Basilisk Rank 6, HP 750, MP 140, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30% As the name suggests, the notable feature of these monsters is their ability to petrify you.  White robe, bitches.  Hey, finally a spear we couldn't have bought in Mysidia!    And now all the flame stuff you got from the previous floor is obsolete. Well, actually, it's not a bad idea to keep the flame sword for the ice gigas.  I guess I could have not mentioned there was an ice gigas and it could have been a surprise. Perhaps there might have been a... flamingo gigas instead.  Ice Gigas Rank 7, HP 2,000, MP 140, Attack Power 120, Attacks 7, Accuracy 95%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 4-50% Yeap, this sure is a gigas.  Actually, it's a little different. For one, it actually used the rock attack! Also, the ice gigas's ice spell is lower leveled and multi-targetted, so it doesn't do poo poo for damage.  Although its attack isn't quite as crap. This is what I mean when I say Vivian isn't quite untouchable, but is unlikely to die. Now, the gigas has 7 hits, but not all of them are going to hit. Even three connecting is a bit rare, since usually one or two connect. If there were more enemies in this fight, and they all has similar strength and number of attacks, I could be up poo poo creek if I had some unlucky rolls. But with one the damage output is quite manageable. Also, I hadn't cursed and blinded it yet.  And Curse really helps; that would have been nasty otherwise. Basically, as long as I'm always careful, the battle should never kill this character. Since your fire spell is usually your highest level spell, and that holds true in this play through, fire is probably the best bet for dispatching this gigas.  After fire and ice comes... purple. It's supposed to be thunder themed, I guess, but at this point they seemed to be getting tired of their own gimmick. Which is appropriate, as this is the point the player is getting tired of this dungeon. Yet there's still a fair bit to go. This dungeon is really loving long you guys.  Yes, even around two-thirds of the way through this long-rear end dungeon, they felt the need to put in a gag chest.   Devil Flower Rank 6, HP 1,140, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 85%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 5-70% These guys can confuse you, have high HP, and are weak to fire. That's all there is to 'em. For some reason I keep thinking they're undead, but I think I'm confusing them with an enemy from FF6.  The Evil Stick here is an odd weapon. If used as an item, it casts single target Aero 16 on a random target. And I do mean random: enemy, ally, dead, doesn't matter. Not worth using.  Wait, no gigas here? Weird.  Now we've just given up on themed floored entirely.  Malboro Terra Rank 6, HP 1,000, Attack Power 60, Attacks 7, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30% I have no idea what the "l" stands for, so I'll just call 'em what they're called in the newer translation. Anyway, like their cousins these malboros would be scary because their attack inflicts stun, and like their cousins, having resistance to status ailments neuters the threat.  These floor mostly has a bunch of strange odds and ends. The Shoes (or Hermes Shoes, which is the name you're more likely to know) casts haste on the user. I don't know if I've talked about haste yet. Haste increases your number of attacks. It can be useful, but the reason why you do so little damage to bosses in this game is because your attack doesn't exceed (or barely exceeds) the boss's defense. Since the formula is (random value between attack and attack x2 - defense) x number of hits, having more hits often doesn't really help. We all know what happens when you multiply by 0. It's nice in conjunction with berserk, curse, or the blood sword, though. Considering it's not the best spell there's probably no point with putting on the restriction list, but it doesn't matter either way I guess. There's also a unicorn horn a thread on this floor, the latter of which I forgot to pick up. Not that it matters. I've still got two threads I never use.  Oh and now the gigas attacks you. Uh, okay.  Thunder Gigas Rank 7, HP 2,500, MP 370, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 95%, Defense 150, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 4-50% Third verse same as the first... and second.  Although its thunder attack is nasty. Ouch. This is one point where the gold pin's bolt resistance would actually come in handy. And you know, I didn't think of it, but Vivian has barrier level 4, and at level 4 it grants lightning resistance. Eh, Vivian can keep up with this damage. Really, what's annoying is that this gigas's weakness is poison, and there's no goddamn way any sane player has a decently leveled aero at this point. Curse and then beatdown is the best choice.  And for the last two floors, again, there is no theme. Each of those pathways leads down to a door, and there six of them on this floor. And of course, only one leads anywhere.  At the very top of this whole mess, there's a chest with a spell I should be excited to get but I'm not.  And it's trapped. Hi Gotus! But yes, Flare is, like in most Final Fantasies, a powerful non-elemental attack. It has a base power of 20, five more than holy and one of the best base powers in the game. But it has the same problem holy has; magic, by this point, tends to do crap damage unless it's hitting a weakness. Holy, at least, you can get much earlier and you have a lot more time to level it up. The problem with all the spells you get at this point is that you're not going to want to level a whole new spell. There's not much of the game left, and flare just isn't a good enough spell to devote time to. Also it's black magic. Soul is a lot easier to level than intelligence, at least in versions with stat decreases, so white magic is generally better for Viv than black. Well, I do end up learning it, just to have a full spell list. The door right below the flare is the door we want. And from there, we move onto the last floor.  Well that's one way to translate that. Yeah, this is just an hourglass. Stop is a temporary status ailment, so this goes to be sold.   Dragon Rank 7, HP 2,500, MP 140, Attack Power 150, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 5-50% And finally, we have one last mini-boss to send us off. Actually, the game plays boss music for this, so it's supposed to be a boss fight, but it is completely optional.  This ice attack hits the whole party, but this is a case of a monster being scarier to a whole party than a solo character. Also it's weak to fire, so killing isn't too tricky. Another "boss" that's a complete chump, but at least it's scarier than the behemoth.  And there's one last door roulette before we're basically done with the tower. Honestly, it seems so weird that this was such a quick and easy run, relatively speaking. Mysidia tower is well know for being an absolute slog. But it's mostly difficult because it's such a drain on your resources; you do have aspil by this point, but unless you tried to grind drop the wizards, and the only place you can do that is in the coliseum, then you've only got one. And all the new armor with status resistances are great, but you only have so many. For a solo game none of that is a problem. I never said a solo run of FF2 didn't have some perks.  Oh there you are. Everyone's been looking for you. Have you been here this whole time? Maybe. Anyway so I'm gonna sacrifice my life to open this door so you can get Ultima. ...even I think that's a little excessive. I mean, do we really need to-   Well, uh, thanks for that. Sorry about your... life.Well that sure was a death of some description.  Oh look, shiny orbs! Now, this is kind of weird. Each of those four orbs surrounding the center give a random character +10 to a certain stat.  +10 strength to... Vivian! All right!  +10 soul to Richard. Ah well, I'm not really heartbroken over that. Vivian's got plenty of soul.  +10 intelligence to... Vivian! Well, that's nice.  And finally, the most important one, is agility. It goes to...  You're making GBS threads me. It went to Vivian. Vivian got almost all of the stat gains, with the exception of the one she was already pretty solid for to begin with. That is... wow. By the way, I am not abusing save-states for this game. I did not save-scum for this result. I... really have nothing to save about this. I'm just stunned.   And finally, we get the sealed spell, Ultima. Ultima is a piece of poo poo. This spell is famously bugged in this version of the game. It has a base power of 100, which is flipping insane, but it doesn't actually gain power as it levels. Now, in the remake, the spell's power is based on the levels of all your spells and weapons, which is probably how the spell is supposed to work. But it doesn't, and Ultima is worthless. Even in versions where it works, Ultima is still a waste of time. A decently leveled toad in capable hands can devastate a whole mess of enemies in a single turn, and when that doesn't work, a berserked fighter chews through single enemies effortlessly. Both of which are methods you are likely to already have at your disposal. Ultima requires grinding a new spell. Also, I don't know what the formula is for Ultima, but even in the remakes Ultima's power doesn't seem to grow that much. Again, it's based on weapon and magic levels, so maybe I never had high enough levels for it. Still, if you had Berserk 16 why would you need Ultima 16?  The game very nicely warps you out once you get the spell. By the way, make sure to get the other orbs before Ultima, because if you don't they're gone. Anyway, now that we've got Ultima, we... hm, what is next? Could it be something stupid? Of course it is, it's FF2.  Power +2 (+10 from equipment, +10 from sphere), Agility +0 (+10 from sphere), Vitality +5, Intelligence +3 (+10 from sphere), Soul +12 (+10 from equipment), Unarmed +1, Magic Defense +1, Cure +1, Fire +1, Blink +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, Blind +1, Aspil +3, Drain +1, HP +386
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Sep 6, 2014 04:56
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So, believe it or not, we're pretty close to the end of the game; there's only three dungeons left. And I was thinking, since no one else has done it for LP here, I could tackle the GBA only Dawn of Souls. However, this would necessitate playing through the game again. So, if I have to play through the game to see the optional content, how would you all like to see me play the game? Ideas for challenges, spells or weapons you want to see used, or whatever! Now, I'll have to add a disclaimer: I reserve veto power for any requests that are impossible or incredibly tedious. Also, while I don't play on any special gimmick for Dawn of Souls, Minwu, Josef, and Richard will all not be allowed to gain any stats whatsoever or have their equipment tampered with. So if what you want involves those characters, then sorry. Also, I need names for the protagonists. How does that sound?
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Sep 6, 2014 05:24
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Chapter 15: Ride the Wind Now that Minwu sacrificed his life for 10 points of agility and a useless spell, time to head back to base to find out a new disaster cropped up and what we just did had no bearing on anything whatsoever.  That's weird; all the sea enemies have changed.  And so have the enemies around Altea.  Oh hey, sweet.  And for some reason, we can't enter Altea. It's looking a little worse for wear, too.  And so is this town.  Also someone left the world's tiniest tornado outside of Phin. I suspect shenanigans are afoot.  So this is one of FF2's more infamously ludicrous plot points. The emperor creates a magic tornado and kills off half the world's population. No, seriously. In addition to Altea and the pit stop town, Poft and Palm are also destroyed. Moreover, the population of Phin has thinned out a bit. Bofsk, Salamando, and Mysidia are the only towns untouched. This plot point is one of the clumsiest attempts to shock the player and raise the stakes I've ever seen in a Final Fantasy. I find it adorable, honestly.  And despite all that carnage, the game didn't pull the trigger on Layla. Go figure. So what do we do from here? Well, do you remember the Chekhov's Mirror?   Use the pendant (remember, the one found in Dist cave?) and it summons the wyvern!  This is kind of an odd leap in logic, although the game does give you some clues. You can use the pendant on the mirror earlier, and it will give you a message of "hey the wyvern egg is in the water good job." Also, an NPC in Mysidia will just flat-out tell you what to do, although I have no idea why the creators thought you'd go back to Mysidia.  Now we got the wyvern because it can fly through a tornado, somehow. And it's an inventory item. Joy. But it's not just here to take up space; the wyvern can also be used as an item in battle. Somehow. It casts some multi-targetted attack spell... yeah, I don't care. I gave it to Richard, though, because it seems fitting. If morbid. Before we head into the whirlwind, though, we've got some things to do.  First off, if you use the whirlwind key word on Paul, he'll tell you to check by his bed. Perv.   Sweet. The haul from this is a ruby cuirass, black suit, thief gloves, quartz cuirass, gold pin, silver cuirass (sensing a theme?), an elixir-  And another loving blood sword. The game is just... begging you to rip it open now. The gba remake onward actually replaces this blood sword, making it so there's only one in the game. How cute, they're trying to pretend you haven't ripped the game open by this point. After that, it's time to do some serious inventory clearing.  Hey, how much for this mysterious forbidden magic tome of legendary power? 1 gil. Sounds fair. And when all was said an done, here is our end result: a mess of elixirs I probably won't ever need. (Solo and Loq are carring two more elixirs.)  Oh, one of the sorcerers dropped another Aura tome. I decide maybe I'll play around with it, just for shits and giggles. I do have to drop a spell in order to learn aura. I decide slow has to go. If I really do need slow, I have two threads. All that out of the way, it's time to go tornado hunting.  To get in, you just walk up to it and then the wyvern will fly you in from there.  And of course the tornado is a dungeon. This dungeon has fewer floors than Mysidia Tower, but more branching paths.  Vampire Lady Rank 6, HP 1,140, MP 140, Attack Power 85, Attacks 6, Accuracy 85%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 6-30% Vampire Ladies are upgraded Vampire Girls. That's it. Anyway, the first floor has two stairs going up, and the one you see first has treasure.  Giles? No, no, it's a knife, and kind of an odd one. It's supposed to add 20 damage per hit to its base attack, but in this version it doesn't work. In other versions it does, and it's decent enough. If nothing else the added damage pierces defense, so that can be useful.  Oh, well, hello captain, my old nemesis. A lot's changed since we've seen you last. We've got 16 evasion, a fair amount of agility, and some decent goddamn armor. I was legitimately kind of scared when I saw a captain as a random encounter, but that was just out of reflex. Near as I can tell, the most damage it could do to me was 426, and that requires the highest damage roll and every hit connecting. That never happened.  Corpse Rank 6, HP 870, Attack Power 60, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30% I have no idea why this translation called them this; they're not undead. Anyway, they get a fair number of attacks but has the same attack power as the captain. No big deal. EDIT: Prism has the answer! Prism posted:In Japanese, these monsters are 'shineitai' (しんえいたい; FF2 doesn't use kanji for monsters), which is 'bodyguard'. 'Shitai' is one of the ways you can describe a dead body. Someone wasn't reading real carefully.  Oh and damaging water makes a return. In a... cyclone. Yeah, you know what, we've really flown past "sensible" a long time ago.  The game has very few axes in it, one of the biggest downsides of that weapon type, and this is the first upgrade you see in a long time. Of course, you might have gotten one just a few steps earlier because the corpses love dropping these things.  By the way, you can warp out of the tornado. I mostly did this just to see if I could, and also because it's slightly faster than walking out. (Although I still had to heal myself back up and that took time and really I didn't save any time. Well, whatever.) Anyway, once more! After going to the far left staircase on the first floor, we have another branch on the third. A good of thumb in this dungeon is that the staircase closest to you has the goodies  Lamia Rank 6, HP 1,000, MP 60, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 85%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30% As much as the idea of petty revenge excites me, these aren't Lamia Queens, but the lower grade Lamia. Still pretty similar to the queens, in that they have sleep attack and can charm you, but that's not so threatening any more, is it? Worst thing they can do is cast blink on themselves and make them harder to kill. Weirdly, I think they have higher attack and defense than the queen, but fewer hits. Weird.  Golem Rank 7, HP 1,620, Attack Power 100, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 4-100% Golems are basically like beefier slimes: high defense, so magic is the way to go. They're weak to fire and resistant to everything else but lightning. Even with the easy to exploit fire weakness it takes more than one casting because of their HP. So they're kind of annoying and that's about it.   On the top part of the fourth floor, we've got two pieces of heavy armor. Oh woo. Diamond stuff protects against lightning, if you care. From there, back to the third, go up the other flight up stairs, and progress.  And once again, we go up the nearest staircase for goodies.  The defense sword is lovely. Like the main gauche, it gives a substantial evasion bonus, but the defense sword's evasion bonus is roughly equivalent to a higher tier shield. Very nice. Its major drawback is that it has the same nasty magic penalty as most other swords. So it doesn't really replace the main gauche. In the remake, where they got rid of int/soul penalties on weapons and fixed dual wielding, it's drat great.  You know, it's funny how much having protection against status ailments changes things. A group of five wizards would have been really scary, but now it's just annoying, and that's because they keep trying to steal my MP. I guess nothing can kill me after all.    General Rank 7, HP 1,800, Attack Power 120, Attacks 10, Accuracy 95%, Defense 100, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 4-60% No, your eyes do not deceive you: 10 motherfucking attacks.  Yeah, this isn't starting on a great note.  So yeah, this guys are fuckers. On the next round I chose to curse one of them rather than heal, and that ended up being the wrong choice.  Oops. At the very least, the guys aren't random encounters... in this dungeon. They are in the next! I'm... looking forward to that. And the kicker of it is that the diamond armor they're guarding is complete trash. But I'm getting it anyway.  Next time around, I wear the spiral headband (I tend not to wear a full set of armor for evasion purposes) and I land a curse on them. As you can see, it helps. A lot.  They can drop a ton of interesting items, but almost none of them are useful to this character.   Across a dangerous pond there is a staircase leading u- oh, hey, we're in a castle! I guess it's supposed to be like a castle riding on top of the cyclone? Anyway, there's four doors here and none of them have anything. I would have sworn they did, but nope! Waste of time!  Amoeba Rank 6, HP 1,140, Attack Power 100, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 6-30% But of course I had to check. Anyway, Amoebas are mostly notable for being resistant to pretty much everything, and that's about it. Well, they can poison you, but even if I didn't have resistance to poison that's just annoying more than anything. Anyway, go back down to the fourth floor and go right. From there, it's up to the sixth floor again, but in the outside ring.  The wind flute casts an all-target attack spell in combat. Woo.  Green Dragon Rank 7, HP 3,000, MP 190, Attack Power 150, Attacks 7, Accuracy 100%, Defense 150, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 8-40% But it's guarded by a monster anyway! The green dragon has a poison attack, but it's multi-targetted so it's a non-issue.  It has a pretty gnarly attack, though, and it's damned accurate. Still, after the generals it's hardly scary. Like its dragon brethren, it is weak to an element, in this case bolt, but our bolt spell sucks so fisticuffs. Curse, blind, beat it to death, boom.  And it drops another attack item I won't use! Oh nice. Anyway, we go up here and-  Oh hey, it's the emperor! Let's go kill him.     Yeah, I really don't know why he's wasting his time.   Emperor Rank 6, HP 1,290, MP 190, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 4-40% And now we have the climatic showdown with the head cheese himself.  Got your MP!  Got your eyes!  And now the emperor cannot do poo poo to me. Apparently the emperor can use an elixir on himself, but never did. Actually, looking this stuff up, I've now realized items work really, really oddly in this game. When you use them in combat, they're casting a special unique spell, and that's all items including potions et al. That's why the amount that an item can heal you for varies, and why you get better returns if you use it in combat. Elixirs, just so you know, don't actually set your HP/MP to full, but instead casts a spell that heals around 5000 HP/MP, which is always a full heal anyway unless you're crazy about HP grinding. Why do I mention this? Because if the emperor has the elixir ability in his ability list, that means it's coded as a regular spell and costs MP. It makes sense considering the system they're working with, I guess, but it means he can't use elixir when he actually needs it. (Not that it really matters, since the enemies' usage of abilities is strictly reliant on probability and enemies can't "respond" to anything.) Anyway, the emperor is a chump and I beat his rear end down with no difficulty.  And as my reward for saving the world, I get a phoenix down.  : *barf*   And now, dance party! Thanks for following this FF2 LP you guys and-   Of course it's not over. The fact that Stalin ended up being a power hungry jerk who took advantage of a power void to seize control for his own selfish ends is frankly shocking to me.  Okay, I have to give props to the fan translator; that was pretty funny.  In any case, we're at a crossroad. An old friend has betrayed us and taken over the world, which is a bit of a dick move. Can we bring ourself to take him down? ...that would be a question if we knew or cared about this dude one bit. As it stands, the game is just telling us that there's a dramatic crisis. But that will have to wait. For now, we sign off.   Power +4, Agility +1, Vitality +2, Intelligence +1, Soul +3, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Fire +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, Blind +1, Aspil +1, Drain +1, HP +400 Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 01:45
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I thought it was just my lovely internet connection.
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Sep 25, 2014 20:02
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GBA Bonus Run Part 2 Next up on the agenda: getting the Mythril back to Altair.  I'm certain he'll figure out what to do with it. Anyway, after that it's off to Bofsk/Bafsk to destroy the Warship/Dreadnought. (I dunno, are the different names confusing? Does that help?)  Seriously, potions are as precious to this party as agility was for Vivian, at least for now. Honestly, there's not much to say about the cave in Bafsk. It was filler in the original and it's filler here. However, there are two chests.  The first equipment pick up we get!  And now we can start dual wielding.   Just to show that dual wielding, does in fact, work in this version. You may notice that the other weapon's damage is way worse. Well, it is a worse weapon, and it's in Charlie's non-dominant hand. I didn't mention it before, since this doesn't come into play for unarmed character, but FF2 characters have hand preferences. Mostly this just works to screw you over with Layla/Leila and Dennis, since they're the only southpaws. Interestingly there are no ambidextrous characters.  Oh and Dee gets a bow upgrade.  Gosh who could you be?  I gotta mention Borghen also gets some pretty swanky portraits too.   They make a little cutscene here for the Dreadnought taking off. There's a couple of cutscenes like this in the remake. Again, nice but not fancy.  Since there's no reason not to, I'm gonna grab the pass. Yes, killing the captain still works, and I may do that anyway, but in case that turns out to be really difficult I've got another option.  Oh, and Mac got the first magic defense level of the game! I mentioned the growth formula for magic defense has been changed in this game. Vivian's endgame magic defense level of 13 was very unusual for the original FF2; for a full party it's usually level four to six. Magic defense levels much more slowly in this version, but since we'll actually get magic defense from multi-targeted spells, it'll shoot up once we start facing true spell casters. I'd say normal end game magic defense levels in this version is around six to nine.  After Bafsk, I switched Charlie and Mac's weapons around. I had Charlie practice bows and sit in the back for while, mostly just to get Mac to gain a drat evasion level. That happened in the very next battle, as a matter of fact, so I guess that was a good call. Mac got the Longsword. This was just until they reached level 3 in their respective weapon skills, so in practical terms it was just on the way back to Altair. I really don't think I can overemphasize how you fast you gain levels early on. After training with bows, Charlie starts on axes. I'm basically hoping to get him to at least level three in all weapon types, except for shields. (Can't have two evasion tanking characters; have to maintain some challenge in the game.)  All the towns that got attacked by the Dreadnought actually display damage. That's cool. Anyway, it's time to drop off Minwu. See you in Valhalla buddy.  This is just a random aside, but if you mention the Sunfire to Hilda she'll tell you it's in Kashuon, and to go there, but I never realized what a dick move that was before. If you don't talk to the king you'll probably take Hilda's advice, and while you can go to Kashuon, there's be no reason to. This message is just here to waste your time. Anyway, I remembered to get the correct keywords, so it's off to pick up Josef.  He won't live, but then again, who does? Anyway, we pick up his snowcraft.  You remember that if you press A and B button a buncha times while on the boat in FF1 you'd trigger a sliding title puzzle? There isn't a similar minigame in the original FF2, but they added one in the remakes. I mentioned this minigame much earlier, but let's actually look at it.  It's a memory game. Once you complete the game, you get a prize depending on how few mistakes you make.  Not bad! Apparently this minigame only has thirty two different solutions that it cycles through in order, so that means on the thirty second try the game is exactly the same. As you might imagine that's abusable as hell. However, right now we'd just get high end consumables. You can get elixirs, though, that's nothing to sneeze at. However, to get the really nice stuff you have to have level 16 toad. I'd argue that level 16 toad is its own reward. In any case, I don't consider this in-bounds, so I reset.  This is where my party's lower tier equipment starts to really drag me down. Fortunately, icicles are some of the higher defense enemies around, but this may start being a problem.  Otherwise the gang makes it to the snow cavern without issue. It starts pretty smoothly, actually. I only begin with four potions, though, and nothing in this cave drops them, so I still had to be careful.  But here you see the problem. Mac can't make it through the grenade's defense, and the last thing we want is to damage a bomb enemy without killing it. Dee's Fire 2, even multi-targeted, kills them in a hit, but as you can see her MP's at a premium. While I was able to trigger a few MP gains for her, Dee's max is still only 41. That's... not great.  Luckily for me only one of them blew up. That probably should have been my cue to pack this run up and walk out (remember? Teleport's disabled for this dungeon) but I just gave her a potion and kept going.  I forgot Shadows can blind you. I was really annoyed when the vampire thorns kept dropping eye drops instead of potions, but it turns out I shouldn't have been.  More weapons!  Charlie got evasion yay! I did end up going to unarmed for him, since he does more damage that way, but it's a double edged sword (fist?). Remember how fists don't increase evasion percentage? And unlike Vivian he doesn't have seven evade levels to bolster a low percentage, and he didn't start with fifteen agility. I still have him wearing his starting leather armor, but I'm beginning to think that's a mistake. It's minus six evasion for two points of defense. What was I thinking? The armor goes off!  Although maybe if he had his armor on he would have survived that hit. Or maybe if I hadn't been so stingy with the potions. Yeah, this time I did walk out.  Well, first I got all the nearby treasure.  It was protected by a monster. Yeah, probably should have thought this through better. Eh, Dee still has even MP to make the problem go away. Let's hope she has enough to get her and Mac out.  Oh holy crap that's close. Unfortunately, there's only one potion left.  I'm probably going to regret this, but I really didn't wanna wipe here. We are getting the cure tome next dungeon, so hopefully this will break us of our potion reliance. Ha. I am thinking that is an over-optimistic statement.  Whatever, I got back to town. I never showed in the last run, since it doesn't apply to solo character, but in FF2 they dispensed with the clinics and instead have shrines that revive all of your characters for free. That's awesome, although since it revives everyone we have to kill Josef again. Oh well.  And Charlie trains up yet another weapon type. If nothing else, the Mythril Mace is actually a really good weapon for this point of the game. It's crazy, though; that attack with both weapons is just 5 points shy of his unarmed score. Honestly, though, I think I'd rather have the small evasion boost from weapons. The run back through the snow cavern goes very well.  It definitely helps that at least Mac is getting some decent evasion. Level 3 evasion is going to be pretty good for a while at least. I'd say this dungeon has less enemies with magic, so that helps converse resources. That's especially nice I've only got one potion.  Okay, two.  Another magic tome! Dee still gets it.  Guess what Charlie you're training spears now.  drat it Dual Heads this run was going really well. It's almost as though I should have made sure to get more than a potion when trying to run through this dungeon. Fortunately I grab another potion out of a chest so Charlie can be healed out of the red. Of course, soon after I was forced to use my last potion. But I soldiered on!  Nice! The Mythril Shield gets two extra to its evasion bonus, and that bring Mac's evasion percent from 39 to 53! Not bad at all! If I take off his armor, that gives him 59%!  Not nearly as nice. While curse would be very good to have right now, this sword is just too inaccurate to bother with. Accuracy was another thing Vivian didn't worry about; fists start at 80% accuracy. Weapons start much lower, around 40% to 60%. The game adds the character's strength to the accuracy score, so at least Mac has decent accuracy. My party was running a little ragged, but I was feeling good about my chances of finishing this. One more floor!  Oh, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention this little gem:    Anyway, Charlie got the Silver Cuirass. He's by far my most fragile member, and the plus ten defense is a pretty big jump in defense for this party. It's unfortunate about the evasion hit, but it's worth it in this case.  Fight time!  I got Dee's Blizzard up to level 2, so she's doing decent damage. Again, they boosted this monster's HP, so it'll take longer than two rounds, but I can make it through this fight.  But then I have Mac use the Antarctic Wind you get in this dungeon, just to make sure. I'm not taking chances.  Now we've got the Goddess Bell, time to walk out. Just one more enemy.  Oh my god gently caress you Borghen.   Go away.  And here you go: the flimsy excuse as to why Josef has to be flattened by a rock.  And least this rock's a lot more impressive. Anyway, we know the drill here; Josef goes squish, and the party are assholes don't tell his daughter, despite being in town. And Charlie manages to survive the way back. Go Charlie. Next time, I get the cure tome. The beautiful, beautiful Cure tome.      
Camel Pimp fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Oct 13, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 01:14
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