Final Fantasy II Classic Jobs Part VI
Aug. 12th, 2023 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingWe managed to wrap up this run (with a bit of extra at the end!) on August 11.
We started by inspecting stats again. It's a bit hard to monitor because there are quite a few bonuses from equipment in play. The thing that seems maybe the most unusual is that all characters are incredibly high in their primary, featured statistic except for Scott: Leila's agility, Minwu's spirit, and Maria's intelligence are all exceptionally high, but Scott's strength is only kind of moderate... and often lower than Leila's depending on her equipment bonuses.
We didn't acquire many items of interest in Palamecia. We quickly got a Diamond Cuirass, which has the same defensive potential as Scott's Diamond Armor but without being so heavy, so we put that on him. Later we grabbed some staves and a Sun Blade for Scott. The enemies were pretty easy; Gottos appear in abundance here but they are quite easy to handle now. A strategy I was using more here was using Osmose on enemies to drain all of their MP so that they had no ability to do anything other than attack. This helped with some enemies but obviously not others; I pretty well had to use Holy and/or Flare to beat the Stone Golems.
We fought an Imperial Shadow as a monster-in-a-box but it really didn't seem like a significant battle.
The whole dungeon was certainly on the quicker side; when I started I explained that there were three dungeons left which I thought was two long ones and a short one; I didn't think this would be the shortest of the three remaining dungeons, but it was.
I was kind of disappointed that there was no boss at the end of this dungeon. There were a bunch of cutscenes, and with cutscenes comes weirdness. It was funny to see how Leon was himself in one moment and Maria (his sister) in the next.
The scene where the party talked to Hilda was quite mixed-up. It was sort of hard to tell who was who, because it was mostly Leon/Maria talking to Maria/Leila.
Here right before the end game, I said, "There's not really much in the way of sidequests in this game, huh? ... There IS a sidequest!" as I suddenly remembered that I could go to Deist to get the Excalibur. But besides that it was on to the Jade Passage.
This dungeon was longer and more complex than I expected, not helped by certain particularly strong enemies. The Abyss Worms were a real thorn in my side; they have strong melee attacks as well as fairly good defenses. While the situation never got completely critical, it was definitely the most threatening thing that had happened in ages.
Maria even died to them once, although it wasn't in the pictured battle.
The best treasures we got in here were the Diamond Mace for Minwu (I didn't enjoy using the Healing Staff with him as we didn't need it often enough), the Aegis Shield for Scott, and a Protect Ring that I gave to Maria for now. We got Cat Claws but I decided to keep the Ripper on Leila for two reasons. First, it's got that neat 20-damage-per-hit bonus. Second, since the PlayStation Origins release of this game they re-skinned the Cat Claws to be more like handheld claws like monks use in other games (Yang, Sabin, Tifa...) so even though I think it counts as a knife it just wouldn't look right.
There were some bigger enemies that appeared as monsters-in-a-box with boss music but they weren't hard to beat at all. A Blue Dragon guarded the aforementioned Cat Claws but it wasn't much of a threat. We buffed on turn 1 but that was probably mostly unnecessary as it was weakened so quickly by Maria's Scourge spell, and eventually killed by Scott's attack.
The King Behemoth was guarding a Rune Axe (which I already had and can't use), and I tried to use Osmose to steal his MP since King Behemoths in most of the series have crazy meteor-based abilities, but he had no MP. With our Blink spell on it couldn't touch us and we beat it in about 4 rounds. I slightly missed getting a good screenshot.
Yoichi's Bow (also trash) was guarded by a Red Dragon. A couple of Blizzard spells ended that.
The end of the dungeon got a bit more linear, which was closer to what I had expected from the outset, and then we were in Pandaemonium. Like the Abyss Worms in the Jade Passage, there were specific enemies that stood above the crowd here, which were the Death Riders. They really packed a punch, and were sort of the only enemies that were much of a threat. I started casting Blink whenever I encountered them so their exceptionally strong, HP-draining attacks would consistently miss, which worked nicely.
I got Ribbons as random drops several times here before finding one in a chest near the end. By the end of it, I had a Ribbon on all characters.
Given it was the final dungeon and I was feeling well-prepared I strongly considered not going for the treasures... but I re-considered that when I realized there were mostly awesome-looking boss enemies in most of them. The first one was the Genji Gloves which were guarded by Zombie Borghen, who we defeated in one round.
Before getting the rest of the goodies from the epic bosses, I grabbed the Masamune from its very hidden hiding place. I thought this was remarkable, because I haven't played the very end of this game before but I had read it was in a pass-through wall on the right side of an otherwise pointless room in the final dungeon and I just straight-up found it. But I decided I couldn't justify it conforming to my job classes and thus didn't use it regardless.
Next, we found the Genji Helm, guarded by Tiamat. Tiamat's resistance to different elements surprised me; in Final Fantasy I, Tiamat is famously vulnerable to BANE/Scourge, but in this game she absorbs it. I thought I'd try the opposite element, which in this game is Thunder, but she absorbs that too! We ended up just sticking with Flare and weapons.
Next, we found a chest with a Ribbon in it (which we already had a couple of) as well as Astaroth. This was the first time I actually tried out the Blood Sword on Scott. It may have broken the battle a bit. It still took three such attacks, plus whatever everyone else was doing.
It took a while with a bit of wayfinding confusion because it's a pick-a-door dungeon, but next was the Genji Armor guarded by Beelzebub. I pulled the move where Maria took its MP while Minwu used Blink, rendering it pretty useless. I had Maria experimenting with elements a bit; I figured if I were fighting a giant bee, I'd use fire against it, but Beelzebub absorbs fire. Holy was strong, Blizzard was weak, and Scourge was medium. Really, I was only experimenting like this because the battle was so simple.
Very shortly after the bee, we randomly ran into an Iron Giant who had boss music playing. How timely!
It started by trying to use Poison Cloud XVI but Maria had already removed all of its MP with Osmose. With that plus Blink, it was pretty well neutered. It didn't like Maria's Thunder spell and Scott took it down without a Blood Sword rather quickly after that. Was that 2 turns or 3? It was quick.
The dungeon becomes a bit more linear and plain after that. The encounters seemed to have more of the elemental gigases toward the end, but I could take them each out with a single opposite-element spell. There were no more big elements of interest until we reached the Emperor.
Unfortunately for the Emperor, I've really been enjoying my newly-perfected strategy of removing the enemy's access to magic and then make the party borderline immune to physical attacks.
With his MP gone on turn 2, and with our Blink status up... he couldn't harm us. He stood there like an idiot while we depleted his MP. Minwu threw out some Berserk spells but Scott and Leila still had pretty pitiful damage, so Scott did switch to using a Blood Sword instead of Excalibur and then we sort of... ran out the clock. We beat the final boss of this game without taking a single point of damage.
We won! That was nice. And the ending is pretty cute in this game.
I wasn't sure how the game would behave during the ending with my Lua script running. It was about as strange as usual but it worked okay. It was so touching when Maria said goodbye to Maria.
At the beginning, I had said there was a bonus. I decided to see if I could just leave my job-forcing Lua script active while starting the Soul of Rebirth post-game. I was surprised to see... it worked! It was my first time doing this post-game. It was basically just Jade Passage and Pandaemonium, slightly remixed and with different treasures and enemies. Now, normally you'd be doing it with relatively low-powered characters but my script actually pulled in all of the identities that had been forced all along. Obviously, this makes it waaaay easier.
There were the same usual strange behaviours in cutscenes. Right at the beginning, there's a great part where Minwu explains to Scott the role of the rebel heroes Scott, Leila, and Minwu.
Playing through Soul of Rebirth was easy. The Jade Passage part is quite easy, although some enemies definitely ramp it up in the Pandaemonium part. We managed to beat Ultima Weapon pretty easily using basically the same strategy as the Emperor.
The bosses were fun to see but trivial to fight, and I didn't get good screenshots of any of them. With our accelerated characters, we blew through Soul of Rebirth in just about an hour. It was a bit novel to get some of the specialized, character-restriction equipment, like a Stardust Rod for Minwu. Until we got to the end!
The ending of Soul of Rebirth has this part where your party (who are supposed to be Minwu, Scott, Josef and Ricard) sees a vision of the surviving rebel heroes (who are supposed to be Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon) and it plays out as a scripted battle - quite interesting, since scripted battles don't exist anywhere else in this game. As you might expect, having a script force changes to the party in a scripted battle is an issue. You can check out this part starting from about the 3:04 timestamp in the video.
First things got a bit weird:
...and then we got to see the first hard crash of the entire game, with a terrible ear-crunching screech playing on repeat.
I don't think we'll be quite beating Soul of Rebirth as part of this classic job playthrough! But we did beat the game.
This game is pretty interesting with dedicated job classes! At least in this version the game balance doesn't suffer much at all. It's as if it were designed around it. No wonder the SaGa series exists!
<< Start | < Previous | Index
The next "Classic Jobs" run in the Final Fantasy series: Final Fantasy III
The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy IV
We started by inspecting stats again. It's a bit hard to monitor because there are quite a few bonuses from equipment in play. The thing that seems maybe the most unusual is that all characters are incredibly high in their primary, featured statistic except for Scott: Leila's agility, Minwu's spirit, and Maria's intelligence are all exceptionally high, but Scott's strength is only kind of moderate... and often lower than Leila's depending on her equipment bonuses.
We didn't acquire many items of interest in Palamecia. We quickly got a Diamond Cuirass, which has the same defensive potential as Scott's Diamond Armor but without being so heavy, so we put that on him. Later we grabbed some staves and a Sun Blade for Scott. The enemies were pretty easy; Gottos appear in abundance here but they are quite easy to handle now. A strategy I was using more here was using Osmose on enemies to drain all of their MP so that they had no ability to do anything other than attack. This helped with some enemies but obviously not others; I pretty well had to use Holy and/or Flare to beat the Stone Golems.
We fought an Imperial Shadow as a monster-in-a-box but it really didn't seem like a significant battle.
The whole dungeon was certainly on the quicker side; when I started I explained that there were three dungeons left which I thought was two long ones and a short one; I didn't think this would be the shortest of the three remaining dungeons, but it was.
I was kind of disappointed that there was no boss at the end of this dungeon. There were a bunch of cutscenes, and with cutscenes comes weirdness. It was funny to see how Leon was himself in one moment and Maria (his sister) in the next.
The scene where the party talked to Hilda was quite mixed-up. It was sort of hard to tell who was who, because it was mostly Leon/Maria talking to Maria/Leila.
Here right before the end game, I said, "There's not really much in the way of sidequests in this game, huh? ... There IS a sidequest!" as I suddenly remembered that I could go to Deist to get the Excalibur. But besides that it was on to the Jade Passage.
This dungeon was longer and more complex than I expected, not helped by certain particularly strong enemies. The Abyss Worms were a real thorn in my side; they have strong melee attacks as well as fairly good defenses. While the situation never got completely critical, it was definitely the most threatening thing that had happened in ages.
Maria even died to them once, although it wasn't in the pictured battle.
The best treasures we got in here were the Diamond Mace for Minwu (I didn't enjoy using the Healing Staff with him as we didn't need it often enough), the Aegis Shield for Scott, and a Protect Ring that I gave to Maria for now. We got Cat Claws but I decided to keep the Ripper on Leila for two reasons. First, it's got that neat 20-damage-per-hit bonus. Second, since the PlayStation Origins release of this game they re-skinned the Cat Claws to be more like handheld claws like monks use in other games (Yang, Sabin, Tifa...) so even though I think it counts as a knife it just wouldn't look right.
There were some bigger enemies that appeared as monsters-in-a-box with boss music but they weren't hard to beat at all. A Blue Dragon guarded the aforementioned Cat Claws but it wasn't much of a threat. We buffed on turn 1 but that was probably mostly unnecessary as it was weakened so quickly by Maria's Scourge spell, and eventually killed by Scott's attack.
The King Behemoth was guarding a Rune Axe (which I already had and can't use), and I tried to use Osmose to steal his MP since King Behemoths in most of the series have crazy meteor-based abilities, but he had no MP. With our Blink spell on it couldn't touch us and we beat it in about 4 rounds. I slightly missed getting a good screenshot.
Yoichi's Bow (also trash) was guarded by a Red Dragon. A couple of Blizzard spells ended that.
The end of the dungeon got a bit more linear, which was closer to what I had expected from the outset, and then we were in Pandaemonium. Like the Abyss Worms in the Jade Passage, there were specific enemies that stood above the crowd here, which were the Death Riders. They really packed a punch, and were sort of the only enemies that were much of a threat. I started casting Blink whenever I encountered them so their exceptionally strong, HP-draining attacks would consistently miss, which worked nicely.
I got Ribbons as random drops several times here before finding one in a chest near the end. By the end of it, I had a Ribbon on all characters.
Given it was the final dungeon and I was feeling well-prepared I strongly considered not going for the treasures... but I re-considered that when I realized there were mostly awesome-looking boss enemies in most of them. The first one was the Genji Gloves which were guarded by Zombie Borghen, who we defeated in one round.
Before getting the rest of the goodies from the epic bosses, I grabbed the Masamune from its very hidden hiding place. I thought this was remarkable, because I haven't played the very end of this game before but I had read it was in a pass-through wall on the right side of an otherwise pointless room in the final dungeon and I just straight-up found it. But I decided I couldn't justify it conforming to my job classes and thus didn't use it regardless.
Next, we found the Genji Helm, guarded by Tiamat. Tiamat's resistance to different elements surprised me; in Final Fantasy I, Tiamat is famously vulnerable to BANE/Scourge, but in this game she absorbs it. I thought I'd try the opposite element, which in this game is Thunder, but she absorbs that too! We ended up just sticking with Flare and weapons.
Next, we found a chest with a Ribbon in it (which we already had a couple of) as well as Astaroth. This was the first time I actually tried out the Blood Sword on Scott. It may have broken the battle a bit. It still took three such attacks, plus whatever everyone else was doing.
It took a while with a bit of wayfinding confusion because it's a pick-a-door dungeon, but next was the Genji Armor guarded by Beelzebub. I pulled the move where Maria took its MP while Minwu used Blink, rendering it pretty useless. I had Maria experimenting with elements a bit; I figured if I were fighting a giant bee, I'd use fire against it, but Beelzebub absorbs fire. Holy was strong, Blizzard was weak, and Scourge was medium. Really, I was only experimenting like this because the battle was so simple.
Very shortly after the bee, we randomly ran into an Iron Giant who had boss music playing. How timely!
It started by trying to use Poison Cloud XVI but Maria had already removed all of its MP with Osmose. With that plus Blink, it was pretty well neutered. It didn't like Maria's Thunder spell and Scott took it down without a Blood Sword rather quickly after that. Was that 2 turns or 3? It was quick.
The dungeon becomes a bit more linear and plain after that. The encounters seemed to have more of the elemental gigases toward the end, but I could take them each out with a single opposite-element spell. There were no more big elements of interest until we reached the Emperor.
Unfortunately for the Emperor, I've really been enjoying my newly-perfected strategy of removing the enemy's access to magic and then make the party borderline immune to physical attacks.
With his MP gone on turn 2, and with our Blink status up... he couldn't harm us. He stood there like an idiot while we depleted his MP. Minwu threw out some Berserk spells but Scott and Leila still had pretty pitiful damage, so Scott did switch to using a Blood Sword instead of Excalibur and then we sort of... ran out the clock. We beat the final boss of this game without taking a single point of damage.
We won! That was nice. And the ending is pretty cute in this game.
I wasn't sure how the game would behave during the ending with my Lua script running. It was about as strange as usual but it worked okay. It was so touching when Maria said goodbye to Maria.
At the beginning, I had said there was a bonus. I decided to see if I could just leave my job-forcing Lua script active while starting the Soul of Rebirth post-game. I was surprised to see... it worked! It was my first time doing this post-game. It was basically just Jade Passage and Pandaemonium, slightly remixed and with different treasures and enemies. Now, normally you'd be doing it with relatively low-powered characters but my script actually pulled in all of the identities that had been forced all along. Obviously, this makes it waaaay easier.
There were the same usual strange behaviours in cutscenes. Right at the beginning, there's a great part where Minwu explains to Scott the role of the rebel heroes Scott, Leila, and Minwu.
Playing through Soul of Rebirth was easy. The Jade Passage part is quite easy, although some enemies definitely ramp it up in the Pandaemonium part. We managed to beat Ultima Weapon pretty easily using basically the same strategy as the Emperor.
The bosses were fun to see but trivial to fight, and I didn't get good screenshots of any of them. With our accelerated characters, we blew through Soul of Rebirth in just about an hour. It was a bit novel to get some of the specialized, character-restriction equipment, like a Stardust Rod for Minwu. Until we got to the end!
The ending of Soul of Rebirth has this part where your party (who are supposed to be Minwu, Scott, Josef and Ricard) sees a vision of the surviving rebel heroes (who are supposed to be Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon) and it plays out as a scripted battle - quite interesting, since scripted battles don't exist anywhere else in this game. As you might expect, having a script force changes to the party in a scripted battle is an issue. You can check out this part starting from about the 3:04 timestamp in the video.
First things got a bit weird:
...and then we got to see the first hard crash of the entire game, with a terrible ear-crunching screech playing on repeat.
I don't think we'll be quite beating Soul of Rebirth as part of this classic job playthrough! But we did beat the game.
This game is pretty interesting with dedicated job classes! At least in this version the game balance doesn't suffer much at all. It's as if it were designed around it. No wonder the SaGa series exists!
<< Start | < Previous | Index
The next "Classic Jobs" run in the Final Fantasy series: Final Fantasy III
The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy IV
