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

What, you didn't know? Cecil's a professional skateboarder.



The whole "paladin" thing is just his day job, see.

Suddenly it all makes sense.*

Hmm... Now I'm imagining a Square-Enix extreme sports game (Enixstreme?):
Cecil skateboaring!
Cloud snowboarding!
Tidus surfing!
Edgar, Sabin and Terra white-water rafting!
Look! Exclamation points!

*This is a lie. It doesn't make any damn sense at all.

It is a very long dungeon, and cure potions just go right through you.

When you pee into the abyss, the abyss pees back.

That's impressive! No hands! When I do that I usually end up pissing on my shoe!

Time and space don't act the same in this dungeon...

Is that like a candiru?

Everyone! We must send our prayers to Brickroad!

Show us true courage!

Brickroad! My prayers are with you! Even though I died like 30 hours ago!

I'm not going to send any lame-ass prayers to Brickroad. I'm going to send wishes!

Brickroad!
Show us what true courage is!
For Talking Time!
Stand up! You're our last hope!

If you're gonna do something like that, Torzelbaum, you should go all-out with photoshops. Like-a so:

Your wish came true and the FF2 LP updated! Unfortunately, it was the other FF2, because the Department of Wishes gets a kick out of purposely misinterpreting requests that get sent in. What a bunch of jerks, amirite?

That was amazing.

Incidentally, my official six-character-limit version of my name is McClan (or McLain, and sometimes MCLN) but I kind of like McClin because it just seems so wrong.

The prayers continue. Do I get to be Golbez?

Nicely done.

I would, but alas I have no photoshop ability. I leave that up to people who actually have some ability with it. Like you. (BTW - Excellent job!)

Stupid literal genies. Stupid messed up American Final Fantasy numbering.

If the numbering was correct in 'Murica, a FFX-2 or FFXIII-2 LP would've started instead. Literal genies can easily pretend to be legally deaf genies.

Spoony is like my favorite guy.

And we're getting close, dudes. Hang in there. There's... just a lot of ending to get through!

So you AREN'T just waiting until like 11:55 tomorrow night for the dramatic tension?

♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

Zemus keeps his most elite monters close at hand, deep down in the Lunar Core. These endgame beasties are so tough, in fact, they play the boss music instead of the regular fight music!

EvilMask here opens up the fight by Walling everyone in sight. This is a kind of meaningless action since you can bounce Black Magic off your own heroes to damage it, or bounce Cure spells off of the EvilMask to heal yourself.


It likes to use this tactic against you as well. Its primary form of attack is to bounce White and Nuke at you. Therein lay the creature's greatest weakness: lacking strong multi-target attacks it can't even soften us up, let alone destroy us. Maybe things would be different if it'd gotten a multi-target version of White, as well as Wall.


Er, things might also be different if we hadn't done all that PinkPuff farming. The surplus of Ninja Stars means Edge can afford to spend them in random encounters, and Rydia's Adamant Armor makes her virtually indestructible versus standard black magic.

Also, I think we caught the poor guy halfway through his dinner. What's he eating, purple spaghetti?


♪♪ Within the Giant ♪♪

So here's the annoying thing about the treasures in the Lunar Core. They're all pretty good stuff -- even Whistles have their use at this stage of the game, if you left something important back in the Whale's Big Chocobot -- but you can't record that you've collected them unless you walk back to the Subterrane. This doesn't bother normal people, of course, but I've lost sleep over it. I always feel compelled to walk back to the save point for no reason other than to make sure the game knows damn well that I had an extra Elixir and a couple more Ninja Stars!


♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

Whoops, found another loophole in their "Wall everyone and spam Nuke" strategy!


♪♪ Within the Giant ♪♪

See? Told ya there were Ninja Stars down here. Toss this one on the pile, Edge!

The floor layouts of the Lunar Core look far more complicated than they actually are. The effect it creates is of a crumbling web of crystalline passages spiralling down into some freakish abyss -- not a bad use of what is essentially two or three constantly repeated tiles. The parallax background also has a neat molten core effect to it, but its hidden behind the foreground until you get deeper in the dungeon.

Mostly, though, I just appreciate the designers making something that looks like a maze, but actually isn't one. Because who the hell wants to spend the last hour of their RPG slogging through a boring maze?


♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

Triple Red D.s is one of the more dangerous fights in the Core. Note that they solved the problem of not being able to fit them all onscreen at once by simply stacking the fuckers on top of each other.


♪♪ Within the Giant ♪♪

This is it! The LAST treasure box in Final Fantasy II! Never again will you have to endure another inane compilation of blue boxes trumpeting the acquisition of Lifes or Cure2s! There's nothing left to collect now! You're free!

...I'm actually a little bummed out. Like something important that we shared has slipped away. I'd pour one out, but the only beverage I have at hand is a Mountain Dew and I want to drink it.

♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

The next monster in Zemus's rogue's gallery is the Mind, a freaky alien ghost thing that is remarkable for exactly two reasons. One, it's the only thing in the Core susceptible to Psych, which means Rydia can Baham everything with impunity and then take advantage of the free recharge. And second, this is the first time we've seen this particular monster design in the game. That they saved a few monsters for the last leg showed remarkable restraint at a time in gaming history when resources were rehashed and palette-swapped from hell to breakfast and back. Heck, even most of the bosses we've seen in the final dungeon were simple recolors.

My only basis for comparison at the time was the original Final Fantasy, which featured a grand total of zero unique enemy graphics in the final dungeon. Even as a young'un the importance of that wasn't lost on me.


♪♪ Within the Giant ♪♪

The Lunar Core isn't really long enough to be a dungeon in its own right. (Because again, who wants to slog through a long endgame dungeon? Especially after muscling their way through the Subterrane?) It's just long enough to create the sense of leaving the now-familiar Moon behind and going to some new and fantastic place. And this, the final floor, eschews the maze-like passages of the upper levels in favor of a switchback descent. The way these last three hallways are stacked on top of each other leaves plenty of room in between the tiles for the core proper to shine through.

I know I've been singing the praises of FF2's dungeon design throughout this whole LP, and perhaps it is tiresome to do so again, but this is like one of the most important aspects of RPG design to me. I have played so many great RPGs with bland, forgettable maps that I still look back with awe at what the grandmasters were doing in 1991 with a handful of tiles and a bit of creativity. Each individual dungeon map in this game began with someone saying, "What's the message of this part of the dungeon? What sets it apart from what came before?"

To put a different spin on the context, you know that story about how Mario has a mustache because at the time Miyamoto only had three pixels to draw his face and he wanted players to know he has a nose? That's exactly how I feel about the dungeon layout in FF2. Doing a lot of things with very few resources used to be a major element of game design. Oftentimes it was the difference between a truly excellent game and one that was merely good. I don't think it's too terribly crotchety of me to say that I miss that, now that developers are limited "only" by what they can squeeze into three Blu-Rays.


♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

Of course, squeezing a lot of mileage out of limited resources means absolutely no enemy graphic goes un-palette-swapped, even enemies introduced literally on the last map of the game. As far as I can tell the only thing Nacho Cheese Dorito Breath does is cast Peep and Blast at you, and Blast doesn't seem to do anything. Neener neener!


♪♪ Within the Giant ♪♪

The point of no return is the end of this little bridge. Once you step off of it you're locked into the endgame cutscene. You know, just in case you're a freak-head like me who absolutely must cart his last few treasures to a save point.

And hey, while I have you here, I might as well point out that I actually prefer having a little bit of dungeon in between the final save point and the final boss. Don't mistake me here, I am not pining for the days where you had to save in a town and then swallow the entire final act as one huge chunk. I just think it's nice to have a little buffer between powering the game on and phasing the biggest monster in creation onto the screen.


Speaking of the biggest monster in creation, our heroes arrive just in time to watch those other dudes fight it!


♪♪ Fight 2 ♪♪

I'd love to say that Golbez and FuSoYa throw everything they have at Zemus, but, ah, that's not really the case. Golbez brings his A game, what with the spamming of high-level black magic, but Dr. Moppenbeard sticks exclusively to white magic for reasons that are lost forever to science.


I mean... Hold? Hold!? That shit don't even work on Imps half the time, and you're flinging it at the cosmic source of all evil? And Jesus, even if it were going to work, why would you pair it with Slow? That just don't make no damn sense! FuSoYa doesn't even have the good sense to look embarrassed as he shame-walks back into position.


I guess I can see what they were going with. If they were being honest here, FuSoYa would just match Golbez's *-3 spells by casting White over and over. Perhaps the rationale was that wouldn't have been as exciting as watching six unique spells. I'd have just gone one better and shortened the scene from six spells to two: Golbez casts Nuke, then FuSoYa casts White. They're both superpowered magic-users, yeah? Point taken.

Finally Goofus and Gallant decide to quit screwing around and reach for the big guns. Which, in my experience, is a course of action best decided upon during the first round of combat.

Of note: if you can read FuSoYa's line here without imagining him first singing "Swing your arms from side to side," you are a better man than I.

Also of note: if you can reconcile Zemus's line here with the foppish position of his hands without imagining him as having one of those awful Hollywood gay-lisps, you are a better man than I twice.


We drove ourselves nuts as kids trying to figure out what the W in W.Meteo stood for. Perhaps all these magical meteors are being summoned from the bowels of a gargantuan space walrus? Who knows.

I'm also pretty sure this scene is canonically impossible, since FuSoYa doesn't have enough MP to cast Slow/Hold/White/Meteo without drinking an Ether. Hax!



Zemus crumbles, as good bosses do, but if the Moon-Twins earn any EXP from the fight they're selfishly keeping it for themselves. Cecil and friends look on, devastated that they could have saved themselves a very long and arduous trip.


"And we unlocked all these forbidden weapons and everything, and now nobody even cares!"

I think it's rather delightful how indignant Edge is about the whole thing. You just know he spent the whole trip badgering Cecil about how he totally has to put the sharp end of his sword into a nightmarish warlock from beyond time or he's just gonna, like, explode, dude, for reals.

Of course, things are rarely that simple at the grand finale of oldschool RPGs. We didn't step into this starry netherworld just to watch some NPCs punk the big bad!

Oh, come on! Rydia's got Adamant Armor! At the very least she should still be standing!


Golbez at least seems to be getting into the swing of this whole "hero" business. Let's see if he can do better than to pull out Ice-3 this time, shall we?


Huh. Okay, that's... unnerving. FuSoYa, what've you got? Peep, right? You going to go with Peep?


No, see, Golbez just tried that, and you're an idiot. I would have more respect for you if you had gone with Peep!


I guess at this point in the story we have dropped any pretense of there being some finite amount of crystals, each with unique properties, and instead have just settled on one nebulous Crystal to End All Crystals. Which... looks awfully similar to the White spell, come to think of it. I can appreciate that Golbez is all enthusiastic about being a good guy, now, but man, do you really think he was the right choice to field that one?


Apparently Zeromus agrees with me on that, albeit in a kind of roundabout and grammatically-questionable way.


Being a relatively new addition to the plot, they didn't really have time to give Zeromus much characterization beyond... well, what you see in this text box, actually. His motivation as originally explained by FuSoYa was that Zemus didn't want to wait for those puny Earthlings to finish evolving before going down and conquering their planet. Apparently a few eons followed by repeated Meteo-blasts to the face have caused him to up the ante a little bit.

What we need now is a miracle.


...and if that miracle comes with what I suppose is the sound of hacking up phlegm, so be it! Alright, elder dude, what's the plan?


I would mock this line, except last time this cat made a wish a spaceship climbed out of the ocean and took me to the moon. So I have to say I'm pretty stoked right now.

I think the Toroian clerics have something to say on the subject of wishing, too, but they're boring characters so they can take a hike. I bet those snooty bitches made the two youngest and least experienced clerics take the trip to Mysidia in the first place. On the other hand, I guess it's gracious of them to send anyone at all considering we never brought their Crystal of Earth back.


In the face of all logic and reason the wishing orgy manages to do the trick, geting Cecil back on his feet with a single hit point. Well, it's better than nothing.


Seems like Golbez still has some breath in his lungs as well. Enough, at least, to hand his Crystal WMD off to someone who can actually put it to use. There's just one thing left for our hero to do, I suppose!


Oh my god hells yes.

Okay so what do you just stick the Crystal into the pulsating cloud of evil, or what? What's the method here...?

Wish-a-palooza isn't quite over, as it happens. Palom and Porom send us their power vitality, which serves to revive the rest of the party.


Next, our notorious party weaklings show up, crossing the boundaries of death and/or cowardice, to refill the HP and MP of our current party weaklings.


I'm not really sure what it is Cid wants us to hold on to at this juncture. A throttle, persumably. The energy of our former tough guys gives Edge and Kain their refill.


Finally, the spirits of Cecil's brother and uncle arrive to recharge his strength for the big showdown. I suppose he gets a pair of spirit-batteries all to himself because he's got the most HPs. Also, kind of strange their spirits are up and about considering their corporeal bodies are laying just a few feet away. What, did they just get up and walk over?

Stranger still, since Tellah established that death is no impediment to wish-energy-transfusion, is the fact that Cecil's dad doesn't bother to show up. When asked for comment, KluYa confided, "I already done turned him into a Paladin. What else does he want? Boy's got to stand on his own two feet."


Once everyone gets their recharge, the fight begins for real. At this stage Zeromus's only attack is to shake ominously, and he cannot be targeted by any attacks or effects.


The only thing that touches him is the Crystal, and it's only effective if Cecil is the one who uses it.


Zeromus's transformation from wispy hair-creature to... whatever the hell twisted pile of flesh he eventually becomes is immediate, but not instantaneous. Any attacks queued up on him before the Crystal goes off -- including, say, Baham or a Dart'd Spoon -- will resolve as though they'd gone off beforehand. In other words, it's a wonderfully indulgent waste of resources.

I have lost many Spoons that way over the years. So... many Spoons.

It also finally puts an end to the Prologue music, which has been playing for about half an hour at this point. And lo, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the final boss of Final Fantasy II...


♪♪ The Final Battle ♪♪

Oh my god you guys. This fight. This boss right here. This music. This is how you end an epic RPG. This here is how it's done.

Zeromus is one of the meanest and toughest bosses in the entire Final Fantasy series. He has tons of HPs and an invisible ability that heals him back to full for no clearly defined reason. If you've played the game multiple times and noted that sometimes this battle lasts twice or three times as long as usual, that's why. I don't well understand the inner workings of the boss's AI script, but it goes something like this: Zeromus has about 65,000 HPs, and if he is able to take a turn when his HP total is within a certain window (between 10k and 12k or so, I believe), it gets silently reset to 65k and the battle continues.

This sounds like a pretty flagrant "fuck you" on the part of the developers, and maybe it is, but I think the sin is forgivable for two reasons. First, it's a somewhat clever way to make the fight much less predictable. Unless you're keeping careful track of the boss's HP and when he takes his turns (a level of knowledge utilized by TASers and basically no one else), you have no way of knowing whether you're in for a double-length fight or not. There is no point in the fight where you can say, okay, a thousand more damage and that's it. We killed TIAMAT and CHAOS like that a lot in the original Final Fantasy, back in the day. Zeromus doesn't allow you the luxury of complacency.

And secondly, let's say your party's power level is right at the low end of what can resonably defeat the boss. Let's say they can survive a 65k HP fight, but not a 120k HP fight. This means the first time you tackle Zeromus you're going to get your face stomped as all your resources run dry without any recourse on your part. The second fight is just as frantic, except you actually win -- and that's a hell of a rush. You don't know or care that the game had to cheat to create that effect, do you? No, all you know is that you came back and got shit done.

The strategy of the actual fight is not very technical. Stack as many 9999s on the boss as you can, and have Rosa spam Cure4 every single round. Win or lose, that's sort of all there is to it.

As for what Zeromus can do to you, well...

Every challenge, adventure and obstacle in FF2 exists solely to prepare you for this one moment: surviving Big Bang. To say it is the strongest enemy attack in the entire game is an understatement. This attack is so unbelievably powerful it warps the animation of the battle background.

(Speaking of which: animated battle background! Pretty awesome, right? That's something you wouldn't have known the FF2 engine was capable of until just this moment. It's yet another example of FF2 holding something back just so you can be surprised when the timing is right. In fact, it happens twice during this fight: once when the background animates at all, and then again when Zeromus twists it around and incorporates it into his spell animation! Absolutely masterful.)

Big Bang is strong enough that it can kill Edge and Rydia in a single hit, even at full HP. Without excessive powerleveling (or Adamant Armor) it is essentially impossible to keep Rydia on her feet. Splitting Rosa's turns between Cure4 and Life2 is an exercise in futility, so my normal strategy is to just leave Rydia dead, let Edge and Kain deal most of the damage, and split Cecil's actions between sword swings and Elixirs.


For low-level parties, Rydia can be more of a liability than a help, anyway. Zeromus counters magical damage with Nuke which, while not that deadly, can turn the tide of a battle against you if you manage to land Baham immediately after he finishes Big Bang. Having Rosa Nuke'd at any point between Big Bang and the subsequent Cure4 is a game-ending happenstance.


The most reliable damage-dealer is therefore Edge. Here he is finally chucking Mrs. Yang's Spoon, at long last! After this he'll throw Cecil's old Excalibur, followed by the Masamune, and then we'll start in on the giant pile of Ninja Stars. I've been a bit hard on Edge for being squishy and inconsistent, but the way he pulls his weight in this fight more than makes up for any past hardships.


Zeromus's other trick is Blk.Hole, which nullifies any positive status effects you may have put on your party members. Even if Rosa had a spare turn to Fast or Bersk someone, the effect would only last a few moments until Zeromus invalidated it. Since you don't have a real opportunity to buff anyway, and since Zeromus uses Blk.Hole regardless of whether you're buffed or not, the real purpose of this attack is to give you some breathing room between Big Bangs. I've often wondered how difficult it would be to kill a version of Zeromus who used Blk.Hole as a reaction to buff spells, rather than as part of his standard AI routine.

In other news, Blk.Hole has won the award for Least Helpful Enemy Attack Description in the Known Universe every year since 1991.


Booya! Excalibur. Not quite as powerful as KARATE Spoon, but still nothing to sneeze at. It seems fitting that the final resting place of the legendary sword that transforms DKnights into Paladins is pierced deep within the fleshy recesses of a monstrous moon-mutant.


If you manage to get Zeromus past that obnoxious HP window where he refills his life, he switches his routine up a bit and can begin using Virus on you. This would be annoying in that it sticks HP Leak on everyone except, oh, yeah, Big Bang already freakin' does that. Did I forget to mention?


...and then I accidentally Item'd the Masamune at Zeromus instead of Darting it at him. Masamune casts Fast when used as an item, rending this particular action somewhat less than worthless. Cue trombones.


Since Zeromus's AI tends to get a bit chaotic towards the end, you will end up having to switch up your healing tactics before it's all over. I like to keep this as simple as possible, using Cecil to spot-heal with Elixirs as needed. This is another argument against using Bersk, even if you could.


Towards the very, very end, Zeromus will even start slinging Meteo at you. At one point in the plot this was the most powerful form of magic in existence, but things have moved on quite a bit since then. Meteo is susceptible to Mag Def in a way that Big Bang isn't, so it's possible for the girls to avoid damage completely if they're properly equipped. Still a dangerous chaser to Big Bang, though.

After much perseverence and innumerable doses of Cure4, Zeromus finally kicks the bucket. Of course, as befitting of his station as final boss, his death is as spectacular as his attacks:

Can we all agree that "puff" is the least appropriate Dramatic Villain Death Quote in history? Little known fact: Zeromus is 1/8 Mr. Saturn on his mother's side.



Listen, Edge, just because you were able to destroy the arch-villain when the bearded moon-man was not doesn't mean you get to be cocky about it.



It doesn't mean you get to be a suck-up, either. Will someone step up and put this douche in his place?


Thanks, Rydia. Thanks so much.