Next up on the list is another game I've never played before: Final Fantasy Legend II. From what I've been told about the game it's actually very similar to the first Final Fantasy Legend with the addition of a new class: ROBOT!
Now I haven't done very much research at all but I believe the human, mutant, and monsters classes work pretty much the same way as before. Robots scale entirely with the gear they have equipped. I'm torn with regards to how I feel about this. On the one hand it actually seems like a great way to design a game such that the characters are always at a good spot against the enemies. Their power is strictly capped at gear from shops plus what you can loot from dungeons so there's always an upper bound so things don't get out of hand. Assuming you tune the enemies properly they can always be capable of winning fights. Maybe you need to grind a bit for cash to buy the new gear from the shops but that's quite reasonable.
On the other hand I have no faith at all that the game is actually balanced in such a way. After my experience with monsters in the original game I really worry that a full robot party will either be trivial or a real pain. I'd like to play a game with that system which I was confident was designed with just that system in mind but this game has four leveling systems and I fear the robot one was just tacked on at the end.
That said, what should my party be? With four leveling systems and four character slots it seems like one of each type would make a lot of sense. Unfortunately I really soured on monsters with my four monster party last time and really don't want to write another leveling program to work out how to optimize one character. Even worse, if I did optimize a monster in the same way it would mean some mindless searching for meat at the start and then trivial random encounters the rest of the way up until eventually the monster became bad and I'd just have to hope the other characters have caught up.
I do want one of the other three though and I think I will make the fourth a robot because robots are awesome. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being worse characters in general but I hope they should at least be competitive most of the time. Time will tell!
Your experience with this one should be a lot less frustrating than with the four monster party. Also FFL2 is just a better game than FLL1. I played that one a lot on my gameboy. I think I played pretty much every party combination (I imagine I missed some of the male/female human/mutant mixes). Have fun.
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