March 16, 2008



I'm visiting relatives now that it's easter, and to get here I spent about a day on a boat the size of a ferry. This meant quite a few hours of free time, so I got some good quality time with FF2.

The screenshot for today isn't too exciting, but it shows the loot screen, which is new. So far monsters have dropped potions for the most part, but it gets better apparently.

The progress I've made entailed going through the first few towns, trying to figure out the geography, getting better equipment, and trying to help out the rebels. My main mission at the moment is to sabotage a big flying warship which some dudes in a village have been forced to work on. They used to be guarded by this nasty commander guy, but he's been replaced by some lazy guy, so I have a fair shot now.

Also, one neat feature is that you can pay for transportation now. One of the first towns you enter let you pay to go by boat to another town, where you can pay even more to go farther away by airship. Definitely a time saver.

The characters you interact with seem quite a bit more interesting this time around. It might have to do with the translation, but there are actual dialogues now. For instance when you're going to talk to some story related character you have the options of saying something, learning something, and using an item. The rebel leader talks among other things of the warship. By clicking learn, and then warship you keep that word in a notebook of sort, so when you talk to someone else you can go to say, and then mention warship. Eventually you do get quite a few things to say, but you can usually guess what's relevant or not.

The overall difficulty seems more balanced, even though high level monsters lurk in some fairly early areas. You do have to grind to get by though.

And finally I should expound some more on the level up/down mechanic. As I mentioned your stats go up as you use something, but other stats go down if you don't use other things. A melee heavy character will have his INT drop quite fast, and his melee power grow just as much. Characters have a higher chance of gaining HP when they're low on health, so since you can damage your own characters a pretty cheezy way is to hurt yourself until you're really low, and then just wipe out the enemies. Additionally there's a weird bug in the weapon skill level up algorithm where you can select an enemy to attack, cancel it, select it again, cancel it again, and so on. This gives you a pretty substantial bonus depending on the level of the enemy. Remember the high level monsters I mentioned? Once you're at a half decent one tactic is just to look for the easier of the bunch, do the select-cancel trick, and try to somehow kill the enemy with spells. I might give this a shot if the game turns really hard, but if not I'll try to play the game as intended.

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