Part 8: Wandering the Earth
Now that we done the thing, it's time to fall back to our stand-by; go back to Hilda who won't even mention what just-
Oh, nevermind, the king is dying. Awesome!
Well I'm dying. Probably should do something before I croak. First off; Gordon I'm putting you in a position of authority. 
...
...
...*ahem* Oh, and Minwu, go get the Ultima spell. And, uh... you. Go find the Dragoons. They were soundly defeated by the empire and their home razed. Therefore they'll be invaluable allies. Well, that's all I do. Bye.
Bye-bye King What's-his-face. You will be... uh, remembered?
Wait, where the hell is Hilda?
I'm certain nothing will come of this.
So we're getting our marching orders from Gordon now. Lovely. He just repeats what the King said.
But now Dragoon and Hiryuu are keywords. Yeah, this translation calls the Dragons Hiryuu. I get why they did it ("Only Dragoons can understand Dragons," yeah, kinda awkward) but it's not the best solution. Later translations call them "wyverns" so I'll be doing that.
In any case, we have to make it to Dist. A townsperson will tell you it's on an island. Hm.
And conveniently there's some new chick in Poft offering a ride.
Surprise she's a pirate and wants to kill us.
Pirate
Rank 1, HP 45, Attack Power 17, Attacks 1, Accuracy 60%, Defense 4, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-40%
Oh honey.
Actually, you can help me. I want your ship.
So... you're sparing my life?! ...let's go.
Layla's not great, in some ways she's a little worse than Gordon, but out of all the temporary party members she's with you the longest. You kinda have to grow to like her. For us, she comes with something very nice.
The Goldpin gives an +10 to agility like the Thief Gloves, but unlike the Thief Gloves it doesn't give us a massive Int/Soul penalty. (It also resists lightning, but I don't care about that.) Since in this version bonuses from equipment do not stack, the Thief Gloves are worthless to Viv now. They move on to Solo.
So long and thanks for all the gear.
Buccaneer
Rank 2, HP 80, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 2-50%
Seriously these random-ass pirates are better than yours, Layla. You sucked at this.
Killer Fish
Rank 3, HP 100, Attack Power 25, Attacks 2, Accuracy 65%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 2-50%
On the sea we finally start to see enemies weak to Bolt. Unfortunately, since our Bolt is still at level 2 it doesn't help that much. Time to grind out Bolt a bit, I guess.
Sea Snake
Rank 4, HP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 75%, Defense 40, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-50%
Sea Snakes are a bit nasty. They're also weak to Bolt, but their high HP means that even a single-targeted Bolt won't OHKO them.
Oh! I missed you.
Getting to Dist is a bit of a pain. The ship starts in a enclosed area. In order to get out, we have to find this strait here and sail through it. Sail south from Altea, then sail east and you should find it soon enough.
From there you want to go south. Once you hit the top of the snowfield you're in the general area. Follow the coast east, and then south. Dist is really close by.
And here we are!
Inside there's a kid, his mom, and a dying wyvern. We have to grab a pendant so you can talk to it and do something for it, but we're not doing that today.
Instead, we're just raiding the castle. There's a lot of good stuff here, and no monsters to get in our way, so let's party!
Although for whatever reason there are still ambush closets in this castle. Why...?
Stop and Stone are just temporary status ailment spells (Stone is supposed to be "stun") so who cares, but the real prize is Curse. Curse halves the target's attack power and defense power. As you can imagine, this'll become very imperative for the bosses. If you're using Berserk it's pointless to level this spell, but Curse makes a half-decent replacement for it.
I wish I could tell you that we just got a unicorn out a treasure chest, but this a unicorn horn. Cures temporary status ailments. It gets sold.
Damn.
It's a good sword. Does extra damage to flying enemies.
Again, I regret to say that the Wilson sisters are not in a treasure chest in FF2. It's an item you use in battle to temporarily raise your Soul to 99. Not bad, but...
So here's another annoyance with FF2.
Your inventory space is stupidly small. Oh, and do you see those items on the bottom? All key items. You never, ever get rid of them. Even the Sunflame and Egil's Torch which if you recall we threw into the engine of an airship. By the end of the game almost a third of our already small inventory will be clogged up with useless key items. This is why I fought the Captain rather than get the Pass; that's one inventory space that I get to keep.
Our dead buddies, at least, can help lighten the load. In addition to the two item slots everyone gets, I can also load the useless equipment onto Loq or my fourth member. So in a solo run the item restrictions aren't as bad.
Probably the nicest thing the remakes from Dawn of Souls onward do is remove the limited inventory entirely.
Does the same thing as the Heart, but for intelligence. And like the Heart, I just can't justify keeping it to clog up the inventory. Just not crazy on these items.
The rest are just status recovery items, including a Gold Needle which is immediately getting sold. There's also a Phoenix Down in the castle; another item in our vendor trash pile.
Thankfully Bofsk is really close by, it's directly west of the island, so let's go sell some shit off.
Look at all the money. I could buy an elixir now, but I'm gonna hold off.
Since we're not gonna do the wyvern stuff right now, what next? Well, it's popular to go to a town called Mysidia around this time, since the boat allows us to make a shorter trip. Unfortunately, this means we have to sail past the strait again. Oh well, at least the encounter rate is much lower on the ship.
And the RNG gods have once again decided to bless me.
I went and labeled the towns so it's a little easier to read. (Also this version of FF2 doesn't actually mark Mysidia on the map) Theoretically you can reach Mysidia once you get the canoe; you just go left from Altea, and then all the way down to Mysidia. You'd also have to be crazy to do that. (And I've never done that. Nope. Never.) Now, at least, we have a boat allows us to park a little closer to Mysidia so we don't have to travel all that way. We're still a little underpowered for this area, but as long as we don't get certain monste-
Ghost
Rank 5, HP 540, MP 140, Attack Power 35, Attacks 5, Accuracy 75%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 3-50%
ABORT MISSION! ABORT MISSION!
Yeah.
All right, reload and try again.
Big Horn
Rank 4, HP 1,140, Attack Power 50, Attacks 4, Accuracy 85%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-60%, Magic Resistance 6-30%
Flier
Rank 5, HP 750, Attack Power 60, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65% Magic Resistance 4-40%
Wow look at that HP.
Admittedly, I fucked around a bit casting some pointless spells, but I don't know I could have beaten this encounter. They have too much HP and do too much damage for me to keep up with. Time to roll the dice again.
Imp
Rank 5, HP 300, MP 100, Attack Power 35, Attacks 4, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-100%
Werewolf
Rank 5, HP 540, Attack Power 50, Attacks 4, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 4-40%
There we go. Imps and Werewolves are still stronger than the monsters we're supposed to fight, but they have manageable attack and HP scores. Also I got a preemptive on this. I can do this!
Shit. Yeah, there's the hitch.
However, if you input a command and the character gets confused before they act, they'll still do what they were commanded to do. All right, now all we have to do is wait out the confusion.
It helps that Vivian's really confused. Or hates Loq that damn much.
Before long Viv gets her head back in the game. It takes a while due to the Werewolves' high defense, but their attacks aren't that bad and attacking is all they do. Winning was inevitable at that point.
After that, I got lucky and didn't run any more monsters along the way.
Coming to Mysidia right now is a teeny bit of a sequence break. All the mages talk about Minwu and the seal on Ultima, which isn't important for us yet. Still, the designers probably thought most players would explore here around this time.
If you manage to get to Mysidia much earlier, you can nab some Thief Gloves before you're supposed to. Not bad. The Giant Gloves increase strength, but they're heavy armor. The Knight Armor is also heavy.
The weapon shop also has some pretty good weapons. If you manage to get to Mysidia early enough, the weapons you get there can let you one-shot enemies until the Warship or so. It's not that infeasible to get to Mysidia before you get the boat, actually. If you copiously abuse the row system, and have one or two spellcasters with decent enough MP, it's difficult and luck reliant but possible. It's actually best to do this when you still have Minwu.
However, the real reason we're here is...
The magic shop! All the other vendors sell the spells in Altea, Poft, Salamondo, and Bofsk. The guy in the middle, however, has new stuff.
These are all neat spells. Barrier protects you against certain elements, depending on the spell level. I haven't full explained element system. There are eight elements in the game: fire, ice, bolt, poison, body, mind, matter, and death. The rest are self-explanatory, but body, mind, and matter are all for status spells. At level 7 barrier protects against all of them except ice. It's supposed to, but the spell's glitched. Still, at level one it protects against matter, and at level 3 it resists mind, and those are the elements for the most dangerous spells in the game. Yeah, the elemental system is wonky. For example all of the KO spells, except death, fall into the same element: matter. Why have so many spells that do the same thing in the same category? Barrier gets bought.
Wall blocks offensive spells of the equivalent level or lower. If you have a tolerance for grinding this can be useful, but at the end most enemies spells are level 8 or higher. Many are level 16. Despite what some people will tell you, there is no reason to grind anything to level 16 in this game. (Well, evasion is going to hit 16, but not through any special effort of mine.) However you can pull off an interesting glitch with Wall; cast it on a monster, then cast a lower level insta-death spell. While the game will say it fails, the animation will still display and the enemy will be die, regardless of whatever resistances the enemy has. We won't be doing that, sadly. I skip it.
EDIT: Thanks to Gabriel Pope for correcting my mistake!
Change, which you probably know as Swap, switches the caster's HP/MP with the target's. This has some applications for grinding; it's especially nice for grinding MP. But I'm not going to level a spell for grinding.
Finally, Holy is a white magic attack spell. It's actually a non-elemental spell, despite the name. Holy has a high base attack power, but since it's non-elemental it can never hit weaknesses and that's when spells are usually their most damaging. Honestly, most of the time I'd never bother with non-elemental spells, but I have a specific purpose for it later. So let's get holy.
And I believe that may be the last non-item purchase in the game. We've actually seen all of the towns in the game now. Finn will open its shops later, but other than that, there's only two other shops in the game and they're in dungeons. All the money I get from now on goes to ethers, cottages, and elixirs.
There's nothing else I want in Mysidia, so let's try to make it back to the ship.
Bomb
Rank 5, HP 640, MP 140, Attack Power 60, Attacks 5, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 4-40%
Weirdly enough, the enemies right around Mysidia are much easier than the enemies a little further out.
The Bomb's attacks can do some damage, but their self-destruct is piddly. Honestly, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to just multi-target a Bolt or something and just let them all blow up in your face.
Revenant
Rank 4, HP 240, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40%
Specter
Rank 4, HP 300, MP 100, Attack Power 25, Attacks 3, Accuracy 75%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-50%
And the good luck train keep rolling. While it takes a few fire spells to get them all down, none of them are as nasty as Ghosts. The Specter can cast some nasty stuff, but thankfully never even tried.
Made it to the boat!
So now are we getting the pendant the wyvern wants?
Nope!
There's a small island south of the strait. It's in the middle of nowhere, so you have to keep checking the map to make sure you're on the right track. No one tells you about this island at this point; it has something we have to get later. But we can now. This is the only real sequence break you can do in the game, and it's not much of one. But that's what we'll be doing next time. 'till then!
Power +2, Agility +2, Intelligence + 3, Soul +2, Evasion +2, Magic Power +5, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Bolt +1, Heal +1, Blink +1, HP + 62, MP +19