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

While playing Advance, the Sealed Cave was pretty much filled to the brim with goddamn [Zu]bats. They all used the Vampire attack, and there was never any party with less than four of the things.

TrapDoors? Ha. I still hear the sound of the Vampire spell when I close my eyes.


Ever since FF2, battle SFX has been one of the major things I look for Of course, it eventually led to the interminable summon sequences of 7 and 8 (which I still enjoy, but I can see why others wouldn't.) I was massively disappointed when the Super Famicom SMTs and Earthbound had such low-grade SFX that calling them "minimalistic" would be an insult to the word.

And FF2's Lit-3, Ice-3, Weak, Virus, and Big Bang continue to be either my top, or very nearly my top favorite spells in FF.


And the endless parade of Fukts seems to have robbed him of his indoor voice. Poor guy.

This is fantastic

It's exactly what I did on my first playthrough, thanks to my not reading the manual properly.

PRO TIP: Don't ride a yellow chocobo south across the river near Toroia and abandon it. And for the love of god, don't save if you do.

- Eddie

I don't think I ever bothered to fight my way through the cave. I always just ran until I got to the Dark Elf, then fought my way back out. Though I think I might have done it the right way on DS, either for myself or because it made you somehow, I don't remember.


I can't remember if this completely traps you or just makes you walk really far.

Can this be exploited in the Sealed Cave as well, or will you have to keep Stop-spamming those bastards?

Nope. It's not "connected to anything" in terms of how they look like on the screen, but these doors are still square sprites that bar access to rooms/other floors.

Wooooooow

I vaguely remember there being a second chocobo forest that can get you back, but it may be only in the DS version...

For some reason when I was a kid I thought Toroia was spelled Troia, like Deanna Troi. It's full of ladies who don't join the party, like Deanna's mom, so it didn't even seem that odd.

The hell with enemies that can actually kill you, I always hated those friggin' bats more because of their combination of high speed and overly slow life draining attacks. Whenever I encounter those bats, I hear my mind go "AW GODDAMMIT NOT THESE FUCKERS AGAIN!"

I have a similar reaction to the Yin/Yang monster from Final Fantasy VII's Nibelheim Manor, though in that case it's actually a threat as well. @.@

Yeah, vampire bats are a pain. And Yin/Yang in FF7 is annoyingly slow and powerful for that area. But those two are nothing compared to some of the shit Dragon Quest games throw at you. Woe betide the player up against Ding-a-lings in DQ8 who doesn't slay those high-defense bastards swiftly, for they will summon Jargons to spit sand and fire at you, reducing your accuracy and burning through your HP far faster than your puny Heal spells can keep up with. Those little bastards have been known to bring about the defeat of parties 10 levels higher than the recommended level of the area they're fought in.

Don't you just love well-balanced game design?

Oh, I am all too familiar with annoying status effects in Dragon Quests. As much as I love it, in Dragon Quest III alone I recall those butterflies that love to screw up your accuracy, and those flying cats that love to mute your spellcasters while tagging along with monsters that have high defense.

And of course, it's the game that introduced the disruptive wave to the series. Bye bye boosted stats. >=(

Quite. This very FF game was the first eye-opener to a world of turn-based RPGs where you didn't have to put up with battles becoming little more than prolonged sessions trying to get the RNG to behave itself, if memory serves. Before that, pretty much every RPG followed the DQ gold standard of "roll a 1d6 to see if the player gets to have fun".

Of course, DQ games still follow that standard. Only with some of them (DQ8 especially), it's more like "roll a 1d100 to see if the player gets to have fun" and anything less than a 70 results in the player being waterboarded instead.

(I'm a wee bit angry at DQ8 at the moment, if you didn't guess. Mostly thanks to aforementioned Jargon bullcrap. No fight should ever end with the party getting TKO'd due to a combination of incurable blindness status and enemies abusing super-attacks that take off over a third of everyone's HP per use.)

God I hate those bats. When I replayed this game with the release of the PSP version, I quickly remembered the horror of fighting bats. The worst part is when you start encountering groups of 1 vampire with 6 bats, which take forever and a year to fight.

ARGH.

Honestly, those bats are the reason why I try to run from every fight in the Magnes Cave.

You're still going to get at least three drain animations, and often you'll get a couple of rounds before you manage to run away.

God I hate those bats

Can't you run away? Is there some "Brave Blade" sort of thing in the game that prevents you from doing so?

I'm pretty sure Sky Render just doesn't run from fights on principle.

That, and DQ games hate me when it comes to that kind of thing. I have yet to see the Flee command work when I actually need it.

I'm just... so happy to see all this DQ hate in my thread. So happy. For years on this forum I've been reading nonsense like "Spells like Upper and Sap actually work, and make battles fun!", and just blinking, exasperated, in response. What do you even say to that? "Yes, I too enjoy wasting several rounds of turn-based combat putting my stats in order. Games which balance your stats so they're just naturally where they need to be suck ass."

There may be hope for you yet, Talking Time.

Having to deal with stat issues is the sole reason I don't play DQ games... For whatever reason stat manipulation by enemies seems like dickery to me...

I kinda like the stat boosts in DQ, but as soon as you start having bosses who can remove ALL of them at once it's kind of pointless.

It makes people feel like they're strategizing, and thus makes them feel smart. Going "attack attack attack" feels simplistic to them in a way that "cast Oomph, cast Sap, then attack attack attack" doesn't.

Such spells make battles more complex, for sure... but complexity doesn't come hand-in-hand with either increased strategy or increased fun.

Yeah, that's the opposite of fun. I was really happy that DQ9 drastically cut down on the number of boss fights that are just "buff, buff, buff, buff, attack once, cold wave, start over." Though there's still the ridiculous situation of having to walk all the way back through a dungeon because Zing didn't work three times in a row.

This pretty much sums up my main gripe with stat boosts in DQ games. They are simultaneously required AND ridiculously easy for the enemy to remove or negate. I don't mind it nearly as much in a game engineered effectively around the concept of adjusting the fight in your favor (Vagrant Story, for example), but DQ games aren't even that. It's a crapshoot even with buffs if you're going to clear most battles with all of your characters intact, since enemies can and will pull out their ridiculously overpowered attacks at random to completely wreck your day.

Vagrant Story doesn't pull that crap on you, though at a glance it seems to. Did you know there are very easy ways you can skip most fights in that game without taking extra damage or missing out on anything in the process? Good luck at that in a Dragon Quest, though. DQ is grind-or-die, else toss-the-die and pray for endless good RNG calls. Either way, you're at the mercy of chance and will get completely screwed sooner or later.

You can talk to the Chocobos. And because this is FFII, they go "Cooooc."


It's meant to be Troia, as a reference to Troy.

I just hate RPGs that give spells and abilities totally unintuitive names. Dragon Quest games give me a little trouble with that but nothing will trump the Lufia series in that regard. I look forward to the day when letting players rename spells and abilities becomes standard.

Yes, I suspected as much now but at the time it was Star Trek: The Next Generation all the way, baby!

Oh man, never play the Phantasy Star games.

Or the Breath of Fire series, for that matter. Especially the Japanese versions, where every single spell name is complete and utter gibberish.

Three words.

Shin.

Megami.

Tensei.