Final Fantasy 2: Complete

I finished Final Fantasy 2 yesterday evening. One of the most interesting things about this is that it was actually, for all its NES-level story-telling capability, a fairly dark game. A lot of heroes end up dead, and our heroes do not reconcile with each other at the end. Leon is sort of a proto-Kain, but he pulls it off better since he doesn't seem to slip in and out of mind control as easily as a cartoon character. As with FF1, the early limitations really showed in the game; grinding by hitting yourself and your friends in the head is... thankfully a system Final Fantasy dropped. The other problem with FF2 is that, much like some of the later Final Fantasies, your characters start to blend together, ability wise, if you're going for max effectiveness. By the end of the game, Firion, Mariah and Gus were only different in that Firion swung two lances, Mariah used two swords and Gus had two axes. All three could heal and buff effectively, and attack magic was of nominal use.

This is another game that is fun in the sense that you get a feeling of overcoming challenges, until you hit the mid-game when some odd combination of equipment and spells lets you sit on easy street until a random encounter in the final dungeon with monsters that do a percentage of your max HP as damage. Then, once you clear the two floors they are on, it is smooth sailing. I expected the boss to actually transform into a super powered. final true evil form. He did not. Oh well, on to Final Fantasy III, which brought us the Job System as we think of it.

Below are some pictures from my failed adventure to the Air and Space museum today, as the lecture I was hoping to attend was canceled.

I don't know why I like this statue.

Also, here's something I noticed while I was walking around outside the Air and Space museum.

Compare this Earth sign...

To this Mars sign!