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

And now Milon's appearance makes perfect sense to me.

Well done, Mr. Deptford.

I've always found it amusing that one of the first things Cecil does after becoming a paladin is start to wear dresses.

On the other hand, maybe a Cecil clad in a short white leather dress doesn't so unreasonable given the Nintendo Power character art. After all, it's not like Cecil is wearing any pants.



Also, what's with Cecil wearing one of those head mirror thingies that old-timey doctors would always wear? Is that the magical medical device that allows him to cast Cure 2?

Surely you don't think it's coincidence that "paladin" rhymes with "OB-GYN"?

Tetsuooo!

Hmm, a lot of the bosses in this game come from Dante's Divine Comedy, at least in name. I think they missed a trick in the remakes by not at least including Graffiacane, Farfarello and Draghignazzo.

It blew my mind when I realized Milon = Scarmiglion. Speaking of our buddy the Earth Fiend, has anyone questioned why exactly the Earth Fiend is associated with undeath? Because corpses are supposed to go into the earth or something? I've never understood this. Reading what Deptford wrote about 'planting death in his body' makes sense in a way I'd never thought about, but he shows up with a posse of zombies, not earth elementals. Yes zombies are what you find on the mountain, but if he's the fiend of earth you'd think he'd have custom followers, not just what he scrounged up locally.

Also count me in with the people who never realized his hand was completely broken and fucked up until people brought it up in this thread.

Making the Earth Fiend entirely undead-themed is a strange choice, but right off the bat I'll say it's more interesting than making him a rock monster. Part of it might have to do with legacy, referencing good ol' Lich from FF1, though that does nothing but change the question to WHY WAS FF1'S EARTH FIEND UNDEAD. Probably just comes down to nothing but the burial angle, and hey, it works. Plus, in some ways, the fiends kind of represent the dark, violent side of their element, and with earth/land, pestilence and rotting bodies are a creepier and, again, more interesting angle than Milon, The Living Avalanche!!! would have been.

(consideration: maybe any dead body buried in Milon-infested earth is corrupted into one of his lackeys? Someone write a fanfic!)

Also, to look a little deeper into comparing FF1's fiends and FF2's, it's kind of interesting that in every case the FF1 fiend is more flamboyant and dynamic and even colorful. They all look like goddamn EXPLOSIONS of their theme, while FF2's are more low-key designs. It works, where the fiends are true, if rudimentary, characters in FF2 compared to nothing but boss fights and plot points as they were in FF1. FF1 fiends look suitably fearsome, but FF2's look like what they are, ancient evil demons which are also sentient agents going about their business. The FF2 fiends could totally carry a spy team movie, with all their assassinations attempts and kidnapping and undercover work.

Another thing to notice, contrasting the two sets of fiends, is that not only are the FF1 designs more flamboyant, but their poses are far more action-packed. Rather than making their new 16-bit fiends more huge and exciting and complicated, Square focused more on just making the designs and sprites sleek and simplified in concept but far more detailed and subtle. Also, the FF1 fiends arguably had to have ACTION POSE sprites because that was their ONLY sprite. It had to convey that there was a fight going on. Meanwhile, of course, the fiends of FF2 aren't limited to having all their capabilities and intricacies represented by a single sprite, and the game made use of this in every encounter with one of 'em.

the DS version does add that Geryon thing.

For the same reason that FF1's Fire Fiend was a multi-armed naga, the Water Fiend was a Scandinavian octopus, and the Wind Fiend was a dragon stolen from D&D the mother of all gods and monsters in Mesopotamian mythology. There's no 1:1 relation between the themes, and none of the monsters is ever an incarnation of its Element, it's just some entity that has a vague connection to the it.

I also like that all the Fiends in FF2 are human(oid.) The least human of the lot simply looks that way because he's on all fours, but if he stood up he'd look just like a Ninja Turtle who had joined the Blue Man Group.

Guise, my personal Let's Play-Along has hit a snag. I impulsively spent every last gil (literally only 40 left) buying up a perfect full set of Paladin Armor in Mysidia and saved over that file, so now my mages are stuck at Mt. Ordeals getting two-shotted by everything. D: What's a guy to do to keep this run easy-breezy zero grind?

I don't think Brickroad mentioned it, but the big-ass flying birds (I think called Zu) you'll find just outside of Mysidia seem to die to Cecil's black sword every time and they give good XP and GP.

Nevermind, I just scored a lucky run where the monsters kept targetting Cecil with physical and PalomPorom with magic. Cecil is now scoring present tense criticals as a Paladin.

They'd be called that if this was FFIV. But we're playing FFII and those things are called Ravens.

I'm currently right before the first time you enter The Tower of Babel.

Milon was just wondering the same thing!

Oh, you're right - I can just make out half of his left foot when I look closer. He's still pretty messed-up looking.

And thanks for pointing that out. We're all learning so much here by over-analyzing a game...

And Farfarello is a minor enemy in FFV's final dungeon.

Milon certainly has a lot of secrets. I hear he has a whole castle full of them!

When I saw an ad for Paladin's Quest in a GamePro or Nintendo Power magazine, I initially thought it was a sequel or side-story of FFII.

You poor, poor thing.

I don't think the artist understood that one is a boy and one is a girl.

They both look like the Cabbage Patch doll I had as a kid.

That is, after my brother stripped my doll naked, scribbled on her face with a crayon and threw her in a tree.

Strange thing about the Mysidian Legend is that it makes less sense in the subsequent "better" translations.

You can beat him! For years I had no idea KluYa was telling me, "Stop it. Stop hitting yourself, you stupid idiot." It's not an easy battle, though.

What the hell?

The Mysidian Legend is a rejected Sarah Brightman song. Amazing!

The last paragraph must be all new; the original version ended with a simple "The moon has begun to seek for its own light"... and that was in the ending. And this new version confuses as much as it enlightens: it makes the reference to the Lunar Whale all the more obvious --"born from a dragon" to "dragon's maw," that is, the gulf just outside Mysidia-- but at the same time it starts talking about Cecil and Golbez and what?

...also, "womb of x's maw"? Really? Way to torture the humble "born from" metaphor, guys.

I don't think the GBA version screwed with it that much.

According to Genesis, Adam was formed out of the Earth itself. During some funeral services, one of the last lines spoken is "From the Earth we were formed, to the Earth we return." Not so big a leap to equate Earth with Zombies in that case.

Also, if we sort of equate "Earth" with "all things organic", then "rotting" does match up with the undead.

Well, according to the same wiki, the original Japanese was this:

So "mouth" of a dragon, maw, whatever

Aaaa, I see. But did the Japanese version have the whole thing at Mysidia, or did it only reveal the last fragments (including the "Sleeps" bit) at the end, like on the SNES? Because the last verse is a pretty huge thing for describing Golbez' post-game fate, so it's weird that they'd take it out from FFIIUS.

According to this site, which has a great side-by-side comparison of the FF2 and FFIV scripts (well, it's great if you understand Japanese, I guess), the Japanese version of the legend as told in Mysidia (i.e., as engraved on the Legend sword) ended with "...a bounty and mercy," just like the English.

The version in the epilogue, though, goes on for another paragraph or so, as in FFIV DS. Not included in the wiki translation of FFIV below is the bit about "one of the same blood" that was retained in the DS version.

I started playing the DS version again because of this thread. Sadly, it's such a slog (and for some really stupid reason I don't have a save right after the shipwreck, I knew I should have gotten a shot of it there) that I doubt I'll be the one to get it. Even with skip-able cut scenes what would take me an hour or two in the original would easily be 4-5 in that version.

I did finally make some progress on my end game save, only to be wiped out on the last level of the lunar core. Not being unable to remove all your weapons mid fight vs. the Minds (Zemus' malice) really hurts. And here I went and removed Rosa and Rydia's attack commands, and felt so clever too).