Final Fantasy II Classic Jobs Part III
Aug. 5th, 2023 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis third session was played on August 3, 2023.
Having just retrieved the Sunfire using Egil's Torch, my team of Scott, Leila, Minwu and Maria wandered up toward the Dreadnought's location from Altair. Against these enemies that are roughly the same caliber as those in Kashuan Keep, Minwu with his Werebuster was occasionally dealing the best damage among my team.
Entering the Dreadnought, I remembered that it was possible to piss off the Captain by saying, "Wild Rose" instead of using the Pass acquired earlier and I decided to give it a try. The Captain is no slouch in battle! In fact, it was quite hard to scratch him with weapons and Maria dealt the most damage by quite a bit using spells. The Captain can do ~400 damage to a party member if he chooses not to use his bow, so Minwu was also casting single-target Cure spells most turns.
We won. It was not a particularly good use of our resources.
I opted to save outside but I didn't use a Cottage, figuring I could manage with what I had left of MP.
The Dreadnought is nothing special as a dungeon. There are Werepanthers here, who were pretty strong on the offense but quick to beat, especially with our Werebuster. The curse effect on Scott's Ancient Sword also contributed. There was actually some fairly good treasure here, too, like a Thief's Gloves, Ice Shield, Main Gauche, and Giant Helmet. The Main Gauche was a particularly useful upgrade for Leila. We also scored a Scourge spellbook that enemies dropped.
The Ice Shield chest had a monster-in-a-box battle against a Hill Gigas and a Soldier. I treated this sort of like a boss, with rounds of buffs and some spells on the offense. The Hill Gigas hits quite hard but we managed with a reasonable level of caution.
We were fairly close to being tapped for resources by the end of the dungeon, but fortunately there's no real boss. You wreck the Dreadnought by putting Sunfire in the engine and then there's an escape sequence in a cutscene; the cutscene seemed to animate completely normally after the part where the empire's Dark Knight appeared. When the Dark Knight was on screen, yeah, it was a little goofy. There was one part where the wrong person was speaking but also a few frames of very weird animation for Scott as leader that I guess probably only exist for Firion.
When we returned to Altair, we sold a bunch of items that we have no use for and then bought a bunch of consumables since our resources have been stretched a bit thinly in the last few dungeons. The cutscene where the king dies was at least a little bit mixed-up.
I also spent a short time grinding at that peninsula south of Altair with the Mysidia-area enemies, for the third time this playthrough, but this time it was fairly successful. It helped with a few stats and with money but it wasn't some enormous difference-maker at this point. We did maybe 10 battles there.
I had been a bit surprised by characters gaining evasion and magic defense after battles. In all of the memory addresses I had been digging through to make the script, those never made themselves obvious and I guess I thought they were strictly equipment-derived values, but clearly I was wrong. Well, the script is still managing the core stats and I don't think anything will become unbalanced by these magic defense and evasion values developing naturally. It's quite exciting to gain these values because we didn't gain a single point until quite far into the game.
The cutscene where we would normally meet Leila for the first time was also pretty unusual.
The pirates were really easy, especially with Leila's help destroying her crew. They were harder than FF1 pirates but maybe not by much.
Deist is a pretty long trip! This is maybe the first part of the world map design that seems truly intentionally designed with regards to its gameplay impacts. Since Mysidia was closer and I knew I could handle the enemies, I popped in there to see what interesting goodies I could get a little bit early. This resulted in me getting two Power Staves for Minwu and Maria, and the Wall, Barrier and Holy spells for Minwu. The Power Staff is an absurd upgrade, keeping Minwu and Maria's regular attacks relevant... in fact, Scott is maybe the weakest on the offense, for the moment. We also grabbed Thief's Gloves for Minwu and Maria.
We encountered a Behemoth on our way back to the ship from Mysidia. With Protect and Blink, we handled it fairly nicely, although it took a while to go down. We didn't gain much from it, but it still felt good.
In Deist, Scott finally got something to make up for his martial deficit: a Wing Sword. We entered Deist Cavern and I found the Pendant almost immediately, but I didn't feel like I was done exploring so I kept going for quite a long time, exploring every path and getting every treasure. This ended up taking two trips because after falling through a bridge we had to backtrack and we were very low on MP. The buffing and healing against some heavy hitters, like now-regular Hill Gigases, is pretty resource-intensive.
None of the treasure was particularly good, particularly after already visiting Mysidia. Eventually, I came to the pack of Chimeras who made up the boss fight. They had some fire breath but it wasn't so damaging that I felt endangered.
We got to the Spring of Life only to find that... nothing happened. Oh. I guess I was supposed to go back after getting the Pendant. Grumble. Time for a third dive.
Actually, talking to the Wyvern was pretty hilarious. The cutscene - which you can trigger more than once - is one of those ones where Scott doesn't seem to have a complete spritesheet for whatever Firion would normally be doing so there's kind of a weird, naked, doll-looking thing standing in.
We delivered the egg and it's rather unceremonious, really. Nothing else happened, which I was pretty sure is how this part of the game actually goes, and I returned to Altair. This is just how this game tends to work, with it's mission-driven narrative.
As a shortcut for getting back to Altair, I decided to walk across a penninsula so my trip via sea would be much shorter. This turned out to be somewhat risky as we ran into a pretty tough fight with four Vampire Girls who are quite strong and prone to confusing the team. But we won, and it was still probably quicker.
Next is this part where you find out that Hilda is a fake Hilda and you need to fight a Queen Lamia. With her ability to use Charm and rather high defenses, this was a different fight. We applied some magic defense buffs in addition to the usual ones and pulled out a decisive win. Isn't it interesting that they actually made this bedroom battle background?
We found out we needed to go battle at the empire's arena to win Hilda back, and I saved over on the shore somewhat near the arena.
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Having just retrieved the Sunfire using Egil's Torch, my team of Scott, Leila, Minwu and Maria wandered up toward the Dreadnought's location from Altair. Against these enemies that are roughly the same caliber as those in Kashuan Keep, Minwu with his Werebuster was occasionally dealing the best damage among my team.
Entering the Dreadnought, I remembered that it was possible to piss off the Captain by saying, "Wild Rose" instead of using the Pass acquired earlier and I decided to give it a try. The Captain is no slouch in battle! In fact, it was quite hard to scratch him with weapons and Maria dealt the most damage by quite a bit using spells. The Captain can do ~400 damage to a party member if he chooses not to use his bow, so Minwu was also casting single-target Cure spells most turns.
We won. It was not a particularly good use of our resources.
I opted to save outside but I didn't use a Cottage, figuring I could manage with what I had left of MP.
The Dreadnought is nothing special as a dungeon. There are Werepanthers here, who were pretty strong on the offense but quick to beat, especially with our Werebuster. The curse effect on Scott's Ancient Sword also contributed. There was actually some fairly good treasure here, too, like a Thief's Gloves, Ice Shield, Main Gauche, and Giant Helmet. The Main Gauche was a particularly useful upgrade for Leila. We also scored a Scourge spellbook that enemies dropped.
The Ice Shield chest had a monster-in-a-box battle against a Hill Gigas and a Soldier. I treated this sort of like a boss, with rounds of buffs and some spells on the offense. The Hill Gigas hits quite hard but we managed with a reasonable level of caution.
We were fairly close to being tapped for resources by the end of the dungeon, but fortunately there's no real boss. You wreck the Dreadnought by putting Sunfire in the engine and then there's an escape sequence in a cutscene; the cutscene seemed to animate completely normally after the part where the empire's Dark Knight appeared. When the Dark Knight was on screen, yeah, it was a little goofy. There was one part where the wrong person was speaking but also a few frames of very weird animation for Scott as leader that I guess probably only exist for Firion.
When we returned to Altair, we sold a bunch of items that we have no use for and then bought a bunch of consumables since our resources have been stretched a bit thinly in the last few dungeons. The cutscene where the king dies was at least a little bit mixed-up.
I also spent a short time grinding at that peninsula south of Altair with the Mysidia-area enemies, for the third time this playthrough, but this time it was fairly successful. It helped with a few stats and with money but it wasn't some enormous difference-maker at this point. We did maybe 10 battles there.
I had been a bit surprised by characters gaining evasion and magic defense after battles. In all of the memory addresses I had been digging through to make the script, those never made themselves obvious and I guess I thought they were strictly equipment-derived values, but clearly I was wrong. Well, the script is still managing the core stats and I don't think anything will become unbalanced by these magic defense and evasion values developing naturally. It's quite exciting to gain these values because we didn't gain a single point until quite far into the game.
The cutscene where we would normally meet Leila for the first time was also pretty unusual.
Deist is a pretty long trip! This is maybe the first part of the world map design that seems truly intentionally designed with regards to its gameplay impacts. Since Mysidia was closer and I knew I could handle the enemies, I popped in there to see what interesting goodies I could get a little bit early. This resulted in me getting two Power Staves for Minwu and Maria, and the Wall, Barrier and Holy spells for Minwu. The Power Staff is an absurd upgrade, keeping Minwu and Maria's regular attacks relevant... in fact, Scott is maybe the weakest on the offense, for the moment. We also grabbed Thief's Gloves for Minwu and Maria.
We encountered a Behemoth on our way back to the ship from Mysidia. With Protect and Blink, we handled it fairly nicely, although it took a while to go down. We didn't gain much from it, but it still felt good.
In Deist, Scott finally got something to make up for his martial deficit: a Wing Sword. We entered Deist Cavern and I found the Pendant almost immediately, but I didn't feel like I was done exploring so I kept going for quite a long time, exploring every path and getting every treasure. This ended up taking two trips because after falling through a bridge we had to backtrack and we were very low on MP. The buffing and healing against some heavy hitters, like now-regular Hill Gigases, is pretty resource-intensive.
None of the treasure was particularly good, particularly after already visiting Mysidia. Eventually, I came to the pack of Chimeras who made up the boss fight. They had some fire breath but it wasn't so damaging that I felt endangered.
We got to the Spring of Life only to find that... nothing happened. Oh. I guess I was supposed to go back after getting the Pendant. Grumble. Time for a third dive.
Actually, talking to the Wyvern was pretty hilarious. The cutscene - which you can trigger more than once - is one of those ones where Scott doesn't seem to have a complete spritesheet for whatever Firion would normally be doing so there's kind of a weird, naked, doll-looking thing standing in.
We delivered the egg and it's rather unceremonious, really. Nothing else happened, which I was pretty sure is how this part of the game actually goes, and I returned to Altair. This is just how this game tends to work, with it's mission-driven narrative.
As a shortcut for getting back to Altair, I decided to walk across a penninsula so my trip via sea would be much shorter. This turned out to be somewhat risky as we ran into a pretty tough fight with four Vampire Girls who are quite strong and prone to confusing the team. But we won, and it was still probably quicker.
Next is this part where you find out that Hilda is a fake Hilda and you need to fight a Queen Lamia. With her ability to use Charm and rather high defenses, this was a different fight. We applied some magic defense buffs in addition to the usual ones and pulled out a decisive win. Isn't it interesting that they actually made this bedroom battle background?
We found out we needed to go battle at the empire's arena to win Hilda back, and I saved over on the shore somewhat near the arena.
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