FFL2 Robot Party Playthrough Part II

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In Edo, I get access to what I've been waiting for. The Dragon Sword is the strongest purchasable sword based on STR. I get a couple for Cutman. The Catclaw, meanwhile, is the strongest AGL weapon, period. By the time I'm done with this world, Floyd and Vivit both have two. The Tank is even nastier than the Bazooka, and even acts like a shield. I just hand a single one to Floyd for now, as his Grenades kinda suck.

Not pictured here to cut back on images uploaded is Jyudo, the strongest purchasable martial art. It's tied with Laser Gun for the best AGL boost on a purchasable piece of equipment. But where am I going to get all the money for this?


Well, you get a second Tank for free in the short Harbor dungeon. Completing this and doing an event after locks out some of the great items...but I made sure to buy all I needed before doing said event. But in turn...


We unlock another source of enemies we can just mindlessly encounter and grind cash on. The two we're really looking for are Knights and Gazers. I have Floyd go after the latter with his Tank due to his higher speed, and Aigis blows up the former since they can't really hurt us.

I do this. A lot. I buy a lot of stuff and become ridiculously powerful. Then I keep on grinding cash, for a very special purpose later on. Mostly for my own amusement since I've always wanted to check into it and this playthrough is an excuse. It's completely unnecessary...but we'll amuse ourselves.


Though it's not shown, Robots are able to push their stats beyond the normal cap of 99. Because of this, it'd be relatively pointless to show stat screens moving forward, and I'm too lazy to calculate the exact values. Vivit's insane boosts put her as a destroyer of universes here.


I stop at about this much cash, and prepare to have some more fun...


Here, just look here for an explanation of what's going on, as well as a bunch of other interesting stuff. Or for a cliffnotes/layman's terms version, check in here. Charming Hatamotos = pain.


Even Aigis can feel this. It's ridiculous, really. Eventually I get tired of this and blow them away with a Tank.


Castle Edo has a few nice things. Ninja Gauntlet is a piece of equipment that is among those that gives the second-highest DEF boost (+26, Dragon Shield and Arthur Armor also give this), but more importantly, bestows O-Weapon to make physical attacks even more useless. I surprisingly give this to Floyd, as Aigis needs no help in reducing physical damage further, Samurai Bow is a fantastic weapon, doing 1000 base damage to an entire group. It gives a nice AGL bonus, so Vivit gets to take hold of this.


I really like the background before the Magnate is fought. Random commentary.


The Dolphin optional minibosses don't last long, and Magnate doesn't either. O-Change does reduce the damage dealt to him, so it takes a bit longer. He has a nasty Tornado attack that can do 500~ damage to everyone, but never uses it.


Next world...except not, since it's just a romp through a long dungeon full of item collecting. And my inventory is clogged with all these stat potions.


This is about as high damage as I see Vivit pump out. It's truly frightening...AGL weapons are fantastic in this game on Robots, as AGL accounts for accuracy as well which STR weapons need to connect.

Can STR bots dare challenge this and strike back? Yes, they can.


More remake commentary: in this version, Odin says nothing if you haven't died before encountering him, though amusingly, still revives and introduces himself to you should you die against him. Henceafter, death is just game over. In the remake, he taunts you before the fight for being a fool for coming here if you have yet to taste defeat.


I don't, by the way. Even though I come close a few times searching for this beauty. It does a flat 1050 base damage...if STR is under 70. If not, it's 1050+15*(STR-70). Did I mention it hits groups, too? And that it never misses? AGL is not needed ever again, except for potential moving-before-enemy purposes.

Though embarrassingly, it fails to drop several times because I have no room for the thing. After realizing and fixing that, I get it a few fights after.


Yeah. How do you like that, Minion? The bad news is, our damage output goes down after this fight when all our MAGI is taken away. The good news is, it only goes down by 200-300 points of damage.


So I have max money now. Or so it seems. I can actually sell off some of the junk to get even more than can be displayed, so long as I don't fight any fights in between buying things. Ninja Gauntlets can be bought in the Final Town, by the way, which is nice.


I go ahead and use all the stat-potions in the game on Dad as he returns. No other place for Robots to use him. I also give him a pair of Hecate Shoes I had as I go in to clear out the Nasty Dungeon.


I still run out of inventory space along the way. And even picture space, because the emulator is weird and has a max of 99 images. I have to redo some stuff to show it off...and still don't get nearly the amount of screenshots I want. Arthur Armor and Parasuit are the best items to be found for this party in the Nasty Dungeon. The former gives O-Stone, and while the latter isn't as great for a robot as it is for a human or mutant, +32DEF along with O-Fire, O-Ice, and O-Change is fantastic. There's also SelfFix, a robot-only piece of equipment that sees them restore 10% of their Max HP after every turn.

XCalibr is one of the most notable treasures of the Final Dungeon. It's Gungnir...except it never runs out of uses. Good for our robots (it goes to Aigis), even better for humans. There's also another Parasuit and Arthur Armor in here.


Hi again, Warmech!!


Bye agai-WarMach. And I'm DEAD??? NukeBomb hurts. 600 base damage, blows through all defenses. He followed this up with some Missiles to wipe me off the map. Luckily, you can save anywhere, so nothing lost but some dignity.


Once I beat him, it's time to throw down with Apollo. I think I would rather not wait, thank you very much.

And I feel the only appropriate way to portray this is with ANIMATRONICS.




So to explain here. Apollo has 25000HP. How the fight normally goes is that he uses Aegis while taunting you. Then he transforms and becomes vulnerable. 12 turns after this, he explodes and Dad takes the explosion. Or if you can lower his HP enough, he'll get angry and use a brutal Flare, which Dad again takes.

However, it's possible to break through with Flare, never-miss weapons, and XCalibr/Gungnir. With enough STR (Dragon Swords, Sun Swords, the otherwise pointless for a robot 1-use which becomes 0-use Glass Sword), you can remove this before he transforms. End result, Dad dies for no good reason. Shoutouts to breaking the game!!

This is why I did all that cash-grinding before. Granted, I cash-grinded too hard and didn't actually need that much, but whatever. And I always wanted to try doing this.


Isis the Goddess joins the team, I fix the robots' equipment, then head go down th-wow. RUDE. Once I heal from this mess, and go get a few Tents for the road which I'd forgotten to pick up anyway, I head down for real. Nothing really stops the robots along the way, not with every party member able to obliterate groups.


Isis can also cast Flare to get you out of almost any encounter, killing everything but the 2000HP Musashi in one hit, who I piled all the rest of the attacks on. Who, again, is rude and thankfully, Samurai Bow doesn't trigger his counters nor does it trigger if he dies. Like, say, instantly to Gungnir doing more than his health total.


Three Tents are enough to carry me to the bottom floor, and-


Wow.


WOW.

Haniwa is one of FFL2's rarest encounters, sort of the WarMECH - or perhaps more accurately, the PinkPuff/Flan Princess of it. It's only found in the final room of the game. It has 10000HP, recovers 1000 of it every turn, and possesses lots of dangerous attacks. But there's a reason to seek them out: they can rarely drop the 7-Sword.


So a quick demonstration since the game was taunting me with a worthless item for this group...7-Sword is like any other multi-hit attack. Except it's ridiculously powerful and can hit up to 7 times. This is how much it does when Cutman swings it and all the hits connect on a weak enemy.

So why's this rare drop from a rare enemy sadly worthless? Well, you need AGL to hit. And robots can't have both STR and AGL in excess short of glitch exploitation. It can still be used to do some really heavy damage on a balanced robot (5000~ with no resistances), but for the purposes of demonstration, since it's really inaccessible, I won't be using it. I also had to pull out of the dungeon anyway after that.


I go up to the final boss. Defense is largely useless against Arsenal, so I strip down Aigis and pump up her strength with some of those Dragon Swords. Then I realize that Floyd still has two pieces of armor, and I threw away two Jyudos the game generously gave me that could replace those. So I go beat up Black Belts while resetting a lot.

Is it necessary? Did I have to do it? Not really. I could easily win without these, but I prefer massive overkill having come this far. They end up dropping me two Karate and one Jyudo. I put the first two on Vivit, and give one of her Jyudos that was replaced as well as the one that dropped to Floyd. I also run into more Haniwas in the process. No more 7-Swords for me, but I sometimes get wiped when they spit out 900+ damage flares.


So here we are. The final boss that walled 12-year-old T-Hawk back in the day. How can a group of robots with no healing aside from SelfFix deal with Arsenal? And yes, I didn't get any even when searching, but you CAN get additional SelfFix from the robots/mecheyes here.


Well, a dead last line of defense (literally, the Japanese version calls it the Last Defense System) against those who may misuse MAGI - who thankfully does not turn into a giant robot in this version of the game much less Megazords with the other one if Threads of Fate are used - can't hurt us, can it?

So how can it hurt us while alive? The first of its attacks in its first phase is Laser Cannon. Not the same as Laser Gun, this does around 45~ damage per active cannon. They're destroyed when 1000 damage is done to them, which is why I piled all the Karate onto Vivit - to increase her chance of one-shotting them. Floyd and Cutman needed no help with this. Second phase, Smasher! is the attack used. This does random damage to one target. It could be as low as 80. It tops out at just under 600. Final phase when the epic music hits (and sadly doesn't last long in this version), it launches the Smasher, as shown. This is basically that same attack on all-targets. Note how Cutman randomly took less than his companions.

Simply put, it's up to luck with Smasher's very variable damage, and your own damage. Kill it before it can kill you. All there is to it! Honestly, I went pretty far with loading down to power up. You honestly don't need as much.

With as much as I had though, and running the fight several times...the best it could do was kill off one robot if Smasher! followed by the launch gave some bad rolls, but with every robot able to do 900-1300 damage with its attacks, it didn't take too long to deplete its 10000HP.


This final boss death animation, also brought to you with ANIMATRONICS!!


So yeah, that's Final Fantasy Legend II, completed with four robots. I have more variants in mind for this game for the future, so you can look forward to more eventually.

One last relevant remake comment: in that version, Robots can actually use magic, via special pieces of equipment called Mana Circuits. They're rare though, and for extras you need to spend some time in a boss rematch arena. Just another way to use them in that version, and probably needed for healing purposes if you want to use threads and therefore fight the aforementioned giant robot.

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