Final Fantasy II: More Progress

Yesterday I finally felt up to using a controller and set about continuing on in my FFII learning run. I leveled my unarmed skill to max and proceeded to actually beat the game without leveling my health very high at all. I did wipe a couple times though. Anyway, here's my current new thoughts...

Most enemies simply couldn't hurt me, but once enemies could hit me they did a ton of damage. Like, in the 200-600 damage range when I had 735 max health. Getting ambushed by 2 of those guys meant I could be dead before taking an action, and that happened once. The final dungeon had some guys who cast level 16 drain or poison spells which were hitting for enough to also kill me in 2 hits if they rolled high. My solution this time was actually to use the 4th character who joins the party with 1053 max health. I was able to get his evasion chance up to 99% and stuck him in the front row to reduce the odds of the enemies killing off Firion in one round. Firion was attacking with a blood sword and healing to full every action so they needed to burst him down in one round, and that got a lot less likely when the enemies could hit Leon instead. Anyway, the way I see it there are 3 solutions to this problem. I can level my max health higher (around 1500 should be safe), or I can level my evasion chances up a little more to make it so the enemies can't hit me at all, though I could still be in trouble against the casters. Or I can make more use of the 4th character. The second to last dungeon was where I started getting killed, but I could easily have stuck Rickard in the front row and used his ~570 health to absorb some of the punishment.

I could run from lots of enemies all the way through the end of the game. For the most part the things I couldn't run from were undead, slimes, wererats, or giants. Undead came in groups of up to 8, and were all immune to toad. So I need to take a lot of time punching them down slowly or I need to level a damage spell. Level 10 fire was actually able to kill all of them but the two highest level ones, and even there they'd come with a bunch of dorks so I still wanted to open with fire. Slimes are also immune to toad and they also have stupid high armour. I couldn't punch them for damage, though I did forget to take my shield off to see if I could hurt them with full on punching. Fire also took care of them. The rats and giants were handled by toad. I think there was only one enemy that wasn't handled by fire or toad, and I could just punch that one.

I timed out how long it took to level punching from 1 to 16. It took 36 minutes, and then 34 minutes, and both times I made big mistakes. I'm pretty sure 30 minutes to max a weapon skill is where I'm going to end up. Spells take longer because there's an extra menu command to move down, and it's 4 buttons instead of 3 per skill, and because of the weirdness where I didn't seem to be able to level all in one fight. Probably more like 40-45 minutes for a spell. So I guess the question is if fire saves 40 minutes of punching in random encounters over the rest of the game. Well, I don't need to send it all the way level 16. 10 did most of what I wanted this time. There's also the question on if I need to level fists and swords. Maybe if I level fire and swords instead I can burn down the bosses before I get a blood sword. Even if it takes two rounds to kill every boss, if it saves 30 minutes that has to be good. Especially since I had to punch a few of them multiple times anyway.

I found a lot of steps in the walkthrough I was using that could be skipped. Lots of 'go talk to this person' when I could just go straight to the dungeon. I have a little more of that to test at the start of the game too.

I definitely need to get the second blood sword, but I think it will be for Leon, not so Firion can dual wield them. I also want two life spells, so they can each bring the other back to life in combat. I don't need osmose at all. I'd rather buy extra elixirs if I need more mana. (In my real play I ran into huge mana problems, but that's because I wasn't running from every fight!)

I'm not sure if I need to grind up the ribbon/aegis shield from the toad spell or not. I did get hit with some instant death attacks in random encounters that ambushed me. They all missed because of the ribbon. Would they have missed from my spell resistance? Not sure. But it's nice when I'm using 2 people to have cheesed up one copy so I can just open the chest in the final dungeon to suit up the second guy. I may even want to just get a second ribbon from the toad puzzle so Leon can use it the whole time I have him... I guess the big thing is I want a way to kill many enemies that aren't weak to fire anyway, and toad hooks me up with both the ribbons and the AE kill spell.

I think for my next run I'm going to try dropping punching again, maxing out fire instead, and just grinding health with Mindu. I'm going to also look up some rank numbers for enemies near the start of the game to see if I can find a better place to grind than right in front of the first town.

Final Fantasy II: Raising Max Health

My left hand/arm has gotten worse the last few days so I haven't actually been able to put any more actual work in on routing a Final Fantasy II speedrun. But I have been doing a lot of thinking about it. I'm trying to figure out how I really want to go about raising my maximum health. I still don't know how high I want it to go, but the way I see it there are 4 possible ways to go about it.

The first is the organic method. If I need more maximum health I could just fight things a little weaker than that and level up my health as they hit me. Easy! And entirely unreasonable. I'm not convinced the difficulty gradients in the game are such that this would even be plausible on a normal run. Even if it could work it would be slow! I want to run from all the fights if I can, and kill all the enemies in one round if I can't. And since I'll have max evasion the enemies won't get a turn.

The second is to beat myself up. It's certainly possible that every fight I can't run from I could first hit myself for half my health before taking a round to kill the enemies. The tricky part is keeping a way to hurt myself for enough to get a health up without risking death, even after I significantly increase my maximum health. My damage is never going to get any better (or worse) so unless I'm in a position where punching myself is in that right window I'll need a different source of damage too. Like leveling up a fire spell or something, but that will add even more time.

Next up is to stay in the early game with Windu longer. He has the swap spell, and the life spell, so he has a safe way to knock me low (kill me then use life) and then as long as I manipulate our health totals to be different I can swap on every fight to get a health up every other fight. This has the advantage of also giving chances at mana ups. It has the disadvantage that Windu doesn't stick around for terrible long and all the fights he is around for can be run from. So while I could level up health in the first couple dungeons I'm not sure it would be terribly fast. I can certainly just stick around the starting town too and grind health, like I grind weapon skills and evasion and the like. The problem is that while I can guarantee I get max weapon skill in 16 fights I'm going to need way, way more fights than that to grind health really high.

The fourth option is to grind some cash, run to Mysidia, and buy my own swap spell. Then I can do the above option over the course of the entire game, swapping on every fight I can't run from. Swap actually levels the health/mana of two characters at the same time if they started with comparable health/mana levels. Which I guess opens up the option of using two characters, not just one character, for at least part of the game. I was really liking the idea of only having to input one command each fight but if I need to grind health over a long period of time then it should be faster to input two commands each round instead of grinding around the starting town. And if I'm using toad to kill enemies, actually, then having my fastest person use swap and my slower person killing everything with toad I'll still end a fight in one round and get a chance at a health/mana up. Also, getting to Mysidia early is non-trivial and probably requires grinding health in some other way first.

So it's going to come down to how much health I need, and how many fights I won't be able to run from later on. If I can get by with just a couple hundred then I should just use Mindu. Otherwise I probably want to punch myself a little at the very start and then head to Mysidia and run a 2 person party. Maria can have toad and maybe a damage spell too?

Final Fantasy II: Trial Start

I went and spent 5 hours tonight streaming the start of a Final Fantasy II run. It didn't exactly go according to plan but I learned some things. I also talked a bit about Final Fantasy games with a 13 year old who randomly decided to watch me because he played FFII on the GBA. Anyway, here's what I learned...

- Even with 16 sword skill you actually need a good sword to do any damage. The enemy's armour applies to each hit so the fact I'm swinging with a 8 attack sword means any enemy with something like 20 armour is immune to my damage. For the record, the Captain I need to grind for a toad book has 50 armour.

- I leveled a fire spell to 10 in order to kill the Captain, but it really didn't do a whole lot of damage. Something like 280 to a single target. I also tried using it against some powerful undead I ran into near Mysidia and it was hitting them all for about 120 each. The ghost had 540 health so it was taking 5 casts to kill them off. That is not fast. Even if I leveled fire all the way to 16 it would be doing less than 200 on average to all enemies. So 3 casts to take out the ghosts. And there are other undead with even more health than ghosts. The damage from my fire is pretty much capped, too, unless I put even more time and effort into grinding my int stat.

- Toad actually took out some enemies despite casting it with a sword and shield on. This confused me. It hit some and missed others of the same type so it isn't that they're vulnerable to the element. I was able to land it despite having 120% accuracy penalty from my sword and shield. It just doesn't make sense. My chance to hit while naked should only be around 50%! (Though toad 16 does try to hit 16 times which means it really will hit everything when I have 50% chance to hit.) My best guess is that the accuracy penalty was removed in this version of the game. Possibly drastically reduced? And that the enemies I didn't hit with toad rolled high on their magic resist checks and I rolled abysmally low on my toad checks? That doesn't feel very good, but it feels better than hitting with a spell that has a -70% chance to hit. Or maybe there's some underflow error going on?

- Toad 16 and the snowcraft did combine to get me an aegis shield and a ribbon pretty early on. No enemies that I would legitimately encounter on the way to this point in the game cast dangerous debuffs so the ribbon here doesn't come too late.

- I had serious money trouble. Especially when I got Mindu and started grinding up magic points. But I was able to kill some enemies near Mysidia for a lot of cash, and that's not very far from the starting town. So if I have a way to kill them I might try grinding down there instead.

- I wanted to get toad on my first trip to the castle but I really only see one way to make that happen, and that's to level unarmed skill. You get 8 damage for each level in unarmed, so if I grind that up to level 16 I'd get to swing 16 times for something close to 200 per swing. 50 armour doesn't do anything relevant against that! It adds another thing to grind, which sucks, but since fire really isn't cutting it for killing undead I can just skip grinding that? Alternatively the Fynn castle isn't very far from the starting town so I can just go get toad after I do some plot and level up organically along the way?

- I got my evade chance up to 99% pretty easily, but I only had 1 chance to evade. This wasn't good since the Captain swings 6 times per attack. I can deal with that by taking the time to grind up my evade chance though. (Equip 2 shields and just mash X to spam attack against a large group of enemies willing to attack you.) This is probably worth my while to do regardless.

- It was weird, but I couldn't get a full level in a spell in one combat. I could take sword skill up a full 100 experience and gain a level in one fight but the spells were all capping out in the high 90s. eventually I resorted to doing half a level in each fight to level up my toad spell.

- Counting to 100 is easy if I focus on it. Counting to 100 while reading chat and responding is tricky.

- It felt like I was still getting ambushed more often than I thought I should. It's possible I want 99% evade on all my characters, even the dead ones. This wouldn't actually take very long. Level 10 shield skill and two of the second shield would do it. Assuming I had the money to buy them!

I'm now torn on if I should continue from my saved game to see what other issues I run into or if I should start a new plan from the beginning since this start really isn't great. I guess I could just grind unarmed skill in my current game to emulate what I'll probably want to do? That way I can see problems that crop up later while having unarmed skill to actually kill enemies with armour.

I'm also torn on if I want one character to grind unarmed for early game and swords for late game or if I want two different characters to grind each one. Only having one character taking actions felt really good... So I think I want to stick with that for now.

Final Fantasy II: Party Setup

My arms have been hurting the last few days so I haven't really been able to do any playing of Final Fantasy II. I have had plenty of time to think about it though! I've been trying to figure out how I want to setup my characters so that I know what I need to grind and what I want to buy from each town when I get to them.

To start, the odds of getting a sneak attack or getting sneak attacked is based on the evade percentage of specifically Firion. This means my top priority is making sure he's maxed out. Maria starts with 15 intelligence versus 10 for the other two characters which means she should be the black mage if I want to have one. 5% extra chance to land a toad cast is pretty big! Everyone starts with the same spirit so they're all equivalent for being a white mage. Firion is going to have to have a shield on so he's going to have a massive spell accuracy penalty so he's really not going to be setup to kill undead with the life spell. Having Maria do both is a reasonable choice, but having Guy do the white magic is probably a better bet.

Then I need to decide how I'm going to win fights fast. On my last casual run I killed things by making use of the berserk spell along with basic attacks. It's way better than any other spell for doing damage, though it has the downside that it's forced to be single target. I said next time I played I'd want to use even more berserk along with maybe haste to just rip through enemies. But that was playing without power leveling with the cancel trick which is certainly in the cards for a speedrun. I guess all the bosses are going to be single target fights anyway, so a good plan could be to run from most fights, use level 16 toad to one shot things I can't run from, maybe life on undead. Then burn down a boss with berserk. That involves leveling a fair number of things though, and squeezing out more speed is probably going to come down to minimizing the time spent cancel grinding.

There's also a weapon called the blood sword. It looks terrible on the surface since it has no attack, no accuracy, no evade, and a massive spell accuracy penalty. But it has the upside that every hit drains 1/16th of the enemy's life. No matter how much life they have, and even if my strength adds no damage at all, they're guaranteed dead in 16 hits as long as they aren't undead. You can max out your sword skill at level 16, which I believe gives 16 swings in a round but might give 17. Those aren't all going to hit, but it really feels like half of them should and therefore any non-undead monster in the game should be dead in two attacks. Oh, and there are two of these swords in the game. And in the PSX version I'm pretty sure you swing with both hands. So one person with 16 sword skill and 2 blood swords will swing 32 (or 34) times per round. Which should be a round one kill... So all I actually need is someone with 16 sword skill and either enough agility to go first or enough health to survive one round from the boss and bosses will be no problem at all.

Which means it's going to come down to random encounters. Which ones can I not run from? What do I need to deal with them? Those are things I'm only really going to find out by trying things out in the game itself.

But one thing the blood sword does point out is I don't necessarily need more than one character. Power leveling health and mana on multiple people will take extra time. It's entirely possible that one character with max sword/shield skill can just straight up beat the early bosses with regular swords and then switch to a blood sword when you get them to trivialize the rest of the bosses. There is certainly the issue of dealing with the fights you can't run from since shields have such ludicrous spell accuracy penalties (-70% for all shields). One possibility is to use elemental damage spells where the enemy is weak to that element. Those spells are guaranteed to hit regardless of your accuracy and hit for double damage. Every undead monster in the game except one has a weakness to fire, for example. So I could quite reasonably wear a shield and still kill them with a high level fire spell. And if I can't run from non-undead there's always the option of killing them off one at a time with a regular sword. That's slow, but depending on how often it comes up it might be faster than powering up three times as many characters. I also save on inputs in combat if I get to kill off most of my party and only need to control one person.

I wonder... The site I've been reading says it's Firion's stats that matter for ambushes, but it doesn't mention if he has to be alive or not. It's possible I want to level just his shield skill to the point where he has 99% evade with two of the starter shields and then murder him. And then probably use Guy since he starts with the highest strength and stamina and therefore will be better in the early game with a sword and will need less time to twink out his health to the same level. His agility sucks, which is unfortunate since agility is the best stat, but if he still uses one shield and has 16 shield skill he'll have a near max evade anyway. (The sword will give 17%, a base shield will give 68%, his base agility of 5 will give 5% for a total of 90%. So he needs 9 extra agility ups or to to use the second shield in the game to max out.)

Actually, I can only use the cancel trick with Guy once I get a 4th character. And since I think I want to get the toad spell before I get a 4th member he's probably out. Which would mean Maria if I end up casting spells that need int for accuracy, or just running with Firion regardless. He'll be running with 99% evade in his standard setup anyway so I guess I don't really gain an edge by not using him.

It's all theory for now, but I think a single character setup might be viable. And if it is viable it's probably going to be the fastest unless it involves jumping through too many hoops just by virtue of saving so much time not grinding the other characters. So I think I'm going to head down that road and see where it leads.

A single character is going to need to level:

Sword - 16
Shield - 16?
Health - 2000?
Mana - 300?
Toad - 16
Cure - ???
Osmose - ???
Life - ???
Fire - ??? (And maybe other elemental spells too? Thunder/blizzard/scourge.)
Warp - 1
Esuna - 3??? (Probably not needed if a ribbon is obtained early via toad 16.)
Swap - 1???
Teleport - 1

As far as gear goes, they don't need much. A starter shield, the best sword I can get at any stage in the game, 2 blood swords, and a ribbon. As I get better shields and exceed the evade cap it becomes possible to use gear with evade penalties too, so maybe I want a power sash and thief gloves or black garb and power armlet. (Either combo will give 10 extra strength and 10 extra agility which has to be good.) I also need to get enough gold to buy the spells I want and I have no idea right now how easy that will be. It's possible killing captains for a toad scroll will give me all the money I need for the entire run!

It's also possible that this whole toad minigame plan isn't needed. The early ribbon might be critical, but with only one character I won't need the 2 extra ones and could therefore eventually use the 1 you find in a chest. Same with the aegis shield. If toad isn't useful for killing fights I can't run from then grinding it all the way to 16 has a lot less value, but to start I want to run that strategy and see what happens.

Final Fantasy II: Fight or Flight?

I've been trying to decide if the right idea is to set myself up to run from every fight or if I want to set myself up to smash every fight. Both are doable within the confines of the system I think, but they do require different gear setups and things to power level.

Fighting every fight has the advantage of getting lots of money/loot drops. In a normal game it would also give more experience, but that's not the case here. It does give more chances to gain agility.

Running from every fight has the advantage of not needing nearly as much mana to beat a dungeon. It lets you build just for boss fights instead of needing to be able to kill a variety of trash mobs. (Ribbons may not actually be needed if you never actually fight anything that casts a brutal spell on you.) Running from fights is typically also faster than fighting them, at least in a game with a high success rate on running.

I loaded up my save file from my marathon playthrough and did some brief testing on running away. I tested by running with some with 99% evade, someone with 0% evade, and then I lowered the 99% guy down (to something like 15%) and tried again. Every time I tried to run at 99% evade it worked. Every other time it failed. This makes me think it isn't agility that matters for running away. It's just evade percentage. And if I want to I can get that up to 99% pretty trivially by dual wielding shields and power leveling the shield skill.

The real question is going to be if many fights are set up with a "can't run" flag. The database I've been using to pull data for the game doesn't list that anywhere that I can find, so it's going to be a trial and error kind of thing. I think I read somewhere that you can't run from undead, which could be problematic.

In terms of the fight plan I'd probably need to find a way to reliably kill all the monsters in one action. Autoattacking them all to death with berserk buffs will certainly work, but it isn't especially fast. There are instant death spells in the game, in particular the toad spell. Toad has the best accuracy of all the instant death spells and it's also needed for getting ribbons super early in the game. Convenient! Some enemies are going to be resistant to toad though, so I guess those fights are the autoattack fights. Or maybe I want to level up an attack spell like fire? Undead are also immune to toad I think, but those you can kill off with a life spell if you have enough accuracy.

I think the flight plan is superior to the fight plan, if it will work on most fights. I guess the way to find out is do a run with a 99% evasion character from the start and see! And probably level up a life spell to deal with undead fights if it turns out you can't run from those.

Final Fantasy II: Match Game

One of the things Square added to Final Fantasy II in the Origins edition is a little minigame where you have to match 8 pairs of cards by flipping them 2 at a time. You can get some money and consumables out of it pretty early on if you can perfect the board. Perfecting the board is extremely unlikely (it's a little worse than 1 in 2 million) so it feels like this can't be faster than just grinding mobs or whatever. There's a catch though. Apparently the game will only generate 32 boards and will loop around them. So if you're willing to write down the first few boards you'll be guaranteed to get some perfects on board 33 and on...

When I read about this I thought they meant there were only 32 possible boards so I went in and wrote them all down. The idea being I could then go in, flip a couple cards, and know where I was in the sequence. Unfortunately this turns out to not be the case. After writing them all down I did confirm that they cycled back for board 33. But then when I left the minigame and then went back in the board that came up had a pattern that didn't match any of the 32 I'd written down. Playing the game 33+ times just to get some gold has to be wrong.

There's a twist to the game... If you happen to have leveled the toad spell up to max level (for reference I have never maxed out a spell or skill in this game) the game changes and the rewards get significantly better. We're talking end game quality gear here... Aegis shield, ribbon, genji helm, genji armour, genji glove, and possibly some one shot consumables too. So if that gear makes the game significantly faster it could be worth the time and effort of writing down some patterns and plowing through the minigame a few times. You'd have to grind up a toad spell, which would also add on a fair amount of time. On the plus side toad is the best instant death spell in the game so maxing it out might actually be optimal even if you weren't going to abuse this minigame.

So the question is... How good are these items? Is it feasible that spending time getting them early will save more time over the course of the entire game?

Ribbon - Probably the best helmet in the game. It has no evasion penalty, so you can wear it without screwing up your agility gains. It has no magic penalty, so you can cast spells at full power. It has the highest magic defense of a helmet. It provides resistance to every element, which means you're immune to all negative status conditions from spells. That part is the one that could be huge... Not having to worry about dying to confuse or stone might save a lot of time. You get one ribbon out of a chest and can fight enemies that drop ribbons so eventually you'll get them that way, but all of these sources are only found in the final dungeon.

Genji Helm - The highest defense helmet in the game, but it comes with massive evasion and magic penalties. If you're happy going last, being unable to run, and getting hit by every attack then you want to wear this helmet. I don't want to do those things, except maybe on my 4th character who isn't going to get agility power leveled.

Aegis Shield - The best shield in the game. It has the highest evasion and provides resistance to 4 of the 8 elements. The evasion boost isn't very big, and since I'm planning on scumming a high shield level it probably wouldn't matter. You get one normally and can farm more off of the optional superboss of the game. All in the final dungeon.

Genji Armour - Same as the helm. Highest defense, but massive evasion and magic penalties. Do not want.

Genji Glove - Same as the other two.

Ok, so the genji gear is all terrible for the way I play, and the aegis shield is probably redundant. But getting my hands on 3 ribbons early on in the game is awesome. And maybe worth the time spent... I need to figure out what that would be. I also need to actually get the toad spell in the early game, which is not a trivial task...

There's a scroll in a treasure chest in Castle Fynn, but that place doesn't open up until near the end of the game. A long time after you get the snowmobile which opens up the minigame, so that's probably out. It's also a drop from a monster that appears on the world map at the same time as Castle Fynn opens, so that's no help. It also drops from a second monster that appears on the world map at the same time as the first one. But they also exist as a trap encounter in the first town. You can walk up to them and talk to them to start a fight. They're brutally powerful for the start of the game, but by the time I can get the snowmobile I'll have twinked out more than enough to kill one of these guys I would think. The toad scroll is only a 5% drop so I'll need to kill lots of them, but the bottom line is it is actually feasible to have toad really early in the game.

Which means I should investigate how long it takes to beat the minigame with 1 miss three times over.

Final Fantasy Month

One of the people I'm following on Twitch started up a long race with another guy where they're going to play 21 Final Fantasy games one after another and see who can beat them all first. They're pausing their times when they're sleeping so you can compare the different games between the two of them. Cereth, who I watch with some regularity, actively speedruns 5 of the games on the list. Crumps only speedruns 2 of them. So he should be at a big disadvantage... But apparently Cereth hasn't ever played some of the games and is likely to lose a fair amount of time on those. Especially since one of them is Tactics and a lot of people I know have to completely scrap their first run of that game because it encourages you to save the game right before a brutally hard fight. This means there's no way to go power up... So if you can't win with what you have, and if you don't have a backup save... You're screwed!

They're playing Final Fantasy II now, which neither of them have played much in the past, though at least Crumps is casting berserk to be awesome. One of the things mentioned on the stream is how the game actually has no RTA record time... No one speed runs this thing. Not even once just to get their name in lights... And the split software I use has a lot of game names preprogrammed into it. A _lot_ of game names. Including every single Final Fantasy game, except FFII. Poor FFII.

When I played this game in my marathon, way back in 2011, I didn't know what to do to make the game interesting so I decided to try to beat it as fast as I could. I got done in a little under 16 hours, but I spent a lot of time actually learning how the game works. And given that my raising agility post is one of the few that actually gets hits from outside people I know I think I actually have a pretty high level of knowledge about this game. I also didn't abuse the cancel trick in my last playthrough and that's certainly kosher in a speedrun.

What I'm saying is, I think I could really shave the time down to the level where it would be 'easy' to play the game in one sitting. And seeing all these people tuning in to watch these guys play the game makes me think there may be interest from other people in seeing it done.

I set up my PS2 today, and hooked it up to my USB capture card, and tried setting up a stream from it. I think it's pretty obvious from the quality that I'm using just composite cables instead of s-video since I don't have that wire for my PS2. If I actually get anywhere with doing this I'll have to track a better wire down. But what I do have seemed to be fairly clear regardless, so the technical setup is in place. The next step would be planning out a path through the game (including what chests are worth picking up) and then figuring out how twinked out I have to be to plow through that path. And then grind it up!

It feels a little bad to be deviating from my marathon to go do something else, but whatever! Tactics Advance is not the best so I'm in a bit of a rut anyway.

Final Fantasy II Conclusions

Well, I finished off Final Fantasy II last night. It turns out there are only 3 dungeons left in the game after getting flare and ultima so those spells really are terrible. There's simply not enough time to level them up unless you cheat or grind for hours and hours. I feel like they needed to either start those spells at a higher level, make them so powerful that even at level 1 or 2 they're good, or really ramp up the leveling formula so low level spells would improve quickly in the end game. Oh well.

The final dungeon was both a let down and rather scary. I never really felt like I could get wiped out, or even like I could lose a party member (other than the new 4th guy). But it really seemed like just a little bit less twinkage and I wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was I had to use all of my elixirs to get to the end. The final boss didn't even land an attack (I think he tried to blind someone) before he fell over dead to the might of my berserk spell.

Some final thoughts:

• Leila didn't actually die when we got swallowed by Leviathan. I guess she fell overboard and drifted to the capital or something? My party seemed about as interested in her being alive again as they were when she went missing: not at all.
• You start the game by naming four characters, and then you immediately lose the fourth one. (The four people are main male character, his girlfriend, their dimwitted friend, and the girl's brother.) In the third last dungeon of the game you end up killing the evil emperor and it seems like all is well... Until your fourth guy suddenly reappears and picks up where the emperor left off. The second last dungeon has you invade his castle to kill him... But when you get to the end the evil emperor comes back from hell to conquer the world. Your random jobber commits suicide to stall the undead emperor (pretty sure I could have just killed him there, but whatever...) while the rest run away. Fourth guy decides he has nothing better to do so he tags along to kill the undead emperor. And then after you do? His sister wants to be friends again but the fourth guy is all "everything has changed, screw you guys" and walks off. And you don't try to stop him! He tried to conquer the world, of his own volition, and it's clear he hasn't repented... But you let him leave to scheme a new plot to conquer the world? Kain in FFIV turns evil for a while but at least he had the excuse of being 'mind controlled'.
• In order to get into the emperor's castle you need an airship. You go to visit Pavel who has been taking care of Cid. As soon as you walk up to talk to Cid he falls into bed, gives you his airship, and dies. I guess Pavel is a lazy jerk and was feeding him the slow fish.
• I was trying to hit for 9999 damage but it looks like berserk actually has a cap. I'm guessing attack is limited (maybe at 99 or 256?) since it didn't seem to matter how often I cast berserk on my guy, I was stuck doing around 3300 max. I bet if I cared I could come close to 9999 though, by maxing weapon skill and haste. 
• Mental note: get osmose for all of your characters, not just the black mage. I was stuck chugging elixirs to restore my healer's mana.
• All told it took 15 hours and 44 minutes to complete. Before the final dungeon I was thinking I'd wasted a lot of time and would really be able to shave time off next time around. I'm not so sure anymore, since I think the final dungeon might actually be a problem. Though maybe with multiple copies of osmose it won't be...

Ultimate Spells?

I finally returned to the world of Final Fantasy II and plowed through the Ultima Tower. Supposedly this dungeon is hard but it has awesome spells at the top to make it all worthwhile. I found the dungeon to be reasonable trivial and the awesome spells at the top seem terrible. I needed to get Ultima to progress the plot so it still made sense to go get it, but it doesn't seem worth casting. Flare was also up at the top of the tower and is supposed to be the best black magic spell in the game. Unfortunately it starts at level 1, so by default it is bad. But maybe if I level it up a bunch it will become good? How exactly do spells work?

Damage spells, like flare, hit a variable number of times. You make an attack roll for each level of the spell (using magic accuracy which for flare starts at 0% but which gets an extra 1% for every int you have) and the defender makes a magic defense roll for each level of magic defense they have (just like how melee attacks and dodges work). Subtract the defender's successes from the attacker's successes to determine a number of hits, rounding up to 0 I think. Then add the level of the spell on to this number. So, basically, you hit somewhere between L and 2L times with the spell.

Then you work out the power of the spell. Flare's power is 20. The other black magic spells have a power of 10. To that number you add on a quarter of your int.

Finally, for each hit you obtained in the first step roll a number between P and 2P where P is the spell power from the second step. Add up all these numbers to see the damage done.

Ignoring enemy magic defense for a moment your expected number of hits, based on your intelligence I, is:

(L+IL) {assuming I stays less than 100% anyway}

which means the expected damage for a normal spell is:

(15+75/2*I)*(L+IL) = 15L+105/2IL+75/2IIL

and for flare is:

(30+75/2*I)*(L+IL) = 30L + 135/2IL+75/2IIL

So flare should just do more damage. And against a generic monster it will, but the tricky part is monsters tend to be vulnerable to some element of magic and flare is non-elemental. What happens when you shoot a monster which is vulnerable to fire with the fire spell?

Two things, both of which are awesome. The first is that the spell simply can't miss. Instead of getting a number of hits somewhere between L and 2L (with some 'dodged') you just get a full 2L. The second is that every hit does double damage. So the damage for a vulnerable spell is:

2*(15+75/2*I)*(2L) = 60L+150IL

Comparing flare to a same level vulnerable spell isn't useful since it's guaranteed to be worse. (All flare has going for it is double the base power. The vulnerable spell has that same doubling, but it also doubles the int factor and removes misses. The question I have is how many levels do we need to give flare before it beats out a vulnerable spell? Call the level of flare F.

30F+135/2IF+75/2IIF = 60L+150IL
F=L*(60+150I)/(30+135/2I+75/2II)

My caster has 52 int right now, so lets use that as a starting point and then also look at a couple bigger points for I.

F(I=.52)=1.81*L
F(I=.75)=1.70*L
F(I=.99)=1.56*L

These numbers are even high since flare can miss! Even if I managed to cap my int and get flare to max level (16) all I would need is the elemental spells at 11 and a vulnerable enemy. But here's the thing... There may be something even better...

I have a black mage now and the spell she's got the most levels in isn't an attack spell at all. It's berserk. So far it's seemed really ridiculously good but I'm wondering if that's just because my fighter has a high axe skill and it would even out if I power leveled a damage spell or not. So, how does berserk work compared to a damage spell?

The first difference right off the hop is you don't get the free hits. You need to actually roll your hits on your friend in order to land berserk. Fortunately you don't roll magic resistance checks on buff spells! Berserk also has a base +50% to accuracy instead of the base 0% which means that my mage with 52 int can't actually miss a cast of berserk. The base power for berserk is only 5. What berserk does is it 'attacks' once per level of the spell, and for every hit it adds the base power of the spell to the target's attack stat.

So in order to really work out what it does we'd need to go into all the details about melee attacks, and hits, and crit strikes, and such. I'm just going to wave hands and abstract a bit. My fighter gets 10 swings a round with pretty much perfect accuracy. But the monsters do dodge, probably around 2 a round. Crits are rare so I don't care. There's also enemy armor, but I'm going to assert that my base attack beats the enemy armor and therefore the bonus damage from berserk is all used. (I don't know that this is true against some bosses necessarily, but it's probably close.) So I'm probably getting 8 swings a round and the damage added to each swing is going to be a random number between X and 2X where X is the added attack power.

Assume berserk goes off before the attack this round. How much damage is added?

8*3/2*(L*(5+I*25)) = 60L+300LI

With all spells at level 6 and 52 int, flare will do 451 damage. Vulnerable fire will do 828 damage. Berserk will do 1296 damage.

With all spells at level 16 and 99 int, flare will do 2137 damage. Vulnerable fire will do 3336 damage. Berserk will do 5712 damage.

At any fixed int a level 6 berserk actually does more damage than a level 16 flare!


And all this ignores the most salient point for berserk... It carries over between rounds. Flare is going to do 451 damage once. Berserk is going to do 1296 damage every round! It even stacks, so I can cast berserk again on the same person so they do 2592 extra damage the second round. Of course, the downside is this damage only hits one mob at a time... Darn!

There is also a haste spell, but it doesn't stack up round after round and I don't have a second black mage. Though next time I play the game I may well set up my 3 fixed characters as two guys who cast berserk and one that casts haste and just have jobber mcbag in the 4th slot be an absolute monster!

Final Fantasy II: Leviathan!

I recently scored my crystal rod and got on a boat to head towards the tower containing Ultima. On the way I had to pass through a 1 square wide gap in the mountains and wouldn't you know it, I ran into a whirlpool! It turned out Leviathan was attacking and he swallowed me whole.

I awoke to find my 4th party member was missing. "Where's Leila?" *shrug* And then we moved on with out lives. No searching around for her. Just head off to continue our quest. Eventually we run into another dude who is looking for Ultima and decide to bring him along. After all, we need a 4th party member what with Leila presumably dead. When Josef got rolled over by a rock at least my party seemed to care that he was gone. Here we seem pretty oblivious to the loss of Leila.

At any rate I'm now 12:05 into the game.

Final Fantasy II: Approaching Ultima

I just plowed through the tropical island dungeon in FFII to obtain the black mask. Along with the white mask I earned from liberating Fynn I'm now set to go unlock Ultima, the supposed best spell in the game. Supposedly in the NES version the spell was rather bugged. It was the best spell at level 1 compared to other level 1 spells but didn't scale properly at all and ended up sucking at high levels compared to other high level spells. Since you get it near the end of the game and it's a pain to level, and you probably already leveled something else... It's not great. Supposedly how it was supposed to work was it scaled based on the levels of all your other skills/spells or something. The site I found didn't go into any details, and it didn't specify if it worked better in the PSX version or just in even further versions.

I did a little testing to verify the revelation from earlier and it seems to hold water. The first cast of esuna in a fight was getting me 6 esuna xp, future casts were just getting 1. So in the tropical island dungeon I started every fight with an esuna and a berserk to level those spells. Woo!

At any rate, I'm now 10:41 into the game.

Final Fantasy II: A Revelation!

Last week I was playing some FFII before our D&D session and was talking with Sky about the mechanics of the game. I mentioned that I didn't quite understand how many times you needed to use an ability but that it seemed like I had to use it at least as many times as I had levels in the skill before I could start gaining any experience at all. Then yesterday I was doing some unrelated reading about what certain spells did and stumbled across the actual formula for how you earn experience.

xp = Rank + Uses + Modifier - Level

Uses is how many times you use the spell and level is your current level in the skill. So I was right that it got harder to gain experience as you got higher in level and that spamming the ability in a specific fight would increase how much you earned once you started learning. The other two parts are the really interesting ones. Modifier depends on the type of ability being used. Weapons get +1, spells get +3, evade chance gets -2, magic defense gets +5. Rank is where it gets really new to me. Each fight is assigned a rank based on the easiest monster in the fight.

This means it's actually easier to gain experience in skills if you're fighting harder monsters, so fighting imps outside the starting town isn't necessarily the best plan anymore. For the base stats (strength, intelligence, spirit, agility, endurance, magic, hp, mp) it doesn't matter. But if you're trying to skill up spells, weapons, or defense rolls it totally matters where you're fighting. A typical fight I'm running into now is rank 5 instead of rank 1, so if I cast my level 2 Esuna spell once I'll actually gain 7 experience as opposed to 3. And if I spam it I'm only adding on one more experience per cast. So what I should probably start doing, if I want to level up spells, is to just find the hardest zone I can find and cast spells exactly once.

I want to be able to remove stone from my party (I almost lost when I came up against some monsters that breathed stone and they took out 3 people) so I need to skill up Esuna. Knowing this I think I'm going to just start casting it once a fight and get it up in a shorter period of time than just spamming it constantly for one fight.

Final Fantasy II: Esuna Replacement

I was broke when I was in the one town that sells the esuna, which removes negative status conditions. As such when someone gets blinded or poisoned I have no recourse. I could fill my inventory with eye drops and antidotes but that's annoying. The solution? Beat up my blind friend until he's dead. Then bring him back to life with the life spell! As an added bonus, he also gets a pretty good chance at getting more max hp in the process!

I just rescued Hilda and blew up the Dreadnought. My play time thus far is 5 hours and 21 minutes.

Final Fantasy II: Leeching XP

I got to the next dungeon and used the goddess bell from the previous dungeon to get in. Cowering just behind the locked door was Gordon. He starts off by saying he's far too weak to fight the monsters in the dungeon. But he got behind the locked door so he must know his way around, right? No, when a party member asks him as much he confesses he doesn't have a clue since there are lots of secret passages and such in the dungeon. But despite being useless in combat and worthless as a guide he asks to tag along anyway. We're suckers so we say yes. It would have been nice to know you could open the door before Josef sacrificed himself getting us a key though.

It turns out he wasn't lying about being terrible in combat either. He has no spells so he must be a bruiser. Only problem there is he started with about 8% of the max health that my bruiser did. Just about the only thing he has going for him is he got killed while blinded so it was gone when I brought him back to life. (I really need to buy esuna at some point.) Now that I think about it that's not such a bad idea. I think it may be time to light Bung on fire so I can bring him back to life without blindness too!

Final Fantasy II: Dead Dead

One of the weirdest things about the Final Fantasy series is which actions are really fatal and which ones can be shrugged off completely with a high enough level white mage. In FFII you have 3 main characters and then a 4th slot with a rotating array of dudes filling in. I just had Josef filling in. He's just a mediocre monk. At one point he got blinded which made him a really, really mediocre monk. So I had everyone attack him until he was dead. Then I cast life and brought him back, sans blind. (I should probably find out where esuna is sold and go buy it so I don't need to resort to such silliness.) At the end of the dungeon a bad guy springs a trap which drops a giant boulder on us. It rolls down the stairs and Josef throws himself in front of it to slow it down. The rest of the party escapes, he gets rolled over. But I still have the life spell, so he should be fine, right? Not so. Getting hacked to bits by an axe? No problem. Get squished by a rock? GG my friend.

I am now just outside the ice cave having gotten the Goddess Bell. It has taken me 3 hours and 35 minutes to reach this point. My black mage could use some more maximum mana but beyond that all my stats still seem quite overpowered for the monsters I'm fighting.

BMI: 21.98 (-0.05)

Wii Fit Age: 31 (+2)

Final Fantasy II: Broke!

I returned to the starting town with the Mithril key item. This allowed the weapon shop to start selling better weapons. Unfortunately I can't afford even a single silver sword. It turns out all those attempts to up my mana (by using Ming-Wu's mana burn spell) have left me essentially broke. On the plus side I do have a pretty significant amount of health and mana now and I'm about to lose Ming-Wu so no more power leveling until I can afford to buy Faze or Swap myself. Time to plow through the plot!


BMI: 21.94 (-0.23)
Wii Fit Age: 31 (-1)

Final Fantasy II: Skill Thresholds

I cleared out the first dungeon today, getting the 'mithril' key item. I had two people wielding double shields, one with sword and shield, and one with a staff. (He's the temp character who will be leaving soon. I don't care about leveling any of his stats.) I figured I'd have two people attacking which would kill all the fights pretty quickly and still level up shields on my two casters.

Unfortunately the game is designed such that as you get higher level in a weapon it becomes harder to gain more of that weapon. Now there are ways to do this that would make sense. Less xp per action or needing more xp to gain a level. No, what they did was added a threshold. If you have sword skill 5 then the first 4 times in a fight you attack with a sword nothing happens. Then each attack afterwards is worth standard sword xp. This means if you do it all in one fight you need to attack, say 23 times to level up. Or you could spend 19 fights attacking 5 times each for 95 actions instead of 23. And if you don't get to fight 5 times in a fight? You'll never level up at all. Short fights mean you're guaranteed to stagnate. My first character who had shield skill 5 going into the dungeon didn't gain a single shield experience. I eventually just unequipped one of the shield to level his hand to hand skill.

It's now clear I need to do skill up fights and story fights and I have to set up differently for each one. So I need to either bring weapons for my mages or build up their mana enough that they can cast attack spells every fight.

BMI: 21.82 (+.14)

Wii Fit Age: 28 (+1)

Final Fantasy II: Raising Agility

The leveling system in Final Fantasy II is such that you tend to get better at things by doing them. Want to level up sword skill? Attack with a sword equipped. Want to get more mp? Spend a lot of mp. Some of the stats are less straightforward and one in particular is flat out weird. That stat is agility.

How do you get more agility? Win a fight with a high evade percentage. You don't need to be attacked. You don't need to have a long fight. You just need to end a fight (without a negative status condition). The higher your evade%, the better a chance you'll get an agility stat up.

How do you have a high evade%? Have a high agility...


Ok, that's not the only way. Like in the original Final Fantasy wearing armor decreases your evade%. The heavier the armor the more it reduces your evade%. So, one way to increase your odds of getting an agility up is to run around naked. None of my characters are currently wearing a helmet, body armor, or bracer.

Another way is to equip weapons and shields. It turns out almost every weapon in the game increases your evade%, and it does so in an awesome way. Almost all of them have a 1% evade stat but it turns out that stat actually gets multiplied by your skill level with them plus 1. So if I'm using a sword with 1 evade% and have 3 sword skill I actually get 4 evade% from it. (I imagine this is because you're parrying with the sword and the better you are with a sword the better you can parry with it.) Shields work the same way but have real evade% numbers. The starter shield has 4 evade% on it. Get a shield skill of 2 and that's an extra 12 evade% right there. Now, you have two hands in FFII and you can stick a shield in each hand so with 2 shield skill I'd actually get 24 evade%. And now if I attack I do no damage but get twice as much shield skill experience!


How do you get more agility? By running around the woods naked, holding 2 shields, and showing them to the imps until they run away. (Can you blame them?)

Final Fantasy II: A Plan!

I somehow woke up an hour early this morning and rather than go back to sleep (and probably sleep through my alarm) I decided to just get up and get started on FFII. I still didn't have a plan but I thought maybe if I played a bit without beating myself up I'd get an idea. Even at starting stat levels I was barely getting any skill-ups at all from anything as I did the first couple plot points. Having an avenue to power and ignoring it for no reason is frustrating to me so I wasn't really enjoying myself. So I decided I need to come up with a good reason to ignore power or I need to just give in and play the game like I play games.

The most common complaint I hear from people when I explain the FFII battle system is that it just seems wrong to attack yourself or your friends in order to raise your stats. You should level up on monsters, fantasy gaming common sense says, and not on yourself. But does that complaint hold water? I asked myself if fantasy Nick would consider attacking fantasy Byung with a sword in order to get powerful enough to save the world. Which made me think of the fencing club at UW. I went to one meeting but couldn't get anyone else I knew to join with me and wasn't that interested in doing it alone at the time. But if Byung had joined with me wouldn't I have been spending the day hitting him with a sword in the hopes that I'd get better at using swords? Wouldn't he have gotten better at dodging swords and gain more endurance to dodge swords for longer stretches of time? Real Nick and real Byung don't even have a world to save and yet we could quite conceivably have hit each other with swords in an attempt to get better at using swords.

If it makes sense for real people why does it seem so wrong in a fantasy game? Is the problem that there's an imp watching me train? Is the problem that I wouldn't actually kill Byung in a fencing club (hopefully!) and could kill him in a game? Is the problem that games just intuitively involve grinding on mobs instead of rote training?

Having an imp along for the ride is a little weird for sure, but he can't hurt me. (Even at base stats the imps can't do enough damage to give me an hp stat-up.) It would make more sense to stand around fighting with no mob around but the confines of the game prevent that. That the most intuitive way to rote train is removed doesn't mean I shouldn't go for the next best thing.

Fantasy Nick can't actually kill fantasy Byung, either. Final Fantasy games have permanent deaths in them and they never result from generic combat. Even if I knock off all his health I just need to use a phoenix down, cast life, or take him to church. Even wearing him down to low health has no negative consequences. We can just drink potions or cast cure spells afterwards. Health is more akin to physical endurance than to a source of life, really. Run on a treadmill some and gain some endurance! I'm actually more likely to maim or kill real Byung with fencing swords than to hurt fantasy Byung and yet fencing clubs still exist.

Grinding on mobs certainly makes more sense in most fantasy games for sure. But this game doesn't work like most fantasy games. Unless you take "cheesy" tactics (I eventually equipped one of my characters with 2 shields so he wouldn't do any damage with the attack command in the hopes that the prolonged fights would allow for more stat-ups) it's pretty likely you're going to end up unable to get stronger. Monsters you can kill will die trivially and be worth nothing at all. Monsters you can't kill will kill you. FFII just doesn't have a smooth difficulty progression from dungeon to dungeon. Sometimes the difficulty takes a huge jump and if you don't do something weird you're screwed. Hitting yourself with a sword may seem wrong but so do the other tactics for getting stronger. (Swapping life with an imp, intentionally doing less damage to make the fight take longer, spamming buff or heal spells to rank them up, cancel trick, etc...) Different people may have different ideas for which tactics cross the cheesy line but pretty much any successful tactic is in that grey area somewhere.


The fencing club train of thought also got me thinking why I'm not actually good with swords. The answer there is time. There wasn't enough time in the day for me to sleep, eat, go to class, do assignments, fence, pump iron, and still play 16 hours of games each day. Something had to give and it turns out fencing and pumping iron were easy cuts. Fantasy Nick has much more pressing things to do than code Connect Four AIs and figure out how we can detect planets around distant stars. He has a world to save! So perhaps the best reason for why standing around hitting yourself in the head around the starting town is illogical is that he really has to get in gear and save the world. But the game doesn't have any such time restrictions on it, as games rarely do.

And then I had the answer to all my problems. My arbitrary limiting factor for FFII can be time related! Fantasy Nick can't screw around forever powering up because I'm saying he can't. I don't currently have a specific time limit in mind, just to try to get my game clock as low as possible when I win. I may search around and see if I can find a good benchmark on the internet but realistically all I'm going to do is establish a benchmark for myself when I do this whole thing again 10 years from now. But it gives me an actual plan and will let me twink up within reason so I'm pretty happy with the idea. I am, however, going to ban the cancel cheat. If thinking about doing things actually made you better at doing them then real Nick would be a much more powerful person. Fantasy Nick can do all the rote training he feels he needs to do but he can't just daydream and become awesome.

Final Fantasy II: What To Do?

Final Fantasy II is a game that eschews the normal gain experience to go up in levels system. Instead you have levels for everything you can possibly do and you get better at something by doing it. Want to get better with a sword? Attack with a sword. Want to get better with Ultima? Cast Ultima. Want to get more maximum health? Take a bunch of damage.

Unfortunately the system is wide open to abuse. Want to get better with swords, and with shields, and get more strength, and more vitality, and more maximum health? Try hitting yourself in the head with a sword over and over and over again. The poor imp you're engaged with won't know what's going on but you don't care!

I looked around a bit and couldn't find any challenges to do in this game. In fact, it just seems plain hard and no one really seems to like it very much. I've only beaten it once so just playing through normally could be the right plan... But how to define normally? Normally for me where I'll hit myself with a sword for 15 hours and then cakewalk through the game or normally in the sense that my characters will only take actions I normally would in a different game. No hitting yourself with a sword. No cast life on people who aren't dead. Etc. I worry this will make the game practically impossible though since I simply won't get to level up spells like life to the point where they're useful.