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

This thread is the first thing I check every time I visit Talking Time, and I am never disappointed by what I find.

I've never even played this game!

I've never played any main-series Final Fantasy game at all! (I have played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, whose universe was later stolen and made canon, but it definitely wasn't main-series at the time.) So it's nice living them via Talking Time.

I had read Brick and McDohl's dueling solos thread before, but in the last few weeks at work I read his LPS of Dawn of Souls and the original FF, and caught up with this.

Uh... good stuff.

If you're in a reading mood, I still think that the Suikoden LP is his best work.

I forgot about that one. Might start it next week.

You'll get to experience the wonderful tale of how Brick learned to never let us name his characters!

The best part is that the only one who learned a lesson was Brick.

- Eddie

You have to fight the crystal's memory of Dark Knight (or something like that. Never really made sense), yes, but that's not what makes Cecil regain his abilities. It's the Dark Knight's decision to either a) kill Golbez or b)attempt to kill Ceodore that enrages Cecil enough to force himself out of the brainwashing and start kicking ass.

As a side note, there's a theory running around that Cecil's Paladin test was a half-assed one Kluya made out of parental bias, with Kain's test being what it should really be like: you have to fully accept your dark side (not just withstand its attacks) to gain your Persona to class change. The reason I mention this is because for one it explains why Kain actually had to chase down his dark side, and because Cecil ends up doing this when he "defeats" the Dark Knight.

I don't know why, but I ended up liking After Years more than the original FFIV, even though I realize it's a much less polished game. Guess there's something wrong with me.

Anyways, as such I can pretty much answer any questions about it.

What are you talking about? We named all three FF1 crews.

(Brick's just smart enough to pick the names he likes, not the most popular ones)

Okay, so let's say it was the point where he learned that we are never to be trusted with even the most innocuous of tasks.

Not even the Thunder animations from FFTactics?

I think it's interesting that the fiends in this game aren't nearly as connected to the crystals as they were in FF1, nor do they hang out in their own element.

Valvalis does sort of hang out in the sky. And you fight Milon/Scarmiglione on a mountain, which is made of earth! I have no idea about the giant turtle though. Presumably Baigan just has to keep hauling buckets of water from the moat to the throne room all day.

They're less in their element and more element-adjacent.

Scarmiglione - On top of a mountain.
Cagnazzo - Right after the waterway passage. Also stole the Water Crystal first.
Barbariccia - Yeah, in the sky.
Rubicante - In the Tower of Bab-Il, which you access through the lava-filled underground.

It's also been observed that hey wait, what does poison have to do with earth?

The earth is full of poisonous things!

And where exactly do you think arsenic, cyanide, lead, and the many radioactive materials out there originally came from?

Scarmiglione is undead, which has earthy connotations, given that's where you usually put dead things. Poison > Decay > Dead > Earth. And it's more sinister than a big rock man that throws rocks at you. Dirtaglione casts Soilaga!

Plus the realm of the dead is always underground.

Which also explains LICH.

That, or you were originally intended to fight an evil sentient LICHEN, whose name was shortened due to size restrictions.

This is an interesting point that I think has been brought up here before. How would our memory of these games be different if we had got them all within a year of their Japanese releases (this also affects FF1, which we got 3 years later)?

Speaking personally, I eventually got around to playing through the first nine FFs, but the only ones that stuck with me were the ones I bought when they were new in the US and played through multiple times: 1, "2" and "3". This also goes for Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger and Seiken 3 (my only import). I can pretty clearly remember the play mechanics of every Square RPGs I've played, but the plots and worlds of these games blur together in my mind unless I replayed them, and I'd only bother to do that if the game came out on time and if it interested me enough to buy it when it was new.

Assuming we get The Last Story, it may be the first Sakaguchi game since Chrono Trigger that I buy at launch.

We'd probably all have played FF1, dug it, moved onto FF2, HATED IT, passed on 3 in principle, and then been lured back by 4's fantabulously cinematic intro being featured in Nintendo Power. Only real difference I could see in the long run is a potential factionalization over whether 5 or 6 is better... moreso than exists now I mean.

This is a topic I was going to explore in some detail later, but basically it boils down to this: FF is a series where every entry is different. The dudes who make FF are always trying new things, just lobbing shit at a wall to see what sticks. Anyone who looks at the 14 games in the main series can see that's true.

However, because certain entries didn't come out in NA, we didn't know that until at least FF8. When you stick to just the games that came out in the west, the series is much less "it's different every time" and much more "mostly-linear adventure games that get more and more cinematic".

FF1 -> FF2/4 -> FF3/6 -> FF7 -> FF8-wait what happened!?

(It's actually a little worse than that, since most of us had Chrono Trigger in there between FF3 and FF7.)

Compared to FF1/2/3/7, which all smashed the boundaries of what was considered epic storytelling at the time of their release, FF8 was a jumbled mess of stats, numbers, incomprehensible plot points, and characters who seemed to only exist to take up a spot on the menu. Which is also a good way to describe the Japanese FF2 and FF5 -- which we didn't get. Job system? That didn't come along until Tactics.

So yeah, the western experience with the FF series was hella different than the native Japanese experience. I believe that part of why the series became primarily about flash and bang is because, here in the US where the games consistently outsold Dragon Quest, we had never played the entries that didn't focus on flash and bang. In Japan in the late 90s, FF8 was just the new quirky entry in a series full of quirky entries. But in the US, FF8 was an anomaly.

I think my preference for games in the series is heavily based on what came out in America, but then wonder if I would have still felt that way if I have gotten them all in order. A bit of a nature/nurture question. As it is, i tend to heavily favor the "story" games over the "system" games. I think that playing 2/4 and 3/6 first has a lot to do with that.

But then I love the Dragon Quest series, especially 9, which has all the elements that I tend to avoid in Final Fantasy. Maybe DQ just does jobs and grinding better?

Undoubtedly DQ games do grinding better. It's an anomaly to see a DQ battle last more than 30 seconds; often they're over in less than 10 seconds in the first game. Also, DQ games keep it simple: if you're at a tough point, all you need to do is fight enough battles to gain a few levels (class or character) and unlock the stats and abilities necessary to progress. The same cannot be said of a lot of FF games, particularly post-FF4. If anything, 4 stands out in the series for being the most DQ-like since the original.

As for my history with FF, by the time I even got back into consoles proper, the SNES was well past its prime and Xenogears was considered the newest thing. Prior to my departure, the only console RPG I'd played for any meaningful length of time was the first DQ (or as we knew it then, Dragon Warrior). But the dark wizardry of emulation caught my attention about a year before I got a PS1. FF2US was my re-introduction to console RPGs via SNES9x, and being so DQ-like, it was deliciously familiar. Though that was back in the bad old days of emulation when transparencies weren't available, so it was also basically the only SNES FF that was fully playable at that point.

Chrono Trigger actually felt like a reasonable transition between 3 and 7 at the time - down to a three-member party with a smaller roster of selectable characters, stuff like the fair in contrast to the Golden Saucer, the mute lead character... it all kind of matches up in the end.

Basically, if you draw a line between FF3 and FF7, Chrono Trigger's right around the halfway point. I think that's why it's held up so well in the eyes of everyone; the post-FF7 crowd can look back and play it without being too freaked out by the elements which make the earlier games harder to approach, while the SNES-and-earlier FF crowd looks at CT as the last game in the lineage before it all went to hell.

Exactly.

The Squaresoft RPG experience for a US gamer in the 90s was very different than the Squaresoft RPG experience for a JP gamer. We had a linear progression of mechanics and storytelling; theirs was more scattershot.

That's been the theme of this whole LP. Ever since the days of "fixed" romhack translations there has been this idea that we need to replace American FF history with the "correct" Japanese one. That's been an idea I've always objected to. My experiences growing up with this series aren't invalid simply because I didn't have them in the right time zone. Lots of modern gamers would just as soon forget this particular version of FF2/4 exists.

Not that sometimes the JP experience didn't come across. I was floored by the differences between 1 and 2/4, and was actually kind of disappointed that 3/6 was so similar. I never understood why I kept seeing people at the time criticize FFVII and FFVIII for changing too much, when that was one of the things I liked about the series. I always took it to be part of the meaning of "Final" Fantasy -- each game, in its own way, pushes the limits of "Fantasy."