Final Fantasy Legend II

....MAGI.... The symbol of great power. The legacy of the ancient gods who made this world. Many fought for the mighty power. Some won and some failed. Now.... another legend of bravery is about to begin...

The Title : The title Final Fantasy Legend II is somewhat of a marketing ploy as it was called SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu in Japan. Because of game play similarities between the Final Fantasy Legend mini-series and the SaGas, it could be argued they are more accurately classified with the SaGas than as separate Final Fantasies.

The Story :

Final Fantasy Legend II was more heavily influenced by mythology than any game I've seen besides Valkyrie Profile. Mythological themes are found in the two major objectives of the game and many characters and monster names come from mythology. The primary objective is for the hero to find his missing father. (Note that a female or genderless robot main character is available as well; I'm just using male pronouns for convenience.) A young man's search for his lost father may seem like a cliche in this day and age, but it is an established mythological theme. Countless other video games use it. I found that this game's treatment of this common theme of searching for one's father was far more well done than in some movies and its only on a puny Game Boy!

The other major objective in the game is for the hero to collect pieces of MAGI to build a statue of the goddess Isis. Legend has it that Great Power comes to the one who does. As one might expect, there are evil individuals and groups trying to harness the power MAGI for their insidious causes. Thankfully, the MAGI is scattered into 77 pieces throughout just about 20 mini-worlds. Most of these antagonists are named after other classical mythological gods like Apollo and Venus. Each piece contains a considerably amount of power individually, so even a single MAGI in the hands of an enemy is dangerous. The heroes venture through these worlds, collecting MAGI and searching for the hero's father. They travel between worlds through this trippy, pseudo-outer space series of organic, twisted pillars and doorways leading to nothing.

Various other characters join the group for story reasons and are usually a great help. Among the more notable are Mr. S, a mutant teacher that is vastly overpowered for the first level; Mask, an enigmatic guy that looks reeeeeeeally familiar to the heroes; and the goddess Isis herself, who literally has every statistic maxed out.

The game play :

As I mentioned before, FFL2's plays considerably different than the mainstream Final Fantasy series. At the start of the game, a single character is chosen to be the hero/heroine. After the opening scene, three more characters are chosen to accompany him/her on the quest.

These characters are:

• Male Human
- The Male Human is the traditional Fighter/Knight character. He grows in strength and hit points, but is really slow. I usually chose him for the hero. His sprite looks like an early pixelated Crono or Cloud Strife.
• Female Human
- Similar to the Male Human, the Female Human has more agility and less strength. As damage for bows and lithe weapons like knifes are based on agility, she is essential the same, but uses different weapons. She looks like an early Tifa with black hair and a flower on her head.
• Male Mutant
- The traditional Black Mage character, the Male Mutant starts out with the Ice spell. Excelling in magic with a bit of strength, he looks an elf with half his face missing.
• Female Mutant
- Once again, the female counterpart is nearly the same as the male, but she has a bit of agility instead of strength. She looks like a female elf with a tiara and starts out with a Flame attack.
• Robot
- The robot is my favorite character as it is quite an interesting and innovated. Like the robots in SaGa Frontier, the robot's stats are based on what it equips. Therefore, equipping multiple weapons based on strength, such as Long Swords, will raise its strength. The more powerful the weapon, the more its stats are raised. I'm a big fan of buying a Gold Bow and a bunch of agility based swords to boost its agility; it can be dealing out 300 damage (999 is the max) with the bow very early in the game. It looks like a stereotypical robot with treads for feet, pincer claw type arms, and antennas.
• Baby-D
- The following three characters are monsters. Enemies randomly drop meat after battles which monsters can eat. Afterwards, the monsters randomly evolve (Pokemon style!) into something hopefully better. The stronger the monster, the better the meat, and the better chance of getting a better monster. Baby-D (D is for dragon) starts out with a useful fire attack; if I chose a monster as one of my characters, I always start with it. It looks like a weird bug, hardly resembling a dragon.
• Slime
- The slime monster starts out with an attack that absorbs hit points called dissolve. It has one centralized eye and looks like a green blob.
• Imp
- The imp monsters starts out with a basic strength based attack. It looks like a tiny demon with wings.

The instruction book recommends a Male and Female pair of Humans and Mutants. This is a solid balance between strength, agility, and magic for the entire game. The other character combination (my personal favorite) is a Human, a Mutant, a Robot, and a monster. With a wide array of versetile skills, this group becomes incredibly powerful late in the game. Choosing three or four of any type of character is a bad idea as your party will lack in its abilities to kill certain bosses that are weak against certain things.

In addition to choosing your characters, there are many other differences with the mainstream Final Fantasies. For example, the characters don't gain experience or levels. Stats are randomly raised after using the appropriate weapons (or spells) to raise them. However, as the story progresses, more pieces of MAGI are found. By equipping MAGI, stats are significantly raised, making it easy to customize and augment characters' roles.

Several bosses are extremely difficult. I remember slaving for hours trying to beat some of the late game fiends. With the lack of a "Life" spell or other means of resurrection, losing people in battle is devastating. Also, the possibilities of curing yourself in battle are limited: Mutants either have to randomly learn the innate cure spell (which can later be randomly "unlearned") or buy an expensive magic item that runs out after so many uses.

Speaking of items running out after so many uses... With the exception of a sword found late in the game, innate spells and robot equipment, every useable weapon can be depleted. This adds a strategic element to the game as one can't repeatedly mash the Fight command without fear wearing down good weapons.

Other points of interest : Final Fantasy Legend II was a beacon of RPG goodness in its time in the early 90s, especially for being on a hand held system. Existing the vast nebulous far before the flashy RPG revolution of Final Fantasy VII, the music was unremarkable as were the graphics.

This game shouldn't be hard to find as Sunsoft, who bought the rights to the Game Boy Final Fantasies, recently re-released them.

This write-up complies with the E2 FAQ: Video Games standards. Sources: Playing the game www.gamefaqs.com

The universe is split up into a number of different worlds. You usually travel between these worlds using "Pillars of Sky" which are weird-looking braided plant things. (Later in the game, you can get the Pegasus Magi, which allows you to travel much more quickly between the towns in different worlds; and you can buy Doors, which do the same thing as the Pegasus.)

Each world has a number of MAGI in it. You can't go further up the Pillar of Sky (i.e. to a later world) until you get all the Magi in the world. You can use your Prism Magi to determine how many Magi are left in the world (and therefore how many more quests are left there).

You can save your game anywhere.

The party you choose isn't all that important -- the game isn't too hard to beat really no matter what you choose (except for if you have three or more monsters). I like females more than males (I'll explain why in a minute).

The leveling system, as TehBesto noted above, is really strange compared to other RPGs. Each character has five statistics -- Str, Agl (agility), Mag, Def, and Max HP. You can raise these statistics in different ways depending on the type of character:

• Humans get random level ups at the end of battles based on what weapons you used during that battle. Females seem to get stat ups (not HP) more often than males, but the males' Max HP goes up more quickly. (You can get 999 HP pretty fast with the males.) HP ups happen randomly no matter what weapons you use. Defense Ups happen very rarely when you use shield-type equipment a lot (including the Aegis Magi). If a character dies during battle, it can't get any level ups.
• Mutants get random level ups like humans, but much less often. They can also randomly acquire Abilities (more on this later). Again, males' HP is quicker and females' other stats are quicker.
• Robots never get random level ups. The way you make your robots better is by equipping things. Every item makes its HP go up, and whatever else you equip can raise Str, Agl, and Def. A robot's mana is permanently zero, I think.
• Monsters never get random level ups. When you beat an enemy, it sometimes drops "meat". You can feed this meat to your monsters and they'll randomly change into another monster (based on the levels of each). There are two boss-type monsters on the way to the Center of the Earth -- TianLung and Fenrir. If you get meat from these monsters and feed it to your own monsters, your guy becomes the highest-level monster type (and the Monster, who was pretty bad throughout the game, can now become one of your best characters). Now, when he eats meat, he can change, but he'll always be the highest-level type. Meat appears after a battle even if you have no monsters -- it has no effect on any other characters.

I should explain a little about Mutants. They can have up to four abilities at one time. At the beginning at the game, you have one (Blizzard or Flame). When you win a battle, you can acquire abilities randomly (and the level of the ability depends on the level of the monster). If you have free space on that character's equip, or if you currently have less than four abilities, the ability will just be "acquired". If you don't have free space or you already have four, you'll lose the bottommost ability and gain whatever the new one is. You should decide at the beginning of the game how many abilities and how much other equipment you'll want the mutant to have, and then fill up the rest of the space so that you don't acquire too many. I recommend three abilities at once.

There is no such thing as MP for characters in FFL2. The spellcasting items in this game simply have charges -- when the charges run out, the item goes away. There is no way to refill charges on spellbooks. Abilities that are spells come with charges, too -- usually half as much as is found on the spellbook of the same name. For example, the Fire book has 30 charges and the Fire ability has 15. (The book and the ability do the same thing in terms of damage.) But the abilities on mutants refill at inns (for free), which is a great advantage. While HP takes money to refill at an inn (1 GP/HP), abilities are free. (A neat thing you can do is use the Cure ability on the mutant for all your guys right before you go to the inn; you end up paying 0GP and you get all your abilities back.)

The best spell in the game (that you can also acquire as an ability) is Flare -- but it only has five charges. It attacks all enemies with a strong attack, and strength against a particular element won't resist Flare. It's cool, and by cool, I mean totally sweet. It's my favorite spell. And you can get it surprisingly early in the game (but you sorta have to abuse the save system to do it). Here's how:

In Apollo's World, in Dunatis's Cave, save right before you fight Dunatis (after Lynn joins). Fight him. See if you acquire Flare. If not, reset (you can do this by pressing select-start-A-B simultaneously) and fight again. It usually takes a lot of tries. Even if you give up on Flare, though, you can get O-All which protects you against most elemental magic that monsters use. P-Blast is also an option -- it is a weaker version of Flare. Dunatis can give you any ability that a mutant can acquire. (He's the only guy that can do that until the last world.)

More about robots -- on Mutants, abilities refill at an inn; I've said that before. On Robots, however, EVERYTHING you equip becomes refillable. The drawback, however, is that the number of charges is halved. So if you equip a 30-charge Gungnir on your robot, it has 15 charges but it is refillable. If you then unequip it, it gets halved again -- so you're down to 7.

The battles are strictly turn-based -- at the beginning of each turn, you choose what each character is planning to do during that turn. Once you choose the last one, then the battle round begins -- the character with the highest agility among your party and the monsters does their thing, and then the next most agile, etc. This is important! This is why I like Agility more than Strength -- you can attack before the enemies attack. Agility is important on every character!

Each character has eight normal equip slots in the equip screen. You can put whatever you want in these slots, in whatever order. Items that you can use during battle will appear in the selection screen during the battle. But there are nine slots in the battle screen -- the ninth is for Magi. Most types of Magi, like Fire, Agility, Defense, etc. just improve that character's performance regarding those aspects passively. But you also get three special Magi that you can select and use during battle: the Aegis, the Masmune, and the Heart. The Aegis protects that character from most physical attacks and, once that character takes their turn, it will tell you that the Aegis is protecting the Party. After that, your entire party is also invulnerable to many magical attacks too. The Masmune does about 500 or 600 damage to one enemy. The Heart revives all the members of your party and fills up their health bars, but it only has one use until you go to an inn.

Here are some tips:

• The Nasty Dungeon looks silly. You go in, and the one Magi in the world is given to you at the beginning of the dungeon. If you look in the Prism Magi, there's no Magi left in the world -- so you can leave, right?
  Well, you COULD. But, you see, some of the best items in the game are found in the Nasty Dungeon. I'm not going to walk you through the Dungeon here, but you want to explore each of the nine levels before you go down to the next. After you get past the fifth or so, the real items start flowing (and the enemies get a ton harder). Actually, I almost never fight guys in the Dungeon -- I just run from them all. But seriously, you get a Flare book, the Hyper gun, a Parasuit, a Gungnir, a Dragon helm, a Tank, and a ton of other stuff too. At the end of the dungeon, the little fairy at the beginning meets you again. Agree with whatever she says or she'll send you back to level 5. :-)
• How much do you like cheating? Right before and right after the Nasty Dungeon, you have 67 and 68 MAGI. There's a bug where if you hit start, go to the Item screen, and scroll all the way down to the trashcan, you can "use" the Trash Can on a character. When you have 67 MAGI, it gives the character of your choice a Power Potion (permanent +3 Str); at 68 it gives him a Speed Potion (+3 Agl). But you can only use it a specific number of times. Read the following web page on GameFAQs for more info about that:
  http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/gameboy/file/final_fantasy_legend_ii_bug.txt
  Again, this is cheating, but it's a fun way of cheating. :-)
• In my opinion, the Heal Rod is the most important item in the game. Magnate, Odin, and WarMech are very difficult without it, and Apollo and Arsenal are impossible. For Apollo, Dad has a Heal Rod, but for Arsenal you'll have to buy one. The amount of healing each character gets is based on the mana for that character and the mana for the character using the heal rod, so it's extremely useful to level mana up on your humans. I like to put a Heal Rod on my mutant (for major healing) and on my largest-HP human.
• The Center of the World and the stairs down are filled with enemies -- and you can't run from ANY of them. Abuse the save system (again) to make it easier: Walk a few steps, then save. Walk a few more steps, and save again. When you enter a battle, reset. It's dumb, but it works.
• More abusing the save system. In Venus's world, in the sewers, there's a Hermit with a key. Save in front of him, and kill him (with Thunder ideally). Save again after you kill him, and reset. He respawns! Keep doing this until you stop getting level ups or until you run out of Thunders. He gives very good meat and he has a high probability of level-ups; you can get such high-level monsters as Phantom off him.

The best items in the game are:

• "X-Calibr" -- a sword with decent damage and infinite charges that attacks an entire group of enemies. Found in the Final Dungeon.
• Flare -- great spell; I talked about it above. Books are expensive, though -- but after the Nasty Dungeon, you almost never have any trouble with money.
• Mage Rod -- attacks all enemies for moderate fire damage. Not great for bosses, but excellent around the Final Town, for leveling up (because you don't want to kill all the enemies in one shot; you want to let each guy attack). I buy it for my humans to practice magic.
• CatClaw -- the highest level agility weapon that you can buy. Only attacks one target, though.
• PsiGun -- attacks a group with a significant amount of Magic-based damage. Good for a mutant or a practicing human. There are only two in the game -- the Nasty Dungeon and the Final Dungeon.
• Laser Gun -- always hits one guy for 400 damage, no matter the character. Very consistent. Not all that good, but if you have a particularly weak character against some boss, it's better than nothing.
• Gungnir -- a very powerful Strength-based weapon; attacks a group. You can only ever get two -- from the Nasty Dungeon and fighting Odin.
• Samurai Bow -- a very powerful Agility-based weapon that attacks a group. Again, there are only two, I think -- Edo Castle and the Nasty Dungeon.
• Tank -- a shield and a weapon in one; attacks a group. You can buy this in Edo from Echigoya, and I strongly recommend it for a robot. You find one or two in the Nasty Dungeon, too. They are great against Magnate because they block Katana.
• Seven Sword -- attacks a single enemy with massive, massive damage. Sort of a secret item -- it can ONLY be found by beating one of the rare Haniwas in the Center of the World, and they only drop it some of the time. Haniwas are very hard, but if you've equipped a character with the Hyper Cannon (which destroys any non-boss enemy when you use it), you can take out the Haniwa safely. Mutants can learn Explode which does the same thing, at the cost of that mutant's life. The Seven Sword does as much damage as a regular high-level sword (for a 99-str character, that's about 1200). But it can hit up to seven times (based on your agility)! So if you have a 99/99 human, you can be hitting Arsenal for 5000 damage a turn. Unfortunately, Seven Swords only have 7 charges before they die.