I'm currently playing through FFII again. Nowhere in the game is this necessary. Just strategy, mixing magic and weapons. Well, that and don't sell your weapons that inflict status ailments. They really do make the toughest enemies easier, even all the way to end game. For instance, I always keep the Ancient Sword. It's a great weapon against Gigas enemies or anything with a high defense. I've played this a couple time, and I'm going through it again. Mainly the grinding I've done is for Gil and maybe for some extra MP. Leveling up weapons and spells is pretty minimal, too. Sorry mods for going off topic like this. I like to respond whenever I see people think they need to beat themselves up to win the game. I just want to people to realize FF II can be fun!
Back to FF V. I do remember I had a terrible time trying to beat Ex-Death at the end. I even did level grinding throughout the game, and I though I was careful enough to exploit various job skills for my party. Nope. In the end, I had to go online and find strategies. I ended up using that one chemical mix that skips the second form entirely. Next time, I will beat it the proper way!
Last edited by Electroshock Therapy; 01-13-2015 at 02:13 AM.
I haven't been finding the game especially hard so far. Atomos almost got me until I discovered how much shell was reducing his damage, and I had to take a couple of stabs at Liquiflame. It seems to depend on how you build your party to a great extent, and now that I've got the hang of knowing what I always need and how to seriously implement that so I have an effective spread of magic, various damage options, etc. it's become pretty easy for the most part.
Sometimes you come up against enemies that always wreck you though. I cannot for the life of me safely beat Blue Dragons in ExDeath's tower. Red Dragons sure, no problem, but without ice-absorb gear I can't survive Blue Dragons for long at all, and even with it it takes an age to chip their health down.
Without looking back to that time, it's easy to say "yeah, this game is easy" but back then it was one of the more challenging games to wrap your head around with regards to the job system. If you leveled up the wrong jobs at the wrong time, and equipped the wrong passive abilities without understanding them, then you were in for some hell.
I find this game to definitely be up there on the challenge scale, even to this day. Every other game has some kind of kink that totally destroys it, that a normal person can figure out in 10 seconds, or is so painfully easy that you don't even have to try (hello, FFVII).
Xenogears is the tragic story of how your whole life can take a crappy turn, just because you happened to see a lady in a wedding dress before her wedding.
This boy is crackin' up, this boy has broken down
This boy is crackin' up, this boy has broke down