Final Fantasy Legend 2, Part 3 - Venus de Milo

 

Hey! Don't talk about Richie that way! Only I can talk about Richie that way!

Today on FFL2: I take on one of the New God pantheon, Venus. I already have a Venus though. Mina is right here on the team. This is going to get confusing. At least unlike Aphrodite of Melos, Mina has all of her arms.

"I'm the Guardian!"

People in this town are really angsty. But at least they're normal well-adjusted people who aren't screaming at anybody. These days, that's not something to take for granted.

This is a place where the player can get stuck for a while because the game gives you no real hint what to do.

The TRUE SaGa experience!

All you need to do is play this tune on the phonograph. And it isn't the first choice, no. You have to scroll down...and scroll down...to find it.

This opens the door to a secret hideout. You'd think knowing to do this would mean I'm NOT a spy and have the pass-phrase (of sorts) but no such luck. In any case, this gets us into the Secret Resistance Base.

This guy theorizes about an ancient civilization with somewhat advanced technology well ahead of their time, that was completely wiped-out.

::the Scholar pops up nearby:: "Um excuse me, there was no pre-historic ancient civilization, that is a dangerous conspiracy theory!"

Look dude, you were wrong about Dunatis, so back off!

Yeah, I'm very tired. I can't even speculate on interesting ideas without getting ackshually'd by that scholar guy!

"Ackshually there's no proof that giant lizards once walked the Earth! That's just a harmful conspiracy rumor to mock God!"

-The scholar's predecessor, many centuries ago, probably

Our heroes are awakened to the sounds of explosions and battles. The base is under attack.

...by pantless pixies! What a fearsome threat!

THIS guy again. Who the hell is he, anyway? Is he running around trying to save the world, or does he just have debilitating ADHD?

Just in time, because this monster shows up, holding his other kid hostage. Before LUX even got to have a conversation with him, too!

Were FFL2's creators working through personal issues?

Dad tells our extremely powerful and well-armed heroes to make sure the girl is okay, while HE handles the monster by himself!

Father, in a Triple H voice: "I'M the hero-uh! Mee! I'LL defeat the monster and win the title-uh! It will be mee-uh!"

Dad dies in the process of stopping the bad guy. I think he blew up for some reason. Maybe he was a robot? NOW LUX makes sense!

No, he didn't have to do that. That was super unnecessary. Also, he didn't even get the job done, because the boss reappears a second later still ready to go.

Ninja here is then promptly one-rounded. The streak continues! ...why did Dad sacrifice himself? Well, it's just the culmination of a long line of horrendous mistakes and even worse parenting by this dude. How often was he even around? Being an "adventurer" isn't an excuse for not being a father and I'm tired of these old RPGs pretending it is. Well, I'm sure he'll be back later, doubt he actually "died".

The gameplay loop continues. Every floor of the tower is the same, with a locked door and a world whose problems you have to solve to open the locked door.

Come to think of it, this game has a lot in common with Dragon Quest VII. Just with a tower/magi setup instead of a shrine/shards.

The next world is Venus' World, the land of the beautiful people:

::hisses:: It's all relative to the size of your steeeeple.

She then swivels her hips in the air while twirling, like a Bella Twin.

This place is basically a modern city, and the look is different from the rest of the game. SaGa games do this a lot. Wildly-incongruous zones that seem to be from totally different eras of time, often right next to each other.

Venus' Palace is full of statues of Venus. Hard to tell on this low-res Game Boy screen, so unclear if they're sexy statues like that one female-only temple in Elder Scrolls Skyrim.

No wonder we haven't seen Richie Ryan lately. He's been hovering around the windows of this temple with binoculars.

I need to get back to Elder Scrolls

Venus is the next of the trio of New Gods and she hates the unattractives.

She holds everyone to high beauty standards and anyone who falls short gets escorted out of the city. This could also be an injury or impairment, doesn't matter, you'll be sent to live with the non-beautifuls out in a decrepit hovel somewhere. Well, at least she doesn't just kill 'em.

She says there are no magi to be found in her world. She's also a HUGE LIAR. This is like a quarter of the game's Magi.

Venus has robot guards that vibrate in 12 settings and also guard the city against people trying to leave. Also unattractive people might try to get in so they have to keep a lookout for that. I think I see a guy with a face mole! Get him!

In the Town of Unattractives, the innkeeper is a frog. Really? A frog didn't cut the mustard in Beautiful People City?

This town is full of people who got thrown out of Venus' city because of their physical flaws. Some of them are attractive, but have a bum knee or something, and the Venus Commissariat declared them unacceptable.

Next dungeon is this sewer where Magi are hidden. Every 90's RPG must have a sewer dungeon at some point.

The miniboss here is the first fight in the game to last longer than one round. ...due only to his ability to hide in his shell and mitigate like 95% of damage for a round, which he happened to use. Second round, quick win. So basically, still a one-round fight.

Venus doesn't believe that we found Magi in the sewers. There can't be anything good down there, it isn't an attractive place.

Next dungeon is the nearby volcano, which contains, you guessed it, more Magi.

It's a standard FF volcano, with damaging floors. This quickly turns into a legitimate problem.

Despite the 999 HP, my human is taking a lot of punishment and pretty much dying through the dungeon. The robots are falling behind now too. I need to get to the Edo World ASAP and get the huge robot upgrades found there.

At this point I take my first death of the game, since I wasn't watching my health and the damaging floors were doing a number on the party. More than halfway through and the game is finally being a little challenging. Get ready, because this game doesn't know what a difficulty curve is. It's a free ride until it hits a brick wall (we'll know it when that happens). This part of the game is a bit of a minor difficulty spike though.

In any case, dying causes you to get a second chance from Odin, one of the New Gods. He'll revive the party and put them back at the start of whatever fight you lost. From there it's usually a simple matter to just run away. Regardless of how tough a dungeon is, you can essentially die your way through the game if you need to...for now.

Back at the town, Flora and Nils are about to get married. I thought she was married to Bianca?

Oh yeah, so that Leon guy who got exiled, he wants to be with Flora, who is still in this city. Now Flora has to marry this weird Nils guy, who is some kind of imp, even though she doesn't want to. ...why is an imp-guy allowed in the Beautiful People City?

Now Venus is making Flora and the imp make out while she watches.

"Oh yeah, niccce" says Venus.

The hell kind of town is this??

TF

Oh it's Leon. How did he get past the vibrating robot guards?

Well, so much for Prince Valium Nils.

Flora then SCARS HERSELF so that she'll have a blemish and Venus will exile her to be with Leon.

Poor Nils, just standing there during all of this. He shows up for an arranged marriage to a hot woman and just gets made a fool of!

Rei has had ENOUGH of Venus!

"...what did I do?" says Mina.

Come to think of it, what does Nils think of all this?

...uh, yeah, thank you Nils.

....TF?

Venus is the first difficult boss in this game, AND the first boss to (legitimately) get out of the first turn. About 60% of the way through the game and it took this long for a real fight. She's also pretty, outside of the giant head.

My robots BLAST HER WITH BAZOOKAS.

Her main offense is charming characters (which lasts for ages), but it doesn't work on my robots.

HAW! YOUR FEMININE POWERS DO NOTHING HERE!

...she can charm the women fine though. This game doesn't draw that distinction like Romancing SaGa 2 does. Or maybe it does and they're Yuri Enthusiasts.

Other than Charm, it isn't too bad of a fight, even though it's WAY beyond anything else to this point. Venus is basically dead, so that's one of the three New Gods downed.

Winning gets me that weird Fire+Ice Lubricant that people were into like 15 years ago. That loot is so Venus.

Flora is okay with being scarred, because it'll just be a reminder of this day and what they went through so she could be with her love, Leon.

Leon: "Yeah, I dunno lady, that looks pretty gross. I'm outta here."

No, they lived happily ever after, and even Nils was happy for them.

.......the hell was Nils supposed to be?

One key new materia Magi is Aegis, which basically protects the entire team from physical attacks for one round. Put that on one particular character and have them spam it, and it's like summoning Golem in Final Fantasy VI over and over. Super overpowered. At least to a point. As the game goes on, the main threat will be from AOEs, which are unaffected. There's armor that'll mitigate fire and ice AOEs down, but some AOEs don't fall into those categories and will be a problem.

The next world is Race World. It's a really short one compared to the previous world so I might as well knock it out real quick in this session.

RACE WORLD! SHIT IS GOING DOWN!

Apollo runs this place. Basically you choose one of four dragons, then run around a track.

How...random.

The key is to choose the slow dragon. It's the only one that actually wins the race, because the others get locked into fights.

Yep...just kinda...stroll past them

That's it for this world. Man, this game is weird.

Rei: "Give me my Magi, bitch!"

No fight with Apollo yet. No, he's the last of the trio to deal with. And he'll be the hardest fight in the game by a mile, so I'm in no rush to get to it.

The next actual substantial world is Edo World, which is what it sounds like. Here, I'll need to battle the dastardly Shogun. Probably my favorite world in this game.

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