FFL2 Solo Mutant Part II

The rest of Apollo's World was simple. In the Undersea Volcano, I picked up this goodie. With all the Giant's equipment, Gold Sword actually turned out to have some pretty decent numbers - around 300 damage on average. However, since Mutants can't raise STR due to a bug, its usefulness in the long term is questionable.


I actually ended up running out of skill uses around two-thirds of the way through Bright Cave. It had lots of easy encounters to farm out. Had to swap over to a Thunder Book I picked up, and even it was basically completely out of juice by the end.


Random commentary time: there is exactly one female Guardian in the game. All the rest are male. Therefore due to her position, the sprites of her facing sideways and up are unused.


Guardian's Base was a short and straightforward world as it is anywhere. It sells Stone books, but I didn't need them just yet. They're actually inaccurate, so it's often better to just go with attacking magic. I had no drops to get - no monsters to farm meat, no weapons to pick up, and with a mutant the Commando's Bazooka is of questionable use. Some enemies actually could punch through Toma's DEF, but they were small bug bites. Especially compared to these jerks.


I managed to get mana ups on three of the four bosses. When farming for one against the Commando, I instead ended up with this, which was very hard to push away. And so I didn't.


Funny thing about the Ninja: I tried streaming this briefly, only realizing what a pain it is to wrestle with random skill replacement and resetting for stat-ups on stream. So I stopped and reset back to Apollo's World. It's a good thing I did too, as I got tons of mana ups on the reset. Anyway, going back to the stream: I ended up with X-Ice. What happens when you resist an element and are weak to it at the same time? Well, things like Blizzard won't work on you as normal, but physical weapons, say, his Ice sword, will do the extra damage and potential to instantly kill you. After a while of the thing being stubborn to change back, I just went for it and won without incident. The real playthrough didn't have this, of course, so there was zero threat involved.


Venus' World had absolutely nothing to buy. The Psi Sword may have been a possibility, being the natural upgrade over the Psi Knife. It also did far more damage than the Gold Sword with equal attacking stats (the STR weapon doing 277 on this same enemy), so I could now forgo that idea altogether. However, I knew there was a free one in the sewers, so there was no need to buy it.


More importantly, our good friend the Hermit is here. Being DS-7, it allowed Toma to raise his stats far more easily than anywhere else. Having Thunder around allowed me to take him out no problem, too.


Another free item the world served up was this thing. Mage Staff does MANA*8 in Fire-elemental damage, affecting all enemy groups. But with Blizzard still around (albeit MANA*5), and Fire Books to deal elemental damage at MANA*10, I never actually used it.

I noticed/remembered properly around this world that books are actually stronger than rechargable abilties. Fire/Ice/Thunder books do MANA*10, and Fire/Ice/Thunder spells do MANA*7. Still, with stats this high, it was best to only use these when an enemy group needed to be dead as soon as possible - such as O-Bake groups who could toss out Touch.


Venus was preposterously easy. What, is that too cheap? Well in that case...


RUN BACK ACROSS THE PILLAR OF SKY.


GRAB ONE OF THESE FROM APOLLO'S WORLD BECAUSE FOR I FORGOT WHERE THEY WERE SOLD IN VENUS' WORLD.


AND RUN BACK TO FIGHT HER. O-All made Charm, Erase, and Flame all futile efforts on her part, leaving only Blitz Whip. It was indeed a threat, however - winded the whip is a special condition that O-All does not cover, effectively stunning the victim for a round. After dying a few times to this, I noted that Cure had to be used after any damage. Even though Toma could take three hits before dying, if he was damaged and Venus winded the whip, he'd be dead.

The Psi Sword did very respectable numbers here, although due to his low AGL, was prone to missing. Also, I did some image splicing because its hit effect is pretty neat. Thankfully, this should be the last time I have to put up with it. With this, I won easily...then had to do it a second time because Toma lost Thunder for O-Quake.

Dragon Circuit would ordinarily be the point where I grab Dragon Armor. However, O-All already gives all of its resistances, and Dragon Armor itself only gives one more point of DEF over Giant Armor (21 vs. 20). Better to skip it for now, I can get a freebie later and the stronger Battle/Arthur Armors. Similarly, Giant Helmet is the best up until Dragon Helmet, and Giant Gauntlets the best up to Ninja Gauntlets. Giant stuff is really awesome.


Of course, what kind of self-respecting person would I be if I did a playthrough with a Mutant without showing off the Dragon Warp? It's only one of the most well-known glitches in the game. I'm not going to abuse it to gain an advantage, but still!

It's simple. First, you acquire Teleport. The easy way is through a Mutant learning from Dunatis, Venus, or any of the non-Tortoise bosses on the racetrack itself. The hard way is through getting a meat drop after a bizarre memory corruption bug involving an enemy dying of poison after a defending/do nothing message appears in battle, upgrading a monster into the highest level. Hacking in the Pegasus MAGI or a Door will also suffice. Then you use it while riding your dragon.


Your Dragon warps with you, often glitching in the process. And outside of the racetrack, nearly all collision is null and void. The game is your oyster. You can find Ashura's base hidden in the mountains, and even enter it if you have a fifth party member besides Mr.S. Speaking of, you can recruit him again by returning to your hometown and attempting to leave. You can recruit party members before you're supposed to have them, and bring them places they're not supposed to be.

If you visit the Final Town, then for whatever failsafe reason, a switch is flipped that removes all MAGI in chests from the game. Of course, you can purchase all sorts of goodies from further on in the game. You can also exploit this on the track itself, getting 3 more MAGI than you're supposed to. That GameFAQs topic also goes over some of the more unusual things that can happen when Dragon Warping.


You can even go to the Center of the World to fight Arsenal. For whatever reason, there's a warp you can move onto below the nonfunctional telepoter. And if you move there, you can enter the final room of the game. The speedrun route abuses this, along with the poison bug to get Teleport and ultra-powerful robots, to beat the game just over half an hour.


I amusingly ran into a Haniwa, the only enemy you can run from down here. I of course fought it anyway. Toma could actually survive a round due to resisting its Quake. And then this happened. That was worth it to see!


Anyway, getting back into normalcy. So as I noticed when actually getting Teleport (which took ten thousand years), Toma's MANA was a bit on the low side. So I fought the Hermit repeatedly until I gained some more. On my way out after draining my stocks, this humorously happened. The uses are refreshed, but I decided to leave and try building DEF. I failed at this, and decided to do it later. There's still some ability farming to be done in the Dragon Circuit!


The preliminary encounters weren't bad. A bit of luck and an Ice Spellbook got me through the Adamants, the bugged Tortoises were roadkill, and Lamias weren't plentiful enough to do too much. Now it's the Watchers I want something from. That ability being P-Blast! Nothing in the items can really compare to it, unlike spellbook Flare which clearly outclasses mutant/monster Flare (more uses and power).


Fighting Watchers was just random. Most of their moveset was rendered useless thanks to O-All, but Toma could take at most one Beam before dying. He needed two rounds to kill them. I generally reset 4 Watcher encounters, but just as well, they could all use ineffective abilities and die. Similarly, a single one of the eyes could go Beam-Beam.

This was...an adventure. Two hours of 4x speed, Toma obtained every other ability at least once, no P-Blast. To reiterate that, very other ability showed up at least once. Its fellow DS-9 abilities (O-Change multiple times) both popped, Warning and Touch being two of the most frequent, O-Damage leading the pack at around 8-9 times, and X-Thunder being the last to show. Seriously, game?! Screw you!! This is why I don't really like playing Humans/Mutants in the original, the RNG can go on a nasty streak like this. But at any rate, I had a belligerent video game on my hands. I honestly thought about just hacking it in here to grease the wheels of time and have done with it. But I decided on trying a more creative solution.


I found address D906 to pull this off. It changed each time to the memory address for the ability being gained. Using that was the plan. But staging it...did not go as intended. This was too hilarious not to show. I could get it to display properly, but I had to turn on the code after it said Toma had lost Blizzard. However, it didn't actually change, it only changed the name displayed. C215 changed the ability proper, but hacking it in directly felt lame, so I stopped and mulled what to do. Some days of rest gave me more motivation. Still, no sane man would waste his time like this further.

So I checked the next best thing. The short of it is, address C0A5 determines what ability a Mutant will learn, and C0A6 in-part determines actually learning it. I found that value 0B would spit out P-Blast, as would 10. Also that it makes very little sense as to what value determines what result. It's certainly not linear; 09, 0D, and 0F all gave up Explode, for example!


RNG manipulation seemed way cooler than just hacking it in and way more logical than just throwing myself against a brick wall over and over and over again, so I went for it! However, a problem arose: I may have been able to manipulate the values within a margin of error, but getting the ability learn success to actually pop was another story. It's determined by the second value, which is much harder to manipulate. And of course, it feels unfair to keep track of it like this, so I need to find another way. Say, a consistent starting point for the RNG. Say, after a hard reset!


The bad news is, this varies by emulator. The good news is, bgb (the emulator I use when I don't need RAM watch for whatever reason) starts C0A5 close enough to what I want to make using it practical: F6! So how legal is this? Well, it's not like this is something you can't do on Gameboy either - it has fixed RNG on startup too. Most famously, the original thick-as-a-brick Gameboy has a fast method of encountering the Haniwa easily - after a hard reset, it'll be the fourth encounter. In fact, bgb seems to have the exact same RNG as the original Gameboy! I tried checking with Dragon Warp and sure enough, Haniwa was the fourth encounter after a hard reset. So I'd say "exploiting a fact of life, but not outright cheating."


I can kill Watchers in either 2 turns or 3 turns - using a spellbook and Blizzard respectively (they have 614HP). I can take up to one Beam from them in the battle. There are three practical ways to reach my destination
- A 3-Round battle with 2 Watchers with 0 Beams (reaches 0B)
- Two 2-Round battles with 1 Watcher with 1 Beam, or a two-round battle (reaches 10)
- One 2-Round battle with 2 Watchers and 0 Beams AND one 2-Round battles with 1 Watcher and 0 Beams. (reaches 10).

The first seemed very impractical, having to go three rounds with neither of them attacking. Since the second battle after the hard reset was a single watcher who I could beat with it using 1 Beam, I decided to follow that path first. The battles from there went: 2-4-instant random-4-3-4-3-1. This was a 2-round with 0 Beams. Not what I want. From here it was 2-1. Another 0B. Another 2-1, another 0B. 2-4-2-4-2-1. This was 1B! Which did not give up an ability. 3-4-3-4-2-4-2-4-3-4-2-1. 0B, no ability but Mana Up. Hmmm, it's looking as though 0B is far more likely than 1B at this point. It makes sense, they have a smaller chance of using it when factoring in that it can use all the other skills. Might be best to swap over to option 3.


So I do so. The order of encounters remained identical, interestingly enough. The third 2 Watcher encounter sets me up fastest with the 0 Beams I wanted. And um. I'll skip you the details of every single encounter from there. But from there on out to my destination, I had 67 encounters including the last one, 14 of which had 1 Watcher. Nine of those had 0 Beams, four had 1 Beam, and one had 2 Beams (aka dead). And in the end, I got what I was looking for. Now this game knows who's boss!

So yeah. What an update. Thankfully this should be the last time I have to do this and/or put up with the game's randomness, as I can't think of any other ability to get. So I'll probably actually stick with just three abilities the whole game. But if I change my mind, another fine opportunity is in the next world.

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