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

So is the crystal that Golbez hands Cecil to fight Zeromus.

I'm less impressed you got the tail then by how you compiled screenshots of every fight in the interim. You must really like mind-numbing tedium. Know that your hard work hasn't gone unnoticed or unappricated.

While we're on the subject, what are everyone's opinions on the best and worst final dungeons?

Best final dungeon for me is probably FF5's. It's long, epic, but also well-paced. And it has a huge amount of variety, too.

As for the worst, Xenogears wins hands down. There is nothing fun at all about that thing, especially not the whole "rotating bridge" part. You are in giant robots that can FLY. Why do you need to align bridges to get to the center? Answer: because the gameplay team and the story team were not on good terms.

EDIT: Limited to the FF series, my least favorite last dungeon's gotta be FF12's (and I don't mean the short-ish one, I mean the Pharos). It has all the length of FF4-6's last dungeons combined with 1/100th the interesting content. Snore.

You think the Counselor's Corner in the magazine was bad, can you imagine the inanities the "Counselors" probably spouted to keep some kid on the line for $1.95 a minute?

Then they're even more worthless than I thought, because holy crap are they weak.

Best dungeon is FFVIII; I don't know how this happened, most of its other dungeon designs are sort of terrible. But it's a great final area, rewards how well you know the game's systems and even makes for very natural challenge run material. IV and VI take honorable mention.

I'd say X has the worst final dungeon (but at least it doesn't have a stupid cloister puzzle so it's not even the worst dungeon in that game). III has it's issues: lack of a save point and lack of end-game class variety. IX is a great concept that's pretty dull as far as actual execution (but my opinions of IX in general are lower than most people's). XIII gets a black mark just because enemies with instant death attacks are so common there and there's the stupid 'game over if your leader dies' rule, though otherwise I'd put it in the mid-tier (and I believe instant death immunity isn't hard to get? Been a while and it's the only non-MMO in the series I've only played once...)

I always liked Kefka's Tower. If you run straight through the game and try to keep everyone balanced without making any mini-gods it's so much fun trying to make three balanced parties that can survive. I wish it had a bit more teeth, like the Lunar Subterranean.

FFXIII was terrible. A big abstract mess that's really just a long tube but with annoying shape/path puzzles made more annoying by relentless enemies and a bad camera.

And then for 13-2 they were like "hey, let's do that again, but with jumping!"

FFXII, which I otherwise like, had some really headache-inducing dungeons at the end. For the best, I have a hard time picking between FFIV and FFVIII. Both are vast, memorable, and have amazing music.

FFIX gets an honorable mention for looking cool, but seriously, invisible bosses and save points?

FF9 has the most amazing individual locations, but FF8 slightly edges it out because the final area is coherent and incredibly well done. I think bad FF2 should get a shoutout too, just cause I like the concept of killing a guy then having to jump into hell itself to kill him again. Worst final dungeon goes to FF10, which doesn't even get a ribbon for participation.

I always had a soft spot for the Temple of Fiends revisited. It's kind of neat that there was all this stuff hidden beneath the first dungeon, lost to the ravages of time.

If the Bahamut counts, FFXII wins by a mile.

I personally like V and VI best final dungeon wise. V is was cool to see old areas packed into a new dungeon, and had a good variety of bosses to go with it, while VI had the three party thing going on, yet switching between the parties gave a lot more depth to it, rather then taking depth away.

I actually phoned one of those lines once! They were rather useless (telling me there were no shortcuts in a level that, in fact, had quite a useful shortcut right at the start, although admittedly it didn't skip the bit I was having trouble with). IIRC 1-7 of Donkey Kong Land 1, if anyone's interested, which they probably aren't. Strangely, they didn't try to hold me on the line for very long.

I solved that level legitimately, in the end. It's still one of the hardest levels in the game IMO, but I can probably still do it nowadays. (Haven't played the game for years, though.)

Nintendo of America is actually very good with that (they also, if my knowledge is still correct), they have very great customer service. The turnaround for replacing my Wii disk drive was about seven business days.

My mom's coworkers used to call me and ask for help on Zelda and Crystalis. I shoulda charged $1.95 a minute.

Nah, you should've charged $1.94 a minute. That way you had a distinct competitive advantage over the official alternative. :P

ASandoval wins. *golf clap*

Unf, I adore this thread so much.

I love the Lunar dungeon--I love how you enter as a wimp, but exit as He-Man--but I kind of hate how the Red Wings music resets after each battle, so you have to hear the same five notes before your next random encounter.

*crashing sound*

*Battle music*

"DUN-DUN! rrrrr DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN! rrrrr DUN-DUN-D--"

*crashing sound*

It gets so much nicer when you enter the Lunar core. You see that light glowing under you and you suddenly realize that shit is rapidly getting real.

When I was 15, my high school had an internet connection (kind of a big deal in 1995), its own BBS, and a couple of gaming newsgroups. I wrote, "CAN'T FIND SHADOW'S FIFTH DREAM IN FINAL FANTASY III, SEND HALP", and mentioned that there was supposed to be a 1 in 32 chance of seeing it (which was a lie). The people on the other end said it sounded like another Pink Tail hunt, and I had no idea what that was. They explained.

INTERNET. FOR LEARNING!

I'm pretty sure I didn't know about the pink tail until I started posting on here. Maybe not even until the DS remake added more freaking tails.

I kind of came into the FF series late-ish (never had a SNES growing up), and by the time I got to FF2US, I was already casually hacking ROMs. So when I found a strange item called Pink(something) in the items list, I was curious and checked online. Thus I discovered the legend of the almost-mythical Pink Tail.

Similarly, I knew about the pink tail because of Game Genie tinkering, but I didn't learn exactly where to get one until much later.

Ha ha, made you look.

But no, seriously, image processing for the last update is done. (You guys don't mind downloading an 8 meg .gif, right?) Writing is half done. The thrilling conclusion should go up before the week is out. It's been a long, awesome ride with you dudes, as always.

Last call for hilarious and/or amazing Photoshops!

1. That ain't right
2. It took a hundred pages and two years to get to this point
3. For shits and giggles, you should hold out until 1/3/2013

After almost two years of mixing edge of my seat with depths of a coma I'll download a 6 gig .gif of the game from beginning to end including random encounters.

Download, sure. Have embedded in the page, it'll murder my browser.

I was beginning to wonder if you were going to miss the launch month for your next LP!

I think this is the only LP I've ever read from beginning to end. It's been an awesome ride.

Well great, now I'm obligated to finish up FF2A at a breakneck pace so I can say I completed another LP before you finished this one. I hope you're happy.

In all seriousness, though, I'm looking forward to the incoming update.

Oh Brickroad... You didn't have to get me anything for my birthday. But this is the best present ever! Thanks.

I'm not sure if what I have counts but I feel like it must be shared.

So Cecil's KO'ed (or "fainted") pose in that picture reminded me of something.

I'm sure many of you are going, "Of course! It's the same as some of the KO poses from Final Fantasy 1." Which is true:


But there was something else. I thought and thought and finally I realized it!
The pose is the same as the skateboarding wipeout poses from the NES game T&C Surf Designs.

See for yourself:


And just for the heck of it here's that image flipped horizontally:


But I'm not sure what any of this means. This intrepid reporter will have to delve even further to unravel this mystery.