My second attempt at playing through FFII

Not to bore you but I'd like to give some thotz on my experience with FFII so far..

I first meddled briefly with the translation of this game long ago but couldn't be arsed to get into it, then I got FF Origins when it came out.. Back then I was a young noob and probably not smart enough to browse some FAQs which help immensely with older FFs. I think I got as far as the warship which most people get stuck at apparently.

Recently I have been forced to play nothing but old snes/nes/gba roms due to my videocard sh*tting itself and unable to run anything 3d. :mad: So I began FF Dawn of Souls, got through FF1 before getting bored at how ridiculously easy it is. I beat the original long ago and it was a true challenge.. So I decided to play the NES one again and I caught the 8-bit bug. Determined to beat FFII once and for all, I began my campaign in FFIIj.. (never mind dawn of souls FFII, i want the real deal)

My first thoughts were that I will have to grind forever.. But reading about the exploits that were in the game helped a ton. I don't consider it cheating if the programmers didn't know any better. I think it was intentional.. I mean really.. Kranky Kong was just exagerating anyway, games were never meant to be THAT tedious. It still is quite tedious if you have a penchant for leveling every little aspect your compulsive mind sees fit. It boggles the mind to imagine some lonely japanese kid in the late 80s leveling every single spell to level 16 purely by battling constantly. I mean.. people must have done that.. that must have been painful.

I like a game that's painful, it makes it more satisfying. Anyway, my first thoughts when not compulsively attempting to level whatever stats I could were that this game smacks of classicness, just like FF1.. later tho it started to feel like the dungeons were lacking the epicness of the first FF. FF1 didn't have that many dungeons, so they all felt pretty fresh and had interesting and puzzling layouts. FFII is just, run around here, get treasure, check next floor, repeat..
And holy f*** the encounter rate is frustratingly high.. at a certain point none of the enemies are a challenge if youre uber enough to level yourself properly.. the real challenge is being patient enough to sit through rows of magic wielding ogres casting those slow ass magic sequences on your characters over and over..

one life saver i discovered tho: THE TOGGLE FUNCTION .. most emulators have a fast forward function. VirtuaNES has it anyway, as well as Zsnes. You can bind it to a key. So i bound it to the R1 on my gamepad and now i just hold A and watch my guys plow through rows of enemies without even targeting them... also makes running from point A to point B much more bearable.. however, doing this takes away some of the experience... I guess I would only recommend doing this for leveling spells and when enemies cast magic on your entire party.

so yeah.. I am at the mysidia tower now. Firion is my black mage and sword/shield guy.. even tho supposedly thats not ideal.. Maria is the white mage and has full soul.. Guy is a mix, kind of like the time mage.. its annoying that you cant have a pure black or white mage caster because you cant actually fit every spell of that class into their magic cache.. that's why i made guy the 'time mage', he gets the warp/exit/stop/stun stuff.. as well as some necessities like cure/life/heal ... i dunno what this change trick pap is about but it sounds even more exploitish to me and this game cant get any easier without having to do more tedious grinding... so in a way the one thing this game requires isnt skill but PATIENCE..

i'll probably have it completed in a few days.. /end long ass dribble

Remember, Ultima is white magic in this game :p

I'm also playing through the game again (mostly cause I'm writing a few basic FAQs) and to be honest, its been a bit of a blast really. I'm on the Origins version and if anything has saved my sanity it's the Memory cursor option cause that makes spamming the command/cancel for magic so much easier...

Right now, I'm mostly playing with weapon mechanics and stat mechanics so I haven't even left Altair yet. :sweatdrop:

So after two weeks of strenuous spell leveling with a wonky controller I finally completed it.... only to realize I didn't need to bother with half the spells. All you really need is a decent healer.. and then go smursmurfing rampage the Emporer with your best warrior. I suppose that's the major downfall with older rpgs, it's never that satisfying come the end of it.. but the idea that you did beat it is what its all about..

so yes, that's right niggas. I beat FF1, I beat FF2, and you better believe I beat FF3. and 4. and 5. and 6. etc

I can sleep better at night.:redface:

The only good thing about maxing the spells is that they raise the attack power of the Ultima spell for each one maxed out apparently. I'll be testing this in my playthrough but I'm still hung up on figuring out mechanics for the moment to advance the story.