Final Fantasy Legend II

AKA SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu

I finished Etrian Odyssey today, or at least the main part of the game, and instead of playing any of the console RPGs I've got stacked up I pulled out my GBP and started this up again. Uh, I guess I'm spoiled by fancy modern back-lit screens but I can't bear to play on that thing anymore. So I'm emulating it instead.

As an bonus to this method of play I can take screenshots. Here we are at Giant's Town, defending democracy.



...I am not good at naming things. Maybe I can log my playthrough here, like a crappy half-assed "Let's Play!". Or not. Whatever.

I have a question though. My mutant girl had three spells and a trait that protected against Paralysis, then she learned a new spell and lost the trait. Is four abilities the limit, or can I get more by removing equipment? She tends to die to a stiff breeze when not dressed in layers of metal.

If I recall, four abilities is the limit, end of story.

This topic is like a dagger to my heart; FFL2 is the only reason I want to see GB games VC-ified in some form.

Yes 4 abilities are the limit and the bottom most one is always the one you lose.
So what's your party setup? One of my favorite things about this game is the freedom it gives you.

I loaned FFL2 to someone years ago and they lost it. And I had worked so hard on my file with two monsters and two robots.

*cries*

And why didn't the design for robots in this game catch on? It's clever and fun. Even the SaGa series promptly dropped it in favor of a boring cash=stats system in FFL3.

*cries some more*

4 Female Mutants - This team will utterly annihilate the game right up until you start seeing enemies that are resistant to magic. Then, problems. If you take the time to work on their agility, this is a good team.

2 Robots, 2 Female Mutants - I'd say this is the best overall team you can make. Multiple robots are expensive to upgrade, so you might substitute a female human. (Males are weak. Don't use them.)

4 Robots - Robots are fun, and I really enjoyed this setup. In some areas upgrading can be ridiculously expensive, though. (Venus's Land...)

2 Robots, 2 Monsters - For maximum weirdness. Monsters are a pain in the ass to manage but have some interesting possibilities.

I love this game even though I played it entirely wrong.

See, back in the day for some reason, I ran from 90% of the encounters in RPGs. I got disturbingly far in FFL and FFL2 (final boss and... I forget where I got in FFL2, but it was damn far). I still remember the illustrations of each land from Nintendo Power... ahh memories.

I restarted FFL2 like eighty times and then played it the same broken way. My party was Human, Mutant, Robot, Monster.

So I have to give up the all-fire, group-fire, group-ice, or group-lightning spell. Kind of a hard choice since I've been using them all. I guess group-fire moves to the bottom of the list.

Well, SaGa Frontier has it too. Don't mech games work kinda like that? I've never played one.

I loved this game as a kid. I even took the time to work out a complete chart of what meats turned you into what monster, as well as an intricate list of what abilities every monster had. I still go back once and awhile to play through the game again, but I always get distracted around the time I reach the desert world.

I wish the old GB FFLegend/Saga games would get the fancy 3D DS-remake treatment. Those games were my first "Final Fantasy" experience.

Oh great, now I have to play FFL2 again.

I got this game like back in '97 or '98 when it was reissued. It was fun, but I got stuck at that damn shogun boss and lost interest.

I've never managed to finish this game, mainly because my saves kept getting erased by Satan, or whomever it is who erases saves.

It came out in '93.

It was re-released in '98.

I'm just saying.

FUNFACT: The Banana smugglers were opium smugglers in Japan.

I played it the same way. It was amazing how far you could get not leveling up and only fighting bosses.

I hate hate HATE the Legend games' battle systems. You're punished for using weapons too much and enemies "stack." So you could be fighting 3 or 4 slimes or something but they're displayed as one icon on the screen. It's like there is a stack of them and you can only see the one on top. Likewise, you can only attack the one on top while all the ones in the stack can hurt your party. Completely unfair and cheep.

I thought that you could kill more than one monster with an attack, though. I remember messages like "BOB attacks! 230 damage! Killed 2 slimes!" I always assumed that overkill damage on the "top" monster carried over to the next one.

Think so. At least thats how it worked for the mutants' powers.

It sort of depends on the weapon. There are a lot of weapons that only hit the first guy in the stack like swords. But most spells and certain weapons like the smg or gungir hit the entire stack for that amount of damage.

For a number of my early playthroughs of this game I would pick 4 mutants or 4 humans and then abuse the random number generator in the first town in ashura's world to powerlevel like a madman. 99 mana for my mutants or 999 hp for the humans was worth all the time fighting and reseting.

I like this battle system. Maybe I'll hate it later, but for now the durability on weapons isn't hindering me at all, and I like the targeting limitations.

After retrieving the Giant's shrinking device I entered Ki's body. Orally, I think. For such primitive graphics this game does a pretty good job of depicting her insides, shame no one screenshot can really show that place. My robot and mutant were owning like hell previously and they continued to do so here. My human's armor is pathetically out of date and his agility is pretty sad, resulting in a lot of deaths, despite great HP, and few chances to employ his strong attack. Maybe thats for the best, as his weapons don't regenerate.



Sad face.



Woo hoo! Finally.



Wait this could be good...



...oh, just money. And it didn't work after 5 tries either. I miss Ice.



I'm in Apollo's World now, and tall god is taaaaall. I RoBo a Blitz whip, which gave him a huge boost to agility and Saber damage, but the whip itself never seems to do any damage. GuPy continues to be useless. FiRa suddenly stopped being a killing machine for some reason, hasn't gained any agility in forever, and she's lost a few good spells for what seems like garbage. But she learned Cure and does awesome damage with books so she's forgiven. HeRo always acts last. Hits like a truck though, and now that he's upgraded to giant armor he doesn't die so much. I have a Hermes shoes but it'sa tough call who gets to use 'em.

Can I boost my human and mutant agility by attacking with a Colt/bow/saber/whip?

Nintendo Power had maps of Ki's body, and they were indeed roughly shaped like body parts.

Yes, at least with the saber and whip you can, but it can take an extremely long time. The mutant will benefit from the speed, especially as a healer, but your human has probably so slow by this point that it'll take forever to get him fast enough to strike before the enemies, so you might not want to bother with him and leave him as a tank.

Kind of creepy, actually.

You know, up until just now, I don't think I ever realized that Ki's heart was supposed to be a heart.

I don't know what I thought it was, but a heart isn't it.

Monsters tend to feel like a liability for the first half of the game or so. If you picked a Baby D or Slime, you probably wouldn't get meat that actually improved them until after you finish Ki's body. Ultimately though they do become really powerful and at the end of the game some of them have crazy powerful abilities you can't get elsewhere. Too bad only one enemy in the game drops meat of a high enough level to get your monster up to that tier.

As for human males, your description of how it's going sounds pretty standard. In the middle part of the game they hit for serious damage, but they rarely acually hit if they have been focusing on strength based weapons.

Typos in old RPGs are cute.


The last guest that joined me was awesome. And helped me beat an awesome boss. Lynn here entered the cave to retrieve medicine or something and needs help getting by yon boss. This could be awesome.


Bah, weaksauce.


She also seems to think her dad is in town, contrary to what the NPCs told me before. And here he is. Hey, get your own Dad! Wait-a-minute... does this mean...?!


Signs point to yes. Mom's not going to like this. Not at all. =(


A Mutant has turned her skin to stone.
Is this awesome? [Y/N]

I think this may have actually been my first RPG, on a dubious Gameboy back when it was first released. I had no idea what I was doing and never went out of my way to gain levels. Parts of the game I breezed through, and parts held me up for weeks.

The rush I got from beating Apollo, and then eventually the rest of the game is what has kept me playing RPGs for the past 14 years.

Advice!

Cure is essential. Keep cure. And use it to refill your HP before staying at an inn. Trust me, it's stupid but it works - it makes your stay cost nothing.

Monsters are a pain. Eating meat at random is likely to go nowhere, and the patterns they follow are nearly impossible to figure out without hours of work. Save yourself the trouble and use a guide. Get your monster to a form you like and don't change it until it gets too weak to hold its own.

Agility is the god stat. It determines speed, Hit%, and damage with agility weapons(bows, katanas, whips). Strength only determines damage with strength weapons(most things besides the above, as well as guns and psi weapons). Focus on agility. You're going to need it if you want to get past Venus, who dodges every damn thing you do otherwise.

Don't bother trying to train humans in magic. You have to buy them their spells, which gets expensive. Leave it to the mutants.

Always use a robot. A robot is basically a trash can that gets more powerful the more crap you throw into it. And staying at the inn refills their weapon uses to half of max, so always pass the good stuff onto them. Don't change a robot's equipment if you aren't sure you want to do it, because each time you equip you halve the uses. A good trick at the start of the game is to give your mutants' weapons to your robot, boosting its stats up right away.

A mile of intestines my ass.

FFLII was certainly an interesting experience for me. I remember the game being easier than most until the aforementioned Apollo battle. At which point, the game's difficulty curve did a right angle and maintained that pace until the end. That final area was pretty nasty, mainly because you couldn't run from any battles, which was done with almost 100% success in previous regular encounters. Also (then) an utmost bitchin' feature was the ability to save at any point. To this day, I have a saved game right there a step or two away from the final boss. Haven't beaten it, good chance I never will until it hits the Virtual Console. Wait...

Another good trick for robots is to keep an extra piece of armor in your inventory and switch it out with whatever armor they have. They gain a set amount of hp from equiping new things and armor has no durability so you can repeat until their HP is full.