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

Weird, when you get her back she's basically a completely different character in every respect.

I always kind of found it humorous how the only character who ever successfully gets the best of Golbez is a seven year old girl.

So, like, other than the slightly lower MP cost, is there ever a time you want to use Mist Dragon instead of a more powerful summon? I saw in FF5 that it has like a holy element or something. How does that work here?

Edit: Or I could just look it up

I don't think I ever used it later in the game when she has more HP to see how much damage it can do.

WARNING: HEADCANON AHEAD
I think JRPG logic stipulates that users of healing magic have to have a pure, strong mind. It's reasonable that an innocent child would, early on, be able to use such magic, even after something pretty horrible like their last living parent dying - in fact, it may even help moreso as they need to deal with that kind of thing all the time.

Getting suddenly eaten by a sea serpent, being ripped away from all the people you had begun to trust, and not even knowing if they fared any better? Soon after losing the aforementioned parent? That would be pretty traumatizing - just enough to want to use black magic a lot more than piddly white magic.

Doesn't somebody in the castle mention that dwarf women have beards? Too bad the game doesn't introduce any... (Sorry if this picture resembles anybody you know.)



Killing the Cals first works for me sometimes.

Also the antlion cave. I interpreted Rydia losing white magic like a person dropping a childhood hobby as she got older. White magic might've just been an idle curiosity in Mist, or maybe she had to focus more on summoning because humanity almost lost that skill. But why doesn't it make gameplay sense for her to lose it? In the back half of the game you've always got Rosa and Cecil (and Fusoya) to cast white magic.

Because it would be odd at the end of the game to have a seven year old girl rattling off black magic that would have killed Tellah?

Woah! Wouldn't Kain be in the team when they meet FuSuYa? What happens to the party then?

Brick, the only friend of mine who struggles so mouch trouble with reality has to fight to keep his hours at McDonalds and steals cabling out of empty houses for scrap. You don't want to sink to that level.

So THAT'S why it misses!

Sometimes I'd think the tanks were doing all the shooting and the explosions on top of them were merely muzzle flashes.

The Trap Doors will give monster closets a decent fight, though.

Just have Rydia cast each spell on Cecil. Alternately, warp back in time to Cave Magnes and fight the Dark Elf again.

I was like this too. There's no reason not to use up at least 2/3 of your magic when you get to use a tents so often.

Remember that FF2/4j movie we were talking about months ago? Hollywood's next great director is the one who figures out how to recreate the absurdities of this scene in live action. Has anybody already performed this scene at an anime con?

I thought it was aimed at the Dwarf Castle since their standard guns were already taking care of the tanks. Super can refer both to range and power.

If Yang is so strong, why doesn't he just lift up the whole tower and chuck it into space? He coulda clobbered Zeromus at that very moment!

This is one of those moments when the party can enter the battle dead if the guy who left was the last one alive.

One of the fan translations of this game makes Cid's quote something like: "Golbez! Take this bomb and my middle finger!" Then he raises his hand. So iconic!

I always figured the only reason Rydia grows up is so that Edge has someone to hit on

You seem to have forgotten that this is a jRPG.

Ahem...

Fun Fact: Edge is still about 10 years older than her. Dude is old for a JRPG character.

I always thought that the portion of the tower above the surface by Eblan was the Tower of Zot, and the portion underground was the Tower of Bab-il. Since the human and dwarven civilizations don't have any contact with each other, it makes sense that they'd have two different names for the same structure. And outside of Golbez's gang, only your party would be in a position to realize it's the same tower.

No, this doesn't explain why the two airships fly straight up from Troia to reach Zot.

She's just a little girl.

Over the course of the FF series, the black face yellow eye thing has only been seen on oldschool black mages (and a couple related classes), and these dwarves. So... are FF1's black mages secretly dwarves? Discuss!

Rydia grows up because she was never a Toys R Us kid.

Are you implying dwarves are somehow born without beards?

All I knew about Dr. Lugae back then was that I wondered what the fuck was up with his in-battle sprite. I was a bit confused when I saw him sporting a goatee* in the DS version, but when looking up pics a while ago I saw his Amano art and realized he always had it. His battle sprite is just really, really, REALLY compromised to make him look puny and unintimidating, and the palette minimalism hit him hard, too.

I'd post said art here (or at least a link) if I wasn't browsing on the Wii right now.

* The goatee is visible on his little field sprite, though.

Dwarves looked that that in NES FFIII too.

Something about the fact that the dwarves in FFIV and V are basically the Viking class from FFIII.


The dwarves in FFIII look totally different from the dwarves in any other game in the series. They're more gnomish.

Unless you just mean they have the glowing darkness eyes.

Really? People didn't see Lugae's protruding chin as a goatee? Not to mention his simply fabulous pink shirt? Huh.

Yep!

You know, Rydia never seems to age at a greater rate than the rest of the party ever again. Even though The After Years says that she still spends most of her time in the Land of Summoned Monsters.

This can only mean that "Adult Rydia" is obviously a mentally disturbed young woman who just so happened to resemble an older version of the poor little girl whose drowned body ended up in Leviathan's plumbing washing ashore in Summon-Land. Why is she playing this sick game with Cecil and company? Why will she persist for upwards of a decade and a half, without ever once allowing her facade to crack, and her true nature to show? All I know is that I'm afraid of what a person like that would be capable of if anyone around her should ever discover the truth.

After Years just says that time flows really weirdly in the Feymarch. Presumably during that one week it was hyper fast, and after that it was at normal speed.

Or something. Trusting After Years to make sense is a terrible idea.

Well, time passing oddly in the lands of Faerie is an old mythological tradition.
Dark Elf, the Golbez fight you just passed, Magus Sisters, Tiny Magi? Some enemies later too, I think?

Also, didn't Adult Rydia have Nintendo Power art that you're withholding, or am I misremembering/repressing? It's a nice touch in Paladin! Cecil's infobox that the Paladin text is written over "Dark Knight" in shadow.

Super best.

Now, just to round things out, the 'misplaced Simpsons character' version of Lugae:



And one a little closer to the Amano version:

You know, I never really noticed it before, but Lugae seems to be wearing pink flip-flops, while Lugaeborg looks to be wearing stilletto heels.

They were scientifically designed that way.

- Eddie

Here you go


I've always wondered about this, too, because I spent what seemed like forever dicking around in there later in the game, by which logic Golbez should have been ruling the world for a decade when I came back out.

Wait, I've got it: FFIV and OoT mashup!

In retrospect, the weirdest thing about the Lugae Borg is that he's wearing a pair of stylish pumps.

Edit: Damn you Octopus Prime!

It always seemed to me that Lugae's head was a tiny circle (the right eye), that he was facing away from the camera, his lab coat draped over his left side and his left arm was reaching forward. It's a small enough sprite that I never saw how it actually was.

I thought he had some kinda cartoonish rat face. Little pink nose, long grey snout, pink... what do you call'em, crevat? Puffy scarfy thing.

It would've been nice if FFIVA changed things up a bit as far as story is concerned and let you use all of the characters (or at least more of the characters) during the main storyline rather than just dumping them all on you right before end game.

I don't think she's seven anymore, man.