The blood sword is so powerful against the final boss that equipping it is considered the FF2 protagonist's super mode in the FF crossover fighting game.
Did no one tell Mike the story about the programmer changing the damage values on Ultima and encrypting the data so Sakaguchi couldn't fix it because he didn't agree with the spell being good?
@@e-rankluck2594Yeah, he thought that old stuff wasn't as good as new stuff so the spell should be weak. He deliberately made it worthless and refused to correct it or give anyone else access to the data before release. The guy's name was Nasir Gebelli who just shows up in the credits of the NES version of 1 and 2 as NASIR. I don't recall if he was still around for 3.
@@25xxfrostxx I just looked him up and his career and it seems he was actually a very successful figure in the industry and was a key person in FF1-3. Def worth the google search
@@e-rankluck2594this is a story sakaguchi really told, but it is with a very high likelihood not a real story. Sakaguchi is kinda known for lying or at least not telling the entire truth about development stuff of the first few games
It's the same trick the boss uses against you: life drain procs steal 1/16 of the max HP of the target at every hit. And you can hit a LOT of times in a row.
I really appreciate Mike making video recaps like this. His experience definitely helps see games like this in a new perspective for those who wouldn't even bother playing this in the first place. So FFXIII is next? Can't wait to see what Mike thinks to what many people consider as one of the worst FFs.
@@Soress9 Yup, I've been binging his FFXIII vods so far and it's great. Mike was able to be familiarized with the XIII terminologies rather quickly which is really impressive. Mike is even reading the datalogs 😮
About that Compensatory HP setting, it's probably for the best. The other side of the coin would probably be a huge need of grinding your health values to not be too hard. Also, that "cheat" menu was actually added a couple months back! It's a neat way to tweak the gameplay to make it easier, or harder. You could make skills level faster but cut the encounter rate in half for example. Though Compensatory HP is enabled by default because it was always present in the Remaster, even before that menu was added allowing us to turn it off. I should try a run without it one day to get a feel of a more "original" version of the game.
Couple of things: 1. They completely watered down certain.... quirks of FF2 in the remakes. In the original version, whenever a character leveled up their strength stat, they had a chance to lose a point in intelligence or Sprit at the same time, and vice versa. Therefore, you were very heavily incentivized to specialize your crew, with a melee character, a white mage and a black mage. This was completely cut in the remakes 2. As with point nr. 1, the magic interference form gear was actually a big deal in the original version, further incentivizing you to specialize your characters. In the pixel remaster, this mechanic does basically nothing. 3. There is precisely zero reason to do what you did with your weapons. It's WAY better to just give each of your characters one weapon type to focus on and stick with it. Having one weapon type at level 10 is orders of magnitude stronger than having 6 weapon types at level 5. This is the first reason why your melee was so shitting throughout the game 4. The 2nd reason is Berserk, or your lack thereof. Outside of the instant death spells, Berserk is easily the best spell in the game. If you level it up even slightly, casting it onto a melee focused character will make their damage shoot through the roof. Talking going from doing 10 damage on a melee-resistant enemy to 3000-5000 at endgame. Overall, there's a genuinely good game hidden somewhere in FF2's weird ass mechanics. The problem is that the remakes handled that game in a the exact wrong way.
Counterpoint to #3: Ultima. With Ultima being fixed and weapon skills leveling faster than spells, a character that's leveled all weapon skills will have an extremely powerful Ultima. On my most recent playthrough, my Firion was level 8 or 9 in every weapon (including bare fist and shield) and then after I got it I mostly had him use Ultima. It was pretty easily my best dps Now granted, if you're going to actually be using attacks, then only using one weapon is better. But it's incorrect to say that there's 0 reason to level all weapons
The level of your weapon is simply the base number of attacks you make against the enemy. You make 5 attacks with a lvl 5 weapon and 10 attacks with a lvl 10 weapon, so it's not "orders of magnitude" stronger, and since weapon skills level pretty quickly, it's worth swapping out a weaker weapon for a stronger one of a different type as long as it's substantially stronger. Also magic interference DOES make a big difference in the remaster, the reason why it seems to do "basically nothing" is because even a very small amount of interference is enough to totally screw your magic. Interference is a flat reduction in the chance for spells to succeed. 50 Interference? -50% chance to succeed. The default success chance is also not 100%, it's a base chance (defined per spell) + your intellect (for black magic) or spirit (for white magic). Damaging spells have a base chance of 0. So for example if you have 30 intellect but also just 30 magic interference, your damage spells will never hit above the minimum (except against enemies weak to that spell). Despite the seemingly freeform leveling system, FF2 strongly incentivizes you to specialize your characters into doing one thing by severely punishing the "jack of all trades" approach. It just doesn't matter in the remaster because growth values are so inflated and the encounter rate is so high, you end up overpowered no matter what you do, like Mike.
I'm so glad you're covering these games and bringing it to a wider audience. So many people start at 6 at earliest it's super cool seeing this game again through your eyes. I'm praying to trolley you're going to try final Fantasy tactics which is one of my favs.
Blood Sword deals a percentage of the targets max Hp each hit, so it scales out of control vs anything with a high HP value. Its not in any way a well thought out or balanced item.
The "Compensatory HP" thing was always a default thing for all versions of the game. Fixed amounts of wins always give you HP boosts no matter what you were grinding during them. HP boosts that were gained from actual grinding is increased directly from Stamina, while the win boost gives you generally more than that. Messing with that setting, you are in fact not cheating by using it, you're making HP boosts *worse* than original if you DON'T use it.
If i remember right Ultima scales of Weapon and Magic levels. I find it more proficient to cast high level Berserk and Haste on Dual Wielder, then Attack. I only beated the GBA and PSP versions, not sure the same on Pixel ReMastered.
said this before, ff2 is the ff most deserving of an action remake, as it would allow them them really push things. its also both dark and mature enough to deserve a more realistic graphical ovehaul. 6 is amazing but outside of how esper screw the uniqueness of the party members later on, its probably one of the best games in the franchise.
Besides the 4th character swapping and all spells having the same leveling curve, IMO FF2's biggest crime is simply not giving the players the information to understand and use the game's systems properly. Until January of THIS YEAR, magic interference wasn't even displayed in game. But even displayed, there's no real indication of what it actually does. Even a small amount of interference has a drastic effect on your magic, which is why it doesn't seem to make a difference whether interference is 50 or 100. You've already bottomed out your magic effectiveness at 20-30.
i LOVE the emperor in FF2, hands down one of the best big bad in any game. you kill him, he goes to hell, and dude pull a freaking "im not trapped here with you, you are trapped here with me" WITH THE DEVIL and turn his eternity of suffering into a literal isekai op mc story, becomes the king of hell, just so he can come back and get his revenge on the party.
I’ve done the pixel remasters last year and never realised this hp boost thing was in there. The end of the game without auto save would have been very difficult, and also without the map I would’ve gotten lost 😅
About the boost values in Pixel Remaster: what they say is x1 is compared to the normal Pixel Remaster values, which are by my testing about double the values of the original games. So if you feel like you got overpowered very easily it's because you did.
I'd actually forgotten how ridiculous the random encounter rate was in FF2. I watched these videos and at first I thought "that can't be right," but perhaps I'd just blocked it out.
I hope you keep doing these videos, doesn't look like they get as much comments as I'd like but I suppose it is a little niche. Quality content nonetheless
Ots q shame noone knows this but buffs stack up. Most buffs have a hit chance to land, qnd can stack per level up to level 16. Not sure of the internal stat oncrease of that spells. But thats supposed to be how you over come boss resistances and incoming damage.
im gonna be honest, i quite like FF2. and genuinely defend it as the game most deserving an action remake. as it would allow the system to really flourish.
Preach, you should read about the Soul of Rebirth epilogue that was released with the GBA version of FF2. Its an additional side story where you play as the four dead party members in the afterlife and you battle the Emperor for a third time.
Yea his HP values are super bloated. In a casual playthrough my Firion(My Dude) had about 1.9k hp on the final boss, Guy(My Guy) had about 3.2k, Maria(Dipla) had about 1.1k, and Leon(Chadley), had about 2.2k hp. This is without me cheesing HP growths by hiting myself and just playing out like 90% of the fights. This was on the PSP remaster released about 15 years ago.
FF2 was and still is such a design mess all over. The secret to beating all the bosses with such high defenses is to repeatedly cast single target haste and berserk on your strongest fighter and have them wail away. They don't tell you that buffs can stack repeatedly and seemingly endlessly on each other. So that turns your 100 damage attacks to 3000+. Beat the game.
Haste doesn't stack. Only the strongest cast applies. And since defense is substracted to the damage at every hit it's not a good way to deal with a high defense enemy. Berserk does raise the attack power of the target in a way that stacks though so that one is good. But to make the spell effective you are supposed to get a high Int caster with little magic interference and ideally get a few levels in the skill of course. Else it's not really doing much per cast.
Good story? I mean yeah it's a better story than FF1 and 3 simply due to there being an actual attempt at telling a story, but calling FF2's story GOOD is a really low bar.
FF2 i think suffers from the Legend of Zelda Adventure of Link syndrome, the first game was a banger of a success but they haven't established the formula quite yet so they try different things.
the idea behind leon joining you against the emperor is that he's basically a sociopath whose only motivation is to gain personal importance and the re-emergence of the emperor is a threat to his ego these are fun videos, keep it up (also ngl it's kind of nauseating hearing this "chadley" corporate remake bullshit inserted into one of the real ffs lol)
The blood sword is so powerful against the final boss that equipping it is considered the FF2 protagonist's super mode in the FF crossover fighting game.
Did no one tell Mike the story about the programmer changing the damage values on Ultima and encrypting the data so Sakaguchi couldn't fix it because he didn't agree with the spell being good?
Is that real lmao
Because the programmer Nasir Gebelli thought "ancient" magic should be weaker than "modern" magic lmao.
@@e-rankluck2594Yeah, he thought that old stuff wasn't as good as new stuff so the spell should be weak. He deliberately made it worthless and refused to correct it or give anyone else access to the data before release. The guy's name was Nasir Gebelli who just shows up in the credits of the NES version of 1 and 2 as NASIR. I don't recall if he was still around for 3.
@@25xxfrostxx I just looked him up and his career and it seems he was actually a very successful figure in the industry and was a key person in FF1-3. Def worth the google search
@@e-rankluck2594this is a story sakaguchi really told, but it is with a very high likelihood not a real story. Sakaguchi is kinda known for lying or at least not telling the entire truth about development stuff of the first few games
Fun fact: the Blood Sword does ludicrous damage against the final boss. Like thousands of damage.
It's the same trick the boss uses against you: life drain procs steal 1/16 of the max HP of the target at every hit. And you can hit a LOT of times in a row.
I really appreciate Mike making video recaps like this. His experience definitely helps see games like this in a new perspective for those who wouldn't even bother playing this in the first place.
So FFXIII is next? Can't wait to see what Mike thinks to what many people consider as one of the worst FFs.
Yeah he's already several days into FF13
@@Soress9 Yup, I've been binging his FFXIII vods so far and it's great. Mike was able to be familiarized with the XIII terminologies rather quickly which is really impressive. Mike is even reading the datalogs 😮
can not wait to see you play Final Fantasy: Tactics.
i really hope preach plays Tactics and the 13 sequels and dissida 1 and 2
About that Compensatory HP setting, it's probably for the best. The other side of the coin would probably be a huge need of grinding your health values to not be too hard.
Also, that "cheat" menu was actually added a couple months back! It's a neat way to tweak the gameplay to make it easier, or harder. You could make skills level faster but cut the encounter rate in half for example. Though Compensatory HP is enabled by default because it was always present in the Remaster, even before that menu was added allowing us to turn it off.
I should try a run without it one day to get a feel of a more "original" version of the game.
Ultima have weird scaling, as it scale with the number of spells know and total weapon levels, it also ignore resistance
Oh man I loved sword of vermillion! Haven't heard that name is a long time. Cool to know Mike played it as well though.
Couple of things:
1. They completely watered down certain.... quirks of FF2 in the remakes. In the original version, whenever a character leveled up their strength stat, they had a chance to lose a point in intelligence or Sprit at the same time, and vice versa. Therefore, you were very heavily incentivized to specialize your crew, with a melee character, a white mage and a black mage. This was completely cut in the remakes
2. As with point nr. 1, the magic interference form gear was actually a big deal in the original version, further incentivizing you to specialize your characters. In the pixel remaster, this mechanic does basically nothing.
3. There is precisely zero reason to do what you did with your weapons. It's WAY better to just give each of your characters one weapon type to focus on and stick with it. Having one weapon type at level 10 is orders of magnitude stronger than having 6 weapon types at level 5. This is the first reason why your melee was so shitting throughout the game
4. The 2nd reason is Berserk, or your lack thereof. Outside of the instant death spells, Berserk is easily the best spell in the game. If you level it up even slightly, casting it onto a melee focused character will make their damage shoot through the roof. Talking going from doing 10 damage on a melee-resistant enemy to 3000-5000 at endgame.
Overall, there's a genuinely good game hidden somewhere in FF2's weird ass mechanics. The problem is that the remakes handled that game in a the exact wrong way.
Counterpoint to #3: Ultima. With Ultima being fixed and weapon skills leveling faster than spells, a character that's leveled all weapon skills will have an extremely powerful Ultima. On my most recent playthrough, my Firion was level 8 or 9 in every weapon (including bare fist and shield) and then after I got it I mostly had him use Ultima. It was pretty easily my best dps
Now granted, if you're going to actually be using attacks, then only using one weapon is better. But it's incorrect to say that there's 0 reason to level all weapons
The level of your weapon is simply the base number of attacks you make against the enemy. You make 5 attacks with a lvl 5 weapon and 10 attacks with a lvl 10 weapon, so it's not "orders of magnitude" stronger, and since weapon skills level pretty quickly, it's worth swapping out a weaker weapon for a stronger one of a different type as long as it's substantially stronger.
Also magic interference DOES make a big difference in the remaster, the reason why it seems to do "basically nothing" is because even a very small amount of interference is enough to totally screw your magic. Interference is a flat reduction in the chance for spells to succeed. 50 Interference? -50% chance to succeed. The default success chance is also not 100%, it's a base chance (defined per spell) + your intellect (for black magic) or spirit (for white magic). Damaging spells have a base chance of 0. So for example if you have 30 intellect but also just 30 magic interference, your damage spells will never hit above the minimum (except against enemies weak to that spell).
Despite the seemingly freeform leveling system, FF2 strongly incentivizes you to specialize your characters into doing one thing by severely punishing the "jack of all trades" approach. It just doesn't matter in the remaster because growth values are so inflated and the encounter rate is so high, you end up overpowered no matter what you do, like Mike.
FF2 is like FFXIV 1.0. The problem was the systems. The story was actually a good foundation for what was to come later.
I'm so glad you're covering these games and bringing it to a wider audience. So many people start at 6 at earliest it's super cool seeing this game again through your eyes.
I'm praying to trolley you're going to try final Fantasy tactics which is one of my favs.
I am not certain I ever did the hell emperor without the Blood Sword. For some reason it does a ton of damage against him.
Blood Sword deals a percentage of the targets max Hp each hit, so it scales out of control vs anything with a high HP value. Its not in any way a well thought out or balanced item.
The HP option just makes it so your HP levels at least a little like a normal game, rather than having to only grind getting hit for hours on end.
The "Compensatory HP" thing was always a default thing for all versions of the game. Fixed amounts of wins always give you HP boosts no matter what you were grinding during them. HP boosts that were gained from actual grinding is increased directly from Stamina, while the win boost gives you generally more than that.
Messing with that setting, you are in fact not cheating by using it, you're making HP boosts *worse* than original if you DON'T use it.
If i remember right Ultima scales of Weapon and Magic levels.
I find it more proficient to cast high level Berserk and Haste on Dual Wielder, then Attack.
I only beated the GBA and PSP versions, not sure the same on Pixel ReMastered.
You gotta make an exception for Final Fantasy Tactics. It will be good content, and a good game. I would love to see you playing through it blind!
I feel like this game should have a remake. It's a waste to leave it like this, since the story's so interesting.
said this before, ff2 is the ff most deserving of an action remake, as it would allow them them really push things. its also both dark and mature enough to deserve a more realistic graphical ovehaul.
6 is amazing but outside of how esper screw the uniqueness of the party members later on, its probably one of the best games in the franchise.
Besides the 4th character swapping and all spells having the same leveling curve, IMO FF2's biggest crime is simply not giving the players the information to understand and use the game's systems properly. Until January of THIS YEAR, magic interference wasn't even displayed in game. But even displayed, there's no real indication of what it actually does. Even a small amount of interference has a drastic effect on your magic, which is why it doesn't seem to make a difference whether interference is 50 or 100. You've already bottomed out your magic effectiveness at 20-30.
You should research the development story behind the Ultima spell - rogue devs at their finest!
i LOVE the emperor in FF2, hands down one of the best big bad in any game. you kill him, he goes to hell, and dude pull a freaking "im not trapped here with you, you are trapped here with me" WITH THE DEVIL and turn his eternity of suffering into a literal isekai op mc story, becomes the king of hell, just so he can come back and get his revenge on the party.
I’ve done the pixel remasters last year and never realised this hp boost thing was in there. The end of the game without auto save would have been very difficult, and also without the map I would’ve gotten lost 😅
About the boost values in Pixel Remaster: what they say is x1 is compared to the normal Pixel Remaster values, which are by my testing about double the values of the original games. So if you feel like you got overpowered very easily it's because you did.
To be fair the PC version only added those options which were from the console releases a few weeks ago
I'd actually forgotten how ridiculous the random encounter rate was in FF2. I watched these videos and at first I thought "that can't be right," but perhaps I'd just blocked it out.
I hope you keep doing these videos, doesn't look like they get as much comments as I'd like but I suppose it is a little niche. Quality content nonetheless
Ots q shame noone knows this but buffs stack up. Most buffs have a hit chance to land, qnd can stack per level up to level 16. Not sure of the internal stat oncrease of that spells. But thats supposed to be how you over come boss resistances and incoming damage.
15, 2 and 13 one after the other. Brave man is playing the bad ones in a single block
He gotta do Mystic Quest. 😂
He still have one of the mechanical best FF games to go, FF5
@@TheMexRAGE I adore FF5, but he'll likely hate the job system like he hated the one in 3.
@@benoitrousseau4137gotta wait for him to dip his toes into mana series for that 1 XD
im gonna be honest, i quite like FF2. and genuinely defend it as the game most deserving an action remake. as it would allow the system to really flourish.
Story is actually pretty good. I had fond memory of ff2 on gba. I liked it better than ff1
Wait, what was 13 agai... oh no... it's all coming back..... oh god help us all...
Is Preach powerful enough for XI? Ronfaure Forest has filtered far too many Ultimate Raiders.
And thats it. That thumbnail is just the fact about 2.
Preach, you should read about the Soul of Rebirth epilogue that was released with the GBA version of FF2. Its an additional side story where you play as the four dead party members in the afterlife and you battle the Emperor for a third time.
I liked FF2, only FF i havnt liked is 8, but I havnt been able to stomach more than 2 hours of it.
Yea his HP values are super bloated. In a casual playthrough my Firion(My Dude) had about 1.9k hp on the final boss, Guy(My Guy) had about 3.2k, Maria(Dipla) had about 1.1k, and Leon(Chadley), had about 2.2k hp. This is without me cheesing HP growths by hiting myself and just playing out like 90% of the fights. This was on the PSP remaster released about 15 years ago.
FF2 was and still is such a design mess all over. The secret to beating all the bosses with such high defenses is to repeatedly cast single target haste and berserk on your strongest fighter and have them wail away. They don't tell you that buffs can stack repeatedly and seemingly endlessly on each other. So that turns your 100 damage attacks to 3000+. Beat the game.
Haste doesn't stack. Only the strongest cast applies. And since defense is substracted to the damage at every hit it's not a good way to deal with a high defense enemy.
Berserk does raise the attack power of the target in a way that stacks though so that one is good. But to make the spell effective you are supposed to get a high Int caster with little magic interference and ideally get a few levels in the skill of course. Else it's not really doing much per cast.
Good story? I mean yeah it's a better story than FF1 and 3 simply due to there being an actual attempt at telling a story, but calling FF2's story GOOD is a really low bar.
It's great for its era, there's not much like it on Famicom
FF2 i think suffers from the Legend of Zelda Adventure of Link syndrome, the first game was a banger of a success but they haven't established the formula quite yet so they try different things.
the idea behind leon joining you against the emperor is that he's basically a sociopath whose only motivation is to gain personal importance and the re-emergence of the emperor is a threat to his ego
these are fun videos, keep it up
(also ngl it's kind of nauseating hearing this "chadley" corporate remake bullshit inserted into one of the real ffs lol)
I can't replay a lot of the FFs anymore, it's just too aggravating with the random encounters.
First