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

It's hard to know which piece of armor suits Edge better. On one hand that is quite a lot of Attack to get from an armor slot. On the other, that is quite a lot of Magic Defence to give up, right at the point in the game where the remaining dangers are all high-end magic attacks. Still, I don't think I've ever had one of these before, so I'll slap it on and enjoy a slightly-stronger-than-usual Edge.


No, we aren't doing the whole Core in this update. We're here because, for some reason, they sealed the last weapon down here. I guess they ran out of room in the Subterrane? Why not just stick another room down on B7? Oh well. Who're we fightin' this time?



♪♪ The Dreadful Fight ♪♪

Criminey! Now it's Leviathan on steroids! Ogopogo actually opens the fight by throwing two Big Waves at you, and while it isn't quite the same level of crazy that Wyvern's MegaNuke was, it's still way more damage than you can really keep on top of healing. His regular attack and Blaze special are pretty brutal too. What's a group of heroes to do!?


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

Outrun him, of course! Just like Wyvern and Plague, Ogopogo hits hard but has no staying power. The prize is Edge's other super weapon, the Masamune. This brings his Attack up another 25 points or so, allowing him to consitently top 2000 damage. Not too shabby.


♪♪ Red Wings ♪♪

With the last of the lunar sub-bosses down, it's time to retreat back to B7 of the Subterrane for a save and a rest. So how far have we come since we first set foot in the Subterrane...?


In an hour and a half of exploration everyone gained about seven experience levels, hundreds of HPs, decked themselves out in brand new gear, and earned 1.8 million GP. Wild.


Next: "I am the Absolute Dark Substance..."

Okay. Did you know it's a right pain in the ass to win a Pink Tail?

No. No you didn't. Because you've never done it. But I have, dear reader. Oh yes, I have. And I lived to tell the tail. Er, tale.


♪♪ Red Wings ♪♪

In this tiny, nondescript room at the bottom of B5 of the Lunar Subterrane exists an elusive monster called the PinkPuff. It is by far the rarest monster in FF2 in terms of your chances of encountering them. (You might consider other monsters strictly rarer because they only show up in areas you cannot revisit, once cleared. I can, at this point, theoretically kill as many PinkPuffs as my heart desires, but never another EpeeGirl.)

Just how rare are PinkPuffs? Well, take a gander...



♪♪ Samba de Chocobo! ♪♪

I have to encounter and run from twenty-one trash encounters before the first pack of Puffs show up. And no, that isn't a typo; you really do fight PinkPuffs to a backdrop of the black chocobo music. They open every fight with a playful invitation to dance, after which they randomly Berserk some (or all) of your party members. Then you and the PinkPuffs pummel each other until only one group is standing. That's it. That's the fight. That's the legendary encounter most players have only heard spoken of in hushed tones and dark rooms.

PinkPuffs are worth a massive amount of GP. One fight earns enough scratch to buy five Ninja Stars! Which, incidentally, isn't a bad way to spend Edge's turns, in the off-chance he isn't Berserk'd.

The PinkPuff's rare drop is the Pink Tail. This first pack didn't drop one, so back to running around in circles.


♪♪ Chocobo-Chocobo ♪♪

Sixteen trash battles later, the second group of Puffs arrives. The first turn you get after the "Let's Dance!" message should be spent in the Heal menu (either use an item or have Cecil try to cast the spell; if he's wearing Crystal Armor, he'll always be immune to the Berserk effect). You can't actually cure Berserk'd party members, but just going into the menu is enough to check who is inflicted. In this fight, that's Rosa and Rydia. We'll go ahead and call that the Worst Case Scenario.


♪♪ Hello! Big Chocobo! ♪♪

As you can see, PinkPuffs can hit pretty hard. This can be a problem if Rosa is Berserk'd, because Cecil doesn't have much ability to keep himself alive without dipping into the team's precious Cure3/Elixir supply.

Every few rounds, the fight cycles over to the next chocobo-themed music track. I was a little surprised to discover this was the first time I'd linked to Hello! Big Chocobo! in the entire LP. I didn't even share it with you guys when I showcased Cafe HOWDY! all those udpates ago. Truly I am the very worst person. As punishment, I'll run away from twenty-five more trash encounters.


♪♪ Samba de Chocobo! ♪♪

These guys didn't drop a Pink Tail either, but at least I finally caught the "Let's dance!" message.

♪♪ Chocobo-Chocobo ♪♪

One hundred and forty-one trash fights later, I finally get a PinkPuff encounter that Rydia doesn't start out Berserk'd. Throwing Bahamut at a pack of PinkPuffs is one of the most satisfying things you can do in the game.

But they didn't drop a Pink Tail.




♪♪ Hello! Big Chocobo! ♪♪

Thirty-six fights later, a pack of Puffs finally drops something! Unfortunately it's an Ether2, their more common drop. Maybe even their most common drop, I'm not sure. If that's the case, Edge could Sneak them, if he weren't Berserk'd. Or you could just buy all the Ether2s you could ever want with your GP winnings. That'd be the smart thing to do.




♪♪ Samba de Chocobo! ♪♪

Forty-two fights later, Rydia melts another pile of Puffs with her magic space dragon buddy. But they didn't drop anything.




♪♪ Chocobo-Chocobo ♪♪

Forty-three fights after that, Rydia isn't so lucky, and is reduced to clubbing Puffs with her Stardust Rod. Interestingly, PinkPuffs do not have the outrageous physical Defence of their palette-swapped brethren. Probably for the best, considering this fight would be damn near impossible otherwise. (Barring some way to make Rydia immune to Berserk.)

They didn't drop anything.




♪♪ Hello! Big Chocobo! ♪♪

One hundred and sixty fights later, Bahamut comes back out to play. But the PinkPuffs don't drop anything.

In case you were wondering, yes, I was playing on an emulator and, yes, I had the fast-forward cranked up as high as it would go. Click the soundtrack link below if you want to hear what that sounds like, or if you just hate your ears for some reason:

♪♪ PinkPuff Hunting ♪♪




♪♪ Samba de Chocobo! ♪♪

The next batch of Puffs came only four battles later, but tragedy struck. During the 160-fight fuckfest above I started experimenting with ways to streamline the screengrabbing process. I figured I could save a keypress in every battle by binding my screenshot key to one of the shoulder buttons, so I snapped a shot while running away. This had two adverse effects on my grinding:

1) Holding down the screengrab button dumped a bunch of duplicate images in my folder. I had to throw out about a thousand of these.

2) Not expecting another PinkPuff battle so soon, I instinctively hit the shoulder buttons and managed to grab several shots of myself running away without fighting them.

After this I hung myself. The end.

♪♪ Chocobo-Chocobo ♪♪

Another batch of PinkPuffs showed up one hundred fights later, but they didn't drop anything. Around this time Kain got bored and left.




♪♪ Fight 1 ♪♪

Somewhere in the next forty-three fights I discovered Trickers were highly susceptible to Psych, which meant I could use Asura as a renewable source of healing during trash fights. This was a huge bonus because I was starting to run low on Ether2s to feed Rosa, and the only other way to recharge was to leave the PinkPuff room and hit the save point on B7.

I don't know what I would have done if I'd left the room and then won a rare drop off a RedGiant or something en route. Probably hanged myself again.


♪♪ Hello! Big Chocobo! ♪♪

I barely squeaked a victory out of the next batch of PinkPuffs, but they didn't drop anything.




♪♪ Samba de Chocobo! ♪♪

Fourteen battles later another batch showed up. They didn't drop anything.




♪♪ Chocobo-Chocobo ♪♪

Twenty-eight battles after that I had an even narrower victory. Up to this point I had no idea PinkPuffs could do anything but attack you blindly! Fortunately being cured of Charm also breaks Berserk (apparently), so once Kain slapped himself he was under my control again. I commanded him to Jump his way to victory.

And these Puffs...


♪♪ Fanfare ♪♪

...dropped a Pink Tail! Happy, happy day!

At this point my heart was racing and my breathing was erratic. I had never seen a Pink Tail before. Indeed, I wasn't sure any mere mortal had.

Interesting to note: the Pink Tail shows up as yellow on the treasure screen. This means you can't exit the menu without taking it, the way you can with every other drop. The only other item in the game flagged to do this is the Tower Key that drops off Dr. Lugae at the Tower of Bab-il. I think this is to prevent a situation where a player accidentally leaves the screen without accepting the Pink Tail, which would surely result in a broken game controller at the very least. (Or, more likely, a hanged player.)


So how long did this ordeal take me? Only about an hour, actually, because I was playing at blinding-warp speed. The save screen givse the real answer: Cecil and the gang had spent almost six hours in that little room, fleeing from Trickers and *-Ryus, gorging themselves periodically at Asura's teat.

That's a lot of goddamn grinding.

So what can you do with a Pink Tail, once you finally have one?

♪♪ Into the Darkness ♪♪

Why, you trade it to the cantankerous old tail-collecting midget, of course! What else?


In return, you receive a set of Adamant Armor! This is by a very wide margin the best armor in the entire game. Better yet, there are no restrictions on who can equip it. This means...


...I can finally replace Rydia's old Sorcerer Shirt with something that makes her damn near impervious to anything the game can throw at her. A no-brainer, if you ask me!

"But Brick! You spent the entire update harping about why Rydia shouldn't equip Ribbons and Flame Whips! Is the trade-off in spell power really worth it?"

Well, see for yourself.


As this before-and-after shows, the Adamant Armor bestows a huge boost to all five stats. Not only is Rydia's Wis. so forking huge it's visible through Dr. Kory's telescope, but she also acts faster and casts sooner as well. And hey, there's another hidden benefit of all that grinding...


I was able to buy more Ninja Stars than Edge could ever throw. (I didn't restock my Ether2s or Elixirs because I'm just going to run from everything between here and the Lunar Core, and 19 Elixirs is more than enough for the last stage of the game.)

---

Now let's crunch some numbers. The usual probability given to find a Pink Tail is 1/4096. That is, you have a one-in-sixty-four chance of encountering PinkPuffs, and if you do encounter them, you have a one-in-sixty-four chance of winning a PinkTail from them. I want to first point out that I was not able to verify that probability was accurate. There is a truly excellent algorithm FAQ, which I have consulted many times over the years for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't give details on how the game decides to give a monster drop, or what drop to give.

So how'd I do? Take a look:

So slightly fewer than one in fifty battles were PinkPuffs, and I finally won a Pink Tail from my 12th PinkPuff battle. (Remember that I accidentally ran from one.)

Fifty-one battles per PinkPuff group sounds like it might be in the 1/64 ballpark, but unless I got unbelievably lucky I believe the second half of the 1/4096 equation is misleading. In fact, we've seen it in this very LP: drops aren't calculated by encounter, but rather by individual monster. Since PinkPuffs show up in groups of five, your chances of getting a Pink Tail from the fight are actually 5/64, not 1/64. How'd I do on this front?

If each individual PinkPuff has a 1/64 chance to drop a Pink Tail, then this sounds just about right as well. In fact I was a little luckier than average on both sides of the equation.

I think we can comfortably conclude that the 1/4096 figure is bullshit, at least in terms of the number of battles you will need to fight. The actual figure is 5/4096, or about 1/819. This translates into roughly seven hours of grinding per Pink Tail, which is the statistic would-be PinkPuff hunters are interested in in the first place.

That's only thirty-five hours for a complete set! Only 2.25 times longer than the entire rest of the game up to this point! Why, they're practically freebies!

---

And now for the $277775 question: is the Pink Tail bullshit? Which is really two questions: was it worth it? And is this sort of thing bad game design?

Truth is, even if I'd been playing at regular speed, spending six hours on one little doodad is not the craziest thing I've ever done in a game. Hell, it's not even the craziest thing I've ever done in a Final Fantasy game. It took eight hours to successfully dodge lightning strikes on FF10's Thunder Plains, and that's not counting all the other celestial weapons I unlocked by jumping through various bullshit hoops. I'm confident it took more than six hours to put together all the pieces to complete Tournesol in FF12. Don't even get me started on how many six-hour chores I completed in my comparatively short FF11 career. (Or my much, much longer World of Warcraft career.)

So no, six hours is not really an outlandish amount of time spent on something just for completionist's sake. Whether the Adamant Armor in particular is worth that investment, well, no, probably not. The hardest boss in FF2 is the final one, and one hour spent grinding EXP in the Lunar Core will earn enough level-ups to survive that fight easily. But then, if you're on an emulator, you can condense six hours of grinding into one hour anyway. So, uh, pick your poison, I guess.

As to whether this sort of thing is bad game design, that's a much stickier question. You can almost see what Square was going for with FF2's rare drops just by reading this update and counting how many I found. You get a rare goodie every sixty-fourth monster, on average, and you fight many hundreds of monsters over the course of the game. So clearly the trouble isn't rare drops -- the trouble is that not enough monsters have rare drops worth getting.

Imagine if, instead of a mostly-empty rare drop list, every monster in the game had something worth using in its 1/64 slot. Think about how that changes the communcal game experience! Every player will find a dozen or so just playing the game normally, but no two players are likely to find the same types of things. Imagine if Rydia had ten rare summons instead of three, and that you were virtually guaranteed to find one or two of them just playing naturally. Imagine every dungeon having a chance of rewarding you with a piece of armor you otherwise couldn't buy until two towns later. Sure, some players would drive themselves batshit trying to maximize the drops in every single dungeon. But we're not like them, are we?

Okay, fuck me, yes we are. God help us. But for normal people, in FF2's pre-internet gaming environment, doesn't that sound like a pretty cool system? Meeting in the schoolyard every day, and everyone has a different story about some rare sword or spell or item they found? That sounds like a pretty cool game. FF2 isn't that game, sadly, because most of the "rare drops" you see are Cure2s or worse. Swing and a miss. But that's a fault with the implementation, not the idea. Wouldn't you say?

Wow, I caught this at just the right time and my F5 key became a Magical Brickroad Update Spawning Key of Awesomeness!

The eyes... THE EYES.....

Low-hanging fruit, dtsund. I am disappoint.

???

Plesiosaur!

That'll do, Kish. That'll do.

I was thinking the emotional part of your brain was crying out in agony over facing an enemy called D. Bone for a different reason.

Also, you actually got the Pink Tail, you crazy crazy bastard. You could probably just stop the LP now and no one would hold it against you. (but please don't because we want to see how it ends)

I freaking LOVE the Lunar Subterranean. I don't know why, since I tend to hate grinding, but I love dungeons where you dive in, make some progress, escape and heal and then try to go a little further. And the treasure!

So some random things:

Apparently the Pale Dim (which is a way better name than White Dragon) counters physicals with slow! So, random chance?

I was a dumb kid who just used the best equipment button and didn't really understand the stats screen for FF2 and FF3. It wasn't until later playthroughs that I started to try to build characters more for better offence or defense or magic. And even then I don't think I would have thought to build up like you did (not using a ribbon?? The mind boggles!).

You are a freaking mad man for getting that pink tail. In general I agree that rare drops are a cool idea, but that one in particular is kind of BS because of how rare the encounter is in the first place. I think just having a enemy deep in the final dungeon with a tail as a rare drop would have been enough, since it's such a hike to get back to the blacksmith to even see what it was (before the Internet could tell you).

Kishi's shop is brilliant and I don't know that I can top it, though I'll probably try.

I remember being a really stupid kid, Nintendo Power was for someone like me. Once, I had rented Mystic Quest and was playing someone elses save file, and they had gotten partially through the place with the Ice Golem boss at the end.

Those who remember, know that to enter you have to flip a switch. Nintendo Power specifically said that to enter, you were to hit the statue with glowing eyes with your Steel Sword. But this guy had gotten the Knight Sword! And once you get an upgrade, you can't go back! Which meant it was now impossible to hit this switch with the old Steel Sword!

I assumed that he had screwed himself over and started a new game. "If only he had listened to Nintendo Power" I thought.

I've heard about enough advice columns to know that a chunk of the Counselor's Corner was probably just made up in house.

Pinkpuff grinding... *shivers* Back when Final Fantasy Legacy was still alive (May it rest in peace, dang copyright >_>) The developers decided to do 2 things:
Make every fight in the pinkpuff room guaranteed to be pinkpuffs
Add in 2 more tail drops for red dragons and behemoths
Luckily, grinding the tails was made a lot easier considering some of the broken ++ classes it had to offer, but it could still be a pain... just, a humane pain rather then a 6 hour one.
At least, more humane then 2 of the optional bosses, one of which only devs could summon, and both of which wiped me while I had said devs in my party

Say what you will about FFIVDS (I swear I started another post that exact same way...), but the layering effect of the dungeon levels in the Lunar Subterrane was pretty cool (basically you can see the core get closer and closer as you go down levels). Also, the Stardust rod in that version kills.

Also, each of the endgame dragons has a tail drop in the DS version.

This was clearly a prank on the developers' part.

Imagine if, instead of a mostly-empty rare drop list, every monster in the game had something worth using in its 1/64 slot.

You just described Xenoblade Chronicles' item drop system perfectly there, you realize. Except that it's usually a 1-in-32 chance to get the rarest drop from an enemy, not 1-in-64. Also, that game lets you savescum when a rare chest drops so you can force the contents to change as many times as you please until it gives you what you want. And chests don't seem to disappear (I found one chest I neglected to open about 40 hours after it dropped, still waiting for me to check it), so you're never SOL.

I guess the short of it is that RPG developers have in fact learned something since 1991. Some of them have, at least.

EDIT: Someone was obligated to do this one.

/thread

Fine.

The floor beneath his feet is vibrating!

All this talk of Edge dying a lot makes me think it's time for him and Kain to swap positions. Kain has good enough defense to tank and you can afford a enough shurikens now to make Edge useful from the back.

If Edge must stay in the front, shouldn't he get the Adamant armor?

"Why is the Lunar Subterrane the best final dungeon?"

The real benefit here is that Dragoon equipment resists Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Dragons.

Crystal armors, much like the Paladin stuff from Mysidia, boost Cecil's Will. This will probably account for a boost to his MDef multiplier (much needed, too - Kain gets ahead of him there by way of Agility).

Hard to counter Odin, which seems to work well on King- and Ging-Ryus.

I always figured that the floor above conceals the passage... but looking at the passage itself, it doesn't go back far enough for that. Huh!

Blue Dragon's attack is based on its current HP. Knock that down a bit and it becomes more manageable. (Red Dragon's attack is based on its long-nurtured hatred for heroes.)

Oh, but I have! And that's when I learned that it's impossible to go crazy if you're already there, hahaheehahee....

Mirror Cecil needs more goatee.

Uhm, Brick...

Whips are a back-row weapon in FFII.

Wow! (I've never actually seen the effect of adamant armor before)

You know, the closest game in the series to actually doing this is FFII (the bad one). It likely has some of the best drops in the series, and many aren't even that rare.