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

Guys, seriously. They're Dwarves, and your solutions are not nearly Dwarven enough. Let's look at the variables available to the Dwarves: an army of tanks, and infinite ammo. The most Dwarven solution is to point the turrets in the opposite direction, fire repeatedly, and let nature take its course.

You're clearly wrong. What they did was their tanks grew beards, and the beards pulled the tanks out.

Now see, that solution isn't nearly as Dwarven* as you think. Mine combines the essential elements of a needlessly daft and roundabout solution that has a high probability of failure and an even higher probability of catastrophic side-effects for the participating party. Find a way to implement magma and it would be pushing into the GigaDwarf range.

* - Going by Dwarf Fortress standards.

I always assumed they exploded a tank ramp through the Eblan caves. Why else have the Elbanese abandoned said caves by the ending?!

Does... doesn't it do Globe199 twice then Recover because each of the two Globe199 attacks is supposed to be the actual reviving of the globes? Like, you killed both, so the CPU slaps you in the face with the two new ones?

If the Dwarves wanted to be all practical, they could have kept the tanks underground near the Tower, waited for the Giant to step onto a patch of land directly above the magma, then fired at the ceiling of the underworld, dropping the Giant into its molten doom. But that would be too cut and dry, wouldn't it?

That's a good way of looking at it, I suppose.

Maybe the CPU rips the life force out of your party members in order to revive the bits. What's really killing me is why is it called Globe199.
I can't think of any circumstance where 199 is a significant number other than it being a prime, and there are a lot of primes.

Optimus, Rodimus, Metroid, Rib, Time, okay I ran out.

Cut Miggity-Mo' Macdaddy Gizzabang Doggy Dog Dog

Because it's one less than 200. Duh.

If it was Globe197, the CPU could have bought its kids at Wal-Mart.

It's also the first 3 digits of the game's release year.

Now now, Octopus Prime is just one of those things that goes without saying. It's like "Hey did you see the latest thread about Nintendos wi-fi stuff? I loved the choice of images this time, and the jokes about completely unrelated games were even better than they were a couple weeks back. He's totally the best!"

Sorry man, you're way more important than prime time or prime rib.

The thing that amuses me about Alexander is that it looks like it evolved out of a really awkward interpretation of Amano's Giant of Babil. In FFVI, it looks like whoever designed the summon wasn't sure what to make of the Giant's forearms or legs, so they just covered them up with billowy smoke like in the original Amano piece and made it look like it was emerging from some kind of tear in spacetime. And then... well, FFVII and VIII just decide that it ends at the hips and that it has elephant feet for hands. So now we have this weird holy laser shooting tank-thing.

I never thought about that, but you're absolutely right.

I suspect he is absolutely right. Compare:





By Amano standards, that's a pretty direct interpretation. Moreso than practically anything else he's ever drawn, in fact.

It was FFIX that made me realize what a cool design Alexander was. I didn't realize the concept dated back to FFIV!

Yeah, I said that.

That's pretty interesting when you realize Alexander has the exact same role as the Giant in FF9, a super-weapon awakened by gathering all the crystals.

That's a fascinating connection that I've never seen before.

Silly question to the Japanese-readers on the board: Is there any indication by the Japanese names for the Giant and for Alexander in later games that they're supposed to be similar/a reference?

I know he doesn't LOOK the same, but doesn't Proto Babil in FF4DS use Alexander's Holy Light (or whatever) signature attack? Does that count?

Frankly, given the renaming of so many other things in later ports, I'm kind of surprised it never became Alexander.

I'm going to say something anyway: Given how often enemies become summons in subsequent games, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Alexander was meant to be the Giant... although the name is really inappropriate if that's the case.

not that I can see! the Japanese names are exactly the same as the English names.

This is slightly off-topic but as there's so many in the know and we're talking about concept art: Anybody remember the prerelease concept art leak (on gaming intellgenice agency) of material that would later become FF9? That stuff was incredible! A dream come true with all these sweet job class designs and FF1 related characters..and then they abandoned most of it. :/

Makes me wonder what other incredible concept art is forever hidden away...anybody ever find out anything further on that leak?

The trail pretty much went cold after we found an old article talking about how Square had a game they were considering shelving that was potentially to become FF9. Speculation was more or less that the FF9 we got was originally going to be a spin-off game (which makes sense since it contains more past-series references than any other main-series game to date). It's all still in the FF9 LP thread.

(If you don't mind sharing) who leaked it (and why)?

Not to try to derail this thread or anything but

BWWUUUUUHHHHH?? They did that twice?

Something I wanted to bring up is that the boss fights were changed up in the DS version. First up, you fought the Fiends in the same order you had before (Milon, Cagnazzo, Valvalis, Rubicante), which I guess makes sense since the original game is now decades old.

Secondly, the CPU battle has been altered ever so slightly. The Defense node still heals the CPU for a fairly paltry amount, but the Attack node's new laser attack will one-or-two-shot your entire party. This makes the battle weird since the only tension comes from trying to knock out Attack before it kills half your party - if you do that, then the CPU cannot hurt you for the rest of the battle. This also means that following FuSoYa's unchanged advice about going for the Defense node first will get you deaded. I think this was done to reinforce the stereotype that old fogeys just don't get this gol'durned com-pooter nonsense.