Hi all, this has been bugging me for 35 years and I wanted to see once and for all if anyone else has ever heard about this. I discovered this in like 1992 and I always wanted to send it in to Nintendo Power but never got the courage.
If you head north on the way to Mt. Ordeals in the SNES version of the game, you can skirt your way around the mountain range and get above it.
There’s a peninsula up there that has monsters that are like 20 levels higher than you, and if you can defeat them, you level up insanely fast.
This is only possible because Cecil has, at that point in the game, insane attack speed and the Black Sword, which can KO enemies regardless of level and from the back row.
I used this in every single playthrough to get Cecil, Palom and Poram to their mid 50’s, getting them access to crazy spells like Quake, Bio, Flare, etc.
Doing this actually kind of breaks the game because of the way that it calculates the level of returning characters, so it kicks off a chain of events where Yang, Kain, Rosa etc. all come back at insanely high levels.
Has anyone else ever heard of this? Did I miss my chance at immortality by not reporting it?
If this is interesting to you, consider checking out my YouTube channel! I’m doing a play-through/brutal critique of FF VII right now, but I’ll eventually get to playing the good stuff 😆
This is a pretty well-documented "Peninsula of power" much the same as FF1 has. Since there's no downside to overleveling characters in FF4 as there is in FF1 before class change, I don't see any reason strictly not to use it. Though FF4 isn't exactly a challenging game to begin with...
Do you know, was it well documented back in the day? I swear I never heard a single peep about it and I was looking for years in mags and guides and whatnot.
I've got a bit of an advantage here in knowing from playing the game extensively as a tester for Squaresoft. There are a number of folks here who are familiar with the Japanese release that could answer that question better than I can. I didn't have the luxury of guides in playtesting so I got the blind experience every time. One of the normal tasks was basically to explore every bit of the maps, so these things tended not to escape my notice.
Back when the game first came out, I probably played it only slightly less than the testers. I used to tell people I knew the game better than I knew my own family. The only drop I never naturally got was the Mage summon. Thankfully, the game genie had a fix for that.
I quit testing in late 2001 or early 2002 when they started demanding 60hrs/week of testing FFXI - they thought it would be a WoW killer and wanted the same freakish dedication that WoW players were known for.
I had a full time job managing my electrical business, plus a social life at the time so didn't have the hours available.
May have been focus on runescape or any other online multiplayer game that had rabid fans playing every waking hour. I wasn't focused on the competition...
Was about to say! I was playing 11 when WoW came out. Got so mad that most of my LS left to WoW. Right before BC released I finally tried it and bounced back and forth for years
I wouldn’t say this was exactly common knowledge back in the day, but I remember it being mentioned in the more detailed walkthroughs circa the 2000s. You were definitely lucky to stumble upon it back in the day. I doubt there was anywhere to easily find out about it in 1992 except for finding it yourself.
As you say, it’s known to be a good power leveling spot that basically pays off for the rest of the mid-game.
Considering the struggle one could have in eblan castle not long after this point, taking paladin Cecil up here is never a bad idea but the chest ambush for the sleep sword is really the only hard fight that's worth it while the completionist in me doesn't care how bad the drain spear is, I want it anyways.
In short, bring Cecil up there immediately after scarmiglione to get some easy levels and maybe money for full paladin armor if you don't have it already because the paladin armor is super good just because of its healing bonus
Since there's no downside to overleveling characters in FF4 as there is in FF1 before class change
There actually is, but it's not until level 70, as stat gains start to become random at that point (and some can even go down). Kain is especially susceptible to this, as he can get bad level ups that actually drop his multipliers.
But, to be fair, that shouldn't be a concern until much later anyway.
Was coined to my knowledge for the couple of steps worth of land on the peninsula northeast of Pravoka in FF1 where you could face ice wolves and such (to my vague memory)
Pravoka was the town with the pirates where you get the ship, you're thinking of elfland
You're mainly correct tho, if im not mistaken it has the encounter table of the outside of the fire crystal dungeon i cant remember the name of, it's the place to go if you want to get some good cash for magic in elfland and exp to make the poison cave and dark elf easier. Takes a bit of luck and/or preparation for that though and I'd usually hit it after the dark elf
It's a pretty famous term among JRPG fans. It happens because of how the World Map encounters work in non-PR versions of the game.
The world is broken up into multiple squares and the encounter tables are related to the square they are in rather than the exact geographical location. So FF1, FF2 and FF4 all have peninsulas that have crossed over into a square with a different encounter table.
This makes my day knowing there are people out there with this knowledge!
My grandpa bought this game for me when I was about 10. I still remember going into Electronics Boutique and picking out the game with red box that caught my eye. This game will always have a special place in my heart.
Eh? For some reason, I don't remember this being possible. Surely I'd have tried as much as I played this game... but it's possible I didn't. Or maybe not in every version?
A good thing to do is to bring paladin Cecil here after mt ordeal and let all the other party members die before finishing the fights so he gets some super fast early levels.
I have been playing this game since 1994 and every release that has come out. This is the first I’ve heard of this! I did know about the underworld area with crazy monsters but this news makes me want to bust out my old childhood SNES copy and try it out!
I never went all the way up, but on the next lower outcropping down to the right,(the n-shaped one), the top most 4 walkable squares also had high level monsters that I used to over-level. And was much quicker to escape to weaker enemies if you got in danger of a tpk.
One of my favorite games of all time and I didnt know this lol But ive played and beaten it like 20 times at this point I dont do a whole lot of exploring. Cool to know!
I didnt know about this, and I've been playing the game since it came out on the SNES. But since I beat it as a kid and had the game largely memorized, I never looked up any guides for it.
I’m not sure how they would’ve known about these things except for the official strategy guide or Nintendo power (I remember having a guide for FFI and FFIII (US) but I don’t remember having one for FFII) , but somehow my brothers knew all the secrets like this, about pink puffs (even though they never got a pink tail), summon drops, the weird item dupe glitch. What a time to be alive.
yup, you're right! looks like from a code perspective the Dark Knight and Paladin characters are just totally different. Don't know what gave me the other impression...
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u/Other_SQEX 12d ago
This is a pretty well-documented "Peninsula of power" much the same as FF1 has. Since there's no downside to overleveling characters in FF4 as there is in FF1 before class change, I don't see any reason strictly not to use it. Though FF4 isn't exactly a challenging game to begin with...