Final Fantasy Legend II Part #1

Part 1: Chapter The First

Chapter The First: In which our hero, together with his companions, sets out and begins to suspect that his father may have simply abandoned his family at the very first opportunity

Like any good RPG, FFL2 starts with our hero waking up and being exposited at. In this case, in the middle of the night.

will you keep...

.. Hey! Fry! Wake up!

I'm sleepy.

Listen! Do not lose this! Got it?

Received Prism

Dad! Are you leaving again?

Yep. Take care of Mom.

Okay. Could you come home early?

... Yeah. Be good.

As his father leaves, Fry asks a very pertinent question indeed. Perhaps his father has a great deal of experience climbing out of windows in the middle of the night?

An unspecified number of years later...

me what it is.

I want to go look for Dad.

Oh... I knew this would happen someday. You're adventurous like your father.

Besides, all men leave you eventually. I understand that's just how things are, now. Go ahead.

This is.. awkward... but... I'm worried about you..you'll be alone.

Don't worry about me, Fry. I'll be okay. Mr. S will be here, after all. ... Go ahead

Tell daddy that I'm doing alright. And that if he doesn't get his ass back here, not to bother coming back. It's been literally years.

I will!

Take care!

Mom, ... I ...

Go to school and tell Mr. S that you're leaving and that I'll be expecting him around 7.

Okay... Mom, I'll be back with Dad!

Just send a letter ahead so I know when you're bringing him home.

Well then, off to Mr. S, evidently a highly respected member of the community with yet more exposition for us. There's a lot of

at the beginning of this one.

tell you this. The ancient gods made this world.

I know. It's most of the contents of the only textbook we have here.

Their legacy is left all over this world in the form of Magi.

.....

What you have received from your father is one piece of it. 77 of those make a statue of a goddess, Isis. Ha! Thought you knew everything, didn't you?

This...?

Each Magi has its own power. Some people are seeking the power of Magi and trying to become new gods.

Why did my father have such a thing? And how do you know all this?

I go through your dad's stuff sometimes when I'm over. He says he's preventing Magi from being abused for wrong purposes.

Like a hero!?

Well... yes... kind of... he never does go into any detail about what a right reason might be. I did see a lot of sketches involving jumping from windows. If you wish to find your father, search for Magi and keep an eye out for open windows.

I will!

The Magi you have there is called the PRISM. It tells you the number of Magi that are nearby. Since your dad left it with a child, it's also probably the most useless of them all. Maybe it will help you.

At this point everybody comes in and begs Fry to take them with him, including his twin in the lower right corner who is never spoken of again.

have reliable partners. Take 3 with you.

You know, I can think of stranger reasons for party size limits than because your teacher told you that you could only take 3. It's noteworthy here that you HAVE to take people with you. Single character challenge is not an option here.

first.

Mr. S helpfully points us in the right direction, ignoring the fact that there is only one path to go down.

And here are our characters. This game is a bit nicer as far as providing equipment for starting characters. Lela's Flame attack is very useful because it has the capacity to hit an entire screen full of enemies. Zoid is a Baby Dragon because that's probably the most useful form that he has to start with, and Bndr has a powerful pistol as his contribution. In addition, you can see that he's immune to paralysis and poison, which makes sense because he's a robot.

Exploring the town, we find a wolf person who is evidently meant to be Lela's parent. I like that she's fine with her child wandering off on an open-ended quest like this. The Cure potion is a nice bonus.

Naturally Fry's family has the biggest house in town. You can use his house as a free inn at first, but there's little point to that.

Two more houses have messages for Bndr and Zoid, with Bndr's parent being a butterfly.

It's a nice touch to actually give your companions homes. It makes them seem more like a group than in the first game, which had you going down to the local mercenary's guild and hiring friends.

As we try to leave, Mr. S forces his way into the party. This is by no means a bad thing. If you look at his stats, he's a beast. He's pretty much an "I Win" button for the first dungeon.

This is the Prism, which is pretty much useless. The game will lead you to Magi through the plot, and you'll know if you're short any.

Shortly after leaving we run into a group of Jaguar, which shows one of the differences in the game's display. Group attack spells, like fire and ice, now do the same damage to each member of the group and cut down on scroll. Jaguars only have about 50 HP, by the way. Mr. S is a monster.

Starting in the first dungeon there's actually a surprising amount of loot available. The additional cure potion is going to be handy until Lela gets her own cure spell, but shields are still useless.

Early on the game is also very nice about giving you items from battles. I haven't had to buy a longsword yet and have actually sold a good number.

More useless treasure. The hammer is junk, and the bow isn't really great either. They can be useful if you need to give a robot agility, but other than that they're very forgettable with one or two exceptions.

Just up the pathway we have our first boss enemy, who looks like some kind of mustachioed penguin.

In battle he looks a lot more impressive, but Mr. S comes through again. If you're lucky enough to get meat from him, it'll probably substantially boost your monster.

Zoid is now the most powerful member of our party after Mr. S, and is actually on the same tier as the hardest boss in the first world. This means he can't really eat any meat around here, but more about that later.

Mr. S leaves us after the cave in order to not completely cheapen the first part of the game.

Immediately upon entering the nearest town we see a figure who looks just like Fry's dad! ...kind of. Before dealing with that, I'd like to point out something.

You can literally see both sides of this cave and this town at the same time. If you were in the right place you could almost see both towns at once. Seriously, Fry thinks his dad has been hiding out literally in the town next door for his entire childhood?

Naturally it's now Fry's dad. I'm not sure it's even human. But it does say that there might be Magi in some ruins nearby.

We immediately get a bit more exposition, including information about a new destination. Naturally since we've been told the name of a place we must immediately go there. The bit about Ashura is kind of interesting, since that was the penultimate boss in the previous game. It's interesting that in this one it's kind of a minor antagonist.

Time for the pub!

I love the cosmology of this world and the fact that you can see the pillars leading up between what they call Worlds. It almost makes you wonder if it's supposed to be different regions of the same planet that are for some reason intentionally isolated or if the pillars do in fact lead to different realities. We also get a bit more information about Ashura, setting him up as a rival in our search for the Magi.

We also slip a longsword to Bndr, which improves his strength to a point Fry won't reach for a bit. I buy him a bronze gauntlet and some armor for Fry, but I figured I'd take a moment that robots are weird about armor. Rather than having their defense increase according to the part equipped it increases according to the type of armor. To Bndr a bronze gauntlet is the same as a bronze armor for defense, so you can just buy the cheapest piece for him. You can also equip multiple copies of the same armor type, which gives the impression that he's got just random bits of armor strapped to him.

Naturally before going on there's a bit of grinding. The game is nice enough to tell you what kind of upgrade you get now, which is pretty handy. This is also the third time Lela has gained fire. Her spell list looks something like Flame, Fire, Fire, Fire right now.

After a bit we head off to see Ki's swanky palace. Seriously, it's the biggest building around.

How do you not know who Ashura is? He's this...guy...who's...evil and stuff. You know what? Nevermind.

The inside matches the outside pretty well, and it's time for more info-dumping! Evidently Ki and Ashura don't get along and he's unwilling to come for her.

The skeleton unhelpfully chimes in that Ki has the power to heal, while the fairy gives us a geography lesson. I think it's interesting that there are no humans or mutants at the shrine.

Now, to Ki...