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freshfeelingThis was played around March 10, 2022. We are starting by Micronizing to enter Ki's body!
Between sessions, although I haven't played outside of the recordings that are available, I did manage to modify Fari a little bit such that she has lost the Steal ability. I liked the idea of having the Steal ability, but since human characters don't auto-recover their abilities when they rest it was just going to be permanently stuck at 0 uses for the rest of the playthrough and I don't dig that.
Fari the thief is very much pulling ahead of the other characters in terms of power, in some regards. Agility gains are a funny thing, in this game where there are useful agility-based weapons. Unlike Bart the knight, who requires agility in order to hit as well as to improve turn order, and even moreso requires strength to deal damage, Fari only requires agility for all of these functions. And since this higher agility causes her to act more quickly, she also gets more opportunities to grow. Thus, this cyclic situation where she has the higher HP and best damage.
Now, there are limitations to this; there are no agility-based group-targetting abilities in the entire game. There are strength-based group-targetting weapons much later on that Bart will be able to use eventually, but Fari will only ever be dealing damage to a single enemy. For large enemy groups - which are maybe the majority of non-boss encounters in this game - Lenn is very much carrying the team. I guess this makes sense with how these job-based characters are meant to perform. In normal FFL2, although the character types are at least somewhat varied and interesting, and builds always matter, characters are generally not so specialized.
The monsters inside Ki's body are similar in strength (i.e. rank) to Ashura's Tower, including that hilarious-looking Worm. Ki also has terrorists in her bloodstream.
I at least partly knew my way around Ki's anatomy, maybe from real lived experience or muscle memory. Kril's weird white mage skillset would've allowed me to easily exit if it were necessary, but it wasn't. It felt like we gained a lot of stats and HP as we travelled through Ki's body:
I wasn't anticipating big issues fighting the cells guarding Ki's brain magi, although I knew I'd be depending on Lenn for this one. Fari died on turn 1, flying in the face of my earlier statements about her aptitude. Bart used his shields a lot and actually repelled quite a few Wind Up and Dissolve attacks. By the time Lenn ended the fight in late turn 2 (I think?), Bart and Fari were already lying in the dirt of Ki's skull.
In Apollo's World, I chose to do the undersea volcano first. I was still fighting things and gaining stats, and saving up to improve Bart's armor from Bronze Armor to Giant Armor. I was excited to find one of these healing X-symbol things:
I mean, I knew it was there. But I thought it made for a nice opportunity to fight a large string of enemies without feeling a lot of danger or pressure to leave to heal in town. The healing is convenient, especially in a dungeon with lava tiles, but it doesn't restore any ability uses so eventually my mages were going to run out of spells regardless. Lava tiles in this game still count toward the step counter to the next battle, unlike, say, Final Fantasy I.
These healing symbol things are also one of those few things that carries over between Final Fantasy Legend II and III.
I cleared out the undersea volcano and with enough cash in hand Kril teleported us to Giant's Town to buy Bart the long-awaited armor upgrade. As discussed earlier, it's a really substantial upgrade in terms of both armor (10 defense -> 30 defense!) and strength! But that strength bonus does actually make it harder for him to earn further permanent strength upgrades.
Next, I went into the bright cave. I always enjoyed this area. The moving floor and the frantic music really does make it feel sort of unusually energetic and startling. Fittingly, Bart got blinded in this dungeon. For the first time, we had the opportunity to use Kril's Heal ability! That was actually somewhat useful. I am really confused as to why Heal can't be used in battle; it still wouldn't make a difference very often, but it could be nice from time to time.
Not long after, Bart was turned to stone by a Medusa. So then Heal was useful again!
Finally for Apollo's World, we went on to the Dunatis area. There was really nothing very interesting up here. Eventually I found Lynn and fought Dunatis. I didn't do the schtick with re-trying Dunatis to get specific high level abilities or anything; I did get some pretty good drops and gains from the fight but nothing that was really going to change the way we do business. The battle was a quick one; Bart got shot with an SMG, but Fari and Bart acted quickly with high-damage swords and that was that:
I was expecting the next world to be Venus' World, but I had forgotten about the Guardians' World. We got that done, too. The battles as you're exiting Guardians' World are all a little bit ranked-up from the normal enemies at this point, so there was a chance of my mages gaining some unusual, cool ability... but that didn't happen. Kril gained Steal, which was just kind of silly instead, and in the very next battle lost Steal for something else unusable.
I had changed some of the joining NPCs class names to "NPC" during my hacking. I am not really sure what purpose I thought it served, but it does distinguish their amazing stats of 1 all-around from their normal features. But what's funny is around this point in the game, I realized that normal dialogue occasionally uses things like NPC class names; because I changed Dad's class from "Guardian" to "NPC", enemies and other characters would refer to the "the NPCs" as if that's just what they were called. I didn't realize I would change the name of the whole organization; accidentally hilarious.
I wasn't worried about beating the Ninja, but I have experienced him doing some nasty, OHKO-ish damage in the past. He did 306 damage to Bart on turn 1 but was taken out by Fari at the very start of round 2. I happen to have won a Katana and some nice, strong stats gains in the aftermath of that battle.
Finally, we got to Venus' World! We also bought Fari some Army Armor that I decided was a valid upgrade and we saved here after speaking to Venus. The humans have HP in the 300s and the mages have HP in the mid-200s.
Between sessions, although I haven't played outside of the recordings that are available, I did manage to modify Fari a little bit such that she has lost the Steal ability. I liked the idea of having the Steal ability, but since human characters don't auto-recover their abilities when they rest it was just going to be permanently stuck at 0 uses for the rest of the playthrough and I don't dig that.
Fari the thief is very much pulling ahead of the other characters in terms of power, in some regards. Agility gains are a funny thing, in this game where there are useful agility-based weapons. Unlike Bart the knight, who requires agility in order to hit as well as to improve turn order, and even moreso requires strength to deal damage, Fari only requires agility for all of these functions. And since this higher agility causes her to act more quickly, she also gets more opportunities to grow. Thus, this cyclic situation where she has the higher HP and best damage.
Now, there are limitations to this; there are no agility-based group-targetting abilities in the entire game. There are strength-based group-targetting weapons much later on that Bart will be able to use eventually, but Fari will only ever be dealing damage to a single enemy. For large enemy groups - which are maybe the majority of non-boss encounters in this game - Lenn is very much carrying the team. I guess this makes sense with how these job-based characters are meant to perform. In normal FFL2, although the character types are at least somewhat varied and interesting, and builds always matter, characters are generally not so specialized.
The monsters inside Ki's body are similar in strength (i.e. rank) to Ashura's Tower, including that hilarious-looking Worm. Ki also has terrorists in her bloodstream.
I at least partly knew my way around Ki's anatomy, maybe from real lived experience or muscle memory. Kril's weird white mage skillset would've allowed me to easily exit if it were necessary, but it wasn't. It felt like we gained a lot of stats and HP as we travelled through Ki's body:
I wasn't anticipating big issues fighting the cells guarding Ki's brain magi, although I knew I'd be depending on Lenn for this one. Fari died on turn 1, flying in the face of my earlier statements about her aptitude. Bart used his shields a lot and actually repelled quite a few Wind Up and Dissolve attacks. By the time Lenn ended the fight in late turn 2 (I think?), Bart and Fari were already lying in the dirt of Ki's skull.
In Apollo's World, I chose to do the undersea volcano first. I was still fighting things and gaining stats, and saving up to improve Bart's armor from Bronze Armor to Giant Armor. I was excited to find one of these healing X-symbol things:
I mean, I knew it was there. But I thought it made for a nice opportunity to fight a large string of enemies without feeling a lot of danger or pressure to leave to heal in town. The healing is convenient, especially in a dungeon with lava tiles, but it doesn't restore any ability uses so eventually my mages were going to run out of spells regardless. Lava tiles in this game still count toward the step counter to the next battle, unlike, say, Final Fantasy I.
These healing symbol things are also one of those few things that carries over between Final Fantasy Legend II and III.
I cleared out the undersea volcano and with enough cash in hand Kril teleported us to Giant's Town to buy Bart the long-awaited armor upgrade. As discussed earlier, it's a really substantial upgrade in terms of both armor (10 defense -> 30 defense!) and strength! But that strength bonus does actually make it harder for him to earn further permanent strength upgrades.
Next, I went into the bright cave. I always enjoyed this area. The moving floor and the frantic music really does make it feel sort of unusually energetic and startling. Fittingly, Bart got blinded in this dungeon. For the first time, we had the opportunity to use Kril's Heal ability! That was actually somewhat useful. I am really confused as to why Heal can't be used in battle; it still wouldn't make a difference very often, but it could be nice from time to time.
Not long after, Bart was turned to stone by a Medusa. So then Heal was useful again!
Finally for Apollo's World, we went on to the Dunatis area. There was really nothing very interesting up here. Eventually I found Lynn and fought Dunatis. I didn't do the schtick with re-trying Dunatis to get specific high level abilities or anything; I did get some pretty good drops and gains from the fight but nothing that was really going to change the way we do business. The battle was a quick one; Bart got shot with an SMG, but Fari and Bart acted quickly with high-damage swords and that was that:
I was expecting the next world to be Venus' World, but I had forgotten about the Guardians' World. We got that done, too. The battles as you're exiting Guardians' World are all a little bit ranked-up from the normal enemies at this point, so there was a chance of my mages gaining some unusual, cool ability... but that didn't happen. Kril gained Steal, which was just kind of silly instead, and in the very next battle lost Steal for something else unusable.
I had changed some of the joining NPCs class names to "NPC" during my hacking. I am not really sure what purpose I thought it served, but it does distinguish their amazing stats of 1 all-around from their normal features. But what's funny is around this point in the game, I realized that normal dialogue occasionally uses things like NPC class names; because I changed Dad's class from "Guardian" to "NPC", enemies and other characters would refer to the "the NPCs" as if that's just what they were called. I didn't realize I would change the name of the whole organization; accidentally hilarious.
I wasn't worried about beating the Ninja, but I have experienced him doing some nasty, OHKO-ish damage in the past. He did 306 damage to Bart on turn 1 but was taken out by Fari at the very start of round 2. I happen to have won a Katana and some nice, strong stats gains in the aftermath of that battle.
Finally, we got to Venus' World! We also bought Fari some Army Armor that I decided was a valid upgrade and we saved here after speaking to Venus. The humans have HP in the 300s and the mages have HP in the mid-200s.
