Final Fantasy Legend II: Conclusions

I finished playing FFLII last night. I have a bunch of random thoughts about the game and I'm not going to hold anything back with regards to the plot so bewarned. If you've been holding off playing a 20 year old game and don't want the ending to be spoiled you should look away!


The character 'Dad' is odd. My main character was a robot but NPCs on different worlds kept commenting on how much I looked like him. He's obviously a human with a pretty cool hat. I'm a giant metal box with random stuff glued on to me for stats. Maybe the box shape is just how my sprite is represented and really I'm an android? But then how can I put on 7 pairs of gloves? 'Dad' is also living at least three lives. He has families on two worlds and a job high up in the military on a third. And can apparently pass through the magi-restricted gates without having enough magi.

At the end of the game I manage to convince him to come home to mother. And then in the ending sequence he gets bored and wakes me up in the middle of the night to say goodbye before he jumps out the window again. He's going to look for the Lost Ark. (I'm also pretty sure he was equipped with a whip when he first joined my party...) My character decides to go with him and then so does the mother. And they all jump out the window instead of using the door despite there being no one to sneak away from anymore!

In all it seems like 'Dad' is a crazy mix of Dr. Soong, James Bond, and Indiana Jones.


Item balance in the game is way out of whack. Near the end of the game I was able to buy dragon armor from the store. It gave immunity to the 4 elements! I'd started encountering monsters that would hit everyone in my party for elemental damage. Each attack would do about 70% of my max health. I'd run into groups with like 10 guys who could cast these spells. Surviving those fights was practically impossible without dragon armor. And completely trivial with dragon armor since I took no damage at all from them. It really feels like the enemies should be scaled down a little so they can't just insta-gib you. And then the gear should be scaled down too so it doesn't make you completely invincible.

In one of the last dungeons I found the weapon Excalibur. In most Final Fantasys this weapon is pretty sweet. In the original FF, for example, it had 13 more and 5 more hit than the sun sword. It was a pretty reasonable damage boost, especially if that 5 hit gave you an extra swing. But since a lot of your damage came from stats and level it wasn't really unreasonable. (Masamune was a much bigger boost in that game, especially since any character could use it.) In FFLII, however, Excalibur is really over the top. Most weapons in the game require you to have high agility in order to hit and high strength in order to do damage. A couple weapons did damage based on agility and is what my human was using. The best one in the game does damage equal to agi*13. Xcalibur does damage equal to str*15. Ok, not such a big jump. Very reasonable even, especially since it uses a new stat and you still need agility to hit with it, right? Turns out no. Xcalibur is guaranteed to hit when you attack with it. So even with 1 agility you'd be hitting every time. Oh, and if your strength stat is less than 70 it's actually treated as being 70. The max stat for a human is 99. My human didn't even have 70 agility and had spent the entire game attacking with an agility weapon! On top of the weapon not being able to miss, it also can't be blocked. And if that wasn't good enough it also does AE damage and hits all enemies in a group! Oh yeah, and it has infinite uses. The only such item in the game.

My human used to do around 300 damage to one monster, sometimes missing, and sometimes being blocked if they used a defensive ability. Each time I did that it cost me 220 gold. And I had to spend inventory space lugging around extra weapons for when the current one broke. With Xcalibur she started doing around 800 damage to a group of monsters. Every attack. No way for them to avoid the damage. She pointed at one group of monsters and they died.

I'd say a 14-fold damage increase from one weapon on top of quality of life increases from unlimited uses is a bit of a problem. Certainly not balanced!


The final boss was really random. He has three phases. The first two essentially do nothing. The third casts an AE spell on your party that hits for anything from 70-700 with no way to mitigate the damage. That's a damage range that is way too big! My characters had between 600 and 900 max health so the weakest one could just get killed from full if the boss got lucky.

I ended up being sketchy in order to win. I made excessive use of save states in order to play the fight through using my very limited amount of healing at opportune times. I felt like this wasn't really cheating since I could have just gone back to town, bought more healing staves, and won with ease. (I filled my inventory with them but the second last boss had me use up almost all of them. I should have gone back and bought more but I was lazy.)


If I play again I'm going to drop the human from my party. She seemed to gain stats faster than the mutant but not having any non-consumable actions until I got Xcalibur was really annoying. Robots were definitely cool.