💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 9

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Final Fantasy 2 Beginner Club W09

Week 09 2026-02-27T15:00:00Z
Previous week 💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 8
Next week 💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 10
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Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

Stopping point

At the end of the 2nd dungeon this week. I can’t think of a way to describe the stopping point more specifically without getting into heavy spoilers


é€±ćˆŠćźŒç’§äž»çŸ©é€šäżĄ

Paul’s stash

There’s a brief window of time at the beginning of this week where you can gain access to Paul’s stash in Finn. If you miss it you’ll never be able to collect its treasures which include a very powerful Blood Sword.

In order to get it you have to mention the ç«œć·» to him after you learn the keyword from Hilda and before you proceed to this week’s first dungeon.

Keywords

The ç«œć·» keyword can be missed if not learned before using the pendant at the start of this week. The Paramekia keyword can be missed if not learned before starting the 2nd dungeon. Both keywords are taught by Hilda.

Non-revisitable dungeon

Both dungeons this week can’t be revisited once completed.

The second dungeon contains a few unique monsters you’ll have to kill to complete the bestiary if you care about that:

More details

Last week we have collected Ultima, although it cost Min’u his life. Then we discovered that in the meantime the Empire managed to destroy the cities of Altea, Gatea, Palm and Poft. Finn is next, we must do something!

Finn Castle

Go talk to Hilda and learn the ç«œć·» keyword. We need to find a way to enter the tornado (cyclone in the English version). It seems that this wyvern we helped hatch a while ago could be helpful, but before we worry about that we should go visit Paul in his house in Finn Town.

Finn Town

Mention ç«œć·» to Paul and he’ll be so impressed by the prospect of your suicide mission that he’ll give you the コツ to access his secret stash. Go next to his bed and interact with the wall to open a hidden path. Beyond you’ll find a bunch of chests which powerful items. If you want to learn more about the Blood Sword, read the dedicated section below.

Finn Castle redux

Now we can proceed with the main quest. Return to Castle Finn and go to the room with the giant mirror. You have to take the West staircase on the ground floor of the castle to reach it.

Interact with the mirror using the pendant that we found in Dist in order to summon the wyvern.

The tornado

You can now enter the tornado. You may be surprised to discover that it’s just a fairly normal dungeon. Climb to the top and defeat the boss.

After that you’ll be teleported back to Finn.

Fin(n)

Unfortunately we don’t have time to celebrate, it’s time to put an end to the Paramekian empire once and for all before they have the time to regroup.

Learn the “Paramekia” keyword from Hilda. If you interrogate her, Leila and Gordon, you’ll learn that it’s going to be hard to infiltrate the Paramekian castle, but Paul may have some advice.

So let’s return to Paul once more in town. He won’t have much of interest to tell us, but Cid is visiting him! Talk to him to find out that his flying ship survived the tornado in Poft, so we can go there and collect it.

Walk or sail your way to the ruins of Poft and claim your pristine flying ship!

Then don’t forget to rest before launching the attack on Paramekia.

Paramekian Castle

Once you’re ready, simply land directly on the Paramekian Castle (located right behind the arena) and prepare to fight your way through yet another dungeon. Note that I’m pretty sure that you can’t leave or teleport out of the Castle in the original Famicom version, but teleport seems to function in the Pixel Remaster so I could be wrong.

This is another non-revisitable dungeon with unique enemies, so make sure to check the é€±ćˆŠćźŒç’§äž»çŸ©é€šäżĄ above for the details if you care about that.

When you complete the dungeon a cutscene will take you back to Finn. This week ends when you regain control.

Map

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Miscellaneous

Blood sword

This week finally everybody has access to the Blood Sword (the Famicom version had another copy in the Finn castle basement, but remakes only have the one in Paul’s stash).

If you look at the sword’s stats, it grants 0 bonus to attack and has a 100% magic penalty, making it by far the worst weapon in the game. So what’s the big deal? Well the sword has a special effect that drains 1/16th of the enemy’s max HP with each hit.

Note that it’s per hit, not attack. If your attack does 4 hits, you end up draining a quarter of the enemy’s max HP on top of whatever base damage you deal. For bosses with high HP, and especially if you cast haste to increase the number of hits, you can deal tremendous amounts of damage.

To give you an example, here’s the outcome of attacking the final boss with the weapon that has the highest attack stat in the game:

hit-base
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Here’s the same character hitting with the Blood Sword:

hit-bs
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So, a slight increase.

Here’s what it looks like with Blood Sword + Haste + Berserk:

hit-bs-haste
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Now you may be surprised to see that the value dropped a lot, but it turns out that it’s a display bug in the Famicom version: it doesn’t seem to be able to correctly display damage above 9999. The game still seems to calculate the real damage correctly in the background however, because this attack literally one-shot the final boss.

Note that there are drawbacks however: undead enemies invert the effect of drain spells, and that extends to the Blood Sword. On top of that since the drain effect is based on the enemy’s max HP, the damage differential for random enemies with low HP is not quite as impressive.

As a result if you decide to use the sword you may still prefer to keep it only for boss fights.

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
0 voters
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:ring: Final Fantasy 2 - Week 10
:ring: Final Fantasy 2 - Week 8
:ring: Final Fantasy 2 Beginner Club - Home Thread
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Last chance to make proposals for next week’s polls by the way. On top of what we had for FF1 I’m thinking of “best party member” (since they have a personality this time!).

I guess we could have “favorite useless door in a dungeon” but unfortunately I think that Discourse only allows 20 entries per poll.

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Best useless plot point :sob:

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Favourite party member and favourite meat shield should be distinct categories

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Just noticed that if you go to Deist and talk to the mother and child, the child is (I think) named Kain. He’s the son of a Dragoon, who died.

FF4

Kain’s backstory in FF4 is that he was the son of a dragoon, and his father passed, so the king took him in as an orphan. He became a Dragoon to honor his father’s legacy. The original english FF2 translation SKIPS this part of his backstory!

FF4 is chock full of references to FF2 that I never even knew were there since we never got to play it.

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Yeah I noticed a few other references, it’s interesting.

You should tag your spoiler so that people know it’s for FF4 (although I don’t think it’s particularly spoilery)

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By the way I’m happy that somebody noticed that, since it’s effectively a setup for something we’ll do next week. In my original playthrough a few months ago I completely missed that, so the “payoff” felt a bit random.

I recommend visiting Dist before doing the 2nd dungeon this week if you haven’t already.

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By the way, Aspire is vastly more powerful on Famicom. In the PR it only lets you get MP from enemies that actually have them (otherwise you drain 0). In the Famicom it works on all non-undead enemies.

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About this week

The scene where the emperor comes back is still really cool.

Lol I don’t have the revive spell, and I dunno where to get it, so Richard has been ragdolling all week. Maybe Leonheart will be more useful.

Next week has my favorite (and tbh probably only favorite) “thing” in the game, I’ve been looking forward to it, hype for the end.

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Managed to find one guy in the entire dungeon that Maria could steal MP from.

I put a certain overpowered weapon in my offhand, and it ONLY does 0 damage against all enemies and the boss. I haven’t gone back in to try and put it in my main hand.

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First half

The first half of this week took way longer than it should have because I spent a bit of time trying to level up Ultima. For now it hits for 500 at level 7, which
 Doesn’t really make it worthy when Firion dual wielding two swords can hit for almost 3 times that. But I’m doing it for the plot.
That one trap chest in the cyclone with the two generals wiped me first try, they hit HARD.
I kind of liked the battle against the emperor where he sends waves of mooks at you, but the party is literally fighting step by step forward starting a new fight each time instead of simply new enemies appearing.
It was a nice touch!
Also had a chuckle at the emperor, being a pompous bastard, using an Elixir mid battle to heal himself, it reminded me of the stronger Gym Leaders in Pokémon using Full Restore instead of Hyper Potion to show that they mean business.
He also dropped an elixir I like to think he was still trying to use before the party destroyed him.
(The last hit also accidentally happened to be Ultima because he cast Slow on the whole party to the point we were doing two digit damage
 Does high level basuna cure Slow? My Shin Megami Tensei influenced ass went “surely if I use Haste the effects will cancel each other, right??” buuuuut I forgot FF doesn’t work that way lol)
Will do the second dungeon later this week.
Also got a “dragon flute”(?) from another trap chest that had a dragon in it, the description wasn’t exactly clear about what it did
 And since it seems to be single use like the other items that simulate spell effects, I was afraid to waste it. I will have to look it up.
(Is it equivalent to a caste of Flare?)

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Can confirm that I played around with the Blood Sword in Firion’s dominant hand and it also did 0 damage always against normal enemies. Didn’t try it on bosses because I forgot to swap weapons before the battle

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It’s ăƒŹă‚€ă‚ș, found in Salamander and Myssidia.

I was playing with exactly this setup earlier today as I was going through the final dungeon and I also found that the damage was very inconsistent. I wonder if they changed the formula for the Pixel Remaster or if there’s something else at play.

Fortunately next week’s dungeon is filled with magic enemies, so Aspire is extremely good there.

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Yeah I also tried leveling up Ultima and Flare in the Pixel Remaster and concluded that it wasn’t worth it. I think they should have given at least one of them earlier (maybe Flare could have been the Sun Flame for instance?) but at this point you’re better off leveling up haste and berserk and use physical attacks instead.

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Wind Flute maybe? It casts ç«œć·» I believe (fitting for the dungeon). I never bother using these items, I just hoard then (or in the Famicom version, sell them).

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Oh, my damage with it was VERY consistent.

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Oh right, that’s it. I misread lol.
That does make sense

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Week 9

Even more dead allies. I don’t even know why Cid had to die, and I didn’t realize he was dying until he disappeared.

Dungeons were uneventful and not super interesting. Blood sword did nothing at all, never doing more than 0 damage against anything at lvl 10 sword skill, not even the Emperor. The emperor himself was a simple fight, but perhaps by striking him down we only made him stronger
?

The most exciting non-plot moment was yet another surprise chest that will obliterate your party without warning or any way to stop it from happening. A chest with lamia and a bunch of
 was it snakes?.. paralyzed my whole party, then appeared to use instant death normal attacks until everyone died. Fair.

Some random questions:

Why in the heck does Paul claim he infiltrated the palace by riding an octopus?
Why do we let Leonhart join the rebels literal minutes after he exposes himself as some kind of fascist, racial supremacist psycho? I didn’t read anything indicating that he was a puppet, or that he changed his mind or anything. The weak shall submit to the strong or die, and all that. The only thing that changed was that
 the emperor’s real scary now.

Word of the Week

èĄ€ç„­ă‚Š BLOOD FESTIVAL
Runners up:
èș«ăźă»ă©çŸ„らず YOU FORGET YOUR PLACE!
è™«ă‚±ăƒ© WORM!

Man the demon emperor has some good lines.

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reply

Not snakes:

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Coeurl_(Final_Fantasy_II)

Yeah they’re nasty.

In context I suspect that it’s 懧, not 蛞. Would be worth checking with the English script.

When you’re a dark knight, they let you do it.

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Second half

Not much to say about the second dungeon of the week, except for that one trap chest that held the 皇澝ぼć‘Șい (sneaky foreshadowing?). That caught me by surprise because a palette swap of THE major story villain is not something I can say I remember seeing before. I actually enjoyed Richard as a guest party member, he kicked ass.

It’s probably 懧, yeah. Especially since in the Famicon version Paul is a ninja, so I think it’s supposed to be one of those “kites” that ninja use in popular media to fly around.

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On his way to steal the 皇澝’s stuff!

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