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

What?! Oh no!

Any of you fellars remember an old prodigy disscusion club/group called "FF2*"?

This was around '92-93 -- Fun times disccusing the games secrets, game genies codes,etc...

Yes, indeed. I was there as Maenad/Valvalis. The very first day I ever got online in my life was on Prodigy. I scored the Gunslinger Code, which had literally only been posted a day or two earlier. Ah, memories...

Oh man, the Gunslinger Code. I remember getting that from one of my friends at camp, who had printed it out from the internet--this had to be circa 1993/1994, early enough that the idea the internet held such secrets just blew my young mind.

From memory: 00CE 6D69

This Image and the modem's banshee-on-crack boot up screeching will forever be seared into my psyche.


I lost my original FF2 save to the "Walk Through Walls" code --
"let's see what happens if I talk to Cid in Baron castle before his first cutscene..."
*black screen* ... *2 save slots emptied*

So I was flipping through the ol' LP Archive Thread when I stumbled upon this little number:



And that made me angry. Because I hadn't abandoned shit. So I got in my cherry red Lamborghini (all famous LPers drive Lamborghinis) and drove over to PapillonReel's house to see what the haps was. I found him out back in the hot tub with two supermodels.

He was all, "Huh? LP subforum? That's not my gig anymore."

And I was all, "The hell you say. When did that happen?"

And he was all, "I dunno, like a few months ago? Where have you been, man?"

And then I got all flustered and threw up on one of his supermodels. (All former subforum moderators hang out with supermodels.)

He looked at me with disgust and then lowered his star-shaped sunglasses. "Whatever, man," he said, "take it up with Falselogic. You're his problem now."

By this point I was sobbing uncontrollably. I ran off, climbed into my Lamborghini, immediately wrapped it into a utility pole, and then blacked out.

Next thing I knew I was waking up in the alley behind a Wendy's with two weeks of stubble and clutching a bottle of Listerine in a paper bag. And like not even a good Wendy's, one of the shitty ones where the frosties are too watery and the fries are always cold. I knew I had hit rock bottom. But I became determined to turn it all around. I was going to get my life back on track. I was going to give Final Fantasy II the love it deserved. I was going to get the heck off the Abandoned LPs list. I was going to buy Pappy a new supermodel.

I was going to update. Or I was going to die trying.

Interlude the Third: The ToadLady's Treasure Trove


♪♪ Giott, the Great King ♪♪

Having failed to retrieve the stolen crystals and instead making off with a busted airship, Cecil and his merry men slink back to Giott's pad to deliver the bad news. The dwarves, meanwhile, have recently stumbled upon a strange man near the passage to the world above. You know, right around the spot where Cid took his suicide dive. Might these two events be related!?

Yes. Yes they are.


And King Giott? Why, he decides that since there's only one secure crystal remaining in the whole world, the thing to do is entrust its continued safety to the very man who so badly fumbled the previous seven. Dwarves are a reckless and foolhardy bunch. Either that, or they drink a lot. (Possibly both of these things.)


"You know, Big Papa G -- can I call you Big Papa G? -- maybe if nobody can open this cave without your daughter's necklace, she ought to just keep it? Like, here, in the castle, where it's safe? Or, better yet, we could just take a quick walk to the seashore here and pitch it into one of your kingdom's lovely molten oceans, where it will melt and--"


"Okay, yeah, or I could just take it, or whatever. That's fine too. We'll do that. In the meantime, you got any strange men laying around...?"

♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

No, I didn't paste the wrong song in there. That's really what plays during this scene. I don't know why.

In any case, a bonafide miracle has occured! The mass of assorted fleshy gibbets that once walked around and pleased to call itself "Cid" seem to have somehow gravitated towards one another and re-congealed into something resembling their host form. Which is a roundabout way of saying, "Hey, look! Cid's still alive!"



Early on I mentioned that FF2 was the RPG that basically told all other RPGs how to tell stories. It did this by being the first major RPG with a real cast of characters, and with events that formed a logical plot progression, and a dozen or so other little things that were pretty innovative at this point in video game history. Viewed objectively, though, neither the characters nor the storylines are very deep, and the characters' relationships with one another are somewhat slight.

Except for Cid and Edge.

This is something I noticed even as a snot-nosed little brat: Cid and Edge love to hate each other. Cid is stark and abrasive, Edge is cocky and volatile. And man, you could tell the writers had a lot of fun ramming them into each other. FF2 was my first RPG that had a real story, but it was also the first RPG to have this kind of great banter between two very different characters. FF2 doesn't have a lot of ways to develop interactions like this, but boy howdy, it is happy to use whatever muscle it has. These are fleeting moments, but they're wonderful.


To offer a bit of contrast, most of the dialogue in the game is more like Rosa's and Kain's here: anonymous, and to the point. We've read reams and reams of this stuff together, you and I, right here in this LP. The text of FF2 is usually bent only to the goal of getting the story moving, and whose voice gets used is more often than not simply chosen by picking the guy who hasn't said anything in a while. This summary of the party's recent adventures could just as easily been spoken by Cecil and Rydia, or by Rosa and Kain in the other direction. In fact, can you say with any certainty that I didn't doctor these screenshots, or use Namingway-and-savestate shenanigans, to switch these two lines around?

I'll never tell.


♪♪ Hey Cid! ♪♪

Enough about bland ol' nobody-cares characters. All Cid had to hear was "enemy airship" and he's up and out of bed, literally leapfrogging his way across the room.


His nurses try to disuade him, but Cid brushes them off and then impresses them into his crew. Such is the raw power of Cid's manliness that simply by standing in the vicinity of his beard automatically makes you a qualified mechanic.

♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

Now that the airship is fixed and Edge has graduated from his course in airship engineering and design (also offered: interior decorating, gun repair, or get your high school diploma) Cid collapses back into a pile of Zs. He works hard, he plays hard, he naps hard. He's the m-f'n man.

The game tries to fake you out here by playing the sad "oh no!" music and making you think he's died of his wounds, but I won't insult your intelligence by documenting that part in screenshots. If a world-shattering explosion and 500-story fall didn't do the trick, neither is a little wrenchwork and the satisfaction of putting an uppity ninja in his place.


♪♪ The Airship ♪♪

At long last, we finally have open access to all the far corners of the Underground! Giott told us to head southwest to the Sealed Cave, and lo, that's precisely where we find it. But there are a few other cool locations tucked away in the nooks and crannies of this strange, orange world. Like this cute little town!


♪♪ Welcome to Our Town! ♪♪

Welcome to Tomra, the not-quite-final town in FF2. (Well, for certain definitions of "town" anyway.) In honor of this secluded bastion of civilization, the remainder of this update comes at you in totally-not-gross Lava Ocean Orange.


I'm gonna put on my game design hat here for a second, so bear with me. Because I think this part here is pretty cool.

There are a few other locations to explore in the Underground, outside of Tomra and the Sealed Cave. Indeed, we'll be exploring one in the back half of this update. And we can safely assume that an adventurous player will discover these locations by accident, simply by flying around in their newly-acquired airship.

But let's remember, FF2 is not one of those oldschool RPGs that drops you into the world and then expects you to figure shit out for yourself. Up to this point, it has been a safe, linear, go-here-do-this kind of adventure, with each daisy on the chain leading directly into the next one. The player doesn't have any freedom until he gets the Enterprise in Baron, and by that point the only new locations he can visit, other than a village or two, are The Next Place In The Plot and The Place After That. He can't really use this new freedom to get into any real trouble.

Here though, the player finds himself with full liberation in a situation where there's still about half of a world map to explore. He's told by Giott where to go, and in flying that direction, he sees Tomra right next door. "Oh cool, a town!" says this hypothetical player. Who wouldn't want to visit a town before a dungeon? And so that's where he goes. And upon visiting the town, he learns of two separate dungeons he can visit.

This is a clever way to solve two problems that a player might be having. One, it tells a player who has just been following orders that there are other places to poke his head into. You know, if he wants to. No obligation or anything. And two, it tells the player that these locations are pretty safe to visit. It can be a pretty weird moment to step into a new dungeon you're not sure you should be in yet; by casually mentioning the dungeons by name in a safe area -- something that has not happened at any other point in FF2 -- the player is basically receiving an invitation to seek these locations out and party on.

In other words, the game is subtly transitioning from the linear narrative style the player has grown comfortable with into a more freewheeling "do what you want" approach. I'm sure that was appreciated both by veteran RPGers who had been used to identifying dungeons this way from the olden days, and newer, more narrative-focused players who may have been feeling a little lost in this huge scary lava world.

My game design hat has little bells on it, like a jester's cap. Sometimes Peanut makes me wear it when-- you know what, nevermind.


Ugh. Man, I just got done saying all kinds of nice things about townsfolk dialogue, and then this? This fucking joke? Fuck this joke. Your mom's a hi-ho, bitch.


This... this is the happiest moment of my life. Thank you. Thank you, young treasuredwarf.


Nothing spectacular, of course, but each opened treasure box is like the song of a rainbow, bearing tiny cups of happiness to our cheerful, loving hearts. I may or may not have dropped acid before writing this update.


Being a town, Tomra also has shops! In addition to the most expensive axe in all of creation (which we already got for free), Edge can also pick up a second Middle Sword here, for a cool +7 Attack boost. This brings him to a respectible 94, two points higher than Cecil and his IceBrand.


A hole in the wall leads us through a secret passage to the Armor Shop. It's not, like, a hidden Armor Shop or anything; there's a front door leading back out to town. The passage is just here for convenience, and to give the clerks a private place to you highlighted this looking for hot dwarf-on-dwarf action.

Not that I can buy any armor, because apparently my bag is full ooooh noes!!

All that expensive Diamond gear is nice, but the real prize in this store is the even-more-expensive Tiara, which gives Rydia a pretty amazing +10 boost to Wis. Wis., as you'll recall, is the stat that governs the effectiveness of Black Magic. Rydia therefore wants as much of it as possible.

Really, this is the point in the game where paying attention to your mages' magic stats can really pay off for you. Of course there's nothing in the game that clues you into this at all, why do you ask?


By contrast, the thousands and thousands of GP spent on upgrading Cecil's duds nets him just a few paltry points of Defence. But hey, every little bit helps.


After that it's just a matter of getting my Item screen sorted out a bit, so the most useful items are on the top, and we're all done in Tomra.

I couldn't bring myself to part with those seven Cure1s. I'll never use them either. They're just going to win the game with me, and that'll be that.


♪♪ The Airship ♪♪

Passing up the Sealed Cave for now, here are the two side dungeons, right where the Tomra dwarves said they'd be! There's not enough space inside this Interlude for the both of them, though, so let's pick the longer, tougher, more convoluted one that has to be explored twice before it's cleared out.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

And so we enter into the Sylvan Cave. Without even taking a step, this dungeon has three properties that set it distinctly apart from other dungeons (cave or otherwise) we've seen so far in FF2:

1) The cave is confusing. Treasure boxes we can't reach? Two paths to take? Hell, most of the areas have multiple stairways. The whole place is a twisty maze. The Pass to Bab-il was also twisty, but still mostly linear; there was only ever one way to go at any time.

2) New tileset! New... creepy... organic-looking... kinda slimy... tileset. Heebie jeebies.

3) New music! New... creepy... kinda alien... uh... I'm not so comfortable with this development.

Anyway, (game design hat! jingle jangle!) there are a lot of very strong tells that this cave is the next level, just like the Tower of Zot was back in its time. And like Zot, the startling newness of it all is accompanied by a pretty hefty difficulty hike. It's difficulty of a different sort, though; in Zot the monsters just hit a lot harder and you had to pay more careful attention to your HPs. Here the monsters start using really annoying attacks, and are a lot more durable than what we're used to. If you haven't gotten the hang of keeping Rydia healthy and putting her magic to good use, this cave is going to be an ordeal and a half.


There's also a new gameplay element to content with: damage tiles. The glowy ooze that fills some of the divots in the floor drains your HPs away as you walk through it. Solution?


Rosa can cast Float on the party, nullifying the danger entirely! As kids we didn't know Float was a multi-target spell, so we would cast it five times to make sure everyone was covered. We did this for years before we realized we could save 32 of Rosa's precious MPs by not being fucking retarded.

And yet another cool game design thing (jingle jangle!): the damage tiles put a sort of "level lock" on the Sylvan Cave. If her level is too low and Rosa doesn't yet know Float, this cave is going to basically rape your face until you're all pissed and frustrated. So you'll quit, and go level grind, or check out the Sealed Cave, or whatever... but eventually you'll get that "Learned Float" message and think, oh yeah! What about those damage tiles? And voila! Now you're on better terms to face the dungeon's terrain, with more appropriate stats to fell its monsters.

I dunno, I think this is a cool and effective way to set the bar of the dungeon so players have a firm clue on when they're "supposed" to visit it, without simply locking the doors until xyz plot flag has been tripped.

Have I said enough nice things about the Sylvan Cave yet? Yes? Okay. Now it's time to say some not-very-nice things.

♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

This fight sucks. This fight sucks so hard I vomit blood every time I run into it.

The Sylvan Cave is, by a very wide margin, my least favorite location in FF2. And it's all thanks to these ToadLadys.

See, the ToadLady can't actually attack you. All she does is flings her lovely pets at you. Every time she squeals, "Croak, my dears!" all six of her TinyToad companions belch out a Toad spell, which turns one of your heroes into a toad. The effects of these spells are cumulative, which means a hero that gets hit with two Toad spells during a single volley will remain in their hero form. (They'll get turned into a toad, but then they'll turn back.) A hero that gets hit with an odd number of Toad spells is summarily toad-ified. There are lots of ways to transform toads back into heroes -- a Heal spell will do, or a Heal item, or Rydia's Toad spell -- but by the time you've entered the command the ToadLady will be about ready to launch another volley anyway. There's really no getting ahead of it.

You see where I'm going with this. Toad-ified heroes are totally ineffective, but there's no good way to un-toad-ify them, and there's no way to know which heroes are going to be toad-ified on which rounds. It's just a crapshoot. And while all your heroes are transmogrifying back and forth, the ToadLady isn't actually attacking you. So a battle that isn't actually dangerous gets artificially stretched several rounds longer than it otherwise would go. And you get to watch six Toad spells being cast every single round until you deal with the infestation. The ultimate insult is when one hero gets hit six times, or three heroes get hit twice each. Because then you've just watched green clouds flash around for like forty seconds while the game state did not change one iota.


The quickest way to deal with the infestation, of course, is the splash damage from Edge or Rydia's attack magic. The TinyToads have little enough health that one such attack is good enough to take them all out. Even if you queue up Blitz or Mist as fast as your little thumbs can carry you, though, there's no guarantee your caster will be human enough to execute the spell when their turn comes up. Whether the fight is quick or extensive is really just a coin toss.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

There is one good thing about ToadLadys: they drop Ribbons! The Ribbon is a piece of headgear and something of a Final Fantasy staple which blocks all kinds of nasty status ailments. In FF2 the Ribbon is a piece of endgame gear that I didn't even know dropped off of monsters until just now, because I forgot to turn my fucking Game Genie codes off. Ahem.

Also note: TinyToads drop Heal potions. They do this pretty much constantly, Game Genie or no.

Anyway, you can see here that gear choices towards the FF2 endgame aren't always cut and dry. Putting a Ribbon on Rydia's head will help keep her healthy, and would go a long way towards cleaning up the toad infestation in this dungeon. (If she can't be Toad-ified, she can get a Mist spell off flawlessly every single battle.) It does come with a pretty hefty hit to Wis., though, dropping it down to pre-Tiara levels.


This is a decision I won't be making. The Ribbon is too fucktastically good to cheat my way into one, knowingly or not. I probably wouldn't have left this on Rydia, but slapping it on Rosa would have been a no-brainer, and I didn't want to give into temptation. So I turned off my code and threw this Ribbon in the trash. This is the first time an FF2 player has ever thrown a Ribbon in the trash, ever. I am a pioneer.

I kept the six Heals though. I'm going to make Heal smoothies for everyone later.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

There are a lot of treasures in this dungeon. Like, a lot. Almost as many as there are toads!


New arrows for Rosa are always welcome, and +20 Attack is a pretty hefty kick up. As if there weren't already enough transitions happening in the gameplay, this is the point where you're more likely to scrounge around for Rosa's arrows, rather than simply buying stacks of them in town. Assuming, of course, that you're actually using her Aim command in the first place.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

Something I do every time I play through the Sylvan Cave, and I mean every flingin' flangin' time, is get into this fight and think, "Oh! Tree monsters! I will use fire magic on them, for fire burns wood! Fire burns wood good!" I do this completely forgetting that not only are Rydia's strongest fire spells not good enough to kill a DarkTree with one strike, but that Ghosts (and, in fact, all palette swaps thereof) absorb fire magic. That's an expensive 30 MP lesson I have to re-learn, over and over.

Mist is a good compromise, though. It deals enough damage to everything that Cecil and Edge can clean up with their swords.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

Wall is the reason I like to do this optional Underground cave before that other optional Underground cave. Annoying though they may be, the monsters in here give just stupid amounts of EXP. Enough to guarantee Rosa learns this here spell, which you need to you probably highlighted this looking for hot dwarf-on-dwarf action too, you beardophile pervert.

♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

There are two paths through the Sylvan Cave, but don't try to keep them straight by studying these screenshots. I didn't make enough of an effort to properly convey how the different paths fit together, and honestly I wouldn't trust myself to be able to put them back together after screenshotting them anyway. Mercifully, the dungeon isn't actually as complex as it looks; taking one stairway from the first floor puts you on one path, and taking the other one puts you on the second. There's a lot of twisting and turning and doubling back on either path, but as long as you take one on your first visit and the other on your second, you can be sure to reach both endings without getting lost or turned around. You won't actually find yourself in a situation where you step into an already-looted treasure room and have to think about where to go next.


The constant floor transitions do take their toll, though, due to the second reason I hate this dungeon so much: Float only lasts for one floor. Every time you use a staircase, you have to cast it again. Yes, this is hyper obnoxious. And yes, you will forget to do this a couple times on every visit and only be reminded of the chore when you step into an ooze puddle.


There is a save point pretty early on in the dungeon, which is good since you'll probably need an MP recharge before all is said and done.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

Here's a shitty-ass situation to be in: the TinyToads might catch both of your casters with their croakapalooza, leaving you no expedient way to end the fight. In this case it's not a bad idea to use someone's turn to transform one back; at least that way you can at least enter a command and cross your fingers, rather than simply instruct them to fight ineffectively.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

The secret tunnels in the Sylvan Cave look like brown MS Paint squiggles. I don't know why. This path leads around to the third chest we couldn't get to earlier, which contains a +3 Attack upgrade for Rosa.


I didn't really need an MP recharge at this point, but there's enough dungeon left ahead of us that using a Tent is practical.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

This three-TinyToad formation is somewhat rarer than the other one, which is a blessing and a curse. On one hand you only have to sit through three Toad animations each round instead of six. On the other, since you're now eating an odd number of croaks, there's no chance of getting through the volley unscathed. The fight is no easier to actually win, since anything that can kill three TinyToads with one blast will also kill six.

I didn't go out of my way to trigger it, but if you manage to kill all the TinyToads but leave the ToadLady alive for a while she will cast Toad on herself. This serves no useful function that I can see other than to show what a vast and wondrous place the world is.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

Just a couple of treasures hangin' out in a dead end, you know, if you're into that sort of thing.

♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

If the ToadLady battle ever goes really poorly -- and it sort of can't get much worse than this here -- your ace in the hole is Rydia's Toad spell. You can use this to toggle everyone's Toad status, which in this fight means trading one ineffectual fighter for four awesome ones. If you have to do this, though, try and speed through the command windows after you give Rydia her input so you can sit on Edge's. That way you'll be able to queue up a Blitz spell immediately and hopefully swing the fight back in your favor.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

Curling around through this secret passage brings us to another one of the Sylvan Cave's frequent features: monster boxes! Let's see what's inside.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

All of the Fs. All of them.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

At least this time we get something for our pain and suffering. You know, other than a 1/4096 chance at a Ribbon, I mean. The Mute Dagger is a few points better than a Middle Sword, slightly widening the gap between Edge and Cecil's arms race and giving Edge the ability to silence monsters, to boot.

Rydia can equip this, and it is a significant upgrade from her Dancing Dagger, but if you're using Rydia's Fight command you're kind of doing it wrong. (Yes, the time will come when Rydia's weapon actually matters. Patience, dear reader.)


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

If the ToadLadys weren't bad enough, Sylvan Cave is also home to the Molbol, a monster whose breath causes every status ailment in the book.

No, really. Look at this shit:


That's just about all of them! Rosa is currently a blind mute toad midget pig, and the only reason she isn't cursed or confused is those ailments wear off at the end of the fight.

I suppose Breath doesn't poison its target, which is something.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

Somewhere along the way I thought I'd walk around with Rosa for a little while.


Mostly worthless arrows. Feh. Would that these were Charm Arrows, or Darkness at the very least.


♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

Two more facts about Molbols: they are durable enough to eat a Titan spell and not die. So if you're trying to cut your way through Sylvan Cave while conserving your MPs, you're in for a hell of a fight. Second, they can digest you, which sounds kind of gross but is somehow not as nauseating than their breath. It just does a little bit of damage and you can safely ignore it.

♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

Now this is what I like to see coming down onto a new floor! Kind of takes the sting out of having to re-cast Float again!


And so we come to one of the endings of the Sylvan Cave: a weird little... house. Huh.

Don't bother looking in that pot. In a just and loving world there would be an item in there, but ours is neither. It's empty, just like your soul after taking the eight steps over there for no reason.


Not quite as amusing a welcome as "Yipes! Peoples!", but okay, I'll take it.


The Sylphs keep rather... odd treasures on hand. But okay, I'll take those too. what else you got, crazy little fairy chicks?


How 'bout a big ol' heapin' helpin' of KARATE?

So this is where Yang turned up after taking the brunt of that Super Cannon explosion. Unfortunately there isn't much we can do for him that the Sylphs aren't already doing. Note that this does definitively answer one of FF2's most plaguing questions, though: the power of BEARD is objectively stronger than the power of KARATE, at least if your metric is the rate at which one can survive a massive explosion.

Note, too, that the game tries to sneak a bit of lateral storytelling into the mix here. The idea is the Sylphs found Yang and brought him to their house, and carefully stored his weapons for when he woke up. At the point where most players lose Yang, he will indeed be wearing a Poison Claw and a CatClaw. Nice and tidy, no?

Nice and tidy, no. The contents of every treasure chest are hardcoded, so the effect doesn't work if, say, you stripped Yang of his claws before blowing him up, or if you had given him IceClaws or something to work with. Worst case scenario, you end up with two CatClaws.

Still, it's a nice touch and I'm glad they put in the effort.


And with that, a helpful magic tile teleports us back outside the cave. On that run we found a couple weapon upgrades and got good news about Yang. But what about all those paths we didn't take? Time to Cabin up and take a second look.

♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

TinyToads drop Heals so often that getting two at one go is merely uncommon, rather than astronomically unlikely. Yes, even with the Game Genie turned off.


♪♪ Illusionary World ♪♪

This time we'll head down to B3F from the other direction. You can't access the Sylphs' house from this angle, but you can get at some treasure.


Booya, Charm Rod! Finally Rydia has a weapon worth equipping. She will never Fight with this, and casting Charm for free has no useful function that I'm aware of, but it does tack on another ten points of Wis., which is exactly what we like to see.

The D&D woods faffer in me scoffs at Rydia's 18 Str. Like, that shouldn't even be possible.


Seeing all these already-looted treasure boxes is a sad, sad thing. Like, I wouldn't even have minded if they were all Cure2s or tiny amounts of GP. I like touching them and hearing the clicking sound when they open.


A decent amount of GP is waiting for us back up on B2F, you know, in case you needed a bit of help affording suits of full plate made out of solid diamond.


I've often wondered why they didn't simply draw a "hole in the floor" tile. The big ominous black square of anguish and terror doesn't exactly do it for me.


One small cache of potions later, we leap down into the deep, dark unknown. (Otherwise known as "the other end of B3F".)


Said deep darkness lands us on the far side of the Sylphs' house, which then loops back up and around to the teleporter tile in the Room of Already-Opened Sadness.


...but that sadness is only momentary! All six of these chests are monster boxes, and all six are pretty rad. The top three chests all trigger fights with six Ghosts and contain Elixirs, and lord knows you can never have too many Elixirs. The other three...

...cool-ass new weapons! And thank the fat Buddha, not a ToadLady in sight.

Centpedes are a new monster type, but whatever, they die in two seconds. Nobody cares about Centpedes.


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

Soaking up the EXP down here gets us a couple new spells. Rydia will probably never cast Drain ever, because why bother, but Edge's Smoke spell actually has its uses. It allows you to escape combat immediately and risk-free, providing it's a combat you could run from normally. I wish he learned it earlier; it's be a no-brainer in all those obnoxious ToadLady fights.


The FullMoon is a boomerang weapon that is eight Attack points stronger than a Middle Sword, and doesn't get its damage penalized from the back row. That sounds like an advantage but it really isn't. Since the FullMoon is a unique weapon, and Edge can't equip two of them, the options for his other hand aren't great. Either you put a strong sword in his off-hand (which loses half its power) or you put a Boomerang there (which is incredibly weak).

This has always frustrated me because the fix was so obvious, even back when I was a kid. Locked up in the final dungeon are superweapons for every character. Edge, of course, has two, and they are both swords. So "strongest Edge" is always on the front line. If, however, one were a sword and one were a boomerang, then there would be two versions of "strongest Edge"; one with the best sword and the second best sword on the front line, and one with the best boomerang and the FullMoon on the back line. Or you could switch, or mix-and-match, depending on what you wanted to use him for.

As is, the FullMoon is just a brief Attack upgrade until the next sword comes along. Its special properties are completely squandered.


The Avenger is a powerful two-handed weapon, but be careful about equipping it. Losing Cecil's shield makes him slightly squishier (although admittedly for Cecil this isn't a huge deal, and he becomes permanently Bersk'd. Now, this is a good thing for a lot of situations, because like what were you expecting him to do anyway if not Fight relentlessly? For tricky fights and boss battles, though, you may need him to spot heal or issue out Life potions. Since you can't access a Bersk'd character's command window, there's no way to replace the sword mid-fight, either.

Oh and Medusa Arrows or whatever. SNORE.


♪♪ Land of Dwarves ♪♪

Once again, a convenient exit tile whisks us back outside.

The big profit of the Sylvan Cave, in my opinion, is the Charm Rod. While everyone except Kain receives upgrades in here, that +20 Wis. boost helps pack a lot of punch behind Rydia's magic, which we're totally going to need in the adventures ahead. We can't resolve the Yang sideplot just yet; that will require a third trip through the cave later on. (You can cheat the system if you wait until after the big climactic endgame plot event, at which point you only have to clear the Sylph house path once, but doing it this way means forfeiting all those treasures until after you don't need them, and also hot dwarf-on-dwarf action! You found it! Great job.

Next: "It sure is the Power of Light!"

The best thing about ToadLadys is that if you kill all their toad friends and wait, they'll turn themselves into Toads.

Congrats on updating Brick, but I'll still laugh in a high, arrogant and dismissive manner at the fact that you abandoned your LP. although I think I've come close

Ho ho ho.

- Eddie

Ho ho ho.

Hooray! It lives!

I always loved those little Airship Repairing vignettes. We haven't even seen the best one yet either.

Also, how Yang wound up outside that cave is one of those little mysteries that the game never elaborates on.

Since the cave is on an entirely different landmass than the Tower, the obvious solution is that the explosion threw Yang half-way across the Underground, where he made a KARATE shaped crater just outside the cave.

OR, Yang survived the explosion, fought his way out of the tower (weaponless, according to this LP!) and then somehow got turned around when he got outside and went West instead of South, swam across the ocean of lava, and then decided to take a nap outside of the cave because he was plum tuckered out.

56 Wis is plausible, though.

Uhm, I haven't played this in a while, but if memory serves there's a really easy way to deal with this group. Toad is the only spell rydia can cast while in toad form, and ToadLady can't use the 'croak my dears' attack while she's toaded and has no defense against it.

So, if you see where I'm going with this: Rydia's first action in this fight every time should be a single target toad on the Toad Lady. It won't be canceled if she's toaded, and it'll shut down the entire enemy formation. After that the rest of the fight is cleanup.

Can you say that? Squishier? I mean, his physical defense actually increased (+15 Vit). I would think that low magic defense would have its own term, like... melty.

Oh I see. You didn't even leave a note, just disappearing in the dead of night, and now you expect to stroll back as if nothing happened? Of all the nerve!! Please don't go again you know we love you c'mon we can make this work!

I'm glad this LP is back!

And it isn't as if anything fishy was going on. LPs automatically go on hiatus if they haven't been updated in two months and are automatically abandoned after six.



Unless I hear different from the LPer. I'll make the changes to the list now

IT'S ALIVE!

Does this LP's resurrection have anything to do with your video software shitting the bed? Youtube's loss is our gain!

I always hated that cave. First, I NEVER have had float when I first got access to it, and then I would get temporarily locked out of the underground by advancing the plot. Second, I always forgot that you can't actually get the sylph summon until later.

And toad, etc.

And to make matters worse, I'd sometimes go through to the land of summoned monsters and forget that I hadn't learned Wall yet.

Luckily, the top floor of the dungeon area (bottom? whatever) is a fine grinding spot, especially if you find a Conjurer who keeps calling spider ladies. (Hope you have Float by that point!)

Of all the times I've played through this game, I've never done the sylph cave first. Not sure why that is, other than how tedious all the battles are. Looking forward to seeing the other side quest around Christmas!

And here I was considering adopting this LP some time in 2013. Ah well. (Kidding, kidding! Nobody adopts a Brickroad LP.)

This may sound weird, but the first time I played this game, Sylph Cave didn't really feel like it was supposed to be in the game. Like many players, I visited it second of the two areas that become available once you get the second airship upgraded, and of course the two dungeons look eerily similar. The whole thing is almost plot-free if you exclude the napping KARATE at the bottom. My only FF prior to this was FF6, which went to great lengths to make sure that even the optional dungeon(s) had some sort of plot relevance, so I didn't know at the time that Sylvan Cave was the norm for the series at the time of this game's release, not the exception.

The Toad Lady turns herself into a Toad because she can't bear to live without her babies. You monster.

Was the answer to the "disappearing critical" bug ever found here? I remember it being brought up, but not if it was ever resolved.

Because I was looking through some TAS videos, and saw this under the FF4 submission...

Obviously don't click if you don't wanna know yet, etc.