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

Such potential, wasted. Lemmy can be a girl's name too, you know.

Still, it's for the better that the names stay as is than to have the adventures of Sulky the dark knight turned paladin and his best friend/rival Trogd(o)r. Renames can wait for one of the other two localizations of FFIV.*

*Not counting DS because voice acting put Namingway out of a job, but you can make Whyt into a Percy** there.

**No I'm not posting that again.

I never said I loved FF9. I love TF2.

You could always do what I did, and name everybody after X-Men. That way you can have an endgame party of Cyclop, Wolver, Gambit, Phenix, and Storm.

The kids should obviously be named Cooke and Mack.

Brickroad are you going to demonstrate all the secrets are you going to use emulator cheating powers to get the rare drops are you going to explain how the numbers work are you going to skip that one dungeon

Brick is going to get ALL the Pink Tails.

ALL of them.

FF4 is my least favorite FF and yet I somehow have still bought every single release of it at least once.

You and me both brotha.

This would be right nifty. I tried for entirely too long to get a lillith rod because it's a nice thing to have, but it's not worth the endless lamia grinding. Surely there are other items in the same boat.
Will you liberate them from their undeserved imprisonment? Or not, since having psyche in the first quarter of the game might be a little broken.

Man, this game. I don't really know what to say about it. I'm another one of those people who had sort of played RPGs before, but really considers this his first full fledged RPG experience. I've played this game so many times on so many platforms.

A while back I tried to do a Cecil solo run. It was kind of boring and a failure since I got stuck, but I like the narrative possibilities and might eventually LP it. But for now, I'm going to sit back and enjoy this. I'll be curious to see if Brick can teach me anything.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!

I'm pretty excited!

Any reason for not going with the superior Game Boy Advance version other than pure nostalgia?

Anyways, I'm looking forward to it. This is a great game no matter the version you play and it fully deserves the attention you'll no doubt give it. And I'm looking forward to the inevitable Rydia vs Rosa single runs some time in the future.

There's the fact that the GBA version isn't superior, for starters.

I'd give the GBA version the nod, if only for the extra color~<3

the monster art in the SNES version is so dull!

Everyone and their mom gripes about the funky combat turn order, but I found it is mostly solved by turning the combat speed down. The trade off is you get the skills they took out back (even if they are mostly worthless) and the bonus content, plus the items they took out like Siren (for those who REALLY want to hunt for Pink Tails. I remember grabbing over 99 of em).

Anyway, I totally see why people would prefer the one we got however; it's simplicity is part of the elegance I fell in love with.

- Eddie

Is there no good fantranslation of the Japanese original?

Not saying that's what should be LPed, it'd just be cool to play.

There is a fantranslation of what's colloquially known as the HardType version (original JP version\US PS1\Base for GBA ver). I haven't played it in years since the PS1 version came out, but I remember it being pretty stiffly translated.

Also, there's a bunch of text and menu formatting shenanigans going on in the fanpatch since they absolutely had to cram everything they possibly could into it. It's an aggressively literal translation from what I understand, and when it got touched up a while back there was apparently a big furball over the edits losing some of the Japanese purity of the script (not necessarily meaning).

I think (not having played both) that the European version of the GBA game fixes most if not all of the issues/bugs present in the NA one.

Is there any particular reason that you think the SNES version is better than the GBA one, besides the bugs? Or is it just that you don't think the extra stuff adds much to the core game?

I've only played the US SNES version, so I don't know how the GBA one compares with all the extras it adds.

We're not going to see a screenshot of Cecil yelling "FAGNUTZ, jump!" during the Valvalis fight, and that's fucking heartbreaking.

I'll take functional Mode 7* and better sound quality** over slightly improved script*** and portability****. The ability to make my own party at the end, and the Lunar Ruins dungeon, don't rock my world as much as FFV's extras do.

Mind, I LOVE FF4Adv, but you did ask why we thought SNES was better.

* Scaling, rotation, and true transparencies. The final battle with Zeromus is really sad to look at on the GBA.

** The music. Oh God the music. GBA is fine, but SNES is AWESOME.

*** The "mediocrity" of FFIIUS' script has been greatly, greatly exaggerated. It has few actual mistakes and it's perfectly serviceable. Hell, I'd say it's perfectly fine if it didn't bait a dozen people to immediately jump on my back just to be contrarian.

**** The ability to carry my dearest and fondest FF with me everywhere is the only reason I can tolerate its audiovisual flaws.

FF2US' script is hilarious. Most of it consists of characters yelling out each others' names. Seriously, the number of times someone says another character's name and nothing else save punctuation in this version could practically be the basis of a drinking game.

I put forward a motion to have Brickroad take a screenshot each and every time that happens. Failure to do so will result in a one (1) pun penalty.

Why, is the Lamia rod's version useful?

... but... but... Crazy Airship....

Of all the versions of FF IV, good ol' FF II US is the one that I like the best*. The translation is hilarious, the music sounds amazing, and the game is easy enough to breeze through without any grinding. The extra skills from the hardtype version aren't really that interesting, and I have zero patience for grinding in any RPG where your skill progression is as linear as it is in this game.


*It's too bad that I killed Brick's copy of it, huh?**
**Actually, the battery just died, I think.

*knux*
Got any tips? I've never been able to pull off beating Zeromus without grinding. If I just play through the game naturally I'm usually somewhere in the forties by the time I hit the last dungeon. Bro knocks everyone but Kain and Cecil flat in one Big Bang and finishes them off on the second. I have to grind like mad to beat Zeromus in the original version.

Or beating Asura and Leviathan without any grinding, because Rosa's levels will be way too low to learn Wall if you play naturally. (Of course, once you DO learn Wall, the Sealed Cave becomes a picnic.) Learning Wall in the Underground, and then Meteo in the Lunar Core, are the best ways to tell whether you're ready for the the Moon and Zeromus, respectively.

Well, I've never used one (I grabbed one once but never tried to use it as an item) but I assume its value is in having a weapon that can restore MP on a guy with 90 max MP and 30MP spells can be good times.

(It's called a Lilith Rod btw, at least in this version)

- Eddie

My last play when it hit VC, I actually didn't have a problem with Asura. I wasn't able to beat her the moment she became available, but I ultimately didn't to stop and grind, just play further into the game. Leviathan himself is a cakewalk.

And man, Meteo takes so much grinding... by the time you get it it's pretty much unnecessary.

Meteo is a dissapointment, considering that the game makes it out to be the greatest spell ever...it's slow, costs too much MP, and is not as useful as Flare or Quake.