First thing I can report is that I have been informed Maria's thing is a trap because there are hidden somatic component-like rules that give certain weapons a penalty to spell effectiveness, and a bow has a like 80% penalty to magic power, so if you do like me and make her your wizard you also absolutely need to get that bow out of her hand ASAP.
From what you said, apparently the official expected default (albeit not very strongly enforced) is for Maria to be a spellcaster, so the game giving her a weapon with a 80% penalty to spellcasting as her starting default is just bizarre.
I also assume FFII is not robust enough, balance-wise, to allow building Maria (or indeed anyone else) as a pure archer.
It's definitely… Interesting? I'm sure I'm gonna have some Opinions about it when I get, like, a super-spear midway through the game and I look and realize Firion still has only lv 1 in Spears.
I'm not sure how well this applies to other versions, but at least in the Dawn of Souls version experience gain speed is so heavily bound by what you're fighting that if you find a really cool Insert Weapon Here you can catch up pretty fast by just equipping it and sucking up the fighting strength loss short term.
Without magic, of course, combat is incredibly simple: just press attack until everything is dead or you are. The one complication is the introduction of a "row" system; characters in the back row both take and deal less damage from/with everything that isn't a bow or a spell. Maria comes equipped with a bow and is in the back row by default.
This is more refined than new; FF1 doesn't ever like, explain this I don't think, but characters earlier in your list of four are more towards the front, doing and taking more physical damage, while ones more towards the back do and take less, as I understand.
FF2 then made is an actual explicit mechanic and removed the part where each of your four slots differ.
(enemies can also be 'in the back' and out of reach of melee weapons if they're in the third or fourth column of surviving enemies.
The captains are, if you can get to being able to fight them, trivially grindable, as a point of trivia, due in part to the fact that killing them in combat leaves them right there ready to pick a new fight if you talk again, limited only by your own party's endurance.
From what you said, apparently the official expected default (albeit not very strongly enforced) is for Maria to be a spellcaster, so the game giving her a weapon with a 80% penalty to spellcasting as her starting default is just bizarre.
I also assume FFII is not robust enough, balance-wise, to allow building Maria (or indeed anyone else) as a pure archer.
It's viable, at least from my experience in Dawn of Souls. Not great, but viable.
Fun fact about the leveling mechanics; at least in Dawn of Souls iteration, you can gain MP and white magic levels from out of battle healing, but the all important Spirit and less important Magic stats only level *in battle*.
(Magic just determines how much MP you gain when you roll up an MP levelup as far as I know, while Spirit controls the actual strength of your white magic)
(Nothing in the SaGa games, however, will compare in terms of ridiculousness with the single most absurd stat growth system I've seen in a CRPG. That particular honour goes to Ultima I where, and I swear I am not making this up, you gain stats by reading signs on the overworld.)
You should. It's a really unique game that manages to combine aesthetic, gameplay and plot into one cohesive whole in a way few games do.
Also, as someone who wrote a huge-ass fic about dead people finding purpose in life through emotional connections, I'm pretty sure you're contractually obligated to play TWEWY to completion lest the devil takes your soul.
I'm not sure how well this applies to other versions, but at least in the Dawn of Souls version experience gain speed is so heavily bound by what you're fighting that if you find a really cool Insert Weapon Here you can catch up pretty fast by just equipping it and sucking up the fighting strength loss short term.
This is more refined than new; FF1 doesn't ever like, explain this I don't think, but characters earlier in your list of four are more towards the front, doing and taking more physical damage, while ones more towards the back do and take less, as I understand.
FF2 then made is an actual explicit mechanic and removed the part where each of your four slots differ.
(enemies can also be 'in the back' and out of reach of melee weapons if they're in the third or fourth column of surviving enemies.
The captains are, if you can get to being able to fight them, trivially grindable, as a point of trivia, due in part to the fact that killing them in combat leaves them right there ready to pick a new fight if you talk again, limited only by your own party's endurance.
It's viable, at least from my experience in Dawn of Souls. Not great, but viable.
Fun fact about the leveling mechanics; at least in Dawn of Souls iteration, you can gain MP and white magic levels from out of battle healing, but the all important Spirit and less important Magic stats only level *in battle*.
(Magic just determines how much MP you gain when you roll up an MP levelup as far as I know, while Spirit controls the actual strength of your white magic)
Dawn of Souls removed weapon stat penalties for magic. It's one of the things I was mentioning when I talked about how some of its changes were somewhat less authentic. In Dawn of Souls, it's much more feasible to max out everything or have characters with a wide range of focuses; this is very difficult in the original game, due to not only weapon stat penalties but also the fact that stats you haven't been using for a while can go down.
Googling, the Pixel Remaster has the equipment give magic damage penalties for what we would today call tank/physical dps type equipment, but does not have increasing one stat give a chance to decrease an "opposing" stat like the original
I agree with the points in that one post above and want to add that the sequel is also super neat specifically for the kind of high level media interest people on this forum have. A sequel for a decade+ old handheld game is super interesting in itself and then you add in the challenge the developers faced of having to recapture the whole stuff of something as unique and creative as Twewy.
Nothing in the SaGa games, however, will compare in terms of ridiculousness with the single most absurd stat growth system I've seen in a CRPG. That particular honour goes to Ultima I where, and I swear I am not making this up, you gain stats by reading signs on the overworld.
If you repackaged that to something with more flair it could totally work. I have been playing Xenoblade 3 and one of its minor gameplay loops consists of "Spot a corpses red miasm in distance"->"Parkour/Fight/Explore to reach it"->"Do cool funerary rites to strengthen your bonds with the home of the fallen" and it totally rocks. If a game reused that and replaced the reward with direct power ups I would only be the cool, interesting kind of weird.
It's definitely… Interesting? I'm sure I'm gonna have some Opinions about it when I get, like, a super-spear midway through the game and I look and realize Firion still has only lv 1 in Spears.
Ah yes, switching weapons...something I...don't do a lot. So the fact that the game basically incentivizes you to have characters to stick to one weapon (or two if you dual wield) is fine for me.
I briefly toy with the idea of going against the grain and making Maria a punchwoman and Guy a Magic Guy, but honestly I want to keep my life easy so I just go with what the basic stats incentivize. I buy Cure and Fire for Maria to start her off on her journey as the Caster Girl, and Thunder for Firion so he can do a sword and spell kind of thing.
Would it be spoilers I say something about this...?
Ah screw it I'mma say something about this. If it should be spoiled, please tell me, but for now...
When I started my playthrough of FF2 recently, one of the first things I did was try to pick which weapon to go for. However, I noticed that Maria's attack sucked while using the bow and was thinking "why do you suck" until I had the thought "wait sucks with a weapon what happens if i..." and so I removed her bow. And found her strength was now much better.
Since then she's basically been my MVP, being my mage (well more white than black since I gave her most of the white spells but she can do fire and thunder too) and highest damage dealer (and thus my main boss killer), especially during stretches when Firion and Guy need new weapons but it'll take a bit to find them in chests. Firion is second, with me having him dual wield swords and be my designated ice user.
I have no idea if that's how it was Maria was supposed to be built, but I just really like the thought she could kick ass with her fists when I assumed she would be the designated white mage of the group.
I am immediately concerned. While these are "mere" animals, Final Fantasy has so far followed a pretty strict ladder of animal threats - the early game is occupied only by common vermins such as snakes and large bugs. A rhinoceros is a huge escalation, so I decide to be on my guard and -
It's only after asking around on Discord and getting some pointers that I finally understand what I've been missing: one NPC in Gatrea is meant to be your hint and I didn't realize what he was saying mattered and forgot about it until I talked to him again.
Now, in a sane game, this wouldn't have been an issue. Because I would simply have visited Fynn, found the pub, and talked to barkeep. But I didn't find him last time around. Why is that?
Well, you see, in order to reach him you have to "leave" Fynn through a fence to the north, without tripping over the invisible line that decides you left the town screen and drops you back into the overworld, then circle all the way around the town walls until you reach this place:
And that's why you talk to every NPC and remember everything.
Ok more seriously, I wonder how I didn't get stuck on this as a kid instead of where I actually got stuck, but I have a suspicion that I just roamed around town, spotted that pub, and immediately tried to see if I could get to it, and I did.
I don't know if it does anything in the Pixel Remaster since it has it by default, but Scott's Ring let you see the overworld in Dawn of Souls when you pressed start and B at the same time.
Minwu is the best character in the game. Not only is he the only temporary party member to serve a role beyond being a corpse you drag around, but he's also essential to being able to break the game early. That said, it requires some mildly out-of-the-box thinking to make him your best attacker as well as your best defender, at which point he busts a lot of the worldmap open.
"Beyond being a corpse"? Are they really that bad? I didn't really find the later party members that bad. Spoilery thoughts: Gordon when you first get him didn't do much, but after a bit, I gave him a more powerful staff, and he more or less was doing the same amount of damage as the rest of my team. I don't think Josef did much either, but he didn't die as often as Gordon did who only stopped dying as often the second time I got him. ...though i guess they didn't do much beyond doing damage...but I was fine with that.
But then again I didn't really go all in on making Minwu busted with "intra-party violence" and grinding since I wanted to just get past where I got stuck on as a kid so...yeah.
Okay more seriously, I love the game, has some of the best music I've heard, and I loved that it made touch screen combat, with more touch based controls, fun, since I haven't really seen anything else use the touch screen like that for battles. As such, I would personally go with the original DS version (especially because the Gameplay and Story Integration SYMBOLISM) but I know the controls in battle miiiiight be a bit too much (hell i just spammed the dpad while my actual focus was on the bottom screen), so I don't mind people using the remake on the Switch.
I have no idea if that's how it was Maria was supposed to be built, but I just really like the thought she could kick ass with her fists when I assumed she would be the designated white mage of the group.
In general in FF2 there's some starting stat bias (Maria has good black magic and agility but poor strength and stamina, guy is strong and has good stamina but poor agility and bad magic, etc) but the characters only truly personal touches are their graphics.
For the same stats, skills, and gear, you'll get the same outcome no matter what, and the starting stat differences aren't that huge a deal and can be overcome with effort.
Really, the actual answer is just that bare fists is remarkably overpowered in FFII. Generally, a character who's a certain level in Fists will do not much less damage than a character who's the same level in swords and has the current best sword you can buy.
The real winning strategy, of course, is to just cast Toad on everything. Works on just about every challenging battle in the game except the final boss--and it even works on him if you first use a slightly more powerful Wall spell on him so that it can absorb the spell before it has to go up against his spell resistance. (Which, due to the aforementioned glitch with Toad's kill effect taking place as part of the animation, means that the target dies anyway because Wall still lets the spell animation run--part of why it's completely useless in the original version)
(They probably fixed that in the Pixel Remaster, unfortunately, even if it's the funniest god damn thing in the franchise, comparable to using the SAW on the Creator in Final Fantasy Legend)
The real winning strategy, of course, is to just cast Toad on everything. Works on just about every challenging battle in the game except the final boss--and it even works on him if you first use a slightly more powerful Wall spell on him so that it can absorb the spell before it has to go up against his spell resistance. (Which, due to the aforementioned glitch with Toad's kill effect taking place as part of the animation, means that the target dies anyway because Wall still lets the spell animation run--part of why it's completely useless in the original version)
(They probably fixed that in the Pixel Remaster, unfortunately, even if it's the funniest god damn thing in the franchise, comparable to using the SAW on the Creator in Final Fantasy Legend)
The key thing Minwu is bringing to the party isn't his rad aesthetic or his vast magical power, though (although both are nice), it's his canoe.
Il était un petit navire, qui n'avait ja, ja, jamais navigué, ohé ohé…
Interestingly this is a shuffling of the previous order, which had the seafaring vessel be your first upgrade item, and the canoe next. Here, we need it to cross the lake you can see in the picture above and reach the seaside town of Paloom.
One thing I appreciate about Final Fantasy is that it has female characters coming on impressively hard. Here's lookin' at you, Jessie.
We're only really in Paloom for one purpose, buying a ticket to the ship and crossing the sea to reach the town of Poft, where lives a newly-introduced staple of Final Fantasies to come - Cid, The Guy With The Airship!
We haven't unlocked the ship yet; we're paying 32 gil a pop specifically for a trip from Paloom to Poft or back.
Curious what that space at the top is for.
Incidentally, while Cid's sprite looks mostly like a normal old dude with some kind of pauldrons, his concept art is absolutely amazing:
Look at this time traveler from a specific brand of 80s-90s SFF. The flying pauldrons. The bare thighs. The chestplate worn straight over the naked, muscular chest. The moustache. An absolutely outstanding man. He could be on the cover of Métal Hurlant.
If you look at the picture above, you can see that Cid's airship can take us not just to our intended destination (Salamand), but also to places I've never heard of, like Bafsk, Semitt Falls, or that place the brother princes are for, Kashuan. This is intriguing, and I might just go and poke around when I next load up the game, but it didn't happen yet for reasons that will be clear soon.
I decide to explore a little around Poft before committing to any big flight, see if there's some new wildlife to fight, but to my disappointment it's just the same as back in Altair, Goblins and snakes and so on. I bought Maria the Protect spell, but honestly it's unnecessary (although I still use it to train it ahead of time).
I also notice something quite curious.
The character here is buffed with Protect, but eventually the same will happen without buffs.
Notice that damage number.
FFII does not have chip damage. Every hit did at least 1 damage, and with attacks doing multi-hits, this meant in the early game you could still, for instance, defeat a Green Slime despite running out of Fire casts. Not so FFII. If your Defense is high enough, you will reduce damage to nothing.
This plays an important part in the "reduce an encounter to one goblin then have the characters whack each other down from full HP to as low as you can go" method of HP farming, because there is almost zero danger - the goblin literally can't hurt you. And, because most of the random encounters in this region are of the same tier as those back in Altair, this means that pretty soon they come to pose no actual threat whatsoever, as none of the enemies can cause me any harm.
It's an odd feeling.
And eventually, through my wandering, I end up in…
Snowy Salamand, the town I was looking for in the first place! No need for an airship! We saved so much money on this.
Josef, Hilda's contact in Salamand, proves less useful than hoped. All he can do is point us in the direction of the local mythril mine, which is controlled by the Empire and worked using the town's enslaved population. Just your classic empire stuff.
On our way there, we do finally encounter some new enemy types, although by now we already far outmatched them:
The Soldier is a far less powerful version of the Captain who owned us so hard in Fynn, and using the same sprite model.
And we arrive in the first dungeon in the game, Semmit Falls! (so named because the entrance to the cavern is situated at the top of a waterfall)
Another iconic enemy making its first series appearance, with its iconic Self-Destruct ability. Green is an odd choice of color for it, though.
So.
Let's talk dungeon design.
There's one big environmental change in FFII compared to FFI. FFI modeled interior rooms as part of the structure they were set in; FFII models them as separate rooms. To clarify what I mean:
This is FFI. You can see that the central room of the chaos shrine is part of the same screen as the shrine itself. It is obscured while we aren't inside it, and lights up when we enter, but it's one single continuous space. This allowed for the map trick per which entering one sub-room would reveal all others on the map and allow us to avoid dead end room.
Contrast:
The building is one screen. Upon crossing that door to the right, we move to a different screen. This is convenient because it means that the room can be "bigger on the inside" - the building does not need to be wide enough to actually accommodate its presence.
This also means that my previous map trick is impossible.
So how is Semitt Falls designed?
Well, every level has doors. Like, there's the floor map, which is your typical "wet cavern" floor map:
And there are doors. One of these doors take you to a room with stairs down to the next floor. Every other door leads to this:
An empty square room. No chest, no NPC, nothing. Just an empty room.
The dungeon's design is just to throw three to five mystery doors per floor at you and hide the way forward inside one of them, leaving the others as dead ends.
It is.
Annoying.
For the most part, the enemies of Semitt Falls are easily dealt with. But they absorb a lot of my resources as I push forward and use my spells with a little too much abandon. And every so often there are encounters like this:
Green Slimes take 0 damage from my physical attacks. Magic is the only way to hurt them. As you can see on the screen, Firion is running low and Maria is… fairly comfortable still. Minwu, of course, basically never runs out of MP.
On the third floor, I find my secondary objective:
The men of the village, along with Josef's daughter Nelly, are held in this room. Paul, the self-proclaimed greatest thief in the world, attempted to infiltrate the mine to steal its precious Mythril for the rebellion ahead of us, explicitly to show us up, but got captured for his trouble. Now that we've opened their cell and cleared the path, Paul announces he will take the prisoners with him back to Salamand, and leave me to go deeper to get that sweet mythril.
We head down a couple more floors, and…
This is the Sergeant, the first proper boss in the game, although I expect him to come back as a generic enemy type later - he's too generic not to (this is the same sprite as Captain/Soldier).
This encounter baffles me.
The Sergeant is a straightforward enemy. He can hit you with his sword, or with his bow. He hits really hard - enough to take out nearly half of Maria's health in one blow. That's not enough to win - Minwu can heal that much for the entire group with a single Cure spell, and has a ton of MP left. Minwu can also buff the whole party with Invisibility, vastly reducing the changes of the Sergeant actually hitting anyone.
The problem is that Maria and Guy are literally the only people in this fight capable of doing damage to the Sergeant.
Firion has run out of MP before the fight, and, despite being by far the second heaviest hitter in the group, he just… Can't do any damage with his sword. All his blows bounce off with 0 damage. Minwu is crucial to keep the party alive, but on any turn when he's not healing someone or casting buffs, he's also useless, and also doing 0 damage. Only Maria's Fire III and Guy's fists are able to get through his armor.
He can't kill us, though, so we eventually grind him down. But man, it's not fun to have one and a half character in your party just be literally useless for an entire fight.
But eventually I make it.
Note how everyone is at full health and Minwu is still sitting on fifty MP. He hard carries this group.
In the chest behind him, the mythril! Mission accomplished!
Just one thing before we leave - there's one final chest on the final floor that I'd like to get.
Aw come the fuck on.
Maria exhausted her MP on the Sergeant. Firion didn't have any to begin with. The Land Turtle has, as you might expect, high defenses. Very high defenses. Literally only Guy is doing any damage at all (except when one of the others is lucky enough to land a critical hit). This is slow. And boring. While also being dangerous.
I need to never go anywhere without Ether again, but the problem is that in this game Ether is crazy expensive, like 1,000 gil a pop expensive.
Eventually I wear it down. And it was worth it: inside the chest is a Tome of Teleportation. I immediately use it to teach Maria the spell, then use Minwu's own teleportation to thankfully escape having to backtrack through the whole place.
Exhausted, low on resources, but fat with newfound gil, the Wild Roses head back to Salamand… Where they find out another very funny feature of FFII:
There is no standard inn price per town like in FFI.
The cost of resting at an inn are proportional to how much HP and MP you've lost. The more hurt you are, the more you have to pay. 409 gil is much higher than what any inn cost in any place in FFI, and we're barely at the start of the game. Jesus.
Alright, with all this settled, we go back to Salamand. Cid could fly us directly back to Altair, but for an eye-gouging 700 gil, so we instead take the long way round with ship and canoe.
The Empire is building a massive armored flying airship with which it means to rain devastation upon the world. It has to be stopped, and that's our next mission. We also have our first mention of a "Dark Knight" being labeled as such in the series, I believe - I actually thought these didn't show up until Cecil in FFIV, but I was clearly wrong.
We go to the local blacksmith to hand him the mithril, with which he makes a few mythril weapons… That we still have to purchase with real money, of course.
I like spears, I kinda want to give one to somebody, but I'm not sure it would fit anyone. Maybe Firion could dual wield sword and spear instead of doing basic sword and shield like he's doing now?
A brief look at the map shows no clear land path to Bafsk, so it's time to actually use Cid's services!
Oh, so that's what that bit is for. It's an airship parking space.
Timing this was a bit difficult but you can catch a glimpse of the Dreadnought in the background.
The town of Bafsk.
And that'll be it for today, I just wanted to catch some sweet shots of the airship.
Next time: we tackle the dreadnought and meet the Dark Knight, I think!
An empty square room. No chest, no NPC, nothing. Just an empty room.
The dungeon's design is just to throw three to five mystery doors per floor at you and hide the way forward inside one of them, leaving the others as dead ends.
Thinking about it the really cruel thing about these is how they're explicitly there to punish you for exploring and seeing what there is on paths other than the one leading to plot advancement. You know, like everyone does in RPGs.
An empty square room. No chest, no NPC, nothing. Just an empty room.
The dungeon's design is just to throw three to five mystery doors per floor at you and hide the way forward inside one of them, leaving the others as dead ends.
It is.
Annoying.
For the most part, the enemies of Semitt Falls are easily dealt with. But they absorb a lot of my resources as I push forward and use my spells with a little too much abandon. And every so often there are encounters like this:
This is the Sergeant, the first proper boss in the game, although I expect him to come back as a generic enemy type later - he's too generic not to (this is the same sprite as Captain/Soldier).
This encounter baffles me.
The Sergeant is a straightforward enemy. He can hit you with his sword, or with his bow. He hits really hard - enough to take out nearly half of Maria's health in one blow. That's not enough to win - Minwu can heal that much for the entire group with a single Cure spell, and has a ton of MP left. Minwu can also buff the whole party with Invisibility, vastly reducing the changes of the Sergeant actually hitting anyone.
The problem is that Maria and Guy are literally the only people in this fight capable of doing damage to the Sergeant.
Firion has run out of MP before the fight, and, despite being by far the second heaviest hitter in the group, he just… Can't do any damage with his sword. All his blows bounce off with 0 damage. Minwu is crucial to keep the party alive, but on any turn when he's not healing someone or casting buffs, he's also useless, and also doing 0 damage. Only Maria's Fire III and Guy's fists are able to get through his armor.
He can't kill us, though, so we eventually grind him down. But man, it's not fun to have one and a half character in your party just be literally useless for an entire fight.
The Sergeant always amuses me, simply because you are overwhelmingly likely to have already seen (and been stomped by) far more powerful yet blatantly generic Captains driving home what a punk he ultimately is, no matter how much he tries to hype man himself.
The Empire is building a massive armored flying airship with which it means to rain devastation upon the world. It has to be stopped, and that's our next mission. We also have our first mention of a "Dark Knight" being labeled as such in the series, I believe - I actually thought these didn't show up until Cecil in FFIV, but I was clearly wrong.
We go to the local blacksmith to hand him the mithril, with which he makes a few mythril weapons… That we still have to purchase with real money, of course.
Now, in a sane game, this wouldn't have been an issue. Because I would simply have visited Fynn, found the pub, and talked to barkeep. But I didn't find him last time around. Why is that?
Well, you see, in order to reach him you have to "leave" Fynn through a fence to the north, without tripping over the invisible line that decides you left the town screen and drops you back into the overworld, then circle all the way around the town walls until you reach this place:
When I was playing the Dawn of Souls version, I ran into this issue. Unsure of what to do, and half-convinced I had to get past the captains to progress, I started grinding. I ended up going up and down bellow Altair, and apparently there's a couple tiles at the very south of the peninsula (indistinguishable from the rest of the region) where instead of the usual starting-area fodder, the monsters you meet are from a mid-to-late-game part of the overworld. For some reason, I decided that they were the benchmark I had to meet to move on with the story.
I grinded in the starting area. I grinded north of Fynn. My characters got swole - each of them focused on their weapon and one of the starting black magic spells, and Maria also had Cure*. I'm not sure if I got strong enough to go exploring south, but I did level up enough to consistently beat captains. Only after winning half a dozen fights with them did I realize that I was probably missing something.
At that point, I finally talked to everyone again, figured out what the game actually expected me to do, and went to the tavern. By the time Minwu joined by party, he was the weakest member of the group.
Of course, that obviously meant I had to grind more to get him up to speed.
*Actually, everybody had Cure, and possibly each of the starting black magic spells too. But Maria was the only one whose Cure I focused on leveling.
That's a shame; FFII is the first to actually attempt to have a proper story (as compared to FFI, where the whole plot is contained within the intro blurb and the big infodump before the final dungeon), so it would have been amusing to see an unspoiled reaction to those attempts.
Out of curiosity, how much exactly do you already know about FF2? Was it only that one detail? You seemed surprised by the opening, but not much by the leveling system, so I'd like to get a better idea of what your starting knowledge of the game is.
That's a shame; FFII is the first to actually attempt to have a proper story (as compared to FFI, where the whole plot is contained within the intro blurb and the big infodump before the final dungeon), so it would have been amusing to see an unspoiled reaction to those attempts.
Out of curiosity, how much exactly do you already know about FF2? Was it only that one detail? You seemed surprised by the opening, but not much by the leveling system, so I'd like to get a better idea of what your starting knowledge of the game is.
I know nothing about FFII, but if you have a missing party member and there's a mysterious Dark Knight running around, it is pretty standard for the two to be related.
Probably wasn't standard when FFII came out, but by now it is.
