Final Fantasy Legend 2, Part 2 - Ashura's Wrath

 

Ashura? I thought we defeated that guy in the previous game? Well, since the games aren't connected, this is just...a different Ashura. Or maybe not, who knows. Either way, Ashura is like the cock-a-roach.

Ashura's World is confusing, with a giant cloud maze that requires an exact route to get through or it'll blast you back to the beginning. I could see a lot of players quitting at this part. However, there's a way to cheese it. Go to the north part of the world where you zoned in, and hug the "zone wall" clockwise all the way around to Ashura's Tower. Yep, that one tile wide space is safe from the cloud maze.

Can just step north off the wall to Ashura's Tower, it'll allow it. This is a sprawling dungeon, and has some nice attention to detail in that every floor is a little smaller than the one before:

The dungeons in this game are much better than the previous game, and even the overworlds have a lot more finesse to their design. Between SaGa 1 and SaGa 2 you can see Squaresoft going from a rudimentary developer copying D&D to an experienced developer forging their own way.

Ashura's Tower is straightforward. Bring enough weapon charges for an expedition, bring lots of healing potions, start climbing.

Woodman (no relation to Wood Man) is the miniboss here, and gets one-rounded. So far no boss or miniboss has gotten out of the first round, and this guy probably wasn't gonna be the first. Why are the first couple of SaGas so easy for like half the game?

While my mutant appears to be the weakest character by a lot HP-wise, she's actually doing most of the damage currently. She's got AOE spells that hit all enemy groups, something I can't find in the wild yet, and they replenish at an inn.

This MYSTERY MAN who is definitely not your father shows up midway through the tower. He's on a quest to defeat Ashura!

...why the mask and pretending not to know his own son?

.......his own chrome, metallic, vibrating son?

Ashura has some bad news for our heroes: He has already sent his goons to shrink down to microscopic proportions and climb inside Ki's body to look for Magi. They're swimming around in her as we speak!

Ashura is the first big boss of the game. After such an extended dungeon crawl, do our heroes have a chance?

...well, they do if I use this one-charge Punch I've been saving for a boss. Ashura...doesn't get out of the first round, so the streak continues.

Oh yeah, martial arts moves are like 20x more powerful when they only have one charge left. So if someone was so inclined they could bank a bunch of moves with one charge and blast a boss with them one after another. However, this game is easy enough that it really doesn't require that level of commitment. If you just happen to have a martial arts move and it's getting low on charges, it's good to stop at one and save it.

Ashura's minions are already off carrying out their dastardly mission to run around in Ki's body, and our heroes have to find a way to pursue. It's literally the movie Innerspace.

Also, Mask guy runs off without a word. He really is my dad!

Worth Noting: Ashura is classified as an almost top-tier enemy, so your Mutant can learn some lategame abilities from that fight...or nothing at all. Save before the fight and reset until you get something good. With the Punch in tow, this is quick enough.

Surprise is a good ability to learn since it gives you random pre-emptive attacks for the rest of the game, which is huge. I couldn't get it to spark over ten or so tries, but I did get O-Weapon (on the first shot no less). This is a defensive passive effect that cuts all physical attacks in half. Considering the Mutant's low HP and defense, this is key.

Ki doesn't feel so good. Apparently there's a world of Giants nearby, and the Giants got tired of being hunted, so they developed a way to shrink down to tiny size and disappear. They probably got eaten by field mice.

Our quest now is to find the last giant and find out how their shrink method works so I can save Ki. Unfortunately, I slew the last giant in Dark Souls 2.

Our heroes run into the dad again, and he runs off. He's got important things to do, damn it!

"Whirrrr..." says LUX somberly as oil pours from his visual sensors.

The Giant Town is huge...and deserted. However, there's one crucial thing to do here. A nearby town sells Giant equipment, which is likely all left over from when giants lived here. And fits our heroes, weirdly enough.

This shop is only available until the very next story beat (which means, like, the next five to ten minutes of the main story). All of these armor pieces give humans/mutants a +10 Str boost, which is HUGE for the physical-focused human. As much as I'd like to get everyone decked out and put armor/helms on everyone, the amount of gold required is astronomical, and just way too much grinding to do at this point. However, it is a good idea to take a little while (as long as you can stand) and bang out some funds. Bolting a few Giant Gauntlets onto robots is a substantial stat boost so I try to at least do that.

The only enemies here that actually give a nice gold haul: Terrorists.

SaGa is WEIRD.

After slapping on three Giant Gauntlets, my robots end up at an even 420 HP. Are these Tesla robots?

Don't forget to pick up a charger for these vibrating bad boys. With the kind of rigors Rei puts them through, they need to be topped off a lot.

Elsewhere in the Giant Town, there are a few Magi to get. These basically seem to just function as keys. There are only a few types of Magi and the stat boosts they give are small. However, EVERY area has a gate that requires X amount of Magi to continue to the next area, so this allows them to easily gate off the world behind story events.

As more Magi of a certain type are collected, presumably you get more of that stat when equipping them. The elemental Magi allow the character to cast that spell unlimited times.

I was stuck for a little while at this point with no idea what to do in this town. What you need to do is pick up that orb, which requires climbing onto this big table, which requires... going up the steps at the upper right. Which is obvious now that I'm on the table. On the floor, those don't look like steps, they look like wall. You can walk up and around them, regardless. Had to look this up on Youtube, and before that I was just wandering around the town, looking for something unusual. The orb did stand out as unusual, but I couldn't interact with it from the floor, and saw no obvious way up.

The minute this orb is obtained, the Giant Armor merchant poofs. So that window is closed. Basically you're limited to whatever you happened to grab the first time you were there.

The orb is what the giants used to shrink, so now I can...

...shrink down and go inside Ki!

Wait... what entry point are they using?

Ewww.

Yeah, this place is squishy, and crawling with bacteria enemies.

Is that COVID? Get the hell outta here, COVID!

Rei's HP growth is out of control at this point so I move her to the tank position. The robots are at the mercy of me finding better gear later on, and I really won't be able to until the Odo World which isn't for a while. Even the mutant is going to outpace them on HP before that. At this juncture I think that robots are far better for speedrunners who aren't going to spend any time grinding other character types and can just slap all the gear they find onto their 'bots while running away from fights.

After repelling various germs and collecting six Magi inside of Ki, our heroes need to take off for the next world.

The star-crossed non-romance of Ki and LUX will have to end here.

Next up is Apollo's World, and Apollo has an impressive palace.

This guy is one of the "New Gods" along with Venus and Odin. Now that Ashura is out of the way, there's very little stopping these deities from running the show. For now, we're all allies.

Ashura's World has a bunch more Magi, so the hunt continues. They're all in various short dungeons.

In the next town, our heroes learn that somebody named Lynn has a father who looks like...uh...Rei? She isn't the least bit masculine-looking. Oh, you mean LUX? .......uh

People here bicker and argue about whether or not a giant robot called Dunatis is actually a thing that exists. Some say it's the cause of the recent loud noises in the area, while others say that's a "dangerous conspiracy theory" or whatever.

I need to find this woman's daughter and see if she's actually LUX's half-sister or not. She was last seen going to the domain of Mo. You know, Mo, the other guy from 90's WWF tag team Men on a Mission.

In a box, we find "The Rocket" Owen Hart! I thought Tommy Dreamer was the man in the box?

Here's the daughter. She's trying to defeat Dunatis and can't. So...Dunatis is real then?

It's also apparently a Dalek.

This thing looks durable, and I thought it might finally be the first foe to last longer than a single round. Nope. One round, fight over. Then again, I've got a character at 999 HP already and I'm not even halfway through the game. They made the Giant equipment require so much grinding that this was inevitable (and I only spent like half the funds I wanted to on said equipment before I tapped out).

Sure enough, Dad shows up, and he's apparently this woman's father too. So he's been gettin' around. Really sowin' his seed. I think he might have just adopted her, though. ...why he did this when he already had a kid who he abandoned is anybody's guess.

What is he, Gokou?

YOU RUN OFF WITH UUBU, GOKOU! YOU DO THAT!

Funny how our heroes proceed to insult the place immediately. "Bumming around", indeed.

The party decides there isn't much else to do besides just forge onward and keep collecting Magi. So they're just gonna leave Dad here with his new family?

Ehh.

It's SaGa, don't expect too much.

Next stop in Apollo's World is the south seas, where I need to find an underwater volcano to get more Magi.

"It's a dangerous conspiracy theory!" shrieks the scholar. Well, so far you guys don't have a very good win/loss track record, do you?

Thought I needed to find a boat to continue, so I wandered around again, then eventually found that I could just...walk into the water and walk on the ocean floor without issue. Err.

The underwater volcano is the first particularly dangerous dungeon, with lava floors that sap the party's HP quickly.

The big goal here is this Magi, which lets you see in...

...this super-bright cave near Apollo's Palace. All of this is pretty rudimentary. Get key, go to dungeon it unlocked, get next key, continue on.

Whoa, a Laser Sword. This seems like something that'd go well on a robot. They gain considerably more from some items than from others, and generally the good weapons for them are the ones that you would think.

The goal of this place? More of these things. That's it for Apollo's World, onward.

Thoughts on the game so far? I gotta say, it isn't enchanting me the way it did in 2000. The SaGa stat-building system isn't as balanced or interesting as I remember, and I've got characters going through lopsided growth compared to others.

Do I still think this is the best RPG on the Game Boy? Not really. It's likely the best of the Legend trilogy. However I think Final Fantasy Adventure edges it out on gameplay, and Pokemon R/B/Y is a lot more replayable/fun. So this is probably going to move down to #3 on the system for me now.

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