A Full Final Fantasy Fmarathon (Community Edition)

[remy5623]

I love the character progression system in FFII! And it's kind of funny to hear you say your biggest problem is money. I remember it being like that for a short while in the beginning, but pretty soon after Semmitt Falls I ended up having more than enough money for everything I needed. By the time I got to Mysidia, I was sitting on piles and piles of cash with nothing to spend it on .

[Fynn]

Maybe that’s the thing and I’m just at the point before money stops becoming a problem Also, the inn costs are very high if you drain Minwu of most of his HP and MP. I didn’t even know that was what the cost depends on

[remy5623]

Ah, true, the prices at the inns skyrocket when you get really low on HP/MP.

[Fynn]

I wish it were made clear which spells are white and which are black from the getgo. Since one raises spirit and the other raises intelligence, I think it’s a pretty crucial thing to know before I teach them to my mages

[Wolf Kanno]

Yeah FFII is very coy about how all of it's mechanics work. Another hallmark of Kawazu's design philosophy for anyone who has ventured into his other series.

For money woes, the big thing to know in the early game is that you have to kill all the enemies, you get a penalty if any run away. The best way to get money is by selling items that they drop, especially magic scrolls. One of the best early game power leveling tips is to get your barehanded strong enough with your team to be able to pick fights with the imperial captains in Fynn. In addition to having one of the highest enemy levels for a good chunk of the game, they drop Flame Bows and Toad and Curse Scrolls and even Gold Armor. Most of those items will make farming them easier, and you can sell them for a small fortune. Once you get the canoe, you can then try to get to Mysidia early in order to purchase the Swap spell for the rest of your team.

Don't worry about getting high level magic though. Technically after a certain level, their effectiveness increase is marginal at best. So getting magic up to level 8 or 9 is probably for the best unless you're hoping to see all the cool new animations in the remake. You'll want the basic three elemental spells and Flare to be decently leveled, but you should focus on healing, life, and buff spells the most.

[remy5623]

My biggest regret when I got to the Emperor in Pandaemonium was not having Flare past level 5 on anyone. It and Ultima are the only things that seem to do decent damage to him.

[ham]

I support! This is an endeavor I've been doing for quite some time now. My list is sort of similar but it will include all the spin-off Final Fantasy titles as well! I'll be looking forward to hearing your progress.

I dubbed my marathon "Quest to Play Final Fantasy", maybe we could come up with a cool title that would generally be accepted by the community for those of us who take on this pilgrimage.

It's gotten to the point where I've procured a PS2 & PS3 to have access to older games like FF7: Dirge of Cerberus for sake of playing through as much of the Final Fantasy based titles as possible.

[qwertysaur]

My biggest regret when I got to the Emperor in Pandaemonium was not having Flare past level 5 on anyone. It and Ultima are the only things that seem to do decent damage to him.

Did you get the blood sword?

[remy5623]

Yes, but I never bothered to look up what it does. I took one look at its attack stat and ditched it. Whoops .

[Wolf Kanno]

That's understandable. I mean I believe the Blood Sword thing was an oversight on the developer's part of begin with.

[Fynn]

Last time I didn’t even get the Blood Sword The emperor still isn’t that bad if you buff yourself right

[Fynn]

Oh right, I forgot to update my progress yesterday!

So I made it all the way to Kashuan Keep. I think I’m actually a bit over leveled as pretty much none of the enemies at the snowy cavern could hurt me. Josef was actually lagging behind the rest of my party a bit. So far it’s been pretty effortless. It definitely helps that the bosses at the end of dungeons have been very minor so far

[Spuuky]

FF2 is a lot of things, but "balanced" ain't one

[Fynn]

Managed to put in a tiny bit of gameplay today and I finished Kashuan Keep! Forgot the Red Soul was such a hassle to deal with

[Wolf Kanno]

I jumped back into an old save file for Origins to play me some FFII. It is very interesting coming back to this game after marathoning so much of the SaGa franchise that spun off from this entry. It's interesting to see what they held onto and what they drastically changed. The biggest likely being the magic system as it's the one element that has not aged well from FFII but SaGa tends to take in a very different direction by emphasizing buffs/debuff magic while generally downplaying offensive magic. I can see even FFII carries that same concept but old habits die hard and I want offensive magic to be better than it actually is.