Final Fantasy 2 Beginner Club W02
| Week 02 | 2026-01-09T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | 💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 1 |
| Next week | 💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 3 |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF2BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Stopping point
Once you’ve brought the Mithril back to Altea.
More details
Altea
After princess Hilda tells you that the rebellion wants mithril, talk to Min’u next to her and he’ll join your party. Min’u is a strong white mage with a huge inventory of spells and stats that probably outrank your current party. And he comes with his canoe!
The canoe functions like in FF1: it lets you cross lakes and rivers. However this time you have no encounters while on the canoe, so you can use rivers to plot your route and avoid combat.
If you talk with the people of Altea, you’ll gather that you’re meant to go to the town of Salamander to inquire about the Mithril, and the first leg of your journey should lead you to the town of Palm to the North East of Altea, on the other side of the lake.
Palm
Palm will be the first of three new towns we’ll visit this week! It’s a port town populated with shady sailors. There’s some fun chat with the locals, but nothing really interesting in the shops. The important part is to talk to the sailor at the entrance of the town, he’ll offer to take you to Poft for a small fee.
Poft
Poft is the 2nd stopover on your way to Salamander. The shops there are also a bit disappointing, but do visit the bar, there are some interesting people there who will offer to bring you to Salamander for a not-so-small fee. You can accept or, if you want to spare the gil, you can just leave the town and walk north, it’s a fairly short hike.
Salamander
We finally reach the third and last town of the week, Salamander. If you talk with the people here you’ll learn that the Empire gets their Mithril from the nearby Semit Cave, and that they have enslaved some of the townsfolk to mine the ore for them. Josef, who lives in one of the houses, seems knowledgeable but he doesn’t trust you and tells you rescue the villagers to prove your worth. Clearly the next step will be investigating what’s going on in those caves…
The shops in Salmander are worth looking into, in particular there are some valuable spells there. Note that Min’u already knows teleport, raise and anti and you can find a teleport tome in the next dungeon, so there’s no rush to buy them if you’re low on gil.
The entrance to the Semit cave isfairly close by, to the South West of the town, but there’s a mountain range standing in the way so you’ll have to find a way around it.
Semit Cave
This is the first dungon of the game, and it’s fairly substantial. Somewhere halfway through you will encounter the villagers. At this point you can either return to Salamander[1] to rest a bit and get new dialogue, or you can decide to keep exploring the lower levels until you find the Mithril.
Once you have the Mithril in hand you can return to Altea by doing the trip in reverse. Note that, in the Pixel Remaster, you can travel from Poft straight to Altea for a fairly steep fee. In the original version you don’t get offered this destination so you have to go through Palm once again.
Altea
You can show you hard-earned Mithril to the princess but all she wants to talk about now is the flying warship (Dreadnought in the English version) being built by the empire in Bafusk. We’ll worry about that next week, for the time being you can bring the mithril to the blacksmith in Altea and he’ll upgrade both the weapon and armor shop to offer higher-end equipment.
Don’t forget that you can show the mithril to NPC using the だいじなもの menu, the results are different if you select the mithril option in the たずねる menu.
Map
Miscellaneous
The mysterious ring
If you read the description of the ring Scott gave you last week it says:
ガテアの村に使い方を知っている人がいるらし⋯
If you return to Gatea after recruiting Min’u, one of the residents will channel their inner broom and tell you… how to open the world map.
It is true that in the original Famicom version having the ring meant that you could open the map with B + Select, but in subsequent versions the map is always available from the start. So the idea that the ring gives you access to the map no longer makes sense.
Anyway, more evidence that Gatea is a useless town… Unless you have a version of the game with an achievement if you visit every single location, in this case you’ll have to remember to drop by at least once!
MP cheese
Min’u knows the “anti” spell that drains the target’s MP. It can also be bought in Salamander.
This spell can be abused to quickly inflate your MP reserves. Remember that, in FF2, your max MP increases when you use your MP in combat. By casting “anti” on your own mages, you can very quickly deplete their MP pools which should almost systematically lead to MP increases at the end of the fight. Then you can rest at an inn and repeat.
You can also (infamously) increase your max HP by attacking your own fighters, but I don’t recommend doing so. It does work, but it’s not difficult to increase your HP through normal encounters, and getting attacked by enemies also raise your evasion stat which is arguably more important than any other defensive stat in FF2. It’s also why you generally want to give your fighters a shield (instead of dual-wielding weapons) because doing so boosts your evasion.
Treading the donut
As I already mentioned in FF1, the map of these old-school JRPGs is very often toroidal, meaning that the East and West sides of the map are connected (like on a globe) but also the North and South borders are connected, so that when you cross the North edge of the map you end up in the far South and vice-versa.
In FF1 this was a fairly unimportant details, but because the map of FF2 is so much more connected it makes a big difference in the way you navigate the world. In particular the journey that I outlined above is the simplest and most standard way to reach Salamander, but there are multiple other possibilities:
From Altea, you can take the Purple path that follows the coast all the way to Salamander without entering Palm or Poft.
Alternatively you can take the orange path that crosses the East/West edge of the map close to the equator and then follows the coast to the North all the way to Salamander.
Finally you can take the red path that crosses first to the North East, then to the South East and crosses the desert before rejoining the orange path.
The orange and red paths go through regions populated with extremely powerful enemies, so it’s almost impossible to make use of them at this point in the game unless you disable encounters, but interestingly they don’t require the canoe so you can technically reach Salamander, Palm, Poft and Bafusk immediately at the start of the game before you even visit Finn. But you won’t be able to visit the Semit Cave without the canoe, so there’s no point.
Why is there a volcano above a windmil?
It’s an extremely minor detail but I was surprised to discover that, in the Pixel Remaster, you enter the town of Salamender from the South side. In the original version you always enter from the North:
I suspect that they changed it because it makes more sense given the location of the town on the world map but there’s an other advantage: you can see that the North entrance is on a narrow 1-tile path and there’s an NPC roaming nearby. This is extremely annoying because she will often obstruct the path. And she can even prevent you from exiting the town altogether if she gets stuck while you attempt to leave!
Participation
- I’m playing along
- I will catch up later
- I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this section yet
- I’m a filthy preplayer but I’m here for the discussion
Don’t forget that Min’u can teleport you out of the cave at any moment ↩︎
" FF1 trained us to expect different spells.
