Part 33: Everything Falls Apart (Part 2)
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...and that's the plan!
Rez. Sweetie. You know we're happy to help, but I don't really think you need us for this.
What? No! There's like a billion of them and I need a distraction until I can get to the demiurge.
Trog's fight is ready! Like in olden times!
I must say, it does feel good to be back together again.
That's the spirit! Now, on the count of three...





First things first: we're not actually under a timer in the real game. You'll see a lot of shaking, but you can take your time getting to the end.
Second, we've made it to the ground floor, and paladins will start showing up. The rest of the monsters can be dealt with, but paladins have Dragon shields, a vast array of swords (including Defender!), and armor out the wazoo. They'll use the Dragon shield at the beginning of combat to neutralize any magic-based crowd control for all targets. On top of that, they hit like trucks. Even worse, if you brought a monster down here, you better hope they're not undead, or they'll get a Sun sword upside their dome for a critical. They're a major PIA, and this area's flooded with the little bastards.
Fortunately, we're close enough to our target that we can bring out the big guns.



I wasn't kidding about Rezen's stats being ridiculous. She's the first character we've seen, party or otherwise, to break the three digit barrier on damage. Any random mob is going to be liquidated by her Flare. Sure, we only have five casts between recharges—but if nothing else, it's immensely satisfying.
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Rez! I hope you're done in here, because there's way too many of them to—
Commonality of soft potions requires advanced tactics. I believe this will suffice.
*shatter*
NO!
Ah, you must be her allies. This is a most efficient turn of events. *cocks gun*








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*vworp vworp*
I've teleported you as far away from the battle as possible. You should be safe now.
What are you doing?! We need to put Rez back together! Or stop ourselves from even going there! Or something!
You're no match for WarMech, and interfering with your own timestream will have devastating consequences across the multiverse. This is the best place for you.
Then take us to the pieces! We'll collect them one at a time, if we must.
I can't do that.
Why is not?!
Rezen pre-programmed me to take her friends to safety should something happen to her. Beyond that, I can't operate without her direct permission. If I fell into the wrong hands, it would create something far worse than the demiurge.
So what the hell are we supposed to do now? I'm not fucking abandoning my little sister!
I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do to help. Best of luck.
*byooooo*
...
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Alright. Step one, we figure out when and where we are.
Elly... as always, I admire your steadfastness. But, I don't think these particular odds can be overcome.
Bullshit. We're going to fix this, or I'm going to die trying.
Is sentiment Trog gets behind.
...very well, then. We'll need a plan...















Meet the haniwa! He's a burial doll from ancient Japan, he's represented as a malevolent haunted statue in modern pop culture, and he'll be your designated Stupidly Powerful Rare Monster for this game. He comes armed with abilities like Quake and Flare, but his signature attack is the Seven Sword. True to its name, it hits a single target up to seven times. Each successful hit is calculated like it was an individual attack, then summed together and applied to the target. Needless to say, if he hits all seven times, the damage output gets ridiculous. Fortunately, he has a reasonable amount of pffffft hahahaha noooooope. He has 10,000 HP and regenerates 1000 a round.
Yes, 1000. That was not a mistake. I know exactly what I typed.
Fortunately, haniwa is the one fight you can run from, and it works every time. If you're just here to get through the game, there's nothing wrong with it. However, in doing so, you'll miss two fun things. First and foremost, he's not an actual boss.


As for the second, we need to descend briefly into nerdery.
As some of you may already know, random numbers in computer programming aren't actually random. They're what's known as "pseudorandom"—that is, you won't normally get the same number twice, but reproducing the original starting conditions will pump out the same "random" sequence. Usually, these values are seeded by the onboard timer, which guarantees no two sequences will be the same. Thus, for all intents and purposes, you have something approaching random numbers.
This obviously breaks down when there's no onboard clock available. Guess what the original "big grey brick" gameboy didn't have?
In order to simulate randomness, SaGa relies on the one unpredictable element it has: the player. The number of steps taken by your party combines with actions taken in combat to produce something as random as it can muster. The value carries over between soft resets (Start+Select+A+B), so everything should—in theory—be "random enough."
However! By doing a hard reset on the gameboy (switch the power off and on), you reset the value. Furthermore, FFL2 doesn't actually stash the most recent random value in your save files. Have you figured out the consequences yet? If not, let me spell it out.
The game can be manipulated to guarantee certain outcomes.
In this case, the stars align just right so you can fight a haniwa whenever you want. It goes like this:
- Walk onto the "tiled" section of this floor.
- Save.
- Hard reset the gameboy and resume.
- You'll be attacked immediately. Win the fight.
- Take three steps. You'll be attacked again. Do whatever.
- Take one step. One last fight. Good job, go hog wild.
- You'll go through a stretch (about 30-40 steps) with no combat whatsoever.
- Your next fight will be a haniwa.
This only works with the original grey brick Game Boys (or emulators that use the original Game Boy as its programming model). Still, you may ask yourself: why on Earth would I want to fight this thing? It's fifty pounds of pain stuffed into a creepy little ten pound bag.




Because Haniwa has a 1-in-64 chance of dropping his Seven Sword.
Getting the drop to happen is tricky. If you keep using the same combat actions through steps 1-6, you'll end up with the exact same results every time. Thus, you have tinker around to get the magic combination of actions for your particular party. No, I have no idea what they were for us; my eyes just kind of glazed over until it finally happened. Regardless, after many hours of resets, choosing various nonsensical actions, and then firing a Hyper, we finally get Haniwa to cough the stupid thing up.
Now, if I really wanted to be mean, I could have paid more attention, written down the combination, and used the above tricks to arm everyone in the party with a Seven Sword. However, "we gamed the system and slaughtered all before us" makes for a pretty shitty story climax, so we're going to leave that be.
(As a final note: This can also be used for other rare drops and even stat increases. It's technically cheating, which is the best kind of cheating!





























Final boss time. This is Arsenal.

No, not that one.
Final boss or not, Arsenal's not nearly as bad as Apollo if your guys' damage output is up to snuff. He's not a pushover by any means, but he's infinitely better than what we've been facing. He has some pretty cool attacks, too! Of course, you may not be all that concerned. After all, we have Rezen! Nuke him a few times with Flare, bust out the Masasmune and Xcalibur, and we're done here.
Yeah, about that. I didn't make up the above plot point. There's two Arsenal units, and Rez is soloing one. You get the other.
That's right—after getting used to the gigantic fuck-off guest party member this entire trip, you're doing the final boss without her. SaGa, y'all... right up to the very end.
Anyway, Arsenal. This fight comes in three stages. For the first part, he'll do this every round:








He'll blast your guys with laser cannons every round until you do something about it. Each cannon has 1000 HP, which should be easy enough to knock out at this point. However, you can only take them out one at a time. As a bonus, as you destroy each cannon, the amount of damage done by the attack steadily drops. FFL2 may be a lot of things, but it does make sense. (Most of the time.)
Obviously, there's a catch: Arsenal will scramble to fix the cannons while you're fighting. Four rounds or so after you take down the first one, they'll start coming back online, one by one. Your job is to shell out 4000 across 4-5 rounds against steadily decreasing group damage. At this point, you shouldn't be holding anything back, so you ought to achieve it with minimal effort.








In the second stage of the fight, Arsenal will start using Smasher! (Yes, the exclamation point is included.) It's a physical attack that hits one person—and not very hard, either. This is even funnier because our party's all wearing ninja gauntlets, which cuts the damage further in half. This is a really good time to downshift to your second tier weapons and deploy Heal staves to get everyone back to full HP. Trust me—you're going to need it.
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Trog. Come in, Trog.
But Trog has gone outside?
That's not what—look, nevermind. Did you deliver our latest "gift?"
Yes! Micro Sizer is on shelf for new friends.
Great! They should have it by now. Get out of there so they don't see you.
OK! *stomp* *stomp*
...Trog? Trog. You did use the micronizer to shrink again. Right?
Hello, small things! Is getting gift Trog left?
CHEESE IT
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aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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Holy shit, you need to listen to this







After about 3000 more damage, Arsenal decides to get serious, and he'll straight up chuck the Smasher! at your guys every round. Much like releasing the


(I mean, you are, you can just reload your save. But that's not as dramatic.)






























It's time to unleash our first ace in the hole. Heather can hit all seven times with the Seven Sword, and while her strength isn't enough to crank out something dumb like 5 figures, she can still do about 2000 by herself. This means we can put someone on sporatic Heal Staff duty and still crank out about 2.5-3k a round, which is only 3-5 hits of Smasher! That's not great, but it's doable. Ten hits, however, is not.







Our second surprise? Well... remember how Sara was our backup fighter for a long time? A curious thing happens to agility weapons when you crank a party member's Agility up to 99...

















Sara is doing 650-800, and it's enough to be our second most damaging party member this fight. Between her, Heather, and Roy's Samurai bow, we can crank out 3k+ without any sweat. It makes all the difference in the world, and with a few favorable rounds of Smasher!, we can punch its lights out in just three turns.









































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WHY DOES IT KEEP COMING OUT, WHYYYYYYYYY

























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How do I look?
Great! You picked an alias yet?
I'm considering "Sanchez." T'would be enough of a change that no one would suspect it.
Works for me. In the meantime, I've rounded up as many investors as I could. We're going to need some sort of snappy title to keep them interested beyond the sales pitch. Something mysterious and techy...
Trog will save day! Has made letterhead.
"Project SPARTIN." Isn't "spartan" spelled with an "A"?
I believe so, yes.
Maybe it's just an acronym. What's it stand for, Trog?
Is not knowing. Maybe friend Elly can tell?
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...
Whoever we end up getting, I damn sure hope they do a better job saving the world than we have.












Next Time: Everything Comes to an End