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

Who does she think she is, Holly Golightly?

I think I saw this on a Final Fantasy webring once.

Or the worst Toy Story character ever.

Two lens flares! Are Palom and Porom casting a twin attack?



Is that somebody from Star Wars?

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/remember-me-mbd

I thought it was the Burger King King in a weird helmet.

Poor "Remember me?" guy...

Nobody remembers him.

MEMES!?


And, then, I lost all control.





I'm sorry.

I think P3 just won the thread. Or broke it. Either way.

Either way, we all win.

Man, I hope Cecil's responsible with his new powers. Can you imagine what would happen if he decided to turn back to the dark side now that he is so imbued?

This one took me a minute to figure out. You insidious bastard.

Cecil seems to be turning into Midna.

Who? What?

(So you don't think I'm clueless, last year when somebody connected Scott Pilgrim to Akira by yelling "CANADAAAAAA!", I got it instantly.)

Explained! (look at Milon's face)

I am posting all of those Mt. Ordeals shops to my blog when I finally finish the next update (almost done!).

You got me again...


Seriously though, the LPs on this site rock the world. Two more pages to catch up on them all

Sorry about that. I've been in kind of a funk the past few days and have felt more like playing games than talking about them.

I shall expend effort to complete this update for tomorrow. (Yes, you can expend efforts. It's a white boy thing.)

We all have a limited amount of Efforts we can spend each day. Efforts can be regained from sleep or food with a minor percentage chance of failure.

There are also Potions of Caffeine that give an increased pool of Efforts, but if more than the maximum amount of Efforts are expended it can lead to Crash.

Yes, I thought about this way too much.

You're on to something.

That was really something. Amazing how something meant to be amusing can turn profound.

And that was Edward's problem. He was spoony, but he didn't have enough spoons.

It's just opportunity cost and the "dismal science" of economics.

Hate it when you don't check a topic in a while and you're too late to comment on something. :/ BUT I WILL DISREGARD LATENESS AND SAY that is the best thing i have ever seen.

There were hints of this during Brickroad's latest FF1 thread, but we've taken it to a new level here. We already have various image threads, but should we do one where we communicate primarily with drawings?

Chapter the Sixth: Bringing the Fight Back to Baron


Nobody ever explains why there is a convenient magical road running underneath the ocean between Baron and Mysidia. Nor does anyone explain why Cecil and his cronies didn't use it to smash up the joint during the prologue. Nor does anyone know why the Red Wings had to fly around the world twice to get home, when they could have just set a nice, simple northwesterly course.


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

Baron looks much as it did when Cecil left it all those... uh... days? ago as a DKnight. Peaceful, idyllic, prosperous...


Uh.

Okay, so Cid went and got himself locked up. You know, he's kind of a boisterous son of a bitch. I mean, nothing against Cid here? But I could see him knocking back a few too many and breaking a chair over a soldier's head for some fevered reason that only makes sense to him. This is probably an isolated incident.

While I'm checking up on my old friends, let's see how Rosa's mom is doing!


Uh.

You know? On second thought, let's just get caught up on current events.


Uh.

Okay, this is worse than I thought. If Baron has discovered and is exploiting the unstoppable power of KARATE, busting Cid out might be a lot tougher than we were expecting. I mean, yeah, we're packing Meteo now... but it's a well-known science fact that Meteo is only equivalent to 0.4 of a KARATE.

Well, let's cross that bridge when we come to it. Say, didn't we have a fan club here in town?


You know what, kid? You're awwwright.


...wait what? Okay, now this has just gone too far. Stealing crystals, burning villages and waging unprovoked war I can understand. But this? Outlawing dancing!? This is some straight up puritanical hornswaggle right here.

And you people know I only use the word "hornswaggle" when I really mean it.


What, you mean the locked one? The one for which no key exists anywhere that we're aware of? Yeah, thanks for the helpful tip, Worst NPC Ever!

It looks like we're not getting anywhere until we deal with that KARATE. S-s-s-scary! Let's run away.


After a quick jaunt through the Mist Cave, Cecil and friends arrive back at Village Mist. The remaining villagers have been hard at work rebuilding -- you'd never know the sleepy little hamlet had been razed to the ground and then had a mountain dropped on top of it.


Fortunately for us, it doesn't look like anyone's figured out the cause of the blaze. This actually makes perfect sense if you think about it -- with the eastern path blocked off, no news could reach the village except from Baron, who has probably been feeding the villagers crazy propaganda about spontaneous combustion.

Still, somebody's being an awful Negative Nancy about all this, don't you think?


So all of Rydia's faithful chocobos had to, what, burrow their way to the surface first? And there's a freaky ghost thing hanging out underneath Baron? Callers are weird! I'm sure glad we burned them all to death.

The reason to come to Mist is to ransack all the goodies laying around. Here tucked away in some tall grass in the nearby woods are a Cure1 and a Heal potion.


Up near the pond, someone dropped their lunch money. MINE NOW, FOOLS!

Paladins are Lawful Good.


Finally, a fireplace in the town's largest house conceals a secret passage leading to yet another small treasure room.


The Tiara is a very nice helmet that only females can wear. It's a good way to bolster Porom's defense for the time being. The other two boxes are trash: Cloth Armor and a Ruby Ring.


Finally, there is a secret passage inside the secret passage. This double-secret passage hides the Change Rod, which is the whole reason to come to Mist in the first place.


The Change Rod casts Piggy when used as an item, which is amusing but not necessarily very helpful. The real story here is the +5 boost to Wis., which beefifies Tellah's black magic damage output. Anything that squeezes a little more oomph out of his meager mana pool!

And yes, I said "beefifies". It's my LP. You can't stop me.


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

There's a pretty cool weapon in the Mist shop, but I forgot all about it until I'd already walked back to Baron. I'll come back for it later.


♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

What the--! Baron's not just harnessing the power of KARATE, it's hijacked our KARATE!


First, Yang orders his Guards to soften us up a bit. These guys are annoying because they like to open with Size, thereby turning someone into a midget. Thankfully they aren't smart enough to realize Size can be turned into an area attack, so they don't midgetify the entire party at once.

That's right. "Midgetify." We're through the looking glass here, people.

Fortunately midgetification doesn't hinder spellcasting one falutin' bit, and teeny tiny Palom has no difficulty burning the Guards to death.


In the end, you can't send a man to do a KARATE's job. Yang decides to come at us himself.


Yang is the hardest boss we've faced yet in terms of raw damage output. He uses his Kick attack constantly. While Cecil can shrug the damage off, what with his heavy armor and giant pile of HPs, the back row can't take much of this sort of punishment. Even Porom and Tellah both spamming Cure2 won't provide enough healing to keep up.


The way to win is to just go full-hog offensive. If you blast him with everything you've got, he won't survive long enough to Kick the whole team to death.


Yang doesn't have a particular weakness to Ice magic. I was just in an icy kind of mood today.


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

After bludgeoning and/or freezing some sense into Yang's tiny KARATE brain, he reveals that he's been literally out of his wits ever since the Leviatan attack. Hey, on the plus side, at least someone on that ship made it to Baron!


Now, I'm not one to second guess Leviatan, king of all beasts, scourge of the seas. But explain this to me: say you're a huge sea monster, and you've just spent your morning breaking apart a ship. I mean, that's got to take a lot out of you, right? So what do you pick for your mid-morning snack: a skinny little kid? Or the giant, beefy, suculent karate man floating nearby?

(The correct answer, of course, is "both.")


In any case, we now have enough KARATE in the group to dismantle the castle brick-by-brick if need be. Finding Cid should be a snap!


The gang retires to the Inn's only bedroom. Palom hops right in bed... and can you blame him? He was just Kicked repeatedly in his tiny midget face.

This is a quaint little thing about FF2 that always makes me smile: the game falls over itself to make absolutely sure characters always, always, always make their introductions to one another. This really is an RPG from a simpler time, I tell you what.


Eventually the game suddenly remembers it needs some contrivance with which to advance the plot, so Cecil and Yang suddenly find a magic key laying around in the Inn. Thank goodness the housekeepers didn't throw it out!

(Yes, I know it's supposed to be implied that Yang was carrying the key. But the game never outright states that fact, and I like my explanation better.)


If you'll recall, there were two locked doors in the town of Baron. The first, inexplicably, was the building housing the weapon and armor shops. Fortunately for us, "locked" doesn't mean "closed for business". I guess the clerks have just been standing here for months, wondering why they weren't getting any customers.

There's also a secret passage for us to poke our noses into!


You know how you always seethe with rage at old RPGs which put treasure boxes behind shop counters, tantalizingly out of reach? Well, never you mind that; FF2 does you up right. We still had a Thunder Claw from when Yang was with us previously, of course, but this 2000 GP is a nice little windfall!


The shops come stocked with everything today's get-up-and-go karate man needs to face his day. Which makes perfect sense considering Baron is home to an army of heavily-armored skyfaring knights.


♪♪ Into the Darkness ♪♪

The second locked door leads down into the Old Water-way, the entrance of which contains another secret passage. This one contains 1000 GP, so if outfitting Yang drained your wallet for some reason here's your chance to get back on your feet.

Remember the trick I mentioned about Yang being able to hit two elemental weaknesses at once? Here's one of the few spots in the game where doing so is really, really helpful. Everything in this dungeon is weak to either Lit or Ice, meaning this particular setup turns Yang into a devastating engine of pain and death.

I mean, even moreso than he already was.


Even before the dungeon gets underway proper, it starts us off with a couple freebies. The other two chests in this screenshot were an Ether1 and a Life.


The first floor of the Old Water-way is a zig-zagging path over and across a few small, rocky islands. You can almost see where this section of the caves used to be a more direct path, from the entrance in the upper-left to the exit in the upper-right, but it has long since fallen into disrepair. One of the bridges is out, even.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

Like its weaker cousin the Aligator, the Crocdile can attack twice with a single hit. As you can see from Porom's miserable state in this shot, that's enough to put a serious pinch on any hapless mages wandering through the caves. Fortunately, these monsters are weak to Ice, so Palom and Tellah can kill them pretty much effortlessly.

ElecFish are a bit more bothersome. Though they are aquatic they are also Lit-based, which means they absorb HP from electric attacks. They're not particularly weak to anything, but blasting them with Ice-2 will bring them low enough for Cecil or Yang to finish them off with one shot.


...or, failing that, you could just fuck them up with Virus. That's perfectly fine, too.


♪♪ Into the Darkness ♪♪

The second floor is a series of small, flooded rooms linked by secret passages in the walls. It's not difficult to intuit where these pssages are, which is a good thing, since traversing them is required to complete the dungeon.


It was about this point I realized I had forgotten to change the window color for this update. Usually when I tease you guys with "HOT PINK WINDOWS WHADDAYA SAY" nobody responds, so yeah, screw you guys. Now you don't have a choice. It's pink-ass windows from here to god-knows-when, and it's all your fault.

Get a Life, Yang.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

Porom manages to learn herself the Bersk spell along the way. Bersk is a situational buff, but still pretty good through much of the mid-game. We'll get some decent use out of it before the update is out.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

We're also reaching the point in the game where the dungeons begin stretching further than just a few screens. Long before we're within eyeshot of the exit, our Bl. Wiz is completely tapped.


♪♪ Into the Darkness ♪♪

Get another Life, Yang.


Eventually the party climbs out of the flooded basement levels and are greeted by lit torches set into the high, smooth walls. A long, steep staircase leads directly up to the floor just underneath the castle.

Plot hole: wouldn't Tellah have to stop and rest five or six times while climbing those stairs? Maybe that only happens if he's leading the party.

The top floor of the Old Water-way houses a save point and one final secret passage. Using a Tent on this save point is actually pretty intensely stupid, but I completely spaced out about why until the split second after I had already used it.

Oh well. Tents are going to be obsolete soon, anyway, and I'm still carting around a crate of them.


The tunnel leads to a box containing the Ancient Sword. It's slightly weaker than the Legend Sword, but it has the ability to Curse monsters, which reduces their stats. Unfortunately there's no way to know that in a game which lacks item descriptions or even visible indicators when enemies are hit with status ailments, but take my word for it, Ancient Sword is the way to go.


Someone dropped Poison Arrows in there somewheres. Okay!


♪♪ Kingdom Baron ♪♪

The Old Water-Way finally opens up into that tiny nook in the outer wall of Baron's moat.


As you can see, the castle is more or less deserted now. Even the Mysidian prisoners have all been summarily executed.


Fortunately Cecil's maid has been on the ball, and his bed is still 100% warm and fluffy.


On the way to the throne room, Cecil encounters his old "friend" Baigan. You may remember Baigan as the scumbag who sold Cecil out during the game's intro. Fortunately for us, though, it looks like Baigan has replaced his scumbaggery with a sense of overwhelming patriotism. Perhaps we can use that to our advantage?


Score!

~~~



Baigan - GuardCap

One of the more boring characters in the game, Baigan doesn't have a status screen portrait or a unique map sprite.

Command List:

• Fight: Baigan attacks with his equipped weapon. (Or he would, if he could equip weapons.) This causes physical damage to the enemy. Damage is halved if Baigan is in the back row. (Or would be, if you could put him in either row.)
  
• Item: Baigan uses an item from the party's inventory. (Or he would, if he could access the inventory.) Actually, every character can do this. I don't even know why I'm mentioning it now.

GuardCap is kind of a silly class. Baigan doesn't have any stats and doesn't participate in any battles. In fact, the game doesn't even have a designated character spot for him. It's almost as though he's not a real player character at all! Speaking of which, don't we already have a full party anyway? What's going on here?

~~~

Before Cecil takes five steps with his new BFF Baigan, the twins insist that he 1) stinks and 2) is a horrible actor. From the mouths of babes, etc.

They're not wrong, of course. Baigan is totally a monster and he totally intends to murder us all.


♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

First thing to do is get Yang Bersk'd. This gives his physical attack a boost, and causes him to punch relentlessly until either he drops dead or there's nothing left alive within punching range. This is a pretty safe tactic; Yang can't do anything to aid the party except Fight, and if you're in such a dire situation that you need him to use an Item you're probably beyond the point of no return, anyway. Bersking Yang is pretty much standard operating procedure in every boss fight from now until he leaves the party again.


Baigan is actually comprised of three parts. Much like Dr. Octopus, his arms are sentient beings which act independently of their host body. The body is the main target, though, so Tellah steps up to drop some Virus onto it.


Baigan's body is flagged to counter any magic spell with Wall, which will bounce subsequent spells back at the party. This eliminates Tellah and Palom as major damage dealers in this fight, since Baigan will be protected. There are a few ways to deal with this little problem:

1) Wall eventually wears off. Find something for Tellah and Palom to occupy themselves with for a few rounds, then throw another Virus at the boss. There's no visual cue as to how long the spell lasts; you'll just have to guess at it.

2) Spells can only be bounced once, so you could have Tellah Wall someone in your party then lob spells at that person. Spells thus reflected have a 1/3 chance at landing on Baigan's body. Of course, a Wall'd hero can't be healed with Cure magic...

3) Some spells pierce through Wall. Er, neither Tellah nor Palom have any of these spells though, so forget I said anything.


RightArm and Left Arm will attack using Vampire, which steals HP from a hero and inflicts HP Leak. HP Leak is a status ailment similar to Poison, except the HP loss is constant and cannot be reliably healed. This is by far the most common status ailment in the game, but there's not much you can do but learn to live with it.

The good news is, HP Leak is also inflicted by Virus. This means a good, meaty Virus spell will cause Baigan's HP to silently drain away throughout the entire fight.


Fast is a good way to have Tellah spend any spare turns. A Fast'd hero will act more often, so this is a good buff for whomever your main damage dealer is in the fight. In this fight that's Yang, so he gets the first Fast.


Taking out the Arms is easy, but pointless. If both Arms are dead, Baigan will simply regenerate them, and you get to kill them all over again.


After a few rounds of Cecil and Yang hacking away at Baigan, his Wall will come down and Tellah can safely sneak in another Virus. If this doesn't kill him he'll just Wall himself again, but after two Viruses his HP will be so low it might actually run out all on its own.


After the body is dead, the Arms will Explode all on their own. Remember, this deals damage equal to how much HP they had left, so squeezing a Virus or Ice-2 or something on them after the body dies is a good way to protect yourself.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

Hooray! Virus for Palom! If you've leveled enough that he has Virus coming into this fight, you get more bang for your buck by giving him the Change Rod and letting him lead the way against Baigan. His stats are naturally higher than Tellah's, so his Virus will do more damage.