FF2 in a nutshell: Starts with you getting overwhelmed, ends with the opposition getting overwhelmed. Your starting stats, equipment and spell options are terrible. But unless you're making every character a red mage, they'll get so good at their specialties that they get very powerful by the mid-game. (Don't try to make everyone a red mage. I did that once and it was miserable.)
I'm excited to see how some of the later games go. This was basically an attack and item only run, but a FF7 run that makes use of most of the yellow materia and a FF8 run where the lesser used specialty GF command abilities get a chance to shine would be fun to watch.
The reason the Sergeant is such a pain is that it is actually an normal enemy from later in the game with stats to match. Pretty much every "boss" in the game is an early appearance of a later game random encounter. The game has 7 ranks of enemies and the Sergeant is a Rank 3 enemy fough when you've should only have been fighting Rank 1 enemies.
Literally every boss up until the Emperor in the Cyclone is a regular encounter from later in the game albeit some are more hidden than others. Very few are Unique. Honestly probably was a choice of no boss at the end of a Dungeon or later enemies given how absolutely small Famicom Cartridges are, Dragon Quest 3, Dragon Quest IV and Final Fantasy III are outliers on release when it came to content. .
@@costby1105 Borghen in the Snow Cave is one of the few "uniques" and he is weirdly weaker than the Sergeant having 240 hp vs the Sergeant's 420 hp. FFII has a weird boss difficulty curve.
I forgot how bonkers good the Blood Sword was in this game, haha. I gotta assume the other games in this series will be the same as the Magic Only runs, yeah? Can’t wait to see whatever all is lined up!
Ripper is good too as it ignores defense, and pixel remaster lets you buff fists/unarmed for reduced damage if you double shield (older stuff doesn't let you attack). That helps make ultima very viable let alone with genji armor to have a tank as it ignores magic interference penalties. Ff2 is Not really a challenge especially with boost, let alone go to mysidia (overpowered equips/holy) with encounters off once you got enough money to own early game. Spamming tomes in older versions helps a ton once you have enough money.
My casual runs were constructed on a class system and overall, healing wasn't required. 1 front tank, 1 back bow dps, 1 back mage. Mage and tank buff with what they can while dps goes to town. A little grinding when enemies start to damage, but overall it's not too rough. Most of the grind is pre-Scott's Ring to set it all up. I assume it's not much of a stretch to force it to work for you. Plenty of spells and gear drop so this is a very viable run choice.
Do weapons scale better than magic? Yes, yes they do. The only spells really worth considering in this game are Cure, Esuna, Basuna, Protect, Berserk, and Life for the most part. And undocumented, but if you equip any weapon or armor upgrades after the Mythril unlocks, they interfere with your spells. Also poorly explained is shields' defensive properties in this game; whenever I played, I always dual-wielded since equiping a shield didn't impact the defensive numbers on the status screen so I assumed they were doing nothing, but it turns out they do quite a bit! Being more aggressive with two weapons per character could potentially be a better idea anyway, for some characters at least.
The game tells you Leviathan swallows anyone with the crystal rod, so it is trying to prevent people from entering the tower. Now we just need an in-universe explanation of why there are unlimited crystal rods.
When you fought adamantoise and the following bosses, you did low damage first turns and then a lot more damage in the following turns due to ancient sword. That sword causes curse on enemies which is a HUGE debuff in this game and reduces atk and defense a lot. P.S. fists are super strong in this game and do tons of damage in exchange of lower evasion and survivability but it's very worth.
Fist are very strong early and mid game they fall a bit later cause some weapons get strong, with the possibility to Dual Wield for basically doing 2 attacks.
I just recently binged all of your Final Fantasy content and let me just say that seeing this new video pop up in my sub feed put a smile on my face, thank you for the work you put into your content and Happy Holidays!
Agility affects Evasion and the rate of back and pre-emptive attacks. Evasion affect evading hits and turn order... for some reason. Carrying a hunk of metal in your offhand makes you run faster.
Something to make this easier that I did on my own no-magic run of FF2: The Ancient Sword. This sword's on-hit Curse effect reduces enemy attack and defense stats by half. It makes every fight so much easier even if you refuse to use the Blood Sword like I did. I even *tried* to fight the Emperor without Blood or Curse swords.. but while I think it would have been possible, the luck required for the Emperor to just not use physical attack drains for a long enough time was going to be insane. Possible, but improbable. Tried a second go with Ancient Sword equipped and while it took a couple rounds to proc through the Emp's big magic defense, once it cursed him to reduce his defense, he died in like 2 rounds after. Curse really is huge in this game. Also, note that since the Item command was allowed, and magic item consumables were allowed (used Bacchus' Cider on the Emperor), you could have had a much easier time against the Sergeant by just throwing a tome or two at him. You get a Fire and Teleport tome in the same dungeon with him, and while the Fire might not one-shot it would do a lot, and Teleport has a chance to just one-shot.
I remember playing the gba version of FF2 and got the impression the attack stat of the weapon mattered a lot more than your skill with it or strength when overcoming enemy defenses. Weapons a few attack points higher would take me from 0 to hundreds of damage for no reason i could glean at the time.
That would make sense. Skill probably determines the number of hits, where the weapons attack determines damage per hit. 10 hits means nothing if the attack is too weak to actually deal damage.
Sergeant is just bizarre to me in how he suddenly completely invalidates physical attacks unless you grind over him. Wouldn't mind potentially seeing a bonus segment in the wrap up where you at least make a good faith effort to take the Emperor without the Blood Sword.
I remember Thief Gloves being very good in my high-evasion playthrough. Equipment weight matters a _lot_ in the evasion calculation and the gloves can let you equip slightly heavier armour without losing evasion. Huh, that did not go the way I expected. I wonder if the PR did anything to the growth caps or if it's always been like this? Well at least we have the FF2 tradition of "why is this _specific_ boss so much harder than anything else?" XD
To my knowledge, the PR version didn't do anything wonky with growths, but I'm certainly not an expert. And getting good data on the PR versions specifically can be tricky. Good to know on the Thief Gloves though.
Thief Gloves are not only light they also add 10 Agility which also affect Evasion, imo they're pretty the best gloves of the game with how Evasion is simply much better than raw defense.
I feel like a quirk of the balance in the early FF games is the spikey, non-linear gear progression. Early on, you get basically nothing. So, the first boss is a pain. It makes you think you might need to use a variety of offensive and defensive styles. Then you get the next tier of weapons and armour and from then on out, it just outpaces the enemies by a larger and larger margins. Magic (outside of things like warp) scale much more gradually. But even then, the devs did a poor job making the battles feel suspenseful. Either you get steamrolled and you have to go grind or you steamroll the enemies...not much in between. I say all this from a place of love. The early FFs have a special place in my heart, but some warts you just can't ignore.
I also have a lot of fondness for these early games. But yeah, when it comes time to critique them, there is a lot that doesn't quite work the way it probably should. But they're still a lot of fun to play.
Much of the game balancing issues with the famicom Final Fantasy Titles comes down to cartridge space and trying to squeeze more content into very small spaces.
Curious how you apply this to motes in ffxii. Betting some of those palings are going to be a pain, especially in any espers that might block license board tiles that would be useful
As someone who just did an items only run for 12, if I was able to attack, I'd probably bring Cura and Hastega motes, unless the boss couldn't be attacked for fear of counter. Nothing else is really going to help as bosses are surprising immune to most things. You need to either ride out the paling timer or meet its conditions to drop. The most consistent strategy I had for damage was X-potions with the Nihopalaoa accessory that reverses healing items. Much easier to farm too.
@@Thelona okay yeah that’s really smart. How do you heal your units if they’re wearing that accessory? Wouldn’t it cause potions to damage them as well?
Only 3 minutes in so you may have already realized this idk, but the best way to get through the early game without magic is using your fists, they are actually capable of dealing damage to bosses, whereas until you get better weapons. The weapons do pretty much nothing.
What is your favorite among the first 6 ff games? It seems you like 2 and 3 even though they are not liked very much, and I think you don't like 5 but it's considered good. I got lost in 2 and never played 3 and 6 but I love 1, 4, and 5. As for 7,8,9,10 and 12, I love all of them, especially 8, 10, and 12. I really LOVE these 3
I have a soft spot for 2 and 3, but I think of the first 6, 5 is my favorite. I love the customization and versatility of the job system (though it then becomes a bit annoying in solo class challenges). I think 6 is a a close second, which would not have been the case a year ago. 6 has really grown on me as I've made videos about it.
If you grind forever magic can be somewhat on the level of attacking. That same amount of time would turn a physical attacker into a unit that can solo the rest of the game tho
I'm of the opinion that if something doesn't really affect the main point of the challenge then it should be usable. An example in this video would be teleporting out of dungeons. None of the enemies were a threat to you, so the only thing teleport would do is speed up a sure thing. If the enemies had been a problem then escaping the dungeons would have been part of the challenge, but they weren't so the most 'challenging' part was the tedium and motivation to continue. I get why you didn't, hell I even respect it, but for me I value my time more then the 'integrity' of a personal challenge.
I found magic almost useless in this game. healing spells did fine but offensive spells no matter how much I had my characters use them was next to useless.
Trying to unpack all of this as I’ve watched all these series now. These games are unbalanced, and we are playing them over and over in specific ways in order to prove, what exactly? A blank only run could be interesting in a game with play testing specifically for that. As in, I imagine a persistent goal for QA today is to have the testers attempt to blindly repeat one action/mechanic/play-style in order to confirm for the developer that the game will require some thinking to beat. But then, this is assuming a lot of a developer and even so, to what end? What does anyone do with this knowledge if they aren’t actively play testing? But anyway, I swear this content creator is actually John Hodgman 😂
Stripping Minwu of his spells in the name of rules is incredible.
The balancing in this game is insane. Who would have ever guessed the first boss would be the biggest challenge in a run that is effectively "spam a"?
I really was initially a bit concerned. And then the game's difficulty just collapsed in front of me. It was very surprising.
FF2 in a nutshell: Starts with you getting overwhelmed, ends with the opposition getting overwhelmed.
Your starting stats, equipment and spell options are terrible. But unless you're making every character a red mage, they'll get so good at their specialties that they get very powerful by the mid-game. (Don't try to make everyone a red mage. I did that once and it was miserable.)
Turns out the solution to FF2's seemingly very complex mechanics is "fuck it just hit things"
Percentage damage that works against bosses is a wonderful thing.
I'm just baffled that they were like, "yeah, it's cool if each hit deals 1/16 of the bosses hp". It's incredibly funny.
I'm excited to see how some of the later games go. This was basically an attack and item only run, but a FF7 run that makes use of most of the yellow materia and a FF8 run where the lesser used specialty GF command abilities get a chance to shine would be fun to watch.
Enemy Skill materia, that lovely "magical, but not the Magic command" gray area.
But yeah, FF8 could get really interesting.
Looking forward to FF8 for sure!
The reason the Sergeant is such a pain is that it is actually an normal enemy from later in the game with stats to match. Pretty much every "boss" in the game is an early appearance of a later game random encounter. The game has 7 ranks of enemies and the Sergeant is a Rank 3 enemy fough when you've should only have been fighting Rank 1 enemies.
Literally every boss up until the Emperor in the Cyclone is a regular encounter from later in the game albeit some are more hidden than others. Very few are Unique. Honestly probably was a choice of no boss at the end of a Dungeon or later enemies given how absolutely small Famicom Cartridges are, Dragon Quest 3, Dragon Quest IV and Final Fantasy III are outliers on release when it came to content. .
@@costby1105 Borghen in the Snow Cave is one of the few "uniques" and he is weirdly weaker than the Sergeant having 240 hp vs the Sergeant's 420 hp.
FFII has a weird boss difficulty curve.
I forgot how bonkers good the Blood Sword was in this game, haha. I gotta assume the other games in this series will be the same as the Magic Only runs, yeah? Can’t wait to see whatever all is lined up!
Ripper is good too as it ignores defense, and pixel remaster lets you buff fists/unarmed for reduced damage if you double shield (older stuff doesn't let you attack). That helps make ultima very viable let alone with genji armor to have a tank as it ignores magic interference penalties.
Ff2 is Not really a challenge especially with boost, let alone go to mysidia (overpowered equips/holy) with encounters off once you got enough money to own early game. Spamming tomes in older versions helps a ton once you have enough money.
Nice video. I had a crazy thought of trying a no shop challenge. The drop only status healing items and no esuna should be tough.
My casual runs were constructed on a class system and overall, healing wasn't required. 1 front tank, 1 back bow dps, 1 back mage. Mage and tank buff with what they can while dps goes to town. A little grinding when enemies start to damage, but overall it's not too rough. Most of the grind is pre-Scott's Ring to set it all up. I assume it's not much of a stretch to force it to work for you. Plenty of spells and gear drop so this is a very viable run choice.
Do weapons scale better than magic? Yes, yes they do. The only spells really worth considering in this game are Cure, Esuna, Basuna, Protect, Berserk, and Life for the most part. And undocumented, but if you equip any weapon or armor upgrades after the Mythril unlocks, they interfere with your spells. Also poorly explained is shields' defensive properties in this game; whenever I played, I always dual-wielded since equiping a shield didn't impact the defensive numbers on the status screen so I assumed they were doing nothing, but it turns out they do quite a bit!
Being more aggressive with two weapons per character could potentially be a better idea anyway, for some characters at least.
The game tells you Leviathan swallows anyone with the crystal rod, so it is trying to prevent people from entering the tower.
Now we just need an in-universe explanation of why there are unlimited crystal rods.
When you fought adamantoise and the following bosses, you did low damage first turns and then a lot more damage in the following turns due to ancient sword.
That sword causes curse on enemies which is a HUGE debuff in this game and reduces atk and defense a lot.
P.S. fists are super strong in this game and do tons of damage in exchange of lower evasion and survivability but it's very worth.
Ohhhh. Completely forgot about curse. That would explain a lot.
Fist are very strong early and mid game they fall a bit later cause some weapons get strong, with the possibility to Dual Wield for basically doing 2 attacks.
I just recently binged all of your Final Fantasy content and let me just say that seeing this new video pop up in my sub feed put a smile on my face, thank you for the work you put into your content and Happy Holidays!
Agility affects Evasion and the rate of back and pre-emptive attacks. Evasion affect evading hits and turn order... for some reason. Carrying a hunk of metal in your offhand makes you run faster.
Something to make this easier that I did on my own no-magic run of FF2: The Ancient Sword. This sword's on-hit Curse effect reduces enemy attack and defense stats by half. It makes every fight so much easier even if you refuse to use the Blood Sword like I did. I even *tried* to fight the Emperor without Blood or Curse swords.. but while I think it would have been possible, the luck required for the Emperor to just not use physical attack drains for a long enough time was going to be insane. Possible, but improbable.
Tried a second go with Ancient Sword equipped and while it took a couple rounds to proc through the Emp's big magic defense, once it cursed him to reduce his defense, he died in like 2 rounds after. Curse really is huge in this game.
Also, note that since the Item command was allowed, and magic item consumables were allowed (used Bacchus' Cider on the Emperor), you could have had a much easier time against the Sergeant by just throwing a tome or two at him. You get a Fire and Teleport tome in the same dungeon with him, and while the Fire might not one-shot it would do a lot, and Teleport has a chance to just one-shot.
I just love these FF 1-6 videos.
I remember playing the gba version of FF2 and got the impression the attack stat of the weapon mattered a lot more than your skill with it or strength when overcoming enemy defenses. Weapons a few attack points higher would take me from 0 to hundreds of damage for no reason i could glean at the time.
That would make sense. Skill probably determines the number of hits, where the weapons attack determines damage per hit. 10 hits means nothing if the attack is too weak to actually deal damage.
@@Xephrost_GamingThat is indeed the case if the wiki is even close to correct.
Sergeant is just bizarre to me in how he suddenly completely invalidates physical attacks unless you grind over him.
Wouldn't mind potentially seeing a bonus segment in the wrap up where you at least make a good faith effort to take the Emperor without the Blood Sword.
I remember Thief Gloves being very good in my high-evasion playthrough. Equipment weight matters a _lot_ in the evasion calculation and the gloves can let you equip slightly heavier armour without losing evasion.
Huh, that did not go the way I expected. I wonder if the PR did anything to the growth caps or if it's always been like this?
Well at least we have the FF2 tradition of "why is this _specific_ boss so much harder than anything else?" XD
To my knowledge, the PR version didn't do anything wonky with growths, but I'm certainly not an expert. And getting good data on the PR versions specifically can be tricky. Good to know on the Thief Gloves though.
Thief Gloves are not only light they also add 10 Agility which also affect Evasion, imo they're pretty the best gloves of the game with how Evasion is simply much better than raw defense.
I just go ahead and click like before I watch these now.
I feel like a quirk of the balance in the early FF games is the spikey, non-linear gear progression. Early on, you get basically nothing. So, the first boss is a pain. It makes you think you might need to use a variety of offensive and defensive styles. Then you get the next tier of weapons and armour and from then on out, it just outpaces the enemies by a larger and larger margins.
Magic (outside of things like warp) scale much more gradually. But even then, the devs did a poor job making the battles feel suspenseful. Either you get steamrolled and you have to go grind or you steamroll the enemies...not much in between.
I say all this from a place of love. The early FFs have a special place in my heart, but some warts you just can't ignore.
I also have a lot of fondness for these early games. But yeah, when it comes time to critique them, there is a lot that doesn't quite work the way it probably should. But they're still a lot of fun to play.
FF2 with no magic is like my normal FF2 run but without cure spells and buffs that I use but barely do something! 🎉 🤣
Agreed. Especially after this playthrough, I'll never bother with any spells other than a bit of healing and buffing again.
Much of the game balancing issues with the famicom Final Fantasy Titles comes down to cartridge space and trying to squeeze more content into very small spaces.
Very true. They did a lot with that space. But you definitely feel that playing the games 30~ years after release.
Curious how you apply this to motes in ffxii. Betting some of those palings are going to be a pain, especially in any espers that might block license board tiles that would be useful
As someone who just did an items only run for 12, if I was able to attack, I'd probably bring Cura and Hastega motes, unless the boss couldn't be attacked for fear of counter. Nothing else is really going to help as bosses are surprising immune to most things. You need to either ride out the paling timer or meet its conditions to drop. The most consistent strategy I had for damage was X-potions with the Nihopalaoa accessory that reverses healing items. Much easier to farm too.
@@Thelona okay yeah that’s really smart. How do you heal your units if they’re wearing that accessory? Wouldn’t it cause potions to damage them as well?
Love these Final Fantasy restricted runs.
If you're doing no magic, going barehanded is a great option. Costs nothing to do and ignores defense for the most part.
If i sold my blood sword, can i get it again somehow?
Only 3 minutes in so you may have already realized this idk, but the best way to get through the early game without magic is using your fists, they are actually capable of dealing damage to bosses, whereas until you get better weapons. The weapons do pretty much nothing.
Ancient Sword buys you everything in this run :)
No magic could get interesting depending on what games are next
YESS!! 🎉🎉🎉
What is your favorite among the first 6 ff games? It seems you like 2 and 3 even though they are not liked very much, and I think you don't like 5 but it's considered good. I got lost in 2 and never played 3 and 6 but I love 1, 4, and 5. As for 7,8,9,10 and 12, I love all of them, especially 8, 10, and 12. I really LOVE these 3
I have a soft spot for 2 and 3, but I think of the first 6, 5 is my favorite. I love the customization and versatility of the job system (though it then becomes a bit annoying in solo class challenges). I think 6 is a a close second, which would not have been the case a year ago. 6 has really grown on me as I've made videos about it.
If you grind forever magic can be somewhat on the level of attacking. That same amount of time would turn a physical attacker into a unit that can solo the rest of the game tho
It's really funny how much more work you have to put into make spells work, when physical attacks just kind of work right out of the box.
Perfect, as I go through trying to platinum all the pixel remasters 😂
Final fantasy 2 spells required grinding on its own sadly even ultima doesn't compare to weapon damage in the end.
Ngl if square enix cant make a good sequal to a game what would had happened if 2 got a sequal tho would it become better tho
Not enough suffering! FF2 IS PAIN!
I'm of the opinion that if something doesn't really affect the main point of the challenge then it should be usable. An example in this video would be teleporting out of dungeons. None of the enemies were a threat to you, so the only thing teleport would do is speed up a sure thing. If the enemies had been a problem then escaping the dungeons would have been part of the challenge, but they weren't so the most 'challenging' part was the tedium and motivation to continue. I get why you didn't, hell I even respect it, but for me I value my time more then the 'integrity' of a personal challenge.
Did I miss the FF1 video? Or did you decide all fighter or monk runs have already been easily done?
He picks select games - pretty much for the reason you said. Interest.
1 minute ago is wild
I found magic almost useless in this game. healing spells did fine but offensive spells no matter how much I had my characters use them was next to useless.
Trying to unpack all of this as I’ve watched all these series now. These games are unbalanced, and we are playing them over and over in specific ways in order to prove, what exactly? A blank only run could be interesting in a game with play testing specifically for that. As in, I imagine a persistent goal for QA today is to have the testers attempt to blindly repeat one action/mechanic/play-style in order to confirm for the developer that the game will require some thinking to beat. But then, this is assuming a lot of a developer and even so, to what end? What does anyone do with this knowledge if they aren’t actively play testing? But anyway, I swear this content creator is actually John Hodgman 😂
Magic isn't bad!..... You can cast Haste and Berserk to make your attacks even stronger.
Number 1 use of magic. Making regular attacks stronger.
No magic? No problem. FF2 is so badly balanced that once your attack engine gets revved up, it's all over.
It's really wild how effectively regular attacks stomp through the game.
I have nothing I'd like to say