I feel like it would be spoilery to answer this now, but next week may bring some answers…
3 Likes
I guess I also made the mistake of casting fire the same way everything else in the dungeon had trained me to. Maybe it should be a fire turtle as a tell if you want the guy thriving the most in the world of ice to be weak to ice for some reason. I missed the sword cause resources were getting tight to explore thoroughly with. At that point you’re just casting with what MP you have left to do some actual damage and praying melee characters get a crit so they can do a whopping 15 damage very occasionally.
3 Likes
Reptile enemies in FF tend to be weak to ice. Now, why would they put an enemy weak to ice within the “snow cave”…
4 Likes
Week 3
I found myself a little stumped after reaching the castle and having no idea how to carry the flame back. Paid シド a fat tip to fly me over there just to have to trek all the way back lol. At least I found a little help to do it a bit faster in the forest around the castle…
The cave was not that difficult, it feels like the game is kinda missing a bit of early level enemy diversity, or at least that the enemy balancing was overcorrected a bit much in the Pixel Remaster.
I still haven’t been able to gain any proficiency past level 3/4, they straight up don’t give any at the moment, and my characters have been either dodging, parrying, or no selling most damage. I’m still meeting goblins, literally the first enemy.
Most enemies feel like spell levelling target practice and that’s it.
I’ve learned to be suspicious of any generously placed magic tome the game gives you, and I assumed the enemy would be weak to magic this time too so I didn’t waste too many MP like last week.
Firion investing in Blizzard paid off, it went down in a couple of turns.
Plot wise, that sure was a dark turn! Didn’t remember the 大戦艦 being this early in the game, or the cities getting bombed…
What I did remember, however, was that Guy speaks fluent Beaver. I think it’s the first time he has spoken since the very first scene.
5 Likes
The game feels vastly easier in the Pixel Remaster (the difference is much more noticeable than between the Famicom and PR versions of FF1 for instance). I couldn’t figure out why at first because the only obvious changes are the “HP adjust” option enabled by default (which automatically increases your max HP from time to time after encounters, even if you didn’t take any damage) and the automatic retargeting of enemies when they die. These two changes shouldn’t massively change the feel of the game, especially early on.
And then I found this table on the wiki:
This is the number of points necessary for going from one skill level to the next (be it weapons, spells etc…). On the Famicom it’s a flat 100 every time but for the PR it starts at only 20! You level your skills up literally 5x as fast early on, and still twice as fast by level 9! You need 300 total points to have a skill reach level 4 on Famicom, 70 on the remakes. This is a massive change.
This is a consequence of the above. To put it simply, the number of proficiency points you gain when you use a skill against enemies is roughly enemy_rank - skill_rank + other_stuff (with a minimum of 1). enemy_rank is an attribute of the monster, it’s 1 for goblins and 5 for the Adamantoise for instance. Basically the tougher the enemy the higher its rank. other_stuff is a modifier that depends on the skill, I think for spells it’s 3 for instance. There are other subtleties but that’s the general idea.
You see from the formula that the rank of the skill itself is subtracted from the points you earn, so for instance casting Fire 1 against a rank 5 adamantoise is going to net you a lot of points (7 by my count), meanwhile casting Fire 4 against a rank 1 goblin is going to only give you 1 point every time.
Since the skills level up so much faster on the PR, you also hit these diminishing returns much sooner.
5 Likes
Differences
Yeah it has drastically changed between the versions. My experience with the famicom one was that the trip through the ice cave was pretty grueling. Mostly very large enemy groups and the majority either included the bomb type enemies (the stronger variant can do like 80+ damage if we let them pop) or tons of those zombies and skull head things that load up status effects. Lots of poison, paralysis, and the permanently lingering blindness. So I felt the need to be throwing out spells to end fights quickly most of the time. I saved MP on the easiest fights but most demanded resources. Those double head enemies near the bottom of the dungeon hit super hard and tank a lot, too.
Our melee characters seem really unpredictable in usefulness too. I wonder if there’s any calculation for melee damage types against specific enemies? But even beyond that, on the same enemy, the variation is pretty big. The actual damage calculations seem to have a really wide range for the somewhat small numbers the game uses. Some of that must be the influence of how many hits we get, etc, but anyway the end effect is a melee character doing a quarter of the damage I expect at random.
4 Likes
Yeah absolutely, I had the same experience in my Famicom playthrough. Meanwhile I’m currently preparing next week’s thread using the Pixel Remaster and I just autobattle with たたかう only every single time (except for bombs) and it just works. It feels like I have cheats enabled, even though I’m playing with default settings.
You can probably understand why I was very worried for this club when I started with the Famicom version. This is not a beginner-friendly JRPG experience. I also understand why Square decided not to risk it in the USA in this state…
I still feel like they overcorrected a bit here.
3 Likes
I’ve been reading the version differences and it’s absolutely wild. They built a lot of it on the GBA release and it just goes around straight up multiplying every number in sight. I can’t 100% confirm the pixel remaster keeps this but I also see no mention of dropping it, but the GBA version also outright doubles the damage and healing impact of the relevant magic stats. Just wild swings of changes.
Honestly the dungeon dives are a little grueling and stressful but if they didn’t end with springing a trap that’s simultaneously agonizing and boring I’d like how they are; I don’t think the trip was that badly tuned. But yes absolutely I know I’m already way more into being pushed and stressed than most and I think the game beat me, so, lol.
4 Likes
Even compared to 1PR it’s waaaay easier. The first few dungeons in 1 I was buying 30+ potions and still going back to town halfway through. In 2 I just autobattle and one-shot everything. They definitely overcompensated.
5 Likes
Week 3
Yeah he’s pretty insignificant.. Whenever I see his name mentioned I go “..who?” for a second, before I remember
5 Likes
Interesting! I think multicasting however does not make any difference? Because if I nuke 7 goblins with a single Fire 4 it should give me 7 points which would mean it takes only 5-6 random encounters to level up in the pixel remaster, which has not been the case. So it’s simply times the spell is cast and not against how many targets… I’m going to keep this in mind to level some low level spells more efficiently
5 Likes
No it doesn’t matter, in fact the rank is given to the encounter as a whole, not individual monsters (since it must also work for healing spells that don’t involve targeting an enemy at all).
On the Famicom I believe that the rank of the encounter is the lowest rank of any enemy in it. So if you fight a rank 7 super monster the encounter rank is 7, but if your fight the same enemy accompanied by a rank 4 goon the encounter drops to rank 4.
I don’t know if it’s the same on the PR.
By the way in the Famicom there’s a glitch that can be abused to level up quickly: the point gain occurs when you select the action, not when it’s performed. In fact you can select an action like “cast esuna”, then cancel it and select something else, and esuna will still get points. You can select and cancel as many actions as you want every turn this way.
I believe that every other version fixes this.
5 Likes
I was looking at a PSX disc called “Final Fantasy Extra Collection” (which I think was bonus content sold with a collection of Famicom/Super Famicom FF games on the PSX) and it happens to have 3D models of some of the vehicles in those games, including the snow vehicle of FF2!
We learn here that canonically the 雪上船’s bottom has a special coating to reduce friction on snow.
And this is why you participate in this club. Where else would you have known about the codex entry in a random PSX bonus disc pertaining to the FF2 snow vehicle?
7 Likes
Bell of Awakening rang
What do you mean that’s the wrong game?
Week 3 Play Report
This week I felt like a yoyo, going back and forth between バフスク, ポフト, and アルテア, and then back again to サラマンド. And we had to revisit the mines briefly. This is the sort of busywork backtracking that more modern games try to avoid generally, and for good reason. None of it felt particularly meaningful and more like a way to pad out playtime. At least you could pick up on シド knowing something and get his dialogue ahead of time - saved at least one back and forth trip.
But on the other hand, after Final Fantasy 1 I do think it’s cool that something has tangibly changed the state of the world in a somewhat meaningful way, with the 大戦艦 attacking the towns you’ve been travelling between. Seeing the destruction and the NPCs talking about it was quite interesting. It was also very cool to see the scene at the end of the snow cave with ボーゲン - who had kind of been set up as a villain in an earlier scene. It’s not a lot, but it’s more than Final Fantasy 1 had really, so it’s nice to see that development. And the scene with ヨーセフ sacrificing himself to stop the boulder was another development that this extra attention to storytelling allowed for. Stuff like this is why I like to play series in order, even when the stories aren’t explicitly connected - I like to see the development over time and how the games evolve. Would I be that impressed if I’d come from playing Final Fantasy XI and hadn’t already played 1 to give it that context? Probably not
In general I’ve been finding the dungeons in this one nice, if a little boring in terms of mechanical design. I hope there’s a bit more to them as we go on, but they have some very nice visual design that at least keeps things interesting enough
5 Likes
Oh that’s what that sword does? I tried it for a fight or two but gave up on it as フィリオニール could barely land a hit with it. Maybe I should give it to ガイ in his offhand since he at least has another weapon to do damage with
3 Likes
I played the original Ys kind of just on the side and it was pretty fun - I’d say it’s well worth trying out that original version if only because it feels like it was fairly impressive for its time. It’s quite short too so not too much to commit to.
2 Likes
I’m working through the entire manga volume’s worth of text, so I haven’t done any dungeon crawling this week. My favorite part so far is finding out that Bogen, the guy who sounds so impressive in previous weeks, is a ladder-climbing failson whose employees hate him.
5 Likes
There’s also a fun bit of foreshadowing in his dialogue that I only caught in my 2nd playthrough.
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I have a kinda dumb question… should I be reading 大戦艦 as だいせんかん (like 大 + 戦艦) or たいせんかん (like 大戦 + 艦)?
6 Likes
