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

Having Yang Focus three times between attacks was crucial in FFIVDS's crazy boss fights.

Focus is important against enemies who counterattack.

These had occurred to me, but I can't think of any examples in vanilla FF4 where Yang would need to do this. (Later editions of the game with additional content don't really count, since the ability was devised and balanced with the original game in mind.)

...What kind of backwards logic is this? You asked what use the ability "Focus" had in FFIV, it doesn't matter which version you're playing.

Hey, at least it's not FFIII where focus dropped your def to 0 for a round.

... yeah.

It's one of the few things that can do full damage to Mad Ogres.

No, because you still have to go into the first screen of that dungeon and trigger the story event wherein Kain leaves the party. Otherwise, the event flag for Cid attaching the drill to Falcon isn't triggered.

As for Golbez, one Titan and a couple of hits from Cecil and he goes down. I always found him fairly easy in this version.

8bit Final Fantasy 4 (nes pirate cart)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzhiOAKr67o

... why did they reorient the airship?

Pffffaahhahaa.... Baigan... Master Asia.....
Ahaha...Ah...

....

It should've been Yang.

I like how the map and town music is pulled from Chrono Trigger.

Even though the topic of an FF4/2 movie is ancient history, I just had another idea.
It could be marketed as FF2, both because the game was once marketed as FF2 and because it would be the second FF movie in theaters. Likewise, an FF6 movie could be called FF3.

The trouble with calling a movie Final Fantasy 2 (or 4 or any number greater than 1) is the average know-nothing moviegoer will assume they missed the first one and so this one won't make a lot of sense so why bother. An intriguing subtitle like "Final Fantasy: Darkness and Light"* serves far better.

* I'm sure someone could come up with something better but "Legend of the Crystals" was already taken.

You also generally wouldn't want to remind people that The Spirits Within exists.

Hahaha. Rosa looks like a guy.

Numbering the games apparently hasn't hurt their sales, and they're in a worse situation because they span multiple platforms and skipped titles.

A large part of FF2's plot is driven by the Mysidian prophecy, which begins "One to be born from a dragon..." Maybe something that focuses on that, and the epic nature of the journey our heroes will undertake...?

Oh! Got it. Final Fantasy: Dragon Quest.

Movies and games are two entirely different beasts, though. There is a precedent set in movies where numbers tend to represent sequels, and sequels are pretty much always directly related to earlier movies. Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings... And also series like Fast and the Furious and a million other movies I have never actually watched.

Often, the stories may not be directly related between sequels, but there are at least characters shared between them.

The precedent set in Final Fantasy and most other RPGs is that themes and designs are carried between sequels, and not characters(barring the direct sequels of course). This trips up a lot of non-gamers I know, when I explain Final Fantasy; they assume that the series is an extremely long story about a few matching characters, before I explain that "no, sequels here work differently."

Final Fantasy II/IV would be a horrible title for any movie that actually makes it to literal theaters. It would probably get the gamer crowd, but I doubt that it would gain the commercial success that most movies are expected to attain without some sort of godly marketing scheme which, quite frankly, Square-Enix would be incapable of delivering.

I think it would be fine as a title if it were direct-to-DVD or even completely digitally distributed, though. The relevant audience would know exactly what they need to think about it.

How about Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest?

...

I'll just go now.

It's all about gathering crystals, so it should be Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.

And since FF3/6 is about rediscovering magic, its movie should be called Secret of Mana.

From a square promo sent to retailers...
The OTHER FF2 (that was in the process of being translated before it was canceled for US..phew)

CokoBean is like a wonderful Final Fantasy spambot.

He's Rey with a narrow focus of awesome.

Rey who? And why does that narrow focus matter?

He's just saying that CokoBean generally focuses his 'awesome' skills towards Final Fantasy.

That sword looks familiar...

I'm sort of charmed by the contextless menace of the phrase: "Dark Shadow Over Palakia."

Pish-posh, we all know Squaresoft never re-used art designs for anything.



Nope, never at all.

Is that the European box? It's certainly not the one we had in North America.

edit: I see now; it was probably just a pre-production mockup for marketing. I'm surprised they didn't use it in the end.

It's fun to imagine an alternate universe where that chunky, overly vertical logo lived on and became the series norm.