"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

Brick I would love to join you with this, but it means that FFV doesn't exist. That's five Is. And that's terrible.

I have a convenient loophole for you: FF5 came out after FF2 no matter whether you're talking about the NA or Japanish release schedules!

It exists! Yay! =D

Man this kool-aid is so good.

What is kool-aid, anyway?

This is Kool Aid.



The Kool Aid Man famously busts through walls to get to thirsty kids.

"Drinking the Kool Aid" refers to the Jonestown Massacre where a Congressman was killed by a cult and their leader subsequently had his followers commit suicide by drinking poisoned kool aid.

America: Fuck Yeah.

I think I've figured out the mysterious Kain EXP-get thing too, but I'll wait and see what Brick reveals, and settle for internet-nerd smug satisfaction if I'm right.

Mmmmmm, smugness.

Hey, you can't out smug me, I think I've got it figured out too!

My Paladin Cecil had a crit with the Legend sword earlier today. It was the third I had seen (Dknight Cecil hit one in the desert, then Edward got one in the cave).

First dozen times through this game, I didn't know the word "elope". I assumed it was a fancy old man word for "run away".

I also assumed Tellah comparing Rydia to Anna meant Anna had white and black magic and thus we would have been better off if Edward had died and Anna joined the party.

I keep expecting someone to refute the permanent Recall thing but no one has yet. Quite perplexing.

Back to that Tellah "recall" thing - are we sure the spell turns up in his spell list permanently afterwards?

Because I - coincidentally enough - had a GBA save right around where Brick left off, and, well... it certainly didn't work that way in that one. There, it was just a variant on the random-call ability you got in FFV - one shot and done, but with a low success rate.

I imagine it's yet another of those things that the GBA version changed, but... I really want to know for sure now.

And playing twenty minutes of that made me remember why I like the SNES version more for everything but the endgame. All those extra items are annoying.

I'm currently playing the PlayStation version and Recall isn't permanent here. And the SNES didn't have Recall, and you just tested the GBA version, so...

I think I know too, but that's only because a friend clued me in back in 1993. How did he find out? I'll never know.

Ah, the pre-Internet days.

And now I feel bad because I was so sure that's how it worked and I got everyone's hopes up.

Man, I was just coming in here to post about how I'd had an epiphany on the Kain-EXP thing but I'll wait to see what Brick says and then like half a dozen other people already said the same thing. Bah. Humbug.

I still haven't figured it out or even given it a moment's thought! You can still feel superior to me!

Same here. It took me a while to get that he meant that they were both recently orphaned and horribly traumatized adorable little urchins.

Cecil died in the Earthquake, the character currently in the party is actually Kain, who hit his head so hard he lost his memories. Eventually, he'll realize this and return to being a Dragoon, and so all the experience points you obtain after the Caller Village will go to him.

You have no one to blame but yourself for this Brick.

- Eddie

Well, some of the blame can maybe go to FFVII.

Actually...

You were right up to a point. The Cecil he's playing as IS actually Kain. That's all totally correct. But the real Cecil is still alive (otherwise, there'd be a missing character your flight of fancy does nothing to account for). However 'Cecil' (as we'll call Kain-who-now-thinks-he's-Cecil) is haunted by the fact that he knows, deep down, he's not who he thinks he is. He woke up thinking he was Cecil out of his deep-seated envy of the man, but something deep within him contradicts this, he knows it. And when he finally confronts 'himself' atop Mt. Ordeals, it's of course not his true self he fights and succeeds over. It's the false 'Cecil' persona that his heart is trying to reject. When he overcomes it, though, he does not reclaim his former, deeply flawed Kain self, but rather ascends into a new, idealized interpretation of his friend. He became the Cecil that Cecil himself could never become, and if his life from then on was a lie, who could say it was necessarily for the worse?

And what of the real Cecil? He woke up thinking he was Kain, of course, because Cecil always thought of himself as something cowardly and ignoble, while relying on and admiring his Dragoon friend. But this is clearly a warped mentality to take on, and unlike 'Cecil', the real Cecil never goes through the Mt. Ordeals catharsis needed to reign his fractured psyche into a stable existence. This is why he, as 'Kain' is so screwed up over the course of the game, always changing sides, easily controlled, unsure of who he really is. And it makes his love for Rosa tragic; he's not jealous of 'Cecil' wrongly or weakly. Deep down, he knows the betrayal going on, that nobody else does (Rosa, never having seen Cecil without his helmet, as proven in even the most intimate of moments, doesn't realize she's cheating on the real Cecil with 'Cecil'). But even he is not consciously aware of it, hence his confusion and seemingly wild resentment. At game's end, 'Cecil' is a hero, having gotten everything that both Kain and the real Cecil could have wanted. 'Kain', meanwhile, is still a lost soul, needing his own visit to Mt. Ordeals to realize, if not the devastating truth, than at least some means of living as a functioning person.

This is all made quite clear by the After Years, of course.

Are you just making that up or is After Years really that fucked in half?

Not really, but damn if some of it doesn't ring true.

After Years total spoilers:
Cecil is Cecil, and Kain is Kain, but Kain DOES climb Mt. Ordeals for redemption, but he fails to kill his dark half, so for a chunk of the game there is a "Kain" and the real Kain is running around as a Hooded Man. Seriously. And Cecil is brainwashed at some point. And for some reason they have to fight another Dark Knight to regain Cecil's abilities later on.

But what about D.Wave and all those other useless abilities!?!

I will always maintain that Pray is not useless. I'd rather have her doing that every round real heavy healing isn't needed than wasting arrows.

The tagline text above the title in that image should read:

I think FFIV was the first RPG I ever really played. I remember being scared of the genre back in the day. Not entirely sure why, but I think it had something to do with my reputation of being able to finish every game I rented in the course of that rental. I just knew that RPGs likely wouldn't go down as fast (I had fiddled around with Dragon Warrior at my cousin's house, but never really got into it.) It seems like an unreasonable reason to avoid a genre that Nintendo Power was pushing so heavily, but when you're 9, most of the things you think are illogical.

Anyway, I never actually finished the game, as I had borrowed it from a sort-of friend and he wanted it back before I could make it all the way through the moon. That is near the end of the game, right? the last thing I remember was a getting stuck somewhere mechanical and FuSoYa was on my team at the time.

You stopped at the place with one of the best tracks in the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq3Xo84PxsA

Especially since it restores MP as well! Very handy for folks without Psych/Osmose.

only in the DS version! it is just fantastic in the DS version.