Final Fantasy Sequence

Okay so, this entry is going to be a little shorter than most, but I wanted to make sure I talked at length about what transpires immediately after returning from Dist. I wonder how much of a role this one sequence played in FF2 not making it stateside for years and years?

Anyway, the rebel base is abuzz. Hilda is acting strange!

After checking on her in her private chambers, the rest of the party leaves, leaving Frionel alone with Hilda. In her bed. The screen goes a sensual scarlet. Then…

Bwa ha ha! Turns out it isn’t Hilda at all! It’s a Queen Lamia, posing as the princess. In Greek mythology, a Lamia is half woman half snake, although as far as I know she doesn’t posess powers of beguiling or shapeshifting, making her appearence here as a Hilda doppleganger a bit odd.

In any case, the rest of the party rescues Frionel, and Layla admonishes him.

The most amusing thing about this entire interaction isn’t seeing how Square dealt with a sex scene with their limited NES technical and artistic resources. Although that is pretty darn amusing.

No, the most amusing element is considering Frionel’s position. Hilda, without any preamble, asks him to come to bed. Without hesitating, he complies. Things are going to be awkward, once the rebels figure out where the real Hilda is…

Next: The Arena

After traveling to the island of Dist to seek out the help of the Dragoons, in my first random battle I encountered a large group of nasties, including a WzOgre and and two Land Turtles. Welcome to Dist, indeed:

After reaching the castle, I ran into a child and her mom. It turns out the rebel’s fears were correct – the empire did need wipe out the Dragoons. The woman’s husband was the last one living, and he didn’t make it.

I also learned that the final Hiryuu is also not long for this world. I’m not exactly sure what a Hiryuu is – the game isn’t quite clear on this point. It seems like they’re an intelligent race of animal-creatures, similar to a dragon, that the Dragoons ride (or rode, I suppose I should say).

In any case, we need dead Dragoon’s pendant to communicate with the dying creature.

The pendant can be found (somewhat morbidly) on a corpse after a brief jaunt inside a cave to the North.

With pendant in hand, players can now understand the language of the dying Hiryuu. He (she?) asks players to submerge an egg into the Spring of Life, deep inside the Northern Cave. The Hiryuu also drops a bomb – one Dragoon named Richard WASN’T killed off, and is on a journey to discover Ultima, the forbidden magic.

Back in the Northern Cave, the enemies didn’t present my party too much trouble. Players do encounter groups of 1-2 Gigas on a regular basis, which can be pretty nasty. They serve as a great example of FF2′s very steep leveling curve. Just a bit ago, on the warship, running into the Gigas meant certain death. But now they are regular random encounter fodder.

At the bottom of the cave, I discovered the Spring. But, of course it is being guarded by a pack of Chimera. Their motivation for wanting to kill me? Unclear. But, this egg wasn’t going to submerge itself, so the Chimera had to be cut down.

The final Hiryuu passed away while I was off fulfilling his final wish. But with the egg, lies (feint) hope for the race.

If this little adventure seems tertiary to the central plot… that’s because it largely is, at this point. But (spoiler alert!) both the Dragoons and the Hiryuu will be back later in the game, making this detour more relevant.

Next: Seduction, Final Fantasy Style

After the Warship is destroyed, Phin’s king (whom as you undoubtedly remember has been badly ailing) passes away. He puts Gordon in charge – a decision I find quite odd considering Hilda has been ably leading the rebels since the game’s beginning. At least it gets him out of the party.

The King’s last instructions are to travel to the distant last of Dist, and enlist the help of the Dragoons.

The pirate Layla (often translated as Raina) helpfully offers to ferry players there. What a nice lady, right?

NOT RIGHT. Halfway through the journey her and her pirates attempt an ambush of our heroes. Luckily, just like FF1, the gigantic enemy party of eight pirates is easily defeated. After the attempted robbery, Guy does the obvious thing and… invites Layla to join the heroes?

I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me either.

An interesting aside: Layla is the only playable FF2j character that is left-handed. So unlike everyone else, she must be equipped with a weapon in her left hand and a shield in her right, not the other way around. A nice little detail.

Anyway, with Layla in the party players are finally allowed to sail around FF2j’s oceans at will. Freedom!

I took this opportunity to make a trip to Mystidia, a city players normally don’t visit until MUCH later in the game. It is surrounded by extremely tough enemies, but with a boat players can come to shore nearby, and (hopefully) only get in one random battle along the way. With luck, a Run attempt will be successful.

So why go to all this trouble? Simple. Mystidia has loads and loads of weapons, armor, and magic that players aren’t supposed to have access to until later in the game.

I did buy some advanced equipment, but the main thing I was after was a copy of the Change spell for all my party members. Pricy, but very worth it. Casting Change on an enemy causes your HP/MP totals to be swapped with theirs.

So… what’s so great about that? Well, remember when I explained that players only earn HP & MP if they lose more than half of theirs in a single battle? Change makes this easy. With the spells learned, I traveled back to FF2j’s starting town, and began casting Change on the early-game Goblins and Hornets. Bam – I would go from 1000 HP to 6, and from 100 MP to 0. After the battle, that character would get a whole bevy of stat-ups: More MP, more HP, more Magic Power, more Vitality, etc.

The downside is that, like all other magic, Change starts at level 1. At level 1, it misses almost every single time. It probably has a hit rate of less than 3%, I would guess. And like all other magic, it must be cast 100 times in order to increase to Lev. 2. But, this pain is worth it. Once each character’s Change spell is a high enough level that it hits more often than it misses, it is possible to level-up your party at will.

Even with low-level Change, I doubled my party’s HP & MP in one session:

Before...

...and after!

Cheap? Maybe. But my counter-arguement is that FF2j itself is cheap. These are the kind of tactics you need to employ to stay ahead of the game’s curve. The alternativ is to grind for literally dozens of hours.

Anyway, with this little Mystidian detour out of the way, it was time to get back on track, and track down the Dragoons…

Next: The Last Dragoon

Just south of Kashuon lies a forest with a special inhabitant: Chocobos! Players can catch one and ride it on the overworld to avoid random battles. But unfortunately it runs away when players dismount. When riding, the first (very repetitive) version of the chocobo music can be heard.

It’s a good thing I nabbed a chocobo when I did, because the Warship has landed in a very, very remote region of FF2j’s world. Walking there on foot would be a major pain. But with my feathered friend, finding the Warship was a snap.

The Warship is crawling with Paramekian captains, but like other areas of FF2j, they leave you alone if you don’t speak to them. I quickly made my way through the maze-like bowels of the ship, rescuing the captured Cid and Hilda along the way.

The Warship is a very large dungeon, full of very tough enemies that are fond of using poison, dark, paralyze, party-wide magic, and other nastiness. To make matters worse, I took a wrong turn and had to backtrack to the warship’s entrance & back again, meaning I essentially walked through the entire dungeon three times!

Eventually I made my way to the engine room, and hurled the Sun Flame in. The Dark Knight made another appearance, followed by a very nice (for the NES) animation of the Warship exploding. Success!

Despite this major victory, the rebels still have much to do if they hope to defeat the Empire once and for all…

Next: Mystidia Pit Stop

With the Goddess Bell in hand thanks to my adventure in the Snow Cave, I could finally head to Kashuan and obtain the Sun Flame, and bring down the Warship once and for all.

Just inside the Kashuan gates, my party ran into Gordon. Gordon is a bit of a coward my party ran into earlier in the game. He has a major self-confidence problem, but to by frank, his lack of belief in himself is probably well-deserved. I found him to be largely useless as a party member. When he joins he has 64 HP, compared to the 200+ the rest of my party had.

The Kashuan castle dungeon isn’t too tough… until the final boss. The R. Soul guarding the Egil Torch is just plain unreasonably tough. He’s immune to ALL magic, leaving physical attacks as the only option. The problem is… my physical attacks did next to nothing. A normal attack would do about 10 damage, and a critical strike about 30 damage. The boss has over 500 health.

I’m not sure why my attacks were so weak. With FF2j’s open-ended leveling system, it is hard to say. I probably needed a higher weapon skill to do more damage. In the end, I was able to heal faster than R. Soul could deal damage, and I whittled down his 500+ health bar 10 HP at a time, over many, many turns.

My party (finally) had the Sun Flame in hand they needed to destroy the warship

Next: Finally, the Warship

Things are not looking good for the rebellion. The Warship my party was supposed to sabotage was finished ahead of schedule, and is wreaking havoc on the free cities of the south. It is only a matter of time before Altea, the home of the secret rebel base, is targeted.

But it turns out some hope yet remains. Players learn from Cid that the Warship runs on Sun Flame, which is quite unstable. Putting Sun Flame in the engine = disaster for the Warship. After that, the exposition gets… complex. I learned that to get the Sun Flame, I need the Egil Torch, from the town of Kashuon. But to get to Kashuon, I need the Goddess Bell. And to get THAT, I’ll need some help traveling through the Snow Cave, far to the North.

Bottom line? We have a good old fashioned RPG quest daisy chain on our hands.

The first step in the chain is to get help from Josef, in Salmando, who is familiar with the Snow Cave. Josef is much more polite to the heroes this time around. As he should be, since we saved his daughter’s life back in Semite Cave.

The Snow Cave itself is a bit of a nasty dungeon. It’s the first time in all of FF2j that I actually felt a little heat from the battles, and thought I might not make it. Many enemies cast DARK, which made my party members miss much more often, and I lacked the ability to cure it. So they were stuck with the status ailment for the entire back half of the dungeon.

On the dungeon’s final floor, I ran into a room of friendly beavers. Oddly, Guy can understand what one of them is saying. The beaver shows the party the way into the Snow Cave’s final rooms.

The beast protecting the needed Goddess Bell is a giant turtle – an Adamanti. It is immune to almost everything but Ice Magic, which is odd, considering he’s in the Snow cave. Nonetheless, I came prepared, and blasted him away. Time to make my escape, right?

Not quite… it turns out Borgan, the Duke to betrayed Phin and joined the empire, followed our players! A battle (what else?) ensues

Borgan is a pushover, especially after the very tough Adamanti. But even so, escape from the Snow Cave isn’t so simple. A boulder is jarred loose, nearly killing the entire party. Josef sacrifices himself to allow our three heroes to escape. And thus, players witness the first of many Final Fantasy deaths. I did the honorable thing and let Nellie, his daughter, know what happened.

Next: Stealing the Sun Flame

With the Mithril obtained, I could now get some much-needed mithril equipment for my heroes. I was unfortunately still forced to buy it, however. It hardly seems fair, considering that I was the one that recovered the damn stuff. Such is the life of an RPG hero, I suppose.

Talking to Hilda moves the plot along. A Dark Knight has risen through Paramekia’s ranks, and is is in charge of the empire’s vaguely Deathstar-esque warship. FF2j borrows much from the original Star Wars, I’m learning. The heroes’ task? Destroy the Warship by any means necessary.

The Warship is being constructed near Bofsk, another city the Empire has subjugated and occupied. Talking to townspeople reveals that the only way on is with a pass. But a rebel spy tells the heroes they can probably sneak on, via the sewers underneath the city. Time for another tried and true RPG tradition: a sewer dungeon!

After making my way through the sewers, I came face to face with… the dark knight himself! It turns out the warship is already finished, and is fully armed & operational! (See what I did there, Star Wars fans?)

The Warship flies off to wreak havoc on the nearby town of Poft, while our heroes are stuck in Bofsk with no way to help.

Next: Snow Cave Sacrifice

After powering up my party (I considered all the self-inflicted damage to be sparring), it was time to join the rebellion in earnest, and find the Mithril Hilda is after.

First, I picked up fellow rebel Minh as a fourth party member. He’s a powerful White Mage which a very long list of helpful spells that raise physical or magic defense, increase dodge rate, cure poison, and plenty more. This step is not optional – Minh has the canoe I need to cross the lake to the next town.

In the town of Palm, I paid some pirates to ferry me North to Poft – the landmass I need to be on to retrieve the Mithril. This is another clever little bit of design. By using a ferry, FF2j moves players around the world map, getting them where they need to go, without actually giving them the full freedom they would have if they were given a ship of their own.

In Poft, players meet Cid, the first of many Final Fantasy Cids. He owns a great airship, and will take players to almost any city they want to go. For a price, of course. In truth all his current stops are easily reached on foot, so I opted to walk.

Farther to the North, I eventually found the snow-covered town of Salamando, nestled in the mountains. Little details like the North being snowy do a lot to make the world of FF2j feel more like a proper place, when compared to FF1.

Salamando, like all other cities in the region, is occupied by the Empire. Most of its citizens are being forced to slave away in a nearby mine in Semite Cave, in search of Mithril. Jackpot! I now knew where I needed to go. I also ran into Josef in Salamando. He’ll become an important character later on, but for now he doesn’t have much to say, other than to make fun of our heroes a bit.

Now… time to conquer FF2j’s first propert dungeon: Semite Cave! Thanks to my powered-up party it didn’t pose much of a challenge, besides some Slimes which are immune to everything but Ice.

The dungeon is considerably more detailed and intricate than anything in FF1. Little details like doors and bridges go a long way towards making the cave feel more like a real place. Another nice touch is wading through shallow water on the cave’s lower levels.

Halfway through the dungeon I liberated the Semite Cave slaves. Among them was Josef’s daughter, Nellie. Hopefully he’ll be a little more polite to me next time we meet.

At the end of the cave, we run into a Paramekian Sargeant, guarding the Mithril. With just 140 HP he was no match for my beefed up party, and fell quickly. Mithril procured! Dungeon completed.

Next: Paramekia’s Technological Terror

After completing the game’s warm-up quest, FF2j begins in earnest. Hilda asks players to find and recover some Mithril, in order to better equip the rebels. I decided now would be a good time to acquaint myself with FF2j’s leveling system, and power up my heroes a bit.

To describe FF2j’s character advancement system as “different” is an understatement. The game has no levels, and no experience points. Instead, characters slowly improve in battle at whatever they do the most. So using Swords a lot improves the Sword weapon skill and physical damage. Using Magic a lot increases total MP and magic damage, and so on.

The system is a good idea, in theory. For one, it allows for much greater flexibility. You can make your Frionel a sword-wielding bruiser, a White Mage, or anything in between. It also allows for much more frequent, but smaller character improvements. No massive leap from level 3 to level 4, like FF1. Instead, you’ll gain a little HP here, a little Agility there, etc.

But… the truth is FF2j’s leveling system is broken in some pretty fundamental ways, and simply isn’t as much fun as a traditional RPG system.

The biggest issue is that the formulas for determining skill-ups are:

1) very strict.
2) Broken & easily abusable.

Character HP is a perfect example. The formula for HP increases is simple. If a character loses more than half of their HP in a single battle, they get an HP increase. The problem is that early-game enemies are very weak, so you’ll never sustain enough damage in a single battle to raise HP. So players have to resort to attacking their own party members (yes, in FF2j you can now target your own party).

So, for literally over an hour, I got into random battles around FF2j’s starting town, beat the stuffing out of my own characters, and watched as their HP skyrocketed. My heroes went from ~50 HP to over 200-300HP in no time flat.

With HP and MP-ups assessed on a per battle basis, not a cumulative basis, if you play FF2j “normally,” losing a few HP and spending a few MP in each battle, neither HP nor MP will ever increase. To earn an increase, you need to lose a large chunk of either in a single fight. This encourages abusing the system.

Not all stats are like this. Weapon skills and magic spells level up individually, and cumulatively. Strike with a sword 100 times, and that character is a better sword user. Use a Fire spell 100 times, and the spell becomes Fire 2, Fire 3, etc. (all the way up to Fire 16).

But the fact that so many skills-ups are assessed on a per-battle basis means that random battles often feel like they are accomplishing nothing. This makes FF2j often feel much more frustrating to play than FF1. Example: I run through a lengthy dungeon and get into, let’s say, 40 random battles. None of those 40 battles are even building towards meaningful skill-ups. Maybe my Black Mage took Bolt4 closer to Bolt5, but that’s it. The bottom line is that EXP systems work because the player knows that no random battle is pointless.

Additionally, since the character advancement process is so flexible and fluid, players not using a guide are almost guaranteed to get themselves into major trouble, without any warning. It is common for a stat to be unnecessary for hours of game time, but to suddenly become essential. One early boss is immune to all physical attacks, and almost all magic. Only Ice magic does any damage. Without knowing this, a player is assured to receive a Game Over and be forced to redo the dungeon. Worse, without a guide, they wouldn’t even know what was wrong. All they would know is all their attacks did no damage.

So, despite all this, I don’t really hate FF2j’s system. It’s heart is in the right place. It is just undone by a few details. If all stats increased gradually from steady use in battle, instead of just some, the system might work much better. Plus, once you know FF2j’s “tricks” (mainly beating the crap out of your own party for a few hours at the start of the game), it actually makes the game’s battles quite a bit easier. By the time I reached the first boss, my mage had more HP than the boss did.

Huge HP gains...

...almost overnight! Guaranteed!

So, I wrote this post en lieu of providing a proper play-by-play of my last several hours of play, because it consisted largely of what I outlined above. Every evening, for as long as I could bear it before getting incredibly bored (not long), I would get into a random battle and beat up my own party to boost their stats. I only stopped because the enemies in the area all began fleeing before I did enough damage to earn skill-ups. It might seem cheap, but FF2j almost seems designed to force players to play this way. I can’t imagine what my party’s health pool would be without artificially inflating it.

Within literally the first five minutes of FF2j, it becomes very apparent that this is a radically different RPG than its predecessor. It is clearly full of ambition. After Final Fantasy became a hit, Square could have churned our similar-feeling sequels, but instead the company zigged in an aggressively inventive direction for this first follow-up. And they did it all in just one year, no less. FF2j was released Dec. 17, 1988 – exactly one year after FF1.

A brief look at some of FF2j’s largest changes that manifest themselves right from the start:

Actual dialogue!

Speaking Protagonists!

MP!

Phrase choice system!

Battle Rows! Character Portraits!

I’ll cover most of these changes in more depth in later posts. For now I just want to emphasize that jumping into FF2j immediately after FF1 clearly spotlights that these are very different games. Superficially they might both look like clunky 80s RPGs, but they feel very different from one another. Heck, the fact that FF2j has actual characters with histories, friendships, and personalities as protagonists is a huge departure.

Anyway, let’s get on to the play-through!

FF2j’s prelude sets the stage for a smaller, more intimate story than FF1′s “save the world” plot. Instead, the focus seems to be on warring nations and politics, with our four protagonists slowly being pulled into the intrigue.

The game opens with the trope (although to be fair it wasn’t yet a trope when the game launched) of an unwinnable RPG battle. Our four young heroes are fleeing the defeated kingdom of Phin, and get run down and (nearly) killed.

Phin’s princess Hilda stumbles on the party, and rescues them (as seen in the screenshot at the top of this post). But only Frionel, Maria, and Guy were recovered. Leonheart is still lost. After talking to Hilda and other NPCs in town, a pretty dire picture emerges. Princess Hilda is leading a small group of rebels in your party’s current town (Altea), because her father, the king, was gravely injured. Altea lies to the south and Phin to the North, with the evil Paramekian Empire occupying nearly all Northern towns.

Hilda suggests players look for Leonheart back in Phin. Lacking any other immediate leads, I took Hilda up on her suggestion. Phin is a dangerous place for members of the rebel army, though:

Inside Phin itself, I learned that the NPC above wasn’t joking around. Every person walking around town is a Paramekian soldier, and when I tried to talk to one he immediately recognized my party as rebels, initiated combat, and slaughtered everyone. Game Over #1! Having these soldiers physically occupying the town was a pretty sophisticated (for the time) example of storytelling by design, I felt.

After exploring town (taking care to not talk to any soldiers), there is no sign of Leonheart. I did eventually discover that the pub owner is a rebel sympathiser. He is housing a dying rebel soldier in a secret room. This soldier has a message for Hilda. A man named Borgan betrayed his country and is now working for the Paramekians!

After hearing the news, Hilda formally asks our heroes to join the rebellion (she previously rebuffed their request, saying our heroes weren’t strong enough), and gives them their first task. But to prepare, my party is going to have to be quite a bit stronger…

Next: Character Advancement FF2j style