TEXT PLAY SIDE GAME: Final Fantasy II (Famicom 1988/PS 2003 [Origins]): Issue #004: Bafsking For It

It's been awhile since I've done one of these, and it's about time I got back to it.

So, where have I been the last six months or so, since my last update in this little series of mine? Well, trying to work through some personal stuff that I'm not quite through yet. Maybe some day, some place, I'll actually get around to talking about all that, but for now, I just need to get back to doing things like this on a more regular basis again. No silly plans or schedules or whatnot until I get stuff going again to base such things on.

Why this game in particular instead of one of the other two that I may have been more excited about when I started them? Mostly because it's what I wanted to play when I sat down to do one of these, and it was what I had in the PS2 at the time. I'm hoping to get back to the others before long now, too. Or at least that's the plan, even if I'm not really making plans right now.

Anyway, the game. Sometime between the middle of last August and now, I'd intended to get back to this more seriously because I'd bought Firion the Shield spell, which gives our party members a defense boost for however much of the battle the spell is in effect, should it take. It seems my intent was to have this done in a couple months instead of the six or however long it's been.

This actual time, I got some Mythril Helms for Firion and Maria plus the Esuna spell for Firion. That spell is one thing I'm glad that most of the other games in the series I'm familiar with sort of corrected. All the others had just one spell that worked on status ailments whereas this one has two: Esuna, which works on what they call “permanent” status effects like what they call Venom, and another called Basuna, which works on “temporary” effects like Poison. It's just one of many things in this game that makes it a little more difficult than it needs to be.

As far as the actual story goes, when we get to Bafsk, everybody says things have been different since the Dark Knight who'd been in charge left and a guy called Borghen took over. Security has been lax enough for a guy to either sneak in disguised as an Imperial Trooper to spy on the construction of the Dreadnaught or to switch sides from the Empire and send the Rebellion information. Either way, there's a guy in Imperial armor who tells us that we can get to the Dreadnaught's construction site by way of a sewer tunnel. There's also a random citizen in town who tells us that we'll need a Pass to actually get onboard the Dreadnaught.

The tunnel is full of monsters that are a little tougher than the ones on the overworld. This is good because my party needs to get pounded a little bit to bring up their stats. Another good thing is that there's no real boss fight at the end of this.

The bad news, however, is that it turns out that the Rebellion never had a chance of slowing down or stopping work on this new death machine the Empire was building. When we get to the end of the dungeon, we find that the Dark Knight had never actually left, but had instead gone into hiding so he could focus on finishing the airship as soon as possible. He explains that we're all dead now and were foolish to have tried stopping this. Borghen, like the good little hench he is, shows up to laugh in our faces before he joins his master onboard the ship, which then takes off for its maden flight.

But since the game's only just starting, really, and still, we can still get the Pass, which is in an unguarded chamber down a path to the right that we won't be able to get to until after the cutscene of the Dreadnaught taking off. The good news is that there's a Warp Tile in the chamber as well, that'll put us on the overworld map outside Bafsk.

With that, all we can do is survey the destruction on the way back to Altair to tell Princess Hilda that it seems we're all fucked because the Dreadnaught's launched, and maybe come up with a way to stop this thing from doing more damage.

But that's for next time, folks. Hopefully, it won't be another six months before I get back to this. I'm just hoping that doing things like this regular again will bring me around again and help get me into a better place for once.

See you soon, folks.