Can’t wait to try and puzzle it out with everyone during the club!
… Or just never use it lol
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This game sounds so good
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We are now one week away from the start of the FF2 club! I hope that you’re all having good holidays and will be in top shape for our new adventure. I’m almost done drafting the week 1 post on my side.
I don’t know if @LazyWerebear already posted it here but he made a really cool website with the script from the Pixel Remaster: Japanese Video Game Vocabulary
You can unlock the progression progressively to avoid accidental spoilers, it’s neat. I noticed a few oddities with the transcript however, I think some lines were missed or put out of order, but maybe I just looked in the wrong location.
Of course we also have the Google Sheet like for FF1 but I think it’s good to experiment with other options because manually transcribing everything probably won’t be reasonable long-term…
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Also the game appears to be on sale on the Nintendo eShop currently and I’m sure other places.
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Wow yeah the tweaks to the combat and progression system on the Pixel Remaster are a lot more significant than I expected. I just started the game and I ended up double-checking in the menu if I hadn’t activated the cheats by accident because I couldn’t believe how fast I was leveling up.
That’s good though, I was worried that the difficulty of the original would be too much for the non-JRPG veterans in this club.
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I’m a jrpg veteran and honestly I just don’t have time for it anymore 
gimme all the cheats!! As long as they are baked into the game and don’t feel like cheating bc I don’t know better.
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I decided to go the extra mile and look up Japanese-language sources for a thing I’m talking about in next week’s thread. I found a random Japanese page that discussed precisely the topic I was researching. It took me about two minutes reading through the page to realize that it was AI-generated, and the bot had hallucinated complete nonsense.
Somebody used an AI to generate a completely wrong clickbait article for some minor lore point of a 36yo game.
The internet is dead.
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Wow, that is sad. Thanks for the heads-up, I will stay away from the Internet from now on.
Remember when you had to prove you’re not a robot? Now go on and prove you’re not an AI.
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Thanks for mentioning it! I had forgotten to do so. I’ll be going through and trying to clean up some of the transcripts / flag unlock points over the holiday break. And if you tried to sign up (for the progression unlock saving feature) and it wasn’t working, my database provided shut down the project from low activity. I’ve restored it so please feel free to try again. And I’m planning to upgrade from the free tier so that it doesn’t happen again. 
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I noticed that the intro text (starting with 長く続いていた平和が) appears to be truncated halfway through. The full text is:
長く続いていた平和が、
今、終わりを告げた。
パラメキア帝国の皇帝が魔界から魔物を呼びだし、
世界征服に乗り出したのである。
これに対し反乱軍はフィン王国において立ち上がったが、
帝国の総攻撃にあい、城を奪われ、
辺境の町アルテアへと撤退をよぎなくされた。
ここフィン王国に住む４人の若者たちも、
敵の攻撃によって両親を失い、
執拗な敵の追っ手から逃げ続けていた⋯。
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I have good news for you in this area. Once the article becomes training data for future AI models, it will no longer be considered a hallucination.
According to ChatGPT, this has been the recommended solution for most of the world’s problems since 1823, when Ben Franklin first wrote an anonymous newspaper article about it.
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I’m excited to see this one soon!
Posted a little in the videogame thread about Makai Toushi SaGa, the first game in the SaGa series and what designer Akitoshi Kawazu of FF2 went on to make one year after this over here. Started it up as my own project to play every SaGa game, and also to warm up for FF2 with this timing.
It’s been really fun for me and shown that I will probably enjoy the things that make FF2 obtuse and controversial among a lot of the community. It’s funny cause I imagine @simias is probably right that when you’re a newcomer to the genre it might be offputting for the game to be presumably a little demanding on the player, but at the same time I almost wish for my own curiosity that more people were seeing it as it originally was because I don’t know about FF2 specifically but the more I play SaGa, the more it feels like a lot of the way it’s controversial in the west comes from very ingrained expectations about what progression is going to look like and how these games upend that. In some ways a player whose experience makes them a little more of a blank slate might be conducive to being open to what’s going on in those games. 
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I’m looking forward to getting your impressions playing the original. It’s definitely more unique in its original format, but it’s also, uh, more unique, you know. As a big JRPG/FF fan I definitely don’t regret having played that version but also I started worrying that there would be like 3 people left in the club by week 5.
The Pixel Remaster heavily sanded out the rough edges and it feels a lot more “normal” to play as a result, but it also certainly lost some character.
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I’m really looking forward to it too! In the spirit of the ways that I think I understand Kawazu’s game design approach to be, where it feels like he wants you to not necessarily fully understand and master all the systems as much as have fun playing along with them and thus finds ways to obfuscate and give you moments of knowledge breakthroughs, just getting something cool by accident, etc, I think I might just avoid any advice you have about combat, try to look for the original instruction manual, and just go. That might get me into some trouble but I also think it could lead to cool situations. Might confirm things afterwards, like how I found out if my espers in original SaGa were truly just alternating spells randomly, but I did that after letting the system play with me for a while first haha.
All I know from the distant reputation is that FF2 has a lot of seemingly false ideas built up in the community about leveling, like you NEED to hit your party members when really that’s… allowed to get HP but not intended at all, that sorta thing people worked themselves up about because it was different. That and that the dungeon designs sound convoluted? The latter of which I’m a pretty big complex dungeon diving fan but I know that turns a lot of people off. I don’t expect everything about how he designed progression to be excellent but I expect virtually all of it to be interesting.
The SaGa series itself has so many instances of what I think is partially happening. Because many of those games have systems where enemies level after you do enough fights, for example, they have this reputation that they punish you for fighting and if you grind you make them impossible but from the few games I’ve experienced and what the SaGa fans say that seems to rarely be true. A lot of people just really don’t like to go along with certain things that sound like they are punishing you in a sense and find out what happens if you just play normally anyway.
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Immediately after saying this, the first SaGa, which has mostly been reasonable about progression, hit me with this dungeon where I was just expected to walk out into the black space past the floor in order to progress. In pre-internet times I wonder if I would’ve ever seen past this moment. I can’t say with 100% certainty but I don’t think anyone tells me anything about that. I’m potentially in for quite a time
Edit: Alright dude is just taking the piss now (one screen level design spoiler for SaGa 1 on the gameboy)
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Summary
Are those all stairs? I would be so confused because all those tile read as “each tile will lead you one floor down and you have to go back and forth to figure out which stairs to go down” to me, if that’s the intended progression, that’s cool ahah
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SaGa
Yep, they are stairs tiles! Though most aren’t actually actively stairs. This whole dungeon has been built on subverting expectations, walking through walls and stuff like that. This floor was really funny the moment I saw that but how it actually works is despite appearances most are normal floor tiles; it’s a small maze where the goal is to find the tile that is actually real stairs.
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Summary
That’s even better!! Maybe one day I wll check out the SaGa games…
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More SaGa
You definitely should! I’m enjoying them a ton. Because it can be a tough series to get into until you get on its wavelength most people recommend starting with the recent Romancing SaGa 2 remake, Revenge of the Seven (despite some numbered titles there’s never story continuity). I did that as well, but now I’m going through starting from the beginning on the Gameboy to see how the series evolved. RotS is indeed probably the best place to start to have more of how things work actually explained to you.
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Thanks for saying so. I’ve pushed out the latest update that fixed the weird issue. My script to attempt to sort dialog into chapters had a regex bug making the IDs read incorrectly so some of the opening text ended up in later chapters.
I actually plan to pre-play by a week so I can hopefully catch more dialog/vocab errors.
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