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freshfeelingThis is my first time using a "classic" Final Fantasy party for the sake of this variant playthrough series that isn't a Final Fantasy game! Although, I mean, it kind of is. The title would suggest it is, I guess.
For the uninitiated, this would be an unusual spot to first to learn this, but the Final Fantasy Legend series is known as the "SaGa" series in Japan, which includes Romancing SaGa, SaGa Frontier, and Unlimited Saga. They were only re-branded as Final Fantasy games for release to western audiences in the early 90s, presumably either for brand recognition or just because the title "SaGa" would sound silly to native English speakers.
Thus... not a Final Fantasy game!
For the sake of conducting this playthrough, I did a rom hack using tehtmi's nifty little saga2edit app along with a few minor hex edits. The patch itself is posted on GitHub here. I applied a few of Alex Jackson's bugfixes from the GameFAQs topic at gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/585710-final-fantasy-legend-ii/41893465 as well, including making the elemental Magi work appropriately. Then I made changes so that jobs would work as follows:
As well as these modifications in the nature of the hack, I would need to play with a ruleset to make the characters conform to their roles.
The first play session was on March 3, 2022. The game started out normally although at the start of the playthrough I was explaining things a lot. The character selection screen ended up looking like this:
Early on, I said, "There's a lot that I don't know how it's going to play out here, in fact, this might prove to be not very possible." And, in fact, some mistakes in the hack became apparent pretty quickly, like when Mr.S was carrying a whole bunch of 0 hammers. Whoops.
I applied a fix for that, and - spoilers? - it wouldn't be the last! Later on, I'd realize that my female human thief's Steal ability would never be restored by any means and take up an inventory slot forever, so I would ultimately end up removing that even though it was quite fun for flavour's sake. Doing the fix live on stream was kind of funny, actually; it really went to show how easy it was to make a basic romhack when a reasonable tool is available.
I thought the early game would be made easier by most of the changes, but not having a high-powered Mr.S at the start of the game was rather jarring.
SaGa games have a weird way of scaling a lot of the time. In this game in particular, firearms and explosives are very good equalizers that can really help a weak team through a hard battle and can be very effective against large groups of enemies; I happen to be considering my Knight/Thief/White Mage/Black Mage to be a pure, high-fantasy sort of group so they're never going to use guns, grenades and tanks. There's also an entire class of martial arts "equipment" that powers up over time that I won't be making use of. These unusable items, some of which are yielded as treasures, will really impact us by midgame.
I wasn't used to surprise rounds, and they happened really frequently thanks to Fari's Surprise ability. I had forgotten that when you get a surprise round, it literally shows each enemy doing nothing. Enemies are frequently "stacked" in battle such that there can be up to 27 enemies in a battle, so there can be a ton of these messages like, "Lizard does nothing. Lizard does nothing. Lizard does nothing. Goblin does nothing." I was worried that I had somehow screwed up the game's logic in my bugfixes or something, but I hadn't.
I was still explaining things, minding stat gains and panicking about potential errors I may have made in the hack and not really focusing too much on the gameplay here. I got through the ruins of the ancients fairly painlessly; notably, Lenn the black mage's multi-target magic spells made a lot of battles much faster and more achievable. Not much changed by the time I was going into Ashura's base.
This was our status shortly before the boss, Rhino:
Note Bart's HP total there, because this is how Rhino treated him on round 1:
The team was able to pay Rhino back pretty quickly on round 2, though:
And then we got some reasonable stat gains because Rhino is the first higher-ranked monster we've encountered so far. On to Ashura's world!
There was only going to be one thing truly interesting in Ashura's world, and that's Ashura. Depending on my team's composition in this game, it's often the NPC who joins right before Ashura, Mask, who ends up carrying the team with his absurd strength score and high HP. Mask wasn't going to be carrying anybody this time! And Bart the knight was not doing a good job as the party tank. Even with shiny new silver equipment, his defense score was only 7 and he was still occasionally ending regular battles face-down.
At least we got some nice gains after defeating the Woodman!
Ashura is pretty nasty. I knew this was going to take a few tries, perhaps a different approach, and possibly even some grinding. Ashura hitting us with 6-Arms was a pretty big wake-up call despite this.
In my second attempt, I was surprised at the success of Bart using a shield every turn to block the biggest attacks... although this, too, fell flat pretty quickly when Ashura used his AoE Flame attack. I noticed that our Fire magi would allow one party member to be immune to Flame, and tried to think of a way to leverage this. Fari seemed to be my best attacker, so I tried moving the Fire magi from Lenn to Fari.
On attempt 3, I realized removing the Speed magi from Fari to use the Fire magi dropped her damage considerably. She also missed repeatedly.
On attempt 4, it didn't go swimmingly but I did notice that using my speed-boosting potion on Fari made another good difference to her damage. I quit after Bart and Fari got walloped.
On attempt 5, Fari was doing damage with her Sabre around 130 each time. It was promising! Unfortunately, after 3 or 4 rounds she was the first one to get smashed by 6-Arms.
On attempt 6, I tried giving a consumable cure potion to a mage to heal Fari so she had a better chance to live after a Flame attack. Unfortunately, she still got clobbered.
At least these attempts went quickly! Being able to save anywhere sure helps with that. I chose to stop for the night at this point realizing that I'd need either some grinding or a significant change of strategy to make it past Ashura.
For the uninitiated, this would be an unusual spot to first to learn this, but the Final Fantasy Legend series is known as the "SaGa" series in Japan, which includes Romancing SaGa, SaGa Frontier, and Unlimited Saga. They were only re-branded as Final Fantasy games for release to western audiences in the early 90s, presumably either for brand recognition or just because the title "SaGa" would sound silly to native English speakers.
Thus... not a Final Fantasy game!
For the sake of conducting this playthrough, I did a rom hack using tehtmi's nifty little saga2edit app along with a few minor hex edits. The patch itself is posted on GitHub here. I applied a few of Alex Jackson's bugfixes from the GameFAQs topic at gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/585710-final-fantasy-legend-ii/41893465 as well, including making the elemental Magi work appropriately. Then I made changes so that jobs would work as follows:
- Human male -> Knight: No particular changes to start with. Humans were changed so that defense gains were rare but possible.
- Human female -> Thief: Starts with Surprise and Steal that are normally exclusive to mutants and monsters.
- Mutant female -> White Mage: Starts with Cure, Heal and Teleport.
- Mutant male -> Black Mage: Starts with Flame, Blizzard and Thunder.
- NPCs were all given 1 in all stats including HP so that they could exist without really influencing a battle.
As well as these modifications in the nature of the hack, I would need to play with a ruleset to make the characters conform to their roles.
- The Knight can use swords and knives and any armor, tending toward heavy armor. He can still gain agility using agility-based swords and still gain mana using the Psi Sword. He can also exclusively use shields.
- The Thief can use agility-based swords and any knives. She can gain mana using the Psi Knife. She can equip "light armor", which is dubious in definition but I'll just deal with that. No helmets and no giant equips, I guess.
- The White Mage can use hammer and flails and white magic-y things. If they gain a fourth mutant action ability, they can only use it if it's restorative in nature (I'm still considering whether P-Blast could count as some form of holy attack but that is unlikely to matter). They can use the Prayer book if there's a reason to have an offensive mana option. They can boost other stats using hammer and flails. They don't have a lot of armor options.
- The Black Mage can use knives and black magic-y things. If they gain a fourth mutant action ability, they can use it as long as it's offensive in nature. We can also overwrite their starting abilities as long as it's black magic. Like the white mage, there aren't many armor options.
The first play session was on March 3, 2022. The game started out normally although at the start of the playthrough I was explaining things a lot. The character selection screen ended up looking like this:
Early on, I said, "There's a lot that I don't know how it's going to play out here, in fact, this might prove to be not very possible." And, in fact, some mistakes in the hack became apparent pretty quickly, like when Mr.S was carrying a whole bunch of 0 hammers. Whoops.
I applied a fix for that, and - spoilers? - it wouldn't be the last! Later on, I'd realize that my female human thief's Steal ability would never be restored by any means and take up an inventory slot forever, so I would ultimately end up removing that even though it was quite fun for flavour's sake. Doing the fix live on stream was kind of funny, actually; it really went to show how easy it was to make a basic romhack when a reasonable tool is available.
I thought the early game would be made easier by most of the changes, but not having a high-powered Mr.S at the start of the game was rather jarring.
SaGa games have a weird way of scaling a lot of the time. In this game in particular, firearms and explosives are very good equalizers that can really help a weak team through a hard battle and can be very effective against large groups of enemies; I happen to be considering my Knight/Thief/White Mage/Black Mage to be a pure, high-fantasy sort of group so they're never going to use guns, grenades and tanks. There's also an entire class of martial arts "equipment" that powers up over time that I won't be making use of. These unusable items, some of which are yielded as treasures, will really impact us by midgame.
I wasn't used to surprise rounds, and they happened really frequently thanks to Fari's Surprise ability. I had forgotten that when you get a surprise round, it literally shows each enemy doing nothing. Enemies are frequently "stacked" in battle such that there can be up to 27 enemies in a battle, so there can be a ton of these messages like, "Lizard does nothing. Lizard does nothing. Lizard does nothing. Goblin does nothing." I was worried that I had somehow screwed up the game's logic in my bugfixes or something, but I hadn't.
I was still explaining things, minding stat gains and panicking about potential errors I may have made in the hack and not really focusing too much on the gameplay here. I got through the ruins of the ancients fairly painlessly; notably, Lenn the black mage's multi-target magic spells made a lot of battles much faster and more achievable. Not much changed by the time I was going into Ashura's base.
This was our status shortly before the boss, Rhino:
Note Bart's HP total there, because this is how Rhino treated him on round 1:
The team was able to pay Rhino back pretty quickly on round 2, though:
And then we got some reasonable stat gains because Rhino is the first higher-ranked monster we've encountered so far. On to Ashura's world!
There was only going to be one thing truly interesting in Ashura's world, and that's Ashura. Depending on my team's composition in this game, it's often the NPC who joins right before Ashura, Mask, who ends up carrying the team with his absurd strength score and high HP. Mask wasn't going to be carrying anybody this time! And Bart the knight was not doing a good job as the party tank. Even with shiny new silver equipment, his defense score was only 7 and he was still occasionally ending regular battles face-down.
At least we got some nice gains after defeating the Woodman!
Ashura is pretty nasty. I knew this was going to take a few tries, perhaps a different approach, and possibly even some grinding. Ashura hitting us with 6-Arms was a pretty big wake-up call despite this.
In my second attempt, I was surprised at the success of Bart using a shield every turn to block the biggest attacks... although this, too, fell flat pretty quickly when Ashura used his AoE Flame attack. I noticed that our Fire magi would allow one party member to be immune to Flame, and tried to think of a way to leverage this. Fari seemed to be my best attacker, so I tried moving the Fire magi from Lenn to Fari.
On attempt 3, I realized removing the Speed magi from Fari to use the Fire magi dropped her damage considerably. She also missed repeatedly.
On attempt 4, it didn't go swimmingly but I did notice that using my speed-boosting potion on Fari made another good difference to her damage. I quit after Bart and Fari got walloped.
On attempt 5, Fari was doing damage with her Sabre around 130 each time. It was promising! Unfortunately, after 3 or 4 rounds she was the first one to get smashed by 6-Arms.
On attempt 6, I tried giving a consumable cure potion to a mage to heal Fari so she had a better chance to live after a Flame attack. Unfortunately, she still got clobbered.
At least these attempts went quickly! Being able to save anywhere sure helps with that. I chose to stop for the night at this point realizing that I'd need either some grinding or a significant change of strategy to make it past Ashura.
