Part 15: Ride the Wind

Now that Minwu sacrificed his life for 10 points of agility and a useless spell, time to head back to base to find out a new disaster cropped up and what we just did had no bearing on anything whatsoever.



That's weird; all the sea enemies have changed.



And so have the enemies around Altea.



Oh hey, sweet.



And for some reason, we can't enter Altea. It's looking a little worse for wear, too.



And so is this town.



Also someone left the world's tiniest tornado outside of Phin. I suspect shenanigans are afoot.



So this is one of FF2's more infamously ludicrous plot points. The emperor creates a magic tornado and kills off half the world's population. No, seriously. In addition to Altea and the pit stop town, Poft and Palm are also destroyed. Moreover, the population of Phin has thinned out a bit. Bofsk, Salamando, and Mysidia are the only towns untouched. This plot point is one of the clumsiest attempts to shock the player and raise the stakes I've ever seen in a Final Fantasy. I find it adorable, honestly.



And despite all that carnage, the game didn't pull the trigger on Layla. Go figure.

So what do we do from here? Well, do you remember the Chekhov's Mirror?





Use the pendant (remember, the one found in Dist cave?) and it summons the wyvern!



This is kind of an odd leap in logic, although the game does give you some clues. You can use the pendant on the mirror earlier, and it will give you a message of "hey the wyvern egg is in the water good job." Also, an NPC in Mysidia will just flat-out tell you what to do, although I have no idea why the creators thought you'd go back to Mysidia.



Now we got the wyvern because it can fly through a tornado, somehow. And it's an inventory item. Joy. But it's not just here to take up space; the wyvern can also be used as an item in battle. Somehow. It casts some multi-targetted attack spell... yeah, I don't care. I gave it to Richard, though, because it seems fitting. If morbid.

Before we head into the whirlwind, though, we've got some things to do.



First off, if you use the whirlwind key word on Paul, he'll tell you to check by his bed. Perv.





Sweet. The haul from this is a ruby cuirass, black suit, thief gloves, quartz cuirass, gold pin, silver cuirass (sensing a theme?), an elixir-



And another fucking blood sword. The game is just... begging you to rip it open now. The gba remake onward actually replaces this blood sword, making it so there's only one in the game. How cute, they're trying to pretend you haven't ripped the game open by this point.

After that, it's time to do some serious inventory clearing.


Hey, how much for this mysterious forbidden magic tome of legendary power?
1 gil.
Sounds fair.



And when all was said an done, here is our end result: a mess of elixirs I probably won't ever need. (Solo and Loq are carring two more elixirs.)



Oh, one of the sorcerers dropped another Aura tome. I decide maybe I'll play around with it, just for shits and giggles. I do have to drop a spell in order to learn aura. I decide slow has to go. If I really do need slow, I have two threads.

All that out of the way, it's time to go tornado hunting.



To get in, you just walk up to it and then the wyvern will fly you in from there.



And of course the tornado is a dungeon. This dungeon has fewer floors than Mysidia Tower, but more branching paths.


Vampire Lady
Rank 6, HP 1,140, MP 140, Attack Power 85, Attacks 6, Accuracy 85%, Defense 85, Evasion 1-70%, Magic Resistance 6-30%

Vampire Ladies are upgraded Vampire Girls. That's it.

Anyway, the first floor has two stairs going up, and the one you see first has treasure.



Giles? No, no, it's a knife, and kind of an odd one. It's supposed to add 20 damage per hit to its base attack, but in this version it doesn't work. In other versions it does, and it's decent enough. If nothing else the added damage pierces defense, so that can be useful.



Oh, well, hello captain, my old nemesis. A lot's changed since we've seen you last. We've got 16 evasion, a fair amount of agility, and some decent goddamn armor. I was legitimately kind of scared when I saw a captain as a random encounter, but that was just out of reflex. Near as I can tell, the most damage it could do to me was 426, and that requires the highest damage roll and every hit connecting. That never happened.


Corpse
Rank 6, HP 870, Attack Power 60, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30%

I have no idea why this translation called them this; they're not undead. Anyway, they get a fair number of attacks but has the same attack power as the captain. No big deal.

EDIT: Prism has the answer!




Oh and damaging water makes a return. In a... cyclone. Yeah, you know what, we've really flown past "sensible" a long time ago.



The game has very few axes in it, one of the biggest downsides of that weapon type, and this is the first upgrade you see in a long time. Of course, you might have gotten one just a few steps earlier because the corpses love dropping these things.



By the way, you can warp out of the tornado. I mostly did this just to see if I could, and also because it's slightly faster than walking out. (Although I still had to heal myself back up and that took time and really I didn't save any time. Well, whatever.)

Anyway, once more! After going to the far left staircase on the first floor, we have another branch on the third. A good of thumb in this dungeon is that the staircase closest to you has the goodies


Lamia
Rank 6, HP 1,000, MP 60, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 85%, Defense 70, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 6-30%

As much as the idea of petty revenge excites me, these aren't Lamia Queens, but the lower grade Lamia. Still pretty similar to the queens, in that they have sleep attack and can charm you, but that's not so threatening any more, is it? Worst thing they can do is cast blink on themselves and make them harder to kill. Weirdly, I think they have higher attack and defense than the queen, but fewer hits. Weird.


Golem
Rank 7, HP 1,620, Attack Power 100, Attacks 6, Accuracy 95%, Defense 120, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 4-100%

Golems are basically like beefier slimes: high defense, so magic is the way to go. They're weak to fire and resistant to everything else but lightning. Even with the easy to exploit fire weakness it takes more than one casting because of their HP. So they're kind of annoying and that's about it.





On the top part of the fourth floor, we've got two pieces of heavy armor. Oh woo. Diamond stuff protects against lightning, if you care.

From there, back to the third, go up the other flight up stairs, and progress.



And once again, we go up the nearest staircase for goodies.



The defense sword is lovely. Like the main gauche, it gives a substantial evasion bonus, but the defense sword's evasion bonus is roughly equivalent to a higher tier shield. Very nice. Its major drawback is that it has the same nasty magic penalty as most other swords. So it doesn't really replace the main gauche. In the remake, where they got rid of int/soul penalties on weapons and fixed dual wielding, it's damn great.



You know, it's funny how much having protection against status ailments changes things. A group of five wizards would have been really scary, but now it's just annoying, and that's because they keep trying to steal my MP.

I guess nothing can kill me after all.






General
Rank 7, HP 1,800, Attack Power 120, Attacks 10, Accuracy 95%, Defense 100, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 4-60%

No, your eyes do not deceive you: 10 motherfucking attacks.



Yeah, this isn't starting on a great note.



So yeah, this guys are fuckers. On the next round I chose to curse one of them rather than heal, and that ended up being the wrong choice.



Oops.

At the very least, the guys aren't random encounters... in this dungeon. They are in the next! I'm... looking forward to that.

And the kicker of it is that the diamond armor they're guarding is complete trash. But I'm getting it anyway.



Next time around, I wear the spiral headband (I tend not to wear a full set of armor for evasion purposes) and I land a curse on them. As you can see, it helps. A lot.



They can drop a ton of interesting items, but almost none of them are useful to this character.





Across a dangerous pond there is a staircase leading u- oh, hey, we're in a castle! I guess it's supposed to be like a castle riding on top of the cyclone? Anyway, there's four doors here and none of them have anything. I would have sworn they did, but nope! Waste of time!


Amoeba
Rank 6, HP 1,140, Attack Power 100, Attacks 6, Accuracy 75%, Defense 60, Evasion 0, Magic Resistance 6-30%

But of course I had to check. Anyway, Amoebas are mostly notable for being resistant to pretty much everything, and that's about it. Well, they can poison you, but even if I didn't have resistance to poison that's just annoying more than anything.

Anyway, go back down to the fourth floor and go right. From there, it's up to the sixth floor again, but in the outside ring.



The wind flute casts an all-target attack spell in combat. Woo.


Green Dragon
Rank 7, HP 3,000, MP 190, Attack Power 150, Attacks 7, Accuracy 100%, Defense 150, Evasion 1-75%, Magic Resistance 8-40%

But it's guarded by a monster anyway! The green dragon has a poison attack, but it's multi-targetted so it's a non-issue.



It has a pretty gnarly attack, though, and it's damned accurate. Still, after the generals it's hardly scary. Like its dragon brethren, it is weak to an element, in this case bolt, but our bolt spell sucks so fisticuffs. Curse, blind, beat it to death, boom.



And it drops another attack item I won't use! Oh nice.

Anyway, we go up here and-



Oh hey, it's the emperor! Let's go kill him.









Yeah, I really don't know why he's wasting his time.




Emperor
Rank 6, HP 1,290, MP 190, Attack Power 70, Attacks 6, Accuracy 80%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-65%, Magic Resistance 4-40%

And now we have the climatic showdown with the head cheese himself.



Got your MP!



Got your eyes!



And now the emperor cannot do shit to me.

Apparently the emperor can use an elixir on himself, but never did. Actually, looking this stuff up, I've now realized items work really, really oddly in this game. When you use them in combat, they're casting a special unique spell, and that's all items including potions et al. That's why the amount that an item can heal you for varies, and why you get better returns if you use it in combat. Elixirs, just so you know, don't actually set your HP/MP to full, but instead casts a spell that heals around 5000 HP/MP, which is always a full heal anyway unless you're crazy about HP grinding. Why do I mention this? Because if the emperor has the elixir ability in his ability list, that means it's coded as a regular spell and costs MP. It makes sense considering the system they're working with, I guess, but it means he can't use elixir when he actually needs it. (Not that it really matters, since the enemies' usage of abilities is strictly reliant on probability and enemies can't "respond" to anything.)

Anyway, the emperor is a chump and I beat his ass down with no difficulty.



And as my reward for saving the world, I get a phoenix down.


: *barf*







And now, dance party! Thanks for following this FF2 LP you guys and-





Of course it's not over. The fact that Stalin ended up being a power hungry jerk who took advantage of a power void to seize control for his own selfish ends is frankly shocking to me.



Okay, I have to give props to the fan translator; that was pretty funny.



In any case, we're at a crossroad. An old friend has betrayed us and taken over the world, which is a bit of a dick move. Can we bring ourself to take him down? ...that would be a question if we knew or cared about this dude one bit. As it stands, the game is just telling us that there's a dramatic crisis.

But that will have to wait. For now, we sign off.




Power +4, Agility +1, Vitality +2, Intelligence +1, Soul +3, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Fire +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, Blind +1, Aspil +1, Drain +1, HP +400