Final Fantasy II Classic Jobs Part IV
Aug. 6th, 2023 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingToday I did a fourth session of this very non-job-based game with jobs. I finished quite a bit.
First, we entered the emperor's arena to find Hilda. There, we battled a Behemoth, which was probably supposed to be pretty significant although we'd already run into one in the wild. But the on-screen sprite for the Behemoth (
) was really cute; that was new and exciting for me.
Next up was exiting the dungeon under the arena. We saw a few more of those funny occasions where Scott didn't have all of Firion's sprite frames and then we left. This dungeon was short and not very tough, and the couple treasures are super generic.
When we were returning to Altair from the western coast, I happened to see a little feature that I'd never seen before so I checked it out, and it turned out to be the staging camp for the rebellion's invasion of Fynn. There was a cutscene that got weird but this time it was more because of cutscene scripting than because of my script.
We very quickly proceeded to Fynn! I remembered this aspect of the game where you can run around the castle fighting monsters and collecting treasures, or you can make your life quite a bit easier by rushing the boss by literally walking in a straight line. I went for the straight line method.
Gottos was a pretty simple fight. We put on our physical buffs and things just moved along from there. The only thing new and different here was that Gottos uses Haste, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference either way.
We got info about Mysidia, the special masks, and the Ultima tome. We also collected the chests, some of which were still full of monsters in this peaceful castle. There were goodies, including tomes of Aura for Minwu, and Toad, Break, and Death for Maria. We checked in with Paul (who doesn't relinquish his stash... yet) and then went into the dungeon under Fynn Castle.
This dungeon was pretty simple. Many of the monsters are sort of Mysidia-caliber but we held up well against them. Some of the treasure is amazingly bad, like from the very start of the game, but we did find an Orichalcum knife for Leila. For some reason it seemed like the monsters got easier as we went deeper into this dungeon, including Ogre Mages and Adamantoises who we were fighting ages ago. We got the White Mask.
The next stop was actually, finally, Mysidia itself. I stopped in but I still needed to find the Black Mask, which the townspeople said was on a distant, solitary island. I had already passed this and it was pretty obvious on the map screen. So we headed to the tropical island. This dungeon actually had a pretty nice design - still very randomly-oriented, labyrithine walls, but the tileset looked good. We brought a bunch of ethers earlier so we had no MP concerns here. I entered looking like this:
This dungeon had a lot of encounters that gradually became pretty trivial, with no massively hard-hitting enemies like we had when we ran into Hill Gigases earlier. The worst part was when I kept holding down the turbo button and "A" because of all of the easy fights and then wasting a turn in a battle with something that requires spells, like flans. I did that a lot - which speaks volumes about my laziness.
Actually, wait, I just said that was the worst part. That was wrong. The worst part was finding the mask people village, thinking that was the end of the dungeon, backtracking on another path to get treasure, getting to the actual end, and then backtracking again back to the mask people figuring they must be of some importance, only to find that they are pointless.
As well - as the third almost-equally-worstest part - the enemies were easy and the treasure was garbage. The enemies were weaker than Mysidia overworld enemies, including some that appeared as early as the Snow Cavern. The treasure wasn't out-of-date or anything but besides a few tomes I already had it was just consumables. It generally felt out-of-place, like I was supposed to do it quite a bit earlier.
Anyway, the boss - such as it was - ended like this:
Only after getting the Black Mask did I place the White Mask and then proceed to the Mysidia Cave where I also used the Black Mask. You may be curious, as I was, about whether the doppelganger looks like Firion or Scott. Here's your answer:
This next dungeon had a lot of right angles and areas that felt like "rooms" as opposed to the cavern-like structures of the tropical island and such. The part that I hated was that it introduced non-telegraphed pass-through walls. Grumble.
The enemies were maybe a partial step up but I kept doing that thing where I accidentally wasted a turn hitting flans with weapons.
The treasures were pretty nice. We got a Gold Hairpin (for a mage, on Minwu for now), Black Garb (for Leila), and Tomes of Drain and Osmose that will both do wonders for Maria.
With the amount of money we make fighting (mostly because fleeing sucks; I actually ran successfully once in this cave though!) and the stuff we sell because it doesn't conform to my job system, we have a lot of cash for consumables. With a big stack of ethers, the only real worry we have in dungeon exploration is running into an enemy that can crush us outright rather than attrition wearing away limited resources. While this change in difficulty can make things feel a bit dry, the new spells do help things feel fresh.
Anyway, we got the Crystal Rod and saved with our ship just before sailing toward Mysidia Tower.
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First, we entered the emperor's arena to find Hilda. There, we battled a Behemoth, which was probably supposed to be pretty significant although we'd already run into one in the wild. But the on-screen sprite for the Behemoth (
) was really cute; that was new and exciting for me.Next up was exiting the dungeon under the arena. We saw a few more of those funny occasions where Scott didn't have all of Firion's sprite frames and then we left. This dungeon was short and not very tough, and the couple treasures are super generic.
When we were returning to Altair from the western coast, I happened to see a little feature that I'd never seen before so I checked it out, and it turned out to be the staging camp for the rebellion's invasion of Fynn. There was a cutscene that got weird but this time it was more because of cutscene scripting than because of my script.
We very quickly proceeded to Fynn! I remembered this aspect of the game where you can run around the castle fighting monsters and collecting treasures, or you can make your life quite a bit easier by rushing the boss by literally walking in a straight line. I went for the straight line method.
Gottos was a pretty simple fight. We put on our physical buffs and things just moved along from there. The only thing new and different here was that Gottos uses Haste, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference either way.
We got info about Mysidia, the special masks, and the Ultima tome. We also collected the chests, some of which were still full of monsters in this peaceful castle. There were goodies, including tomes of Aura for Minwu, and Toad, Break, and Death for Maria. We checked in with Paul (who doesn't relinquish his stash... yet) and then went into the dungeon under Fynn Castle.
This dungeon was pretty simple. Many of the monsters are sort of Mysidia-caliber but we held up well against them. Some of the treasure is amazingly bad, like from the very start of the game, but we did find an Orichalcum knife for Leila. For some reason it seemed like the monsters got easier as we went deeper into this dungeon, including Ogre Mages and Adamantoises who we were fighting ages ago. We got the White Mask.
The next stop was actually, finally, Mysidia itself. I stopped in but I still needed to find the Black Mask, which the townspeople said was on a distant, solitary island. I had already passed this and it was pretty obvious on the map screen. So we headed to the tropical island. This dungeon actually had a pretty nice design - still very randomly-oriented, labyrithine walls, but the tileset looked good. We brought a bunch of ethers earlier so we had no MP concerns here. I entered looking like this:
This dungeon had a lot of encounters that gradually became pretty trivial, with no massively hard-hitting enemies like we had when we ran into Hill Gigases earlier. The worst part was when I kept holding down the turbo button and "A" because of all of the easy fights and then wasting a turn in a battle with something that requires spells, like flans. I did that a lot - which speaks volumes about my laziness.
Actually, wait, I just said that was the worst part. That was wrong. The worst part was finding the mask people village, thinking that was the end of the dungeon, backtracking on another path to get treasure, getting to the actual end, and then backtracking again back to the mask people figuring they must be of some importance, only to find that they are pointless.
Anyway, the boss - such as it was - ended like this:
Only after getting the Black Mask did I place the White Mask and then proceed to the Mysidia Cave where I also used the Black Mask. You may be curious, as I was, about whether the doppelganger looks like Firion or Scott. Here's your answer:
This next dungeon had a lot of right angles and areas that felt like "rooms" as opposed to the cavern-like structures of the tropical island and such. The part that I hated was that it introduced non-telegraphed pass-through walls. Grumble.
The enemies were maybe a partial step up but I kept doing that thing where I accidentally wasted a turn hitting flans with weapons.
The treasures were pretty nice. We got a Gold Hairpin (for a mage, on Minwu for now), Black Garb (for Leila), and Tomes of Drain and Osmose that will both do wonders for Maria.
With the amount of money we make fighting (mostly because fleeing sucks; I actually ran successfully once in this cave though!) and the stuff we sell because it doesn't conform to my job system, we have a lot of cash for consumables. With a big stack of ethers, the only real worry we have in dungeon exploration is running into an enemy that can crush us outright rather than attrition wearing away limited resources. While this change in difficulty can make things feel a bit dry, the new spells do help things feel fresh.
Anyway, we got the Crystal Rod and saved with our ship just before sailing toward Mysidia Tower.
<< Start | < Previous | Index | Next >
