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This was played on April 25, 2023.
Having become so strong, and having made so much progress, I thought it was attainable to beat the game! I wasn't sure, as the end of this game has been pretty hard for me in the past, but I thought it was possible.
I sold anything of any kind of questionable value and bought more things. Before I left Final Town, my item list contained 3 Heal Staves, 4 Flare spellbooks, and 4 Tents among other random things. What I thought about and then neglected to do was get an extra CatClaw or two. I probably should've.
There wasn't really much standing between us and Apollo. I had a bit of an "oh crap" moment realizing this party's configuration absolutely doesn't account for ways to beat Apollo. The battle with Apollo is probably the most interesting in the game, and it's largely scripted. There's more to it than just this, but the fight ultimately works in one of three ways:
I was legitimately worried that I may not have a path forward at the moment, thinking that I'd need to grind again (yuck) and/or wander back through Odin's Castle for prizes, or something like that. I gave Apollo one more shot, with the key difference being giving Lenn a Flare spellbook and being more careful about when Kril would use her Heal Staff.
Before Apollo's transformation, he tends to use Aegis every turn, so only shield-ignoring attacks are really effective. Lenn doing 800 damage per turn instead of, uh, 0, was a pretty substantive difference. Eventually, Kril got taken out by Flares... but the very next round was when Apollo starts melting, before he explodes. This was our status at that time:
Also I don't think I've ever really noticed Apollo's rather gruesome fourth sprite. That's pretty nuts.
On to the center of the worlds, with Isis! Isis, like other NPCs, had 1 in all stats... but she does have some of the more plot-relevant magi on her, including Masmune, so unlike every other NPC so far she can actually do something some of the time.
And since Isis has Pegasus magi, I chose to swap Kril's Teleport ability with Mirror on a more permanent basis. I kind of doubt it will actually be useful, but better than something entirely redundant.
Battles on the way to the core are all unrunnable - at least I think so. The biggest worry I had as I proceeded was the possibility that Fari didn't have enough weapon uses to reach the final boss. Some of the battles were actually pretty tough and I died a couple of times, but reasonably frequent saves left this feeling pretty painless.
As well, several characters that weren't named Fari continued with good stat growth. I remarked that this is one of those things that's very different when you play with robots: they stop developing in the game's final area. They don't progress their build and stop getting stronger. It felt good that the growth was still occuring, and so frequently.
Early in the first couple of levels, before TianLung, Lenn finally got an ability worth replacing his original Flame/Blizzard/Thunder trio for!: Flare! I decided to move Blizzard down the list since if ice weakness was important I still had an Ice spellbook lying around.
We had to fight an awful lot of these non-runnable, high-tier, random battles. We developed patterns for some of them, like having Bart attack stacks of Moaners because of their defensive capabilities while also having Lenn use Flare so as to remove them quickly, and allowing the other characters to target other enemies.
Most other enemies weren't a particular threat: Glooms had some scary death-inducing attacks, but they could be taken out with a single Xcalibr or spell from Lenn. The small number of mage enemies I ran into down here were pretty tough too, using the Wizard Staff against me (successfully, in one case).
I lost to TianLung; in fact, it took three tries due to stacked Tornados. I was taking 1000+ plus damage without an opportunity to heal in between in a game where the maximum HP total is 999; not the fairest setup. I then had a bit of rant about how this game is actually designed for the player to die, unlike more modern JRPGs. Third try, the luck generally went better.
Fenrir was similar. I got Tornado'd and killed. The second time I ran into him, there was only one, plus a surprise round, so despite getting whacked with a Tornado we won handily.
The rest was pretty well without incident. For the final battle, preparation was as follows:
I ended up taking the Laser Sword off Bart, actually, and giving him the Glass Sword to give the Laser Sword to Fari. I gave Kril two Heal Staves and decided she'd fully commit to using them pretty much every turn since using Hammer against the final boss wouldn't do much.
I used a Tent so Lenn would have his full 5 natural Flares, so he had 25 Flares total. I said, "It's not like he can live 25 turns."
I played this game with a lot of different parties and setups as a kid, y'know, and I frequently had trouble with the endboss. When you're playing a low-grind game with robots, healing can be pretty hard. It was... kind of weird how easy and straightforward this whole thing was. I was legitimately surprised.
Every turn, Bart would use Xcalibr, Fari would use a CatClaw or Laser Sword, Kril would use Heal Staff, and Lenn would use Flare. In the first two phases, my expectations were reversed from what happened, actually. I remembered phase 1 being hard, but it super duper wasn't. I remembered phase 2 being easy, but sometimes the smasher damage was pretty high!
Now, phase 3 was about what I remembered: big numbers. They were pretty random, although bigger than my Heal Staff numbers on average, I'd say. I was worried at points. We stuck to the plan - because what choice did we have - and we happened to win on the first try! The party even all managed to survive.
Cool! The end of this playthrough was pretty fun! But, y'know, games with random stat growth might be a bit of a headache for this kind of run.
So, what's the result of this challenge? Can Final Fantasy Legend II be beaten with a knight, thief, white mage and black mage? I don't know! When the game is hacked like this, it's not such a cut-and-dry result. Removing the Parasuit is sort of interesting, actually, as it would've made the late game easier.
Also, I feel a bit funny about using the trashcan bug - and yet, I don't regret that. I think it made the run more viable and fun and didn't violate the theming at all.
At times, having firm party roles seemed like a generally really good thing. At the very least, I can certify this was interesting... other than the couple of periods of grinding.The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy II
Having become so strong, and having made so much progress, I thought it was attainable to beat the game! I wasn't sure, as the end of this game has been pretty hard for me in the past, but I thought it was possible.
I sold anything of any kind of questionable value and bought more things. Before I left Final Town, my item list contained 3 Heal Staves, 4 Flare spellbooks, and 4 Tents among other random things. What I thought about and then neglected to do was get an extra CatClaw or two. I probably should've.
There wasn't really much standing between us and Apollo. I had a bit of an "oh crap" moment realizing this party's configuration absolutely doesn't account for ways to beat Apollo. The battle with Apollo is probably the most interesting in the game, and it's largely scripted. There's more to it than just this, but the fight ultimately works in one of three ways:
- You take away all of his HP within something like 15 turns - which is hard!
- You last through his onslaught of attacks for those turns, and if Dad is alive, Dad dies and you win.
- You last through his onslaught of attacks for those turns and dad is not alive, in which case either you must have enough HP to survive his final explosion or lose.
I was legitimately worried that I may not have a path forward at the moment, thinking that I'd need to grind again (yuck) and/or wander back through Odin's Castle for prizes, or something like that. I gave Apollo one more shot, with the key difference being giving Lenn a Flare spellbook and being more careful about when Kril would use her Heal Staff.
Before Apollo's transformation, he tends to use Aegis every turn, so only shield-ignoring attacks are really effective. Lenn doing 800 damage per turn instead of, uh, 0, was a pretty substantive difference. Eventually, Kril got taken out by Flares... but the very next round was when Apollo starts melting, before he explodes. This was our status at that time:
Note that Kril was our only source of healing, and our HP totals are awful. And then he got Bart:
Also I don't think I've ever really noticed Apollo's rather gruesome fourth sprite. That's pretty nuts.
On to the center of the worlds, with Isis! Isis, like other NPCs, had 1 in all stats... but she does have some of the more plot-relevant magi on her, including Masmune, so unlike every other NPC so far she can actually do something some of the time.
And since Isis has Pegasus magi, I chose to swap Kril's Teleport ability with Mirror on a more permanent basis. I kind of doubt it will actually be useful, but better than something entirely redundant.
Battles on the way to the core are all unrunnable - at least I think so. The biggest worry I had as I proceeded was the possibility that Fari didn't have enough weapon uses to reach the final boss. Some of the battles were actually pretty tough and I died a couple of times, but reasonably frequent saves left this feeling pretty painless.
As well, several characters that weren't named Fari continued with good stat growth. I remarked that this is one of those things that's very different when you play with robots: they stop developing in the game's final area. They don't progress their build and stop getting stronger. It felt good that the growth was still occuring, and so frequently.
Early in the first couple of levels, before TianLung, Lenn finally got an ability worth replacing his original Flame/Blizzard/Thunder trio for!: Flare! I decided to move Blizzard down the list since if ice weakness was important I still had an Ice spellbook lying around.
We had to fight an awful lot of these non-runnable, high-tier, random battles. We developed patterns for some of them, like having Bart attack stacks of Moaners because of their defensive capabilities while also having Lenn use Flare so as to remove them quickly, and allowing the other characters to target other enemies.
Most other enemies weren't a particular threat: Glooms had some scary death-inducing attacks, but they could be taken out with a single Xcalibr or spell from Lenn. The small number of mage enemies I ran into down here were pretty tough too, using the Wizard Staff against me (successfully, in one case).
I lost to TianLung; in fact, it took three tries due to stacked Tornados. I was taking 1000+ plus damage without an opportunity to heal in between in a game where the maximum HP total is 999; not the fairest setup. I then had a bit of rant about how this game is actually designed for the player to die, unlike more modern JRPGs. Third try, the luck generally went better.
Fenrir was similar. I got Tornado'd and killed. The second time I ran into him, there was only one, plus a surprise round, so despite getting whacked with a Tornado we won handily.
The rest was pretty well without incident. For the final battle, preparation was as follows:
I ended up taking the Laser Sword off Bart, actually, and giving him the Glass Sword to give the Laser Sword to Fari. I gave Kril two Heal Staves and decided she'd fully commit to using them pretty much every turn since using Hammer against the final boss wouldn't do much.
I used a Tent so Lenn would have his full 5 natural Flares, so he had 25 Flares total. I said, "It's not like he can live 25 turns."
I played this game with a lot of different parties and setups as a kid, y'know, and I frequently had trouble with the endboss. When you're playing a low-grind game with robots, healing can be pretty hard. It was... kind of weird how easy and straightforward this whole thing was. I was legitimately surprised.
Every turn, Bart would use Xcalibr, Fari would use a CatClaw or Laser Sword, Kril would use Heal Staff, and Lenn would use Flare. In the first two phases, my expectations were reversed from what happened, actually. I remembered phase 1 being hard, but it super duper wasn't. I remembered phase 2 being easy, but sometimes the smasher damage was pretty high!
Now, phase 3 was about what I remembered: big numbers. They were pretty random, although bigger than my Heal Staff numbers on average, I'd say. I was worried at points. We stuck to the plan - because what choice did we have - and we happened to win on the first try! The party even all managed to survive.
Cool! The end of this playthrough was pretty fun! But, y'know, games with random stat growth might be a bit of a headache for this kind of run.
So, what's the result of this challenge? Can Final Fantasy Legend II be beaten with a knight, thief, white mage and black mage? I don't know! When the game is hacked like this, it's not such a cut-and-dry result. Removing the Parasuit is sort of interesting, actually, as it would've made the late game easier.
Also, I feel a bit funny about using the trashcan bug - and yet, I don't regret that. I think it made the run more viable and fun and didn't violate the theming at all.
At times, having firm party roles seemed like a generally really good thing. At the very least, I can certify this was interesting... other than the couple of periods of grinding.The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy II
