Were you single-targetting or multi-targetting? When you muti-target you lose one level IIRC.
I was aghast when I realized that the towns had been completely razed, I knew that FF2 had a reputation for being rather dark but that’s an insane amount of senseless murder so far. Basically half the world population decimated.
It does make the whole Utima quest feel even more wasteful though. Not only is the spell functionally useless in the Famicom version (and not particularly necessary in the others) but we paid such an insane price for it!
Single targeting, I was wondering if there was a miss chance like a lot of things in this game have but if not that maybe the info I was getting on sufficient level was based on a different version or something.
At least my ultima should work properly with my Famicom bug fix patch. I tested once and its damage was respectable enough for a level 1 spell, I think.
Side note I’m enjoying the history of this series and coming around to liking FF2 despite all its idiosyncrasies but I am looking forward to reaching the point in the series down the line where the text increases enough that I feel like I’m doing Japanese practice with this club, haha. I think we’ve been reading 3 lines in between dungeon dives for a while now.
I just got past the first boss in ff4. Depending on how you mark out week 1 it could be double the character count of any week one we’ve done so far. There are actual conversations in this one, and they happen all the damn time without warning, text heavy cutscenes too. I wonder if ff5 before 4 would be a more gradual increase in difficulty.
The only thing that might make 5 harder is the use of kanji if you play the snes roms and your kanji knowledge is rough. I could be wrong though, but what I’ve played the start of both suggests 4 has more text.
I might be going too hardcore on my version of the spreadsheet but I’m having fun. By the time i finish, it would legitimately be comprehensive enough to make for a fan translation patch and barebones walkthrough.
After months in the nes mines, ff4 feels so much better to play, and i haven’t revisited it since i was a teen.
I think @LazyWerebear can automatically dump the text from the Pixel Remaster, I was thinking to rely more on that starting from 4 since it seems like it will eventually become very tedious to manually transcribe everything.
The leviathan was padding sure, but might be one of the more memorable dungeons for me just for the fun nature of making the interior all fleshy and the damage floors stomach acid. The tower itself was a bit of a slog, and 99% of fights in there were solvable by just sticking on auto-battle. None of the elemental giants were a problem, they all fell to basic attack spam (ガイ with the defense-lowering sword is too powerful). I did think it was cool to get a dragon knight as a party member considering how they’d been built up earlier in the game, and yeah he hits like a truck. Shame he starts off with no health.
I loved the stomach dungeon we did first. Very fun area, and definitely worth talking to the old man in the town area.
The tower on the other hand may have outstayed its welcome, though the shifting sections was cool. I think at the second mini-boss would have been about the perfect length but it outstayed its welcome, and the lack of a really climactic fight at the end was a shame.
I’m looking forward to seeing where the game goes now that we’re nearing the end.
I was actually surprised at how short the leviathan was. I like to think that we at least gave a ride to the other poor guys stuck there, like that one guy that mentions being there for 10 years…
I got two in that chest, I still find it funny that for some reason they made these encounters randomised…
“I only got one chimera in that chest”
“I got four”
Sounds like the kind of playground rumours kids would talk about at school. Wonder if that was the intention.
The first two gygas were pretty anticlimatic but the Thunder Gygas hit HARD. Nothing too difficult to manage but there were a couple of close calls when it oneshot Maria.
Who did everyone teach Ultima to?
I choose Firion because he’s the protagonist and he actually has quite a lot of spells and weapon skills leveled up.
My levels are not that high (8/9 at most) since I haven’t actively been grinding proficiency but we’ll see how it goes.
There’s going to be a bit of overlap since he will also get the Blood Sword (he’s holding it right there on the game cover after all), but it should work out fine. Blood Sword for bosses, Ultima for trash mobs.
I’ll try to make Ultima the final blow against the final boss in Min’wu’s honour!
