Final Fantasy Legend 2, Finale - Apollo's Creed

 

This is it, the final segment of FFL2. With Apollo stealing almost all of the Magi, I have to find the secret 78th Magi and take on the Center of the World.

Dad joins the group finally, and says the 78th Magi is conveniently hidden in the one nearby dungeon...

...the aptly-named Final Dungeon. This place is similar to Nasty Dungeon, just nowhere near as lengthy or difficult. Yet again, I have to point out that Nasty Dungeon makes very little sense and should have been multiple smaller dungeons. It's the sort of thing that would be solid as a postgame challenge, but not as a random dungeon 70% of the way through the main game.

I run away all through it, again. My characters are maxed-out on HP and any stat growth could be achieved more easily at a mid point in the game, so there's no reason to fight lategame enemies.

The second and last Parasuit. Now both my non-robot characters have super defense and resistance to elemental attacks (aka most AOEs)

I get XCalibr in here too. Strong weapon with unlimited charges. Weirdly enough, I give it to one of the robots, as it gives a huge stat boost. My human is doing fine with a Sun Sword, which isn't far behind on damage (neither is great though, this endgame is all about group attacks and AOEs like Laser from the robots and Flare from the mutant).

At the end of Final Dungeon is the third-to-last boss in the game (and probably the second-hardest), WarMech.

...or rather, WarMach.

Mina NUKES WARMECH and the robot shrugs it off. This thing is a full-on BEAST and trucks with unresistable AOEs almost every round. You pretty much have to get lucky to win.

That said, there's a key to victory here, and it's in Dad's inventory:

Heal wand is a full-group cure spell, and the higher the Mana stat of a character, the more HP they recover from it. So it isn't super effective on robots, but it's crucial regardless and spamming it is enough to offset most of Warmech's constant damage output.

This gets me the last Magi. When used in battle, this revives the entire party with full health (once per battle). Provided the person who has it equipped happens to still be standing, it could save a fight.

Now that Heal wands are the difference between winning and losing, I pick up a couple more for Rei and Mina, then work on grinding their Mana levels up by spamming low-level spells on mid-level enemies for like an hour. Probably ready for the final bosses now.

This is it, the Center of the World. Where Apollo is trying to become the new god of all of the planes.

He's got 77 Magi equipped, but By God our heroes have Heart!

Apollo is the Big Bad of FFL2, and the hardest fight in the game. Everything that made Warmech so tough is turned up even higher for this one, and it seems tuned for a party with like 1500 HP (which obviously is impossible).

Between these two fights and Nasty Dungeon, it's clear that the devs saved up ALL of the difficulty in this game for the last 10% or so.

For this fight, I unleash everything. Nuke Bombs, Glass Sword, EVERYTHING.

He gives you a bunch of free turns to attack, that's how overconfident he is. This is a golden opportunity to whittle him down.

Don't have to wait until his last phase to dole out my biggest attacks (like the Creator in the WSC version of FFL1) either. Just go full-tilt from the start.

After the few turns of free shots, Apollo transforms into his true form and starts unleashing hellish AOEs.

...except I already knocked off like 70% of his HP, so his brutal form didn't last too long. I still had to spam heal wands. This guy may be the toughest boss in the game, but I personally had more trouble with Warmech. It all comes down to saving the super-attacks. If I had burned them on Warmech, this fight would have been ridiculous.

For Apollo's final move, he lets out a huge death-explosion and Dad jumps in front of our heroes to Piccolo it up and take the hit. Now, if Dad is knocked-out at this point, then he doesn't do this, and your party gets wiped out. So it's important to keep him up, another thing adding to the toughness of the fight.

Dad fell.

Right on!

Isis, an Ancient God (thus a real one) shows up now and resuscitates Dad. He keeps laying there, though. Are we sure she revived him, or is this "bananas" all over again?

Apollo may be defeated, but a security system at the center of the world has been activated by someone collecting so many Magi, and it's about to go haywire and cause mass destruction. So Isis has to stop it, with our help of course. So wait, our heroes would have triggered this anyway? Ah, whatever, we're almost done.

Isis has all of the combat-usable Magi, including the Masmune attack that's pretty damn solid. Maxed stats as well. I guess she decided that it's best if an adult holds onto the Magi from here on out.

The final area is this wildly-vibrating series of escalators (much like the endgame of FFL1). Is this making Isis randy?

Good thing I brought lots of Tents. (No, not for that reason, ya sicko)

This is the key item to stockpile before heading into the final areas, or even the Nasty Dungeon if one wants to play it legit. Just use these every time the party starts getting low on health, and everyone is back to full. That said, judicious use is required, because the final area is brutal enough that you can actually run out. There's no avoiding these escalator fights either.

There's another big thing one can do to prepare for the final boss: Farm the Seven Sword, the ultimate weapon, which has massive damage output and owns the final boss and the final dungeon. It drops randomly from Haniwa, super-strong enemies that can show up in this final dungeon. I never saw a single one the entire way through, so it's probably a pretty rare spawn, and it isn't even guaranteed to drop the Seven Sword (think it usually takes a few Haniwas). Also, Haniwas are basically as strong as Warmech.

In short, farming the Seven Sword is WAY more trouble than it's worth and probably harder than just finishing the game normally. However, if one is supremely lucky, they might get one on the normal route through the dungeon.

There are several minibosses that are all extremely powerful. Besides Tents, the other key thing to bring are Heal wands. If you don't bring stacks of either, you're doomed and probably softlocked.

The very last area is this glass maze, that bears a resemblance to Zeromus' chambers at the end of FFIV.

Arsenal is the final boss, and there are two of them. Which means...

...Isis leaves the party to solo one. Way to make the party look gimpy. Also, now I wish I'd burned through her Flares and whatnot on the super-tough minibosses, had I known she'd be unavailable for the final boss.

This is it, Arsenal. Some sort of ancient weapon, well above even Warmech in power. Probably the coolest-looking foe in this entire Game Boy trilogy. This fight takes place in multiple phases. Long story short, the first two phases are weak and pose little threat, then for the third phase it just starts spamming MASSIVE AOES. Need to start using Heal wands before that phase starts, otherwise it'll usually get two AOEs back to back and end the fight.

My human has turned out to be the only weak link in the endgame. While the robots are firing off Lasers for 350+ damage and the mutant is blasting Flares for 700+ damage, Rei can only dish out weak sword attacks for like 150. Instead I put her on Heal duty, having her spam wands all fight. They're a lot more effective when Mina uses them (they're affected by caster's Mana stat as well as recipient's) but having Rei spamming them does help.

Reach the third phase, and Arsenal unleashes with...

...this absurdly strong AOE with semi-random damage (it can do as much as 800 damage and hits everyone). As mentioned, spamming Heal is the only way to weather this storm.

Other than that, there isn't much to this fight. Rei used Heal while the other 3 attacked, then when Arsenal was almost at phase 3, I had Mina start using Heal as well. The two robots could whittle it down the rest of the way. As deadly as this thing is, it's a simpler fight than Apollo or even Warmech because it's pretty one-dimensional. It doesn't require saving up any super-attacks either.

With the world saved from the ancient doomsday weapon, Isis no-sells all of this like Orange Cassidy and goes off to do Ancient God things.

Dad, who is back on his feet, announces that it's time for him to go out and SEE THE WORLD!

...dude.

LUX reminds Dad that he exists. That's right, your vibrating mechanical son needs you to be around, damn it!

They then set off on a new mission to find the "Lost Ark", and Mom goes along with them, so that's all heartwarming.

So final thoughts on this game? Is it still the best RPG on the Game Boy? Ehh, I'm not sure. I definitely didn't like it as much as I did back in 2000. The worlds are pretty small, the game is kinda short, and the difficulty is uneven. The whole game is uneven, actually. Most of the challenge is lopsidedly at the very end in the mother of all difficulty spikes. Some worlds are big and interesting/involved while some are over in minutes.

All of that said, I can't think of any Game Boy RPGs that are superior to this. If we're classifying RPGs as anything with RPG-like mechanics (like leveling up), then nothing comes to mind outside of possibly Final Fantasy Adventure. However I think this one holds a slight lead over that one, still.

As for my choice of party, if I could do it over again I'd change it a bit. The human being the weak link at the end of the game was the LAST thing I would have predicted, considering how weak the mutant was early-on and how much I doubted the robots. In retrospect, a party of 2 robots / 2 mutants would have been a powerhouse.

Onward to FFL3. Will I like it more than I did back in 2003, when it was the last Game Boy game I ever bought/played/finished? Probably. Squinting at that screen was a hassle that brought it down a lot. Will it challenge this game at the top of the heap? Probably not, given the lack of classes (least not in the same way), but we'll see.

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