💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 5

[simias]

Final Fantasy 2 Beginner Club W05

Week 05	2026-01-30T15:00:00Z
Previous week	💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 4
Next week	💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 6
Home Threads	FFBC / FF2BC

Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

Final Fantasy II script

Stopping point

Once you’ve killed princess Hilda.

Note that I’m ignoring a location that’s technically accessible this week: 南の島. We could do it now but for pacing reason I decided to postpone it. If you end up going there earlier for whatever reason, I forgive you, but be careful with the spoilers for the other participants.

週刊完璧主義通信

The 竜騎士 keyword is technically missable if not learned this week before doing the Dist quest. Not knowing this keyword will prevent you from obtaining a powerful weapon much later.

You can learn this keyword from Gordon before leaving Altea (and I think you get a 2nd chance when you arrive in Dist and talk to one of the NPCs).

More details

Altea

The Dreadnought is no more! Unfortunately there’s no time to celebrate, as the king has come up with a plan to win the war. Go speak to him in his room and he’ll delegate new duties to his trusted followers: Gordon will lead his armies, Min’u shall depart on a journey to find where the Ultima magic is sealed. As for us, we are tasked with recruiting the dragon riding knights of Dist.

Go speak with Gordon in the audience room and learn the 竜騎士 keyword from him. Then immediately ask him about it to learn the 飛竜 keyword.

If you listen to the conversations form the various NPCs, you’ll gather that Dist is an island far away and you’ll need a boat to reach it. Off to the port city of Palm we go!

Palm

Just as you enter Palm you’ll notice a new woman standing there. She’s a sailor and her boat happens to be heading for Dist! ラッキー！

We’re on a boat!

After some negotiations with our new crewmates, we now have a boat! Like FF1, you will get encounters while on the boat. Unlike FF1, you don’t need a harbor to land, you can just pick any coastline.

So now we need to reach Dist. It’s on an island East of Salamander/Bafusk, but due to the topology of the world of FF2 the pathing is not obvious: you have to go south, pass through the narrow straight to reach the large ocean on the southern half of the map. There you can spot a small island on the map, the aptly named 南の島. As mentioned above, I’m ignoring this location for the time being, we’ll have the opportunity to visit it later^[1].

If you keep going South you should eventually wrap around to the far North of the map and you’ll reach the snow field we visited not long ago. Follow it Eastwards and you’ll eventually reach the end of the main landmass, with Dist awaiting close by to the South East.

Dist doesn’t have any inn or shops, if you want to rest before exploring the island, you can just drop by Bafsk which is very close on the mainland. You can also stock a few cottages to camp on the island.

Dist castle

Your first stop should be the castle. There you will quickly figure out that you’re looking for a pendant hidden in a cave to the north. There also are a bunch of chests you can loot before you go on your expedition.

Exit the castle and find the cave entrance a little way northward.

Dist cave, demo version

This cave is fairly large but our immediate objective is just to fetch the pendant. In order to do this you can go straight to the right from the entrance until you find a staircase leading down. There are other staircases on this level but you can ignore them for now, we’ll have the opportunity to come back and explore the rest of the cave soon.

The staircase will lead you to a small room with the remains of a Dragon Knight. Inspect them to recover the pendant. You can now return to the castle.

Dist castle, revisited

After your short dive in the cave, and with the pendant in your possession, you can make progress with the inhabitants of the castle. You will be given a new quest which will take you… to the same cave, once again.

Dist cave, full release

Time to investigate the bowels of the cave until you reach the spring at the bottom. You’re probably used to the dungeon design of this game by now: a lot of dead ends, which means a lot of trial and error to find the right path. Once you’ve reached the spring you can select the egg through the だいじなもの menu and then teleport away.

You can return to the castle to report your success or return straight to Altea. If you don’t want to sail the long way back you can just cross the sea to the South-East of Dist and you’ll land not far from Finn.

Altea

The princess is in her room, located to the bottom-right of the main rebellion headquarter hall (below the king’s). Go kill her.

Map

Dist is the large island to the South East in this view. The small island in the middle of the ocean is the 南の島 that we’re ignoring for now.

Miscellaneous

Conflicting topologies

As I mentioned previously, the topology of FF2’s world is particularly tricky. It uses the same toroidal map design as most classical JRPGs, but where most games have a large ocean where the map wraps around (like FF1 did), here we have land stretching and connecting in all directions. Last week it let us travel to the Dreadnought that was on the south-east corner of the map by walking north-west from Altea. This week it made us cross the ocean to the south in order to travel to an island located to the North-East.

It’s rather confusing but at least in the pixel remaster you have access to full map at any moment to plot your route. Meanwhile in the Famicom map looks like this:

As you can see only a portion of the map is visible at any moment, and it deforms it to make it look spherical (even though, once again, it doesn’t really work as a sphere). Later games (such as FF8, maybe others) will use a similar trick.

It’s a bit confusing but at least the game lets you pan across the map at your leisure with the arrow keys. Unfortunately, probably due to the weak hardware and the cost of doing that faux-globe projection, it’s extremely slow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwW-v15wXY0

While doing my first Famicom playthrough I just ended up looking up a map on my computer instead…

Read this after you’re done with this week:

A magnificient creature

This week contains what was for me the most memorable moment of my first playthrough of FF2 a couple of months ago. I was playing through the Famicom version and, as noted above, I found the map really tricky to use. On top of that I wasn’t really sure about where Dist was even located, so I decided to look up a walkthrough online to figure out where I was supposed to go.

The page I found was for a remake (the GBC version I think) and had some gameplay screenshots, including one of the Wyvern:

The one in the Pixel Remaster looks very similar:

I was annoyed that my laziness spoiled me the wyvern before I got there myself, but such is life.

So I finally arrive in the castle, talk to the NPCs then enter the room where the wyvern is supposed to be:

How exciting! I was really curious to see how the Famicom sprite looked like. The devs really did a good job with a lot of the monster sprites in these games so far given the technical limitations, so I expected some quality 8bit pixel art.

So I walk forward, and the majestic wyvern appears:

It genuinely made me laugh.

LOOK AT IT:

gollum-ass mofo.

I like this sprite so much that I modified the emulator to extract it:

Yes there’s a random black line one pixel below. Is it meant to be a shadow? But then does it mean that it’s flying? Or just a visual glitch? Who knows.

1:1 version:

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

---

1. I’ve seen people online argue that, enemy-level-wise, it makes more sense to visit it now since we’ll be pretty overleveled by the time we get to it with my schedule. It’s probably true but I decided to go with what made most sense to me pace-wise, difficulty curve be damned. ↩︎

[Cruciarius]

I would suggest changing the stopping point description, got spoiled hard =) I hope it is some sort of doppelganger, not real Hilda.
Maybe to something like 'Once you kill a character you knew for a long time"?

[simias]

I try to avoid spoilers as much as possible in these sections but I thought it was funny for once.

I won’t make a habit out of it, I promise.

[frequent4832]

Surely this week won’t have any dungeons full of trap rooms, right? …Right?

[simias]

Not that many actually. The devs got a bit more creative this time. Muhaha.

[Sisthra]

First half of Week 5

So, funny thing about this week, when first going into the cave I casually missed the first area with the pendant where you are supposed to go and instead dove down straight to the bottom floor. I hadn’t rested from last week so MP was limited and I was starting to struggle quite a bit… The enemy feel like quite the difficulty spike!
There’s those Remnants skeleton that drain a ton of health, レイラ is sadly useless most of the time (should probably teach her some more magic? But I don’t know how long she will stay with us so I don’t know if I really want to bother), those Hill gigas hit HARD and are quite resistant to everything… I actually got in view of the spring before four poison frogs that got hands made me give up and teleport the hell out. Went back in, explored the first floor better, got the pendant.
“That makes a lot more sense”
Spent the night in a cottage to recover all HP/MP and then will go back in.
I laughed a lot when I opened a chest and was greeted by not 1 but FOUR surprise turtles.
Speaking of plot, dragon knights!!!

(I was doubly happy because I casually JUST learned all the various “horse riding/knight” kanji in Wanikani in the last level!)

I remember being really surprised at this first time I played the game, I think having the classic fantasy dragon riding knights be casually exterminated by the empire works really well in showing the power imbalance between the two factions.
(Even if they had to resort to poisoning their water to do it).
You hear about asking the famous dragon riders of ディスト for help and when you arrive there everything is already a smoking pile of ruins.
Welp.

[Sisthra]

Second half of Week 5

Finished the dungeon. The bridge trap was kind of funny, if you use the spell that brings you to the previous floor of the dungeon it brings you right back over that bridge.
Gave the fire bow to レイラ and she did a lot better.
The Lamia Queen was literally the only boss I remember from my previous play through lol
She stuck to only charming Firion and Guy to the point I thought “ahah, of course she only casts that spell on men”, then she did it to Leila.
I like to think that she swings both ways.
There’s some funny dialogue from the kids in the rebel hideout before you go see Hilia.
“I saw the princess eat a rat”

Cool that we’re already halfway through!

[simias]

on murdering princesses

@Sisthra

“I saw the queen eat a rat”

I missed this one! I only noticed the people who say that she keeps laughing.

Replaying the game I guess it should have been obvious that something was off when she didn’t attend her father’s death (and it’s odd that nobody remarked on that I suppose, especially given how involved she had been until now). That’s why I decided to “spoil” it in the post, I thought it was funnier if you knew it was coming but didn’t know how or why.

One thing that I do find strange is that it almost certainly means that the princess we saved from the Dreadnought was the doppelganger (I don’t think it’s explicitly acknowledged, but it wouldn’t make sense for the swap to occur afterwards). But then, when you talk to her in the dreadnought she’s in the same cell as Cid and there’s nothing off with her dialogue as far as I can tell. I thought it would have been fun if they had foreshadowed that something was wrong with her even then.

[Daisoujou]

When they went on to make Romancing SaGa 2 there is in fact a boss where one of the best means of defense is not bringing men.

[frequent4832]

@simias

It’s a bit confusing but at least the game lets you pan across the map at your leisure with the arrow keys. Unfortunately, probably due to the weak hardware and the cost of doing that faux-globe projection, it’s extremely slow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwW-v15wXY0

That video is hilarious to me. I just imagine a developer building it as a proof of concept, thinking “I’ll optimize it later,” and running up against either time constraints or hardware limitations. Presumably someone asked “could we just make it a flat map” and the overworked dev absolutely refused because of all the time he’d already invested in this technically impressive but nearly useless feature.

[VikingSchism]

The opposite is sort of true in Yakuza 7

(spoilers for Yakuza 7) In the Kiryu boss-fight, he is scripted so that he prioritises targeting men over women. This might make it sound like you should have more women in your party, but if Ichiban dies then you game over. So the best defence is having more men so that Ichiban is less likely to eat damage

[Daisoujou]

Midway progress report

I’ve enjoyed Gordon’s little arc, best of luck to him from here

The little story with the pirates(?) was fun. They look very silly.

That said, I liked getting Gordon as a weak guy – it tied into his character and was a fun inversion once to be taking on and training up the weakling. Immediately hitting us with レイラ also being bad is now asking a bit much I think. These ideas feels a little at odds with themselves. Rotating the 4th slot is very cool for storytelling and I like that. But with the growth systems they have here it ends up making you restart getting these people off the ground too much. And the potential to make us play around the new character doesn’t work because you have to commit too hard to your characters doing one thing; there’s not room for flexibility. Not ruining the game for me but it’s a negative in how these two things are in conflict for sure.

I like working around the weird shape of this world and sailing is nice and freeing without docks. My main question is what the hell is up with these guys?

They’re really impressive looking because the game hasn’t played with enemy scale like this much up to this point, but this is probably the most I’ve felt smacked in the face by a difficulty spike so far. We’ve managed to survive but it feels like a boss fight every time they show up. Also shoutout to encounters where 4 enemies all cast full party AoE spells at famicom speeds where you watch the spell do each effect very slowly and deliberately. Rushing to kill those guys just so I don’t sit through another cast.

I stopped after doing our demo run of the cave and I’m kind of afraid of having to go back in but I’ll give it my best shot in a day or two…

Oh and since the famicom has no kanji I have to say 飛龍 got me, had to look that one up when it’s just ひりゅう. 竜騎士 was easy if for no reason other than that’s the When They Cry guy.

[frequent4832]

New character

How is everyone building Layla? Unlike the other characters she doesn’t seem to come with a clear role. I gave her a bow and put her in the backline but she kind of sucks at it. I can’t give her my best bow though because it’s unique and she’ll inevitably walk away with it after another dungeon or two.

[Daisoujou]

Build

Honestly at the moment I’m just being pushed by what the game is making me do because I did some basic work getting her extra MP and more or less outside one shot range but didn’t feel like devoting a few hours to getting her to be an equal contributor. She looked pretty split between her starting dagger/sword stuff IIRC and the magic, so I wanted to just use attack on those weapon types and see if she could chip in without needing to go get her more magic books, focus harder on her MP pool, etc. But then we immediately ran into enemies that with her best weapon types she’s just doing 0 damage to and the thunder spell she came with will at least chip in 70 or something so it looks like she’s a caster

I’m just hoping my overtrained 500 MP Maria carries us

[simias]

reply

@Daisoujou

Immediately hitting us with レイラ also being bad is now asking a bit much I think.

Yeah I thought it was a bit weird as well. Especially since she starts with the Thunder spell but is not particularly good at casting it. And she’s clearly meant to be competent as a pirate leader.

I feel like they just messed up the balance of her character’s starting stats.

@Daisoujou

Rotating the 4th slot is very cool for storytelling and I like that. But with the growth systems they have here it ends up making you restart getting these people off the ground too much.

I have more thoughts on this but I don’t think I can get into it without spoiling upcoming things, I’ll postpone.

@Daisoujou

My main question is what the hell is up with these guys?

Yeah they’re no joke in the original. I think you said that you didn’t get the berserk spell? You can hunt the sorcerers that have it right across from the sea on the East, just saying.

[Daisoujou]

@simias

Yeah they’re no joke in the original. I think you said that you didn’t get the berserk spell? You can hunt the sorcerers that have it right across from the sea on the East, just saying.

East of where we are now? Maybe I’ll have to give it another quick try. Before in the dreadnought area I did try briefly but it just kept spawning those ogres only. But yeah the melee characters aren’t doing much, so…

I did kill a few captains in that early town which didn’t seem to be boosting levels as quickly as I hoped, but they dropped a toad book. Every time I try a spell like that it misses but I need to make someone into a frog at least once cause it’s funny.

[simias]

Yeah the place where the Dreadnought was is just East of Dist, thanks to the weird topology.

[simias]

Hill Gigas

By the way the fanwiki has the artwork of the hill gigas by Amano:

[Kelsyy]

This week

Despite having played this game only a year ago, I still fell for the bridge. Darnit.

I remembered from a few weeks ago that simias had said how the stat growths actually work so I tried it out in the cave once I realized I could actually level up my sword skills on Firion. I was able to get his sword skill to 15 (boosts), 1 away from max I think. Wow, I don’t think I would have disliked the game as much the first time had I known this as that was my biggest issue (all the trap rooms being a close second…) and it’s why the game is at the bottom of my list. I basically had gotten stuck with stat growths by the time we got to week 7? or so and I got really frustrated. Maybe it will surpass FF3 PR by the end…?

[JupiterJesus]

Huh, that’s exactly what they look like in FF6.