Part 17: Vivian Conquers Hell
All right you guys final dungeon time woo!
Like many early Final Fantasy final dungeons, FF2's last dungeon is basically two dungeons back-to-back. We start out in the Jade Passage.
Salamander
Rank 6, HP 1,290, MP 300, Attack Power 100, Attacks 8, Accuracy 90%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70%
They guys hit for decent damage, although usually only land a hit or two on Vivian.
Stalin actually lands a hit on them and gets to pretend he's contributing! He's trying to be like Vivian!
There can be only one.
Anyway, they also get a full party hitting Fire 16, and obviously Vivian mostly laughs that off. Actually, another Fire 16 hit for a mere 46, so you can definitely see the difference between additional hits of the spell missing and hitting.
They're also weak to ice, but since our ice isn't that high a level punching is the better option.
Great Malboro
Rank 6, HP 1,290, Attack Power 85, Attacks 8, Accuracy 85%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70%
Final tier of the Malboro! Like the other Malboros, its attack inflict status ailments. But it doesn't just inflict one, it inflicts every temporary status ailment: confuse, mini, mute, stun, sleep and venom. Yikes! If Vivian's wasn't protected these guys might be an instant game over! Their actual attack stats are slightly worse than Salamanders', though, so with status protection they're not so bad.
...you know, I never thought that perhaps the White Robe would make the game too easy, but maybe it does? Hrm, it never occurred to me to ban it. Sadly, I finished the game already, but if I ever do this run again I'll think about it.
Abyss Worm
Rank 6, HP 1,290, MP 370, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 90%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70%
Fucking Abyss Worms. For the most part, you can coast through the game with low HP and high evasion, but the Abyss Worms fuck that up.
They love, love this attack. Apparently it's a mind elemental attack? That's odd. Anyway, while under 200 damage is nothing to Vivian (although her magic defense deflecting some of those hits, otherwise the damage would be higher), it's not unknown to reach this dungeon with well under 2000 for a dedicated evasion tank, and any back row mages are likely to have far less. Also your magic defense levels would be much lower. With all or most of the worms casting that spell at once it's pretty devastating.
Vivian, on the other hand, is more concerned about their attack. Worse than that, these guys resist body and mind (and absorb death but who cares) so I can't blind or curse them. So while I do have ways of mitigating the damage, namely blink and multiple castings of aspil, that always takes a few turns to pull off, plus they take two or three turns a piece to kill. Always had a longer battle when they showed up.
Oh, and that dragon that was supposed to be Mysidia Tower's boss? Random encounter.
As you'd expect, all of the highest tier weapons are in this dungeon. Here we have the best mace/staff/whatever, with 90 attack. Considering it has a very low magic penalty, that's a decent attack power.
The second floor has a random ass secret passage. Well, it's nice if you're trying to run through the dungeon faster.
Best knife! It's the worst of the ultimate weapons with 86 attack power. It's apparently strong against spell casters. Eh. Well, at least the spell casting penalty is small.
Blue Dragon
Rank 7, HP 3,500, MP 240, Attack Power 180, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 150, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 8-40%
And it's guarded by a monster! Blue Dragons are thunder elemental, which makes their weakness poison. That sucks. Curse works fine, though, so that's pretty much how that goes.
Magic Sucker
Rank 6, HP 750, MP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 4-40%
Ice Lizard
Rank 6, HP 1,000, MP 190, Attack Power 85, Attacks 7, Accuracy 85%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30%
Oh my god fuck these guys. Not the Ice Lizards; they do get Ice 16 and that can do some damage but they're nothing I can't deal with. It's the magic suckers. So do they drain MP per hit like the suckers did? Not quite...
First off, they love casting Drain 16 on you. It drains about 300, which isn't much on it's own, but if they all decide to cast it at once it's a real pain.
But the real kick in the pants is that they get single target Aspil 10.
Fuck. Even if you've got all your spellcasters with Aspil, you should bring at least an elixir or two along in case of this bullshit.
In addition to this, there's two hellfires in this dungeon. Who would ever be using these items this late in the game?
Sphinx
Rank 6, HP 1,140, MP 370, Attack Power 85, Attacks 6, Accuracy 90%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-40%
Sphinxes are the upgraded chimera type enemies. Does the blaze attack, the petrifying attack, you know how it goes.
They also do dispel 16, which would nullify Vivian's white robe advantage and make her susceptible to the stoning attack. In theory. Too bad dispel's broken.
On the third floor, we get change of scenery with this giant waterfall. When you walk under it, it does hurt you. I guess the water's going super fast I don't know with this game any more.
And we've got the best axe! With 95 attack it's better than most other weapon types, but the Excalibur has 100 attack and it's not even the best sword in the game. The Rune Axe just doesn't have that much going for it, just a strength against spell caster enemies and the ability to cast Fog. Whatever.
King Behemoth
Rank 7, HP 5,000, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 8-30%
Also you have to fight a king behemoth. Yeah, for some reason the fan translator didn't give the behemoth and the upgraded behemoth different names, so again I'm just using what the latest translation calls them. At least this behemoth can do some damage, but we've dealt with worse. It has no magic, and is susceptible to curse, so curse and blink and maybe blind for good measure and we already won. It can drop some cool stuff, including a Yoichi bow if I wanted another, but it just dropped money.
Agility! Yay!
At the very bottom, there's actually a shop in the middle of the waterfall! It sells spells that are forbidden in this run. And Flare. Woo.
Fiend
Rank 6, HP 750, MP 300, Attack Power 60, Attacks 8, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-60%
Fiends cast single target Fire 16 and single target Stone 16. Obviously the latter we resist, but the Fire 16 can be scary. If you recall, after the cyclone the enemies on the world map changed. In some areas the enemies don't change, they don't in Dist, but the area around Mysidia gets whole new enemies. Many of them are jade enemies, including the fiend. Apparently you can get encounters with 6 fiends, and if they all cast Fire 16 that'd put me up shit creek. In jade, however, they only show up one or two at a time, maybe with an ice lizard. That's not scary.
It's guess the door! And I got impatient so I'm just showing you the solution now.
In case you somehow didn't get a Yoichi bow by now, here you go. Although if didn't want to have to fight for it...
Red Dragon
Rank 7, HP 5,000, MP 450, Attack Power 180, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 8-40%
It really, really loved to cast its multi-target fire 16 on me. Barely ever used its actually kinda scary attack power. Whatever. Dead.
Also it dropped a holy lance. There's a holy lance in a chest on the same floor, though.
See? Holy lances have mere 90 attack power, and the only other thing it's got going for it is the ability to cast Holy 8. Lame.
There's the dragon armor, which protects against fire, ice, bolt, and poison. Considering how much enemies like throwing out high level elemental spells at this point that's not a bad set of resistances, but it's heavy armor so not the best. The aegis shield, however, provides resistance to body, mind, matter, and death in addition to having the best evasion bonus of all the shields. Pretty rad. If you've got a dedicated evasion tank with high agility and no magic these two items will replace the ribbon for them, so that's something.
More agility! This is the last one I get in the entire game. Goodbye agility gains. I will miss you.
By the way, this path to hell has a helpful inscription informing you of this fact. How thoughtful.
The defense armlet is basically the Pro ring from FF1. It's light, has no magic penalties so it's perfect for mages, gives a lot of magic defense, and protects against death. So this is definitely getting equipped, right?
...but the thing is, I don't need the death protection. The power armlet that Vivian's already wearing has the same small evasion penalty, a very small magic penalty (-2%), one extra defense, and a strength bonus. True, it doesn't provide as much magic defense, but that's a non-issue.
So I haven't described how magic defense's percentage is calcula- holy shit Vivian's got that much HP already? And that vitality! Erm, anyway, magic defense is 15% + vitality/2 + magic power/2 + equipment bonuses. Vivian's magic defense percentage is 71% before equipment bonuses. The white robe gives 21%, and the spiral headband gives +5%. That bring us to 97%. Yeah, I don't need the extra 21% the defense armlet gives. I'm sticking with the power armlet.
Blade
No, no, not that one!
Blade
Rank 6, HP 870, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 4-40%
There we go. I was quite surprised to see this enemy; they commonly show up around Palamekia after the cyclone, but you have no reason to ever go there again, and certainly not on foot. They one show up in two floors of the jade passage, and they're rare. Huh. As for the enemy themselves, total chumps.
At the very end of the jade passage there's a teleporter, although for some reason in the original it's invisible. I don't know why.
And now we're in the true final dungeon.
I actually warp out here to save. There's one enemy here I'm kind of scared of, and I'd rather not have lost all that progress. Once I've cleared jade out it doesn't take that much time to run through it again.
Also so I could have all the elixirs.
In any case, the trip back to Pandemonium is pretty uneventful.
Although I start to realize holy crap look at that HP. You see, while I mention that Vivian can incapacitate enemies through a combination of buffs, status ailments, and MP draining attacks, that always takes a few turns to do. In the meantime, they get their licks in. I'm not in the habit of healing during battle unless I have to, so Vivian's getting HP and vitality increases in nearly every battle.
At this point, I start getting mindful of how low my HP is when I end battles. Believe it or not, I'm trying to discourage HP growth.
In any case, let's start going through Pandemonium.
First off, it's full of arches! They don't lead anywhere, but you will always think they do.
Oh look who it is. Is it time for some petty revenge?
Take that yo- oh, the lamia cast blink 16 on herself. At least Vivian can get through it, which is a little surprising.
Nonetheless, the lamia queen poses no threat now.
They loved throwing defense armlets at me though. I ended up getting three from drops over the course of the dungeon.
Coeurl
Rank 6, HP 1,000, MP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 7, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-40%
I know it says Krull what we all know what these are. First off, they have a chance of inflicting KO with each hit. I believe it actually is death elemental, so I'm protected. At least, it never killed me.
However, their blast attack (I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be Blast 10) is non elemental, and cannot be protected against. Nasty! Or at least, it would be, if Vivian didn't have 10-99% magic defense. Blaster is also multi-target, so that kills its accuracy already. It never hit once.
Death Rider
Rank 6, HP 1,290, Attack Power 120, Attacks 8, Accuracy 85%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 5-70%
Mythril Golem
Rank 7, HP 2,000, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 95%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 14-100%
The golem is like the others, high defense enemy with a weakness to a single element, in this case lightning. What we're concerned about is the death rider. I've mentioned them before, but you may wonder why I've gotten so worked up about them.
They have drain touch. They also get 8 attacks. If all 8 land, then they hit for half of your max HP and that's before you add in their base attack. Death Riders end runs. They ended my first run of FF2. While the Abyss Worms punish you for relying on evasion tanking too much, these guys punish you for not using evasion tanking. In addition, they cannot be blinded, cursed, or slowed (they can be turned into toads, though.) You either have sky high evasion, a high level blink, or get hit.
That being said... they really weren't that big a threat. That damage you see in that screenshot was the worst they ever did. They usually only landed one or two hits even before I cast blink, and after blink next to nothing. I was honestly flabbergasted; I remember other challenge runs of this dungeon being pretty hellish. What was the difference? Perhaps I just got that lucky with agility? Hm, they get 85% accuracy, which is fairly high, but not as high as other enemies we've seen. I've got 40% evasion, and the game just subtracts that from accuracy, so that leaves it with 45. With 16 evasion chances against 8 attacks, that means each hit basically rolls evasion twice. That leaves each hit with... about 20% chance to hit? That almost sounds kinda high for how often they actually hit.
What ended up being the worst part about the death riders is that their defense is high and since they can't be cursed it took forever to beat them down. Although they're weak to fire, which I didn't realize while I was playing. Wish I did, would have saved some time. Oh well.
Oh! I questioned earlier if Blink could raise your evade levels past 16 and if the game would let it. The answer to both is a resounding yes. I should have known this; a high level haste raises weapon levels above 16, so it's clearly possible. I guess I was mistaken because I rarely use haste. I'm curious to know what the limit is. Probably 255, and I imagine that's impossible to reach with in-games means. Although I believe haste and blink stack, so... I don't know.
EDIT: Nope, haste does not stack. The limit for hits seems to be around 30.
Devil Mantis
Rank 7, HP 1,290, MP 370, Attack Power 85, Attacks 8, Accuracy 85%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 5-70%
Basically slightly stronger Fiends. Whatever. Actually, there is another mantis enemy that only shows up after the cyclone around the Mysidia area. Again, you have no idea why you'd ever traverse Mysidia on foot after the cyclone, but they exist even if I never saw them in this run.
This dungeon really likes teleporters, by the way. One sort of annoying thing is that you can't go back once you go through the teleport without the warp spell, or exiting out and coming back. Not that big a deal, but I guess if you realize that you missed something a floor or two back that'd be a pisser.
On the fourth floor, we have four doors each leading to an area with a treasure chest and a boss guarding that chest. I'm going to be hitting each of them, despite only wanting one of these treasures, so let's start on the far left.
They throw in a bunch of arches and a couple of dead ends to make it look more complicated than it actually is.
Wolf Devil
Rank 7, HP 870, MP 300, Attack Power 70, Attacks 8, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 6-60%
New monster! Like a lot of enemies at this point they've got a high level multi-target damage spell. It's only Fire 11, though, so it's pretty piddly in comparison. Really, if you can get past the Abyss Worms magic damage is not going to be that threatening.
The problem with these chests is that three out of four of them have Genji gear, and Genji stuff is rubbish. They do have insane defense scores, the genji gloves here have a defense of 45, which is better than most armor, and mind resistance, but they also have a evade penalty of -47% and a magic penalty of -100%. Yeah, you'd have to have a dedicated evasion tank to wear these while keeping some evasion, and they cannot be a spellcaster. Obviously Vivian will not sully her hands with them.
Zombie Borgan
Rank 7, HP 2,500, MP 370, Attack Power 120, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 10-100%
Each of these treasure chests are also guarded by a boss monster. Each of the four bosses are some of the few bosses that aren't random encounters, and other than Borgan they're all unique sprite. Howsabout that? Believe it or not, Zombie Borgan may be the hardest of them, at least for Vivian. He resists mind and body, so no curse, and since he's undead you can't siphon his MP away.
And his flare magic ain't nothing to fuck with. Fortunately, he has a crippling weakness to fire so Vivian tears through his 2,500 HP in three turns.
Once we've got the gloves, there's actually something hidden off to the right.
The Masamune! The Masamune is the best sword in the game, except for perhaps the blood sword. Its attack power is 150, by far and away better than anything else. And like the Masamune in FF1, it's great for spellcasters, since it carries zero magic penalty (the only weapon in the game that doesn't) It has a +2% evasion penalty, most weapons apart from the main gauche and the defender only have +1%, and casts Haste 11 when used as an item. It's pretty darned good.
This room is notable for the fact that the encounter rate is super high, and the monsters are ones we fought as bosses later in the game. There's the elemental gigases, the red and blue dragons, the roundworm, and the king behemoth. Honestly all of those are less dangerous than death riders or couerls for unprotected characters, so what is supposed to be a nasty surprise is a break.
And now we walk out of this area, and then go into the second door from the left.
Beast Demon
Rank 7, HP 1,000, MP 140, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 6-60%
The worst thing they have is Stop 8. Sad.
Defense 30, evasion penalty -30%, magic penalty -60%, matter resistance. Comes close to being useful.
Tiamat
Rank 7, HP 5,000, MP 450, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-80%
Well, hello Tiamat! None of the other elemental fiends made it into this game, though. Like in FF1 she favors poison attacks, but also throws out fire, ice, and bolt. She's also still vulnerable to stone, but that's not unique in this game. Tiamat resists mind, meaning curse is out. She can be hit with body, so blind is still in, but blink will do the same thing so I don't see the point. None of Tiamat's spells will do much of anything, but I drain her MP anyway.
That out of the way, actually killing Tiamat is a bit of a chore. Vivian can scratch her, but doesn't do much damage. Tiamat has no elemental weakness, she absorbs fire, ice, bolt, and poison as a matter of fact, so either Vivian hopes to get high rolls on her attack or holys Tiamat to death. Vivian's rarely breaking 500 damage a round, so it takes a while. Still, once I've taken her MP and blinked Vivian, I can't help but to win. This... may end up being a theme.
Once I exit out to the beginning of the fourth floor, I skip the third door and instead go through the rightmost door.
Defense 75, evasion penalty -79%(!), magic penalty -100%, death resistance. This might be the worse one of the set. By the way, wearing the full genji set gives you a total evasion penalty of 157. You cannot wear a full set without a shield if you want any evasion whatsoever, and you'd have to have a shield skill of 10 or higher plus evasion bonus from weapons and a high agility to get a halfway decent score. I guess it'd be decent set up if you had high evasion percent but low evasion level, but what do you do with draining enemies?
Satan
Rank 7, HP 5,000, MP 450, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 8-70%
Oh yeah and there's Satan. He can cast single target stone 16 and charm 16, as well as flare 16, but curse, blink, and aspil work just fine, so whatever. (Actually, this is another enemy that casts dispel 16, so if it worked Satan might be dangerous!)
And now, let's go open the chest that actually has something worthwhile!
Excellent. It has a defense of 10, which is a little lower than the spiral headband she was wearing, but it resists all elements. This actually means I could equip the ribbon and swap the white robe out. While the +10 intelligence of the black robe or the 43 defense of the diamond cuirass sounds nice, I like the soul boost. Even if I'm not using the ribbon to get rid of the white robe, the protection from fire, ice, and bolt it gives is enough to keep it. Also +21 magic defense, no weight, and zero magic penalties. It's pretty great.
Astaroth
Rank 7, HP 7,000, MP 540, Attack Power 150, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 180, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 8-70%
The ribbon is also defended by a pretty nasty boss. It has fire, aero, drain, blind, and death, all level 16 and single target. Astaroth also gets drain touch, and really high accuracy! In a stroke of luck, Vivian got first strike and set up a blink immediately. Despite all of Astaroth's nasty attacks, it's perfectly susceptible to the holy trinity of boss crippling (blink, curse, aspil), so all it lands is a fire 16 and that's it.
And it drops a white robe. I... appreciate the thought. Admittedly, out of all the things it could drop, this is the nicest drop.
The reason I saved the ribbon for last is that the teleporter that allows us to continue on with the dungeon is past this chest. (And dramatic tension, of course)
It teleports us to the side of the four doors and leads to-
Another teleporter! Did I mention this dungeon really, really likes teleporters?
By the time you make it to this point, you're probably gonna make it to the end.
The death riders stop showing up, and nothing really replaces them. The worst are the elemental gigases (I have no idea why the bombs are still showing up; they are beyond laughable at this point) and maybe the lamia queens and coeurls.
And there's no more decent treasure, either.
But plenty of teleporters! Gotta have teleporters!
Well, I guess king behemoths show up and that's kind of interesting. No I'm kidding they're not.
This room is kind of odd, in that it sort of resembling that one floor in the sky castle in FF1 that wraps around. I think that's what it's trying to invoke, anyway.
But it's actually just a big square and the teleport we need is in the bottom left corner here.
And now we're on the last floor. It's time for the final showdown. How far have we come?
This is the Vivian we ended up with, with no equipment boosts. As you can guess from her HP total, Vivian's best stat by far is her vitality. Keep in mind she started with 5, and there's no orb in Mysidia tower that increases vitality. She gained 76 points over the course of the game. Her soul is damn good for a character that's not a dedicated white mage, and considering that soul sometimes decreases power, her power stat ended up pretty great too. Vivian getting the power orb from Mysidia definitely helped. As for her agility, while it doesn't look impressive (dedicated evasion tanks usually end the game with 70ish agility) it's better than I expected. She only got 25 total agility bonuses from battle, the rest is either her starting agility or from Mysidia. But considering that she was running with less than 40% evasion for most of the game, and evasion percent is what determines agility growth, 50 agility is as good as I can hope for. Finally, I'm kind of disappointed in her intelligence score, especially considering she starts with 15 and got the Mysidia bonus. The game just kept marking her intelligence down. Oh well, she's not going to need it for this last battle anyway.
As for her attack score, 111 is on the low end, honestly. With her strength, she'd actually have a higher attack score with a weapon. For weapons, if you're wielding it single-handed it's weapon's attack + half your strength. With the catclaw, the weakest of the highest tier weapons, she'd have 117 attack. Now if you do have something in the character's off hand the calculation is weapon + 1/4 strength score, and honestly you're more likely to be holding a shield or another weapon to bolster evasion. However, if we compare fists to the masamune, fists lose. Even if Vivian has 99 strength and level 16 unarmed (and fuck grinding up to level 16 unarmed), she'd have 169 attack... and the masamune would have 174 attack if wielded with a shield or another weapon. The masamune is just that much better than every other weapon in the game.
But we're not going to need that, either. We're going to do something... interesting for the next boss.
First off, true warriors don't need pesky things like special equipment or clothing, so it all goes off. I am taking those elixirs, though.
Next, I grind a bit. I know, know, grinding in FF2. Don't worry, it was only to get Holy up to level 8. (And the stats I showed were post-grinding.) Mostly this was just to preserve my sanity a bit. Let me show you why.
The Motherfucking Emperor
HP 10,000, MP 540, Attack Power 180, Attacks 8, Accuracy 100%, Defense 210, Evasion 1-80%, Magic Resistance 16-70%
The emperor is one tough cookie. Lots of HP, lots of defense, high magic defense, absorbs matter and death while resisting every other element, and host of nasty spells.
But here's the thing, while I can't curse the emperor, blinking myself and stealing his MP is still viable. With 540 MP aspil takes a few turns, but once he's out of MP, if I've got blink up the emperor cannot harm me in any way. While it would be funny beating on a completely impotent emperor, it wouldn't be sporting. So, new rule! Blink is now forbidden. As for Aspil, it actually doesn't matter. If I'm not using blink I don't want his MP gone. Why?
Because the emperor has fucking drain touch, that's why. Not only is the damage pretty bad (especially since Vivian's not wearing any armor) but also drain touch does heal the attacker. It will only heal the 1/16th per hit, the base damage isn't counted, but for the emperor that means that it heals 258 per hit. That doesn't sound so bad, right?
So here's the problem. With 111 attack and the emperor's 210 defense, Vivian can't scratch the boss at all. At best, she'll do 12 per hit. This boss fight requires berserk.
Or you fall back on spell casting. I think the designers expected you to bust out Ultima for this fight, but oops they broke it. So we have to use a different non-elemental spell. In case you're wondering, this battle is the entire reason I picked up holy. The emperor's high magic defense means that Vivian won't land additional hits of Holy, so the damage is around the 400 mark. 10,000 divided by 400... minimum 25 rounds. Yeah. Don't need drain touch undoing our progress. So any turn he's casting is a turn he's not using his draining attack.
Not that the emperor's spells aren't worth worrying about. Flare, while not OHKOing Viv by any means, does force her away from holying the emperor's balls off to have to heal every once in a while. Considering that I never know when the emperor's going to land an attack, and for how much, keeping my HP up was a concern. I generally never let it go below 2800.
And he gets plenty of status spells. Fortunately, he gets no spells that paralyze or insta-kill. Mostly they just cripple your attack power. Well, hell, I'm not using it. Viv already has 0 defense and curse doesn't hurt spell casting so just keep it, right?
Actually no, it does hurt spell casting. Thankfully, her level 3 heal removes it just fine.
Fortunately for me, the emperor really loved meteor and dispel in this battle. Meteor doesn't do a whole lot of damage, and dispel is just a wasted turn, so this helped immensely.
Blind also seems like a non-issue, but blind doesn't just reduce your accuracy, it also reduces your evasion. Yeeeaaah that's the last thing I need. If the emperor ever followed up blind with an attack I'd be up shit creek, but he never did.
(Although it occurs to me that for whatever reason I never used barrier. Uh... pretend it was restricted for this battle! Yeah, that's the ticket.)
Also, he casts slow. That one I can ignore, since it doesn't do anything but reduce Vivian's number of attacks. A wasted turn for the emperor.
And he gained back like 700 HP. Glorious. I decided just to drink an elixir than bother with trying to heal up. I could potentially get caught in a damage spiral, and I'd rather not risk it.
STOP BLINDING ME SHITHEAD.
Anyway, so you get how this battle went. I'll spare you the exact blow-by-blow; this battle was long. No seriously, I don't think you truly how long it was. For the most part, Vivian kept up pretty easily.
Except when the emperor got a lucky hit. Wow, exact same damage, too. Huh. That ate up my second elixir, so I was hoping he'd never get another hit like that.
And he didn't.
Not only were you beaten, Vivian beat you with basically one hand tied around her back. I hope you get noogied for eternity when you return to hell.
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
You're alive?! ... ... ...you're scaring me. Let's, uh, go over here, Nellie.
It seems that Vivian's grasp of reality has broken entirely.
The end!
So, last thoughts. FF2 is a game I'm of two minds of. I just can't deny the game's myriad problems, and so much has been written about FF2's failings that I don't feel like I need to reiterate them.
And yet... it's a game I like. Hell, you've probably deduced through my subtlety that I've done FF2 solo runs before, so my love for this game is pretty obvious. Perhaps I'm broken in the head, or FF2's is just such an amusing trainwreck.
But you know what, there are legitimately good things to say about FF2, even if some of those positives are nullified by other problems. For one, it makes a lot of quality of life changes from FF1, and I don't think people give FF2 enough credit for it. Being able to save freely on the world map without using an item, having monsters-in-a-box rather than encounter tiles, having a different sprite for open chests, using MP over the very limited charge system, these are all changes that, for me, make the game a lot more playable.
Other than the agility/evasion debacle, the character building system is kind of fun. Yes, I think the much derided character building system is fun. There's always some enjoyment in building a team in how you want to build them.
It's really a shame that no other Final Fantasy really played with or refined this system, like they did with the job classes. Well, Final Fantasy didn't, but the head designer of FF2, Akitoshi Kawazu, went on to make the SaGa series, and you can definitely see the connection. Weirdly, I can't actually say I'm a SaGa fan. Maybe I need to play more of them?
So I guess I do get really annoyed when I hear people rail about how bad this game is, even if it is far from perfect. What really, really gets my goat is when people say that the best way to get through FF2 is to spend hours beating up your own teammates and abusing select-cancel. And then complain that the game is grindy. Well no fucking shit.
I think people see that spells and character levels max out at 16 and think you need to have those levels by the end of the game. You don't. I had level 16 evasion through no concentrated effort of my own; to be honest, that just tends to happen for solo characters. While you may need to grind out spell levels every once in a while, don't go crazy and grind up level 16 fists against goblins. Believe it or not, the game is much more fun when you play it closer to how the developers intended you to.
The issue with FF2 isn't that it's hard. It's that the game is obtuse. Obtuse does not equal hard; once you understand the bizarre mechanics of this game, it's absurdly easy. For example, once you know that getting a high evasion level and percent is both fairly easy and makes you invincible to normal attacks, there's no reason not to do it. That's just one example out of many. FF2 is the easiest game people claim is hard.
Ergo, challenge runs! Sadly, this one ended up being a lot easier than I expected. I've probably done this run too many times. So I'm looking forward to my GBA run! The GBA version makes a ton of tweaks to the game, most notably that spell and weapon levels raise much, much faster, and it makes the game less of a slog. Unfortunately, many of the game's biggest problems, namely the evasion/agility problem and the poor dungeon designs, were not fixed. Some of FF2's failings are just too core to the game; you can't change them without making a different game. (Namely a SaGa game)
I've got one bonus update planned (just covering some bits and pieces here) and then we're done with the original game. Next up will be the GBA run, and the optional dungeon Soul of Rebirth. Stay tuned!