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

From what I can gather reading his blog, his lower than usual activity can be chalked up to immersing himself in RHEM 4.

That's only a guess, mind you.

And his dinosaur riding lessons.

Literal lol.

Way LTTP, but I wonder if Cecil's ability to hurt himself with the dark wave was intended in the Japanese version to help the player to understanding how Tellah dies. That is, the player spends 2/3 of the game up to that point being able to hurt himself with his secondary attack, so it not only makes clear how Cecil's reflection wiped itself out, it might make the player unsurprised that other characters have moves that can hurt themselves.

Did I ruin the mood?

I really doubt anyone felt like they needed to explain one of the most common anime/manga tropes around.

Manga was hardly common in North America at that point, but I guess it was straightforward enough that it didn't need more explaining.

So did Brickroad die or something? This is rivaling my Mother 3 LP with the infrequency of updating.

I think he's getting married soon or just got married.

I thought it was a well known fact that dragons take a while to give birth.

It should be obvious why the next update is taking so long.

Er, we did that joke already.

Just last page in fact.

Yeah dude don't you see that BlitzBlast made that joke? Why aren't you patting BlitzBlast on the back?

That... was not the intended meaning of my post, but whatever.

Anyways, since this is probably the best place to post this, I decided to go replay FF IV After Years. It's probably because it's been at least a year since I last played it, but I didn't remember its plot being a total carbon copy of FF IV's. It was pretty pathetic at first, but it eventually turned into a hilarious "Will they do something original? Or will they just rip off FF IV again?"

Nineteen times out of twenty it was the latter choice. And even when they tried to mix things up ("Yang's ship ran out of fuel!"), they still went back to the FF IV rip off.

I haven't actually read anything in the past 5 pages or so. I just click it every time it's bumped to see if it's an update, then flee when it's not.

Note that the ship still had sails. And it ran out of fuel.

I'm pretty sure the reason was that the ship's "engine" was just Monks A, B, and C blowing air into the sails. When they got sun burned, they couldn't continue until they got some Palm Oil.

Makes more sense than a sail boat running out of fuel anyways.

Don't be absurd.

They were doing karate on the sails.

Guys. It's okay. Brickroad will come back someday. He can never quit us.

Besides, it's not like this is SA, where the thread gets locked if no one posts for a while.

Interlude the First: We Have an Airship Now!


♪♪ The Airship ♪♪

Cecil has been given explicit instructions on what he needs to do in order to save his kidnapped girlfriend, so of course the first thing he does now that he has wings is ignore that mess and fly off to explore lands unknown. Wonderful, exotic locales such as this island far to the south of Baron Castle.


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

The lone village on this forgotten island is Agart, and it is indeed a town of many mysteries! For example...


...a bottomless well!? How fascinating! The skeptic in me wants to brush the "bottomless" claim off as nothing more than pure fantasy... something to attract tourists. Except, in this world, the only source of air travel is militarized, and hungry sea monsters prevent any and all seafaring travel. So how are tourists to get here? And, absent that particular incentive, why would the bushy-faced purple man lie?

Science Fact: From this angle, it looks like Cecil has a hell of a bald spot.


Agart's most famous resident is one Dr. Kory, owner of the world's only telescope. This marvel of modern engineering is used to study the world's two moons, one of which is apparently inhabited and... uh... bleeding.


Hmm... weird. The moon doesn't look particularly impressive to me, but honey, I can't get enough of that starry disco rave backdrop!


The nerve center of Agart's buzzing social scene is this here tavern, which is bursting with all kinds of wonderful rumors and tidbits! Either Agart has a rich and storied natural history, or it's home to some kind of bizarre cult.


Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of looting here; naught but a single potion.

Well, that's all Agart has to offer us for now. There are shops, but they only sell junk. Not even so much as a novelty "bottomless" souvenir beer mug.


♪♪ The Airship ♪♪

So Agart was kind of a bust. What kind of fun stuff is there to do back in Baron?

"Brick! Wouldn't it have been more efficient to show us the Baron stuff first, then fly to Agart?"

Yes.

"Then why didn't you do that!?"

Because Merus.

Anyway, I'm here in Baron to check out what so-and-so mentioned upthread, about how to get to some hidden treasures in the tall grass in the corner of town. And wouldn't you know...


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

...so-and-so was right! I mean, it's just a couple of measley little potions, certainly nothing to get all moist over. Then again, looting this grass in the very beginning of the game means adding another Life potion to your cache, and that ain't nothin'.

Once I found my way back here I suddenly had vague memories of having done it before, back in the past, in the long, long ago. However, I'm quite sure I never knew where the actual passage was until I looked it up for this LP. I think I must have explored this area with a Game Genie, which had a pretty entertaining "walk through walls" code. Its primary use was to carefully skip cutscenes that removed characters from the party, causing some pretty wacky configurations like putting Kain in the same party as Palom and Porom. Its secondary use, of course, was to walk to parts of the game maps that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Like the tall grass in Baron. Or so I thought.

♪♪ Kingdom Baron ♪♪

Speaking of Palom and Porom, here they are dutifully holding up the walls in the Baron Castle trap room. You're prompted to try and remove their petrification with potions or what-not, but as you can expect, nothing works. This is a decent example of how to use a gameplay mechanic to develop the plot. There is nothing at all you-the-player can do to help the twins, and that fact is reinforced much more strongly by letting you try (and fail).

This is a good thing, because the inventory window game mechanic certainly isn't good for anything else.


Finally, now that Kainazzo is out of the picture, we can get past the magical purple barrier in the basement level of the castle. Which turns out to be...


...another throne room! Which is... kind of weird, but then, I'm not a ghost king, so who am I to judge. The ex-King of Baron entrusts with Cecil a quest: seek out the land of summoned monsters. There are rules to being a ghost king, of course, and one of those rules is that you aren't allowed to be too helpful, so we aren't told where this place is or how we might get there.


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

And thus we can scratch Baron off our list. Next up is this tiny island amidst a long chain stretching southward from Fabul. And no, despite its roundness, them woods is not a Chocobo Forest.

By the way -- Fabul? Yeah, there's nothing at all new to do there. Even Mrs. Yang's dialogue hasn't changed since she bludgeond a Baronian soldier with a frying pan. Either she didn't know her husband had been shipwrecked, brainwashed, then summarily beaten into submission by a holy knight... or she knew and didn't see it as something worth commenting on.

That tiny cave nearby probably isn't anything. We should just ignore that.


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

Here we are in Silvera, a town peopled by midgets, pigs and sentient toads. What sort of industry could possibly keep this town in the black? Well...


...mining and smelting silver ore, of course! Somewhere nearby, inaccessible to us hoo-man outsiders, must be a dank mine full of hogs with black lung. Whether that mental image is depressing or hilarious depends on how big of a bastard you are. If you need help with it, try to oink and cough at the same time.

Yeah. There. Now you got it. You bastard.


Not only are the pigs of Silvera subject to years of toil, but we learn from this smug little toad that they're also ill-fed. Pigs are, of course, well known for their voracious appetites. I'm just sayin' -- that's a lot of ants.

Well, we know what there is to eat. If only there were a place nearby to see a great dance.


Boy howdy!

Okay, Silvera is officially my favorite remote island village in FF2. Quite frankly, it makes Agart look like a pile of shit.


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

Correction: two piles of shit.


The catch, of course, is that the equipment here costs a fortune. Silver gear is definitely worth getting your hands on, if you've got the scratch, but it'll probably take a few adventures to get that far. Cecil and Cid can put this equipment to good use, although Cid can't equip a shield along with his two-handed hammer.

Cid should get priority over Cecil when outfitting in Silvera. Cecil is still decked out in pretty decent Paladin gear, after all, whereas Cid joins the party wearing Prisoner Clothes and naught else. Not exactly befitting of a front-line fighter!

Science Fact: When Cid cheers, he showes of his perfect, enormous chompers. God bless 'im.


Don't spend all your GP at the armor shop, though! Cid can nab a cool +10 attack power by upgrading from his crappy Wooden Hammer to a shiny Silver one. Aces!

Oh, right, I haven't formally introduced Cid yet, have I?

---



Cid - Chief

Strictly speaking, Cid is a pretty weak character in the grand scheme of things. But we don't care about that, do we? He wears aviator goggles, has a glorious unkempt beard, insults people by spinning at them and pulverizes monsters with a fucking hammer. He's loud and manly and reckless and never does anything half-assed. Oh, and he practically farts airships. He's my goddamn hero and I don't care who knows it.

Command List:

• Fight: No bones about it -- that hammer hurts. Cid easily keeps pace with Cecil and Yang when it comes to damage output, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at. What I like best about Cid's attack, though, is that hammers are accompanied by this wonderful ka-klomp sound effect that make his hits seem even meatier than they really are.
  
• Peep: This is identical to the White Magic spell, which is to say, absolutely worthless. Let me tell you something, son: if you're facing a monster, and your options are "Hammer" and "Look at it", and you pick the latter, you are Cid-ing wrong.

Cid joins the party at a point in the game where the difficulty suddenly jumps up a notch. True, he can't one-shot even mook enemies at this point... but then, Cecil and Yang aren't able to do that either, anymore. His biggest weakness is his Speed, which causes him to get fewer turns than the other fighters and therefore puts a damper in his clobberin'. This actually ends up not being a big deal, though. I mean, it's not as though you have a choice in who gets assigned to your team in this game.

---


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

Now that Cid's pimped out in shiny new armor, we can get on with our explorin'. This small continent far to the southwest of Baron sports a ruined castle, a breathtaking tower stretching out of a massive inky hole, and another inaccessible cave. This kind of stuff just screams "plot relevance"! There doesn't seem to be any way into the tower or the cave, though. That just leaves the ruin.


♪♪ Castle Damcyan ♪♪

Alas! We now see the drawback in naming your generic “depressing castle” music after a specific location in the game world.

Anyhoo, the ruin turns out to be exactly as depressing as advertised. It only seems fitting that the rest of this update, which shall be spent exploring it, be presented in lackluster Razed-Ruin Grey.


The keep is utterly desolate, although like Damcyan the torches are still eerily lit. Considering FF2 is a world of boundless magical power I don't know why that little touch manages to surprise me.

The denizens of Eblan Castle, and the story of what happened here, will have to wait for another update. For the time being there seem to be three areas to explore: the keep's main hall, and the towers to either side of it.


Starting with the hall, we immediately get a taste for what will quickly become the theme of Eblan's swank loot: all the easy-to-reach treasure boxes are already opened, and the rest are seemingly blocked off. Cecil has to jigger his way through some cleverly-hidden secret passages in order to thoroughly loot the place. Even collecting this Cure2 involves walking through the wall behind Cecil.


The second floor boasts a pair of vaults, seemingly accessible from above.

"Above" happens to be the throne room, though whatever royal tuchus once occupied this opulent seat has long since vanished. Oddly enough, the down-stairs implied by the floor below don't seem to be anywhere in sight. What's a potential looter to do?


Ah, here they are: hidden away in the blackspace. Sussing out these stairs nets Cecil a few helpful consumables.


Ditto on the opposite side. And that about does it for the main hall!

At this point, it is highly advisable to walk outside and save. There is good treasure to be had here in Eblan, but taking it is no small task.


Here in the Left Tower, we do some prepatory row-swapping. Cid doesn't know it yet, but right now he's occupying the absolute worst place in the party. I'd put everyone in the back row if I could, but there's only room for three, and Cid's Defence is higher than Yang's is. (Not that it makes a huge difference, or anything.)


Circling around the blackspace brings is to our first incredibly danger monster-in-a-box!


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

So begins the Staleman fight. See, here's the big bloomin' secret of Eblan: you're not supposed to be here yet. This whole area of the world is packaged with storyline events several dungeons, experience levels and gear sets from where we are now... not to mention party make-up. That's right: not only are our heroes much too weak to take these monsters on, they're also the wrong types of heroes.

Fortunately, a little bit of strategy can go a long way. The Staleman hits for hundreds of damage, and his Skull buddies are no slouches themselves, but we have an ace up our sleeve: Cecil's auto-Cover ability. None of these monsters can cast spells, which means if any hero drops to critical HP Cecil will take all the damage in their place. If you can get the fight into a state where Yang, Cid and Tellah are all critically injured, Cecil will be the only character taking damage. This is still a rather punishing position, so I'm having him mitigate things somewhat by sitting in the back row and using all of his turns to cast Cure2 on himself.

But just how hard do these guys hit, anyway?


That hard. I told Cid to Parry this round, and he still took over 300 damage. Yikes! Even with Cecil auto-Covering, you still run the risk of getting KO'd in this fight; it's entirely possible for a healthy hero to be smashed down right where he stands. I've seen the Staleman knock Tellah flat on his face from full HP, and that kind of totally sucks since without Tellah you have practically no chance of winning this fight.


Your other ace in the hole is that the Staleman is vulnerable to Ice, while the Skulls (being undead) are weak to Fire. The moral of the story is, if Tellah survives long enough to cast a single-target Ice-3 followed by an area-target Fire3, you win.

Actually getting him to survive that long is, of course, a roll of the dice. That's why you saved outside, yeah? And you'll be headed right back out there, too, since casting two third-tier spells in a row has just knocked off 60 of Tellah's 90 MPs.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

The rewards for this fight are, of course, outstanding. A nice chunk of EXP is never unwelcome, but the real prize is the Slumber Sword.

This weapon not only puts monsters to sleep on hit, but also gives Cecil an astounding +20 boost to his attack. Schway!


♪♪ Castle Damcyan ♪♪

The tower's top floor has a potion hidden in a nearby urn, but that's about the only freebie this castle gives up.


The little notch on the right hides some stairs leading to the treasure opposite the Staleman box.


The notch between the two pots south of the stairs grant access to some GP and a set of decent-enough arrows. Er, you're kind of supposed to have someone in the party who gets excited about new arrows when you loot this floor.


At last, the Right Tower. Naturally, the hidden passages just keep getting more devious.


Accessing the blackspace leading to this 600 GP means stepping behind one of the pillars in the back of the room.


I swear when we were kids we got stuck on this floor for an entire friggin' weekend. It looks easy enough: hit the button, then walk through the door, right? Wrong. If you try it, stepping back onto the stairs takes you to the previous map, and upon returning you find the door has been miraculously closed again. This is probably the first and only room in RPG history where anyone has ever pined for Dragon Warrior's "STAIRS" command.


The solution is to open the door and then step around the stairs, using walkable tiles hidden by the ceiling. This kind of mapwork is unremarkable nowadays, but this is what passed for a puzzle back in 1991.


Solving that dastardly button/stairs mischief leads to another batch of consumables... and one last treasure box, situated behind an ominous square hole.

Stepping into the hole is its own reward, of course, but this hidden passage allows Cecil to walk inside the wall and access the out-of-the-way chest from the right.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

BlackCats are stone cold villains. Bluster is a magical attack which either paralyzes a hero or flat out kills him. In this fight, neither outcome is particularly ideal.

Science Fact: When a hero is hit with a KO attack, there's a split second between the time he faceplants and the time his HP actually zeroes out. That's how fast my screenshottin' finger is.


But no, seriously, this fight sucks on toast and sometimes there's just not much you can do from keeping it from turning against you.


Neither the BlackCats nor the Lamia have anything to exploit in the way of vulnerabilities, although Slow might be a good option to keep the Bulsters down to a dull roar. They don't have much in the way of HPs, though, and don't hit so hard that your front line can't survive a few shots... uh... on the front line.


If you can get the fight to look something like this, where Cecil is tanking all the damage, you're on the right track. Cid and Yang make good spot healers when it comes to keeping Cecil on his feet.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

The hard-won reward is... a spear nobody in the party can equip. We'll come back to this later.


♪♪ Castle Damcyan ♪♪

Hopping down the square hole allows you to reach this chest, but it's a one way trip. From here you have no option but to take a hidden staircase down into the castle basement... which is even drearier than the rest of the place, if that were indeed possible.


These two chests are safe, and both contain Ether1s. The lone chest along the right-hand wall, though...


...yeah, you're gonna want to put the party back in this defensive formation.

Just a quick aside: I can't decide whether I like Yang in the front or the back row during these scenes. He tends to die a lot faster than Cid does, despite the higher HP total, because he's wearing flimsy armor and therefore can't absorb as much damage. Putting him in the back row does seem counterproductive, though, because he's dealing out half as much damage. But then, if you put him in the front and he dies he's dealing no damage whatsoever. (You saw how the Lamia was able to take him out.) It's a tough call, and it sometimes boils down to how the fights fall out. In either case, though, you have some options: if Yang's up front and he dies, but Cecil is still healthy, you can have someone Life1 him. He'll come back in a critical state, so Cecil will start taking his hits. If you leave him in the back where he's safer, you can help bolster his damage output by having Tellah cast Bersk and Fast.

Actually, why don't I just show you?

♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

Ladies and gentlemen: Mad Ogres. Holy crap these guys are tough. Mad Ogres have zillions of HPs and are impervious to pretty much everything. Dealing 60 damage to a heavily-armored Cecil standing in the back row is kind of a big deal.

To put them into perspective a little bit, regular Ogres are a fairly dangerous monster we'll encounter in the next story-mandated dungeon, and Mad Ogres are at least three or four times as dangerous. And the regular flavor doesn't come in packs of three.


I like to start this fight off by landing Virus, which deals only a single point of damage but at least inflicts HP Leak. There's nothing Tellah can do to nuke these guys, so his MPs are better spent getting Yang and Cid buffed to help improve their damage output.


Which, as you can see, is still pretty meager. Well, that's misleading. Yang's attacking from the back row here, but he's also attacking the Mad Ogre's back row. Yes, monsters can be in the "back row" as well, and yes, they get the same benefits and penalties you do. That's actually the downside of Bersk; the damage boost is real nice, but a Bersk'd hero selects his targets randomly, which means he's more likely to rub up against that back row penalty. The Mad Ogre attacking Cecil in that earlier shot was in the back row as well, which explains why he was only dealing 60-ish damage.

But that's how this fight goes. You don't have any good options, just "less bad" options.


Here's Bersk'd Yang punching the front Mad Ogre, for comparison.


Once Cid and Yang are buffed, Tellah's usefulness is out the door. The Mad Ogres can't be Slow'd or put to Sleep, so you might as well just put him on healing duty. There's no way I'm aware of to win this fight quickly; it all comes down to Cecil's ability to suck up the hits. Keeping him alive is a full-time job.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

The fight reward is "only" an Elixir, which... while nice, is not nearly as useful as the weapons from the other boxes. In fact, of the fights in Eblan, only the Slumber Sword is really useful at this stage in the game. That's also the only battle that really requires high level black magic to win. Looting that is definitely worthwhile, but coming back later for the Elixir and Drain Spear might be the better option if you're looking to keep things nice and easy on yourself.

Not me, though. I need the kickass FF2 street cred. I craves it.


And being the abominable cheapskate I am, I always partake of the free night's stay here at Baron Castle.


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

Okay, okay, that's enough freewheeling. It really is about time to get on with this here plot, don't ya think?

Oh hey, this thread is back on the top. I guess it's just another random conversa- HOLY SHIT AN UPDATE.

Brickroad is back! This time with a SPOUSE!

Except I forgot what you were doing before and have to re-read the entire thread!

It worked!