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KataraniSword posted:If you split hairs, there is one more reason to bother with shields: It's the only way for a character to not take a turn. As Chokes noted, you have to actually perform an action to get statboosts, so it's easy - especially with out-of-depth monsters and/or mechs in the party - to wipe out the enemies before everyone gets a chance to even act. Similarly, gains in the North Cave are awful because Mr. S does all of the heavy lifting. Also, you can actually train defense with shields. Humans have ridiculously low defense growth rates, but for mutants gaining defense isn't any harder than agility or mana. Since mutants have such limited inventory space it can help offset the defense lost from sacrificing armor slots for weapons, but mutants are likely to be the slowest party members so it's kind of a pain to wait a whole round for them to wave their shield around before ending the combat.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:57
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Asura United posted:Wasn't it the same in the first FFL game too? I don't think you said it in that LP; that's why I mentioned it. Nah, in FFL1 powers just came and went randomly. I think you could even have multiple powers change at once. Also, they started with 4 dummy slots for powers right from the start, so you could only ever equip 4 items. In FFL2 you can load up a mutant with 7 items right at the start and they'll only ever have 1 power, although that means their starting power will be overwritten by the first power they get and you'll never be able to save any powers.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:21
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On the other hand, mutant powers are the only mechanic that differentiates them from humans, who are otherwise considerably stronger. If you want someone who has lots of equipment space and is good at magic, the answer is actually a human instead of a neutered mutant.
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Oct 19, 2014 15:00
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Eh, he's got a robot. He's set. I am a bit disappointed that of all the "is X, but thinks (s)he's Y!" character suggestions nobody submitted a human that desperately wanted to be a mutant. There have been several FFL2 LPs in this subforum and I don't think anyone has shown off what humans can do with spellbook training.
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Oct 21, 2014 03:16
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Monsters have easy access to great stats and abilities, but natural abilities are noticeably weaker and have more limited uses than equipped items, so while they perform well they are never quite as awesome as they look on paper. They make up for this by having the meat system be gameable enough to get well ahead of the power curve from a very early point, but the meat system is tighter than FFL1 and there's a cap on how far you go, and the further you get in the game the less of an advantage they get. Mutants get a combination of abilities and equipment, but they have the worst stats in the game. They can't use powers as well as monsters can and they can't use equipment as well as humans can. Their silver lining is their ability to acquire endgame-level powers much earlier than monsters can (which can even potentially let them abuse sequence-breaking glitches.) Robots can equip items and it's easy for them to pump their stats to total shitwrecker levels. For physical attacks and single-target damage they utterly blow everything else out of the water, and if you're patient you can glitch them to be even more powerful. But their Mana is hard-capped at 0, so they have several liabilities: they can't use spellbooks, they take lots of damage from magic, and they're tough to heal. Humans have no easy shortcuts to power, but their stat growth is respectable enough and they can use all the game's best equipment--including spellbooks, which lets them beat mutants and monsters at their own game. They start out slower than other character types but by the lategame they can easily be the most powerful attackers out of anyone. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 15:22
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UmbreonMessiah posted:My 99 mana Mutant and ultimate monsters would like to have a word with your staff-wielding fleshbag It takes ~80 mana for the best spellbook to outdamage the most powerful monster, and humans reach that point faster than mutants do. I guess if you grind your way to 99 mana mutants can tie humans, but that either takes RNG abuse or way too much free time.
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Oct 21, 2014 15:33
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JustJeff88 posted:Chokes, I wouldn't mind at some point if you talked about how to "level properly" in this game. I still have my FFL1 cart and my saved game from about 15 years ago, and I bought a GBASP101 and FFL2&3 in part due to your LP of the first game of the trilogy. I had an old-style GBA, but this one has the really good backlighting (and is black!). I had my problems with character advancement in 1 as you did with Rezen, though not quite as bad, but I've had a vague desire to play Legends 2 for a while and this LP is making me want to start it up even more. He's already mentioned the most important thing: you have to make sure that all your humans and mutants get at least 1 action before combat ends. Which is problematic, since robots and monsters are the faster-developing character types and they tend to have higher agility. Also, many guns and other high tech weapons do not train any attributes--leave them to your robots, because humans and mutants will suffer in the long term. Mutants have pretty low stat growth in general, particularly in strength. I also recommend giving humans and mutants dibs on Magi early on since they develop more slowly than robots/monsters.
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Oct 23, 2014 04:42
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Chokes McGee posted:We also rejigger our magi lineup a bit. Being single-minded is usually a good thing in RPGs (so long as you maintain party balance!), so we stick each of our guys with their bread-and-butter magi. Roy gets Defense, Heather gets Power, and Zero gets Mana. Sara, meanwhile, gets the Fire magi. This works as an elemental buff; you boost the damage on your fire spells while giving yourself O-Fire. As far as I know, you don't get X-Ice from equipping it, either. What a deal! It gets even better!  The code for the elemental boost is bugged, so Fire and Thunder magi actually boost all attack spells including non-elemental ones (Poison and Ice magi boost fire spells only.) It's nice having what amounts to 3 copies of the Mana magi--Fire/Thunder magi don't apply to healing or physical mana-based weapons, but those aren't what you're using Mana magi for in the first place.The resistances mostly work as intended, except Thunder and Ice are flipped. Whoops.
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Oct 25, 2014 21:54
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Chokes McGee posted:With all this in mind, it's possible to get levelling down to a science. If it's a single enemy/group, stopper your powerful guys with shields and let the weaker members use their weapons. After that, you dispose of what's left however you like—preferably with magic, so you can get a shot at increasing mana as well. You're working too hard, unfortunately. FFL2 just keeps track of your most recent action, so only the last attack you use counts for stat ups--trying to drag out the fight is pointless as long as everyone has a turn. The fastest way to grind is to get your slowest characters to wipe everything out at the end of the first round. Conveniently, mutants generally have the lowest agility and (early on) the best at killing lots of enemies at once, which makes it really easy to train their mana while training your humans in whatever. gatesealer posted:Love the LP so far, but as a quick side note. You can actually level up defense. It mostly involves just using a shield in combat and then you get a chances at increasing your defense. Mutants have a better chance of this than humans do. In the game I started up my mutant already got up to 15 natural defense by world 3. The trick is that you need to take off all your other armor so that your chance increases since the math includes your current defense rating with armor included to determine your chance (low defense = higher chance of a level). Mutants don't just have a "better chance"--for humans, defense gains start at something like 1-in-200. For mutants it's just another stat. Note that, due to a bug, mutants' strength growth is also zeroed out the way defense is for humans. Hope you weren't planning to rely on Zero's strength in the long run!
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Oct 31, 2014 15:08
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Chokes McGee posted:Hmm. I swear I had one combat round where Zero used both bow and magic and increased agility. Maybe I just have the brain issues. FFL2 does things to people. There are people who will swear that their mutants gained abilities that they don't have access to, or that just plain don't exist. ...and it's buggy enough that there's an outside chance they could be right.
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Oct 31, 2014 15:53
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gatesealer posted:yeah, unless you read it somewhere or for whatever reason gave your non-robot characters a shield to use you would probably never figure it out. There are some less lovely defensive items later on that might lead you to discover it, at least if you wind up giving them to a mutant. And yeah, I don't think it's possible at any point to equip enough armor to break the leveling curve. Especially if you're a mutant and only running 2 pieces of armor.
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Oct 31, 2014 16:58
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Shwqa posted:This is the site I have been using for all my information. It does contain spoilers so be wary. http://www.shenafu.com/ffl2/help.php That guy is pretty smart and knows more about the game than I do but that site is really ancient. People have decompiled the leveling algorithms since then and the actual chances to gain stats depend on a comparison between a character's stats and the enemies' level (which is probably why he came up with the numbers he did: high agility/low mana is a very typical human stat spread, so if you load up a save you will gain mana very very quickly against advanced enemies but not so much agility.) In general: -Humans have all-around better stat growth than mutants -Mutant agility growth supposed to be on par with mutant defense/mana/HP but due to a bug it's somewhat slower -Human defense and mutant strength have near-zero growth (on purpose for humans, by accident for mutants) Mutants' stat deficiency is compounded by the fact that new mutant powers preempt stat gains--humans don't have that much of an advantage (except in strength), but each character can only get one thing per battle and if a mutant rolls a new power you don't even get a chance at raising a stat.
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Oct 31, 2014 20:42
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Chokes McGee posted:Besides being a cute strappy number that matches Heather's outfit perfectly, the Geta shoes also increase strength. All giant gear increases strength, actually. Toss it all on one character with power magi equipped, and they will become a juggernaut of heavy bladed weapons. (Just gotta keep that Agility stat up so they can still connect!) In addition, shoes count as an entirely separate piece of armor. A fully armored character can have a helmet, armor, gauntlets, and shoes. Oh, and a shield, I guess. I have to admit, I'm really warming up to shields in FFL2. They have a near 100% block rate against some fairly powerful abilities like Dissolve and Horn. That alone makes them way less crappy than FFL1. Of course, this invalidates my guarantee from the first chapter, which means I'm now obligated to refund your money. Giant armor goes a long way towards patching up the deficiencies of strength-heavy humans early on: you have lower initiative, accuracy, and evasion than an agility-focused character, but you gib enemies on contact. It synergizes extremely well with whips, which do damage based on strength but train agility: due to the massive boosts you don't need to improve your strength any (and would have a hard time training it if you tried, since the game looks at your current STR and assumes you're way overleveled), so you can take full advantage of your towering strength while building up some badly-needed agility. If you're made of money you can even load up an agility-based character with giant gear and get more damage out of whips than you could with rapiers and sabres (especially when you consider Magi: you only get 1 set of speed Magi, so if you have two speedsters you can give one of them Power Magi + giant gear + whip.) Mutants can do without spellbooks, but the books hit a lot harder than the equivalent mutant abilities. If you can afford spellbooks it's often better to focus on utility powers and murder things with the spellbooks.
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Nov 6, 2014 16:05
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Asura United posted:True, it's hard to get a good monster if you don't know what you're doing, but later on in the game, pretty much any monster will be a boon to the team. Just like in FFL1, they're all crazy good in one way or another: massive stats, party-wide attacks, great resists, etc. The problem is that unlike FFL1, monsters' physical attacks do not scale; even the mighty Bash is eclipsed by weapons as early as Ashura's World. So it's pretty much magic-using monsters or bust. The good news is that the evolution mechanic is much more systematized than FFL1's, so it's a lot simpler to keep good monsters with minimal effort.
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Nov 17, 2014 04:16
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Even if you had mutants/robots/monsters in your party, though, there's no way you'd be able to make it through a dungeon before your attack abilities ran out of uses. There's no guarantee that the capricious whims of the Internet wouldn't throw away all your weapons though (you probably wouldn't have very many to begin with due to the chore of buying and equipping items.) UmbreonMessiah posted:That's funny, because I can't really think of a single state in which this game would be unwinnable, other than Twitch playing it of course. This is not the kind of game that lends itself to random movement and chaotic input. Other than the premise alone though, the game always gives you a way to fix mistakes if you're willing to take that path. Any point where 1) you have no attacks and 2) you have no way to acquire attacks without winning a battle is an unwinnable game state. You'd have to be trying pretty hard, but it's possible. Generally speaking to be truly unwinnable it has to be right before a boss/mini-boss, since if you can run from battles long enough to make it to a treasure chest (or NPC event) you might theoretically have a chance. If you have 4 monsters it's possible to evolve them all to the point where they can't kill anything, at which point you can no longer get any meat to evolve them to anything else; there are very few points in the game where you can do anything in this situation.
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Nov 26, 2014 16:36
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Last update, there was some speculation about unwinnable states in FFL2. The Big Eye pictured here has no damaging attacks--its only combat power is Gaze, which just inflicts paralysis. A party of 4 Big Eyes has no way to win battles and can't acquire any new attacks except by eating meat, which requires them to win battles, so if there are any forced encounters between you and an NPC joining you're stuck. (This is not likely to happen by accident, though, since as soon as you get one Big Eye you are probably going to shovel the first meat you find into it so that you can get something, anything, more useful than a Big Eye.)
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Dec 8, 2014 15:40
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Chokes McGee posted:Honestly, there's multiple ways to play through the game—it's just the degree of difficulty that changes. Theoretically speaking, if you have a good armor loadout and decent agility, you can line up a team of Strength-based sluggers and just take the initial hits. It's not fun, but it's possible. Most monsters' physical attacks can barely scratch level-appropriate armor, and most magic attacks can be blocked with resistances from equipment (which you get access to by the time they become common.) So for most of the game it's perfectly possible to struggle through with under-optimized characters without much difficulty, except for a few dangerous attacks like Dissolve/Touch, or mid-late game humanoid enemies that start busting out high power weapons. Until you reach a boss, that is...
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Dec 10, 2014 19:28
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I dunno exactly how terrible Revenge is in FFL1 because I simply never bothered. Revenge/Counter in FFL2 is a... niche tactic. It's one way to leverage a strength-based build--counterattacks deal twice as much damage as you take, which is a losing proposition since the enemy party usually has much more total health than you, but you do get a bit of bonus damage from having high strength and the counterattack can't miss. At this point in the game you can stick a high strength/high defense character (e.g. a tricked out robot or a human in giant gear) in front and have them use Revenge or Counter and they will flatten everything that attacks without taking too much damage. Unfortunately, it's still not very reliable because you can't predict which enemies are going to be attacking your lead character with physical attacks.
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Dec 18, 2014 16:30
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I'm sorry, but this whole punny derail has resulted in zero laughs for me. As in the number zero, signifying the concept of nothingness, which also happens to be the name of the character Zero.
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Dec 23, 2014 15:11
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Chokes McGee posted:Actually I'm a vegetarian It's ok, we can get you some flower meat. Or maybe rock meat, if you're against eating anthropomorphic plants.
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Jan 10, 2015 07:13
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Chokes McGee posted:It's double the damage of the attack before your defense check. That's not quite how it works--Roy has a lot of armor strapped on, so double the pre-defense damage would have been way higher. It's been a while, but I vaguely remember the formula being something like "deal Strength * 5 or Damage Taken * 2 + Strength, whichever is greater." Roy has the Revenge Sword and a Musket for a total of 24 strength, he took 230 damage, 230 * 2 + 24 = 484.
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Jan 12, 2015 16:08
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Chokes McGee posted:Well. The reason I think it's pre-defense check is because, off camera, Roy blocked a Manticore attack with his defense alone and still did 2x damage back. The math may be off, but I feel the point about defense and immunities still stand. You can end up taking zero damage, wasting an enemy attack, and really pushing their face in, all in one move. I agree, it just relies on having a high enough strength to make it stick. At 24 strength a zero-damage attack would still take 120 damage in return, but if he had a couple more +str pieces of equipment he could be dishing out 250-300 damage easily while still taking hits like a tank.
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Jan 12, 2015 16:21
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Seyser Koze posted:The best censorship is still coming, though. It's not censorship if it improves on the source material in every way imaginable.
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Jan 15, 2015 02:08
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Monsters are low effort but they require lots of knowhow. It's pretty easy to figure out how to build an effective robot and you can get decent human/mutant characters with sheer effort but a new player is not likely to stumble into optimal monsters without prior knowledge.
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Jan 25, 2015 16:16
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Monsters for dummies: Pick a Baby-D at the start, never ever eat any of the meats below. Mushrooms Slimes (includes viruses and cells) Boulders Octopi Spiders Frogs Lizards Jaguars Flies Goblins Wyrms Skeletons As long as you avoid those specific meats you can eat whatever you want and you'll generally stay within the group of monsters that includes dragons, sprites, and most of the other good poo poo.
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Jan 26, 2015 01:07
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Venus's O-Damage doesn't affect physical attacks, actually. O-Damage covers elemental damage types: fire, ice, lightning, poison (includes the status effect, since poison status and poison damage are covered by the same bitflag), and quake. O-Weapon usually gets lumped in with status effects for some reason, which later bosses do have--but neither Venus nor Ashura does, making them vulnerable to instadeath petrification.
the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 17:49
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Sorry, figured by Venus it would be fair game. Later bosses are obstacles of a different nature so it's usually Venus that people use it for, if they don't have the natural stats to brute force it or petrification abilities to cheese it.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:17
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akkristor posted:So if you put the Dragon Armor on Roy, won't that O-Damage negate a LOT of his problems from having a 0 mana stat? Yup. It's especially nice because robots can equip as much armor as they want--a human or mutant in dragon armor is going to be awfully squishy by the endgame, but robots can just wear another more advanced armor to patch up their defense. They'll still be wrecked by nonelemental magic and get frustratingly little healing out of cure spells though.
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Feb 21, 2015 17:14
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KataraniSword posted:Three mecs and a monster is actually how speedrunners do it. There's a handful of monsters that come pre-loaded with Teleport, so the trick is getting one of those monsters and then letting your mecs do all the heavy lifting. Note that you can't legally get any monsters with Teleport until well after the dragon race, so you need to break the game even harder just to get to the point that you can do this. Usually by straight up data corruption glitches 
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Feb 25, 2015 20:40
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Sadly, this kind of voodoo is not always unheard of when working on very limited platforms like the Gameboy; tons of glitches in older games involve memory manipulation because it's easier to cram x bytes of code in if you just ignore data safety and weird edge cases, if it works for 90% of your users, that would probably be considered good enough, it's not a life-or-death situation. A big part of why 8-bit games are capable of failing so spectacularly is that assembly languages are, by their nature, heavily overloaded and context-sensitive. In a higher level language like C++, if you have a common instruction like while (x) it is unlikely that you could make the compiler accidentally interpret this as a variable or a number. In assembly language, however, if you have a byte storing a given value it might be an instruction or it might be a memory address or it might just be a number--and not only are all of these uses identical and indistinguishable except by context, the exact same byte in memory may be interpreted in different ways at different times.
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Feb 27, 2015 04:32
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There's actually a very interesting angle behind the banana ban that will be apparent later.
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Mar 13, 2015 06:07
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Krumbsthumbs posted:Yay its Hana! She's... uh... Two gimmick weapons on par with first world starting equipment and a charm ability. So, basically a slightly better version of Lynn.
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Mar 28, 2015 16:07
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Samurai Bow hits an entire group for 700-800. Magnate has O-Weapon, so he was taking half damage. It's one of the best weapons in the game, and you get a very limited number of shots.
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May 9, 2015 15:14
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Chokes McGee posted:... RS3 is a helluva drug. It'll gently caress you up worse than bananas.
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May 11, 2015 16:00
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FFL3 is to SaGa what Mystic Quest is to Final Fantasy (they were directed by the same guy, even.) Shallow gameplay and story, but a lot of enthusiasm.
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May 11, 2015 22:07
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The Nasty Dungeon is interesting in that it's basically a preview of the next few dungeons. The treasures and enemies are almost identical to what you'll be seeing in the next couple dungeons. So in many ways it's easier to skip the Nasty Dungeon the first time through--you wind up against the same enemies either way, so you can skip the hellish slog and fight them in a regular dungeon instead. The brick wall comes later. The final areas ramp the difficulty up immensely without much increase in resources (for most characters.) Getting a second set of endgame equipment from Nasty Dungeon (and the stats you get from trekking through it) becomes a lot more important at that point.
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Jun 13, 2015 21:59
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UmbreonMessiah posted:I have to hand it to you Chokes, you really are making the most out of the character loadouts you have. But I don't get how. What you've done with Heather should easily double your play time, yet you're making it pretty quick. Nah. Humans are just that good 
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Jun 16, 2015 14:45
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I have to tip my
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Jul 2, 2015 15:20
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Starhawk64 posted:Wow, that was a dick move by the game. How badly depowered is the party now? I think with maximum MAGI you're looking at something like a hidden +15 to the stat they boost, so considering how weak most of the party is... pretty badly, really. On the other hand, you get NPC buddies during the endgame to help you out, so the game's not completely cruel.
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Jul 2, 2015 16:15
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Chokes McGee posted:Oh my gods. I think the game gives you an out at this point and makes the bone it throws you available in all item shops, although I can't say for 100% certain.
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Jul 3, 2015 07:20
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