CONTENT

Obtaining the Adamant Armor

How to get the best armor in the game.

The Adamant Armor is one of those legendary items in Final Fantasy history that almost everyone has heard about. Mostly because it is exceptionally difficult to obtain in the old SNES Final Fantasy II game. It is also infamous because it is probably one of the best body armors in any of the Final Fantasy games. It provides protection from numerous status and elemental attacks, as well it has an extremely high physical defense value. Making obtaining it a worthwhile endeavor in any version of the game, except well, Final Fantasy II SNES (as you'll see why later).

GAME VERSION COMPATIBILITY:

Exists in All Versions

INSTRUCTIONS:

Getting the adamant armor, as you might expect, is similar to forging Excalibur. Both deal with the adamant ore. If you don't know about forging Excalibur or the tail collector in Adamant Grotto please read Forging Excalibur.

Once again you're going on a quest for a tail to give to the tail collector. This time though you need something far rarer for the likewise rare gift you will in turn receive. This item will be the Pink Tail, the tail of the "Pink Puffs" or "Flan Princesses" which are beasts that live no less than on the moon. Actually they inhabit only one room in the final dungeon, the Lunar Subterrane.

I can tell you exactly which room the Flan Princesses are in, because as I said it is the only place where you can fight them. It is...(need to look this up, and provide a screenshot)...one level up from where the last chance save is (before the crystalline area preceding Zemus). In the column to the right where there is a small room with a single treasure chest.

However there is a catch; fighting them is extremely rare. I used to have notes from a ROM hacker who deciphered the math involved in the random encounter for the Flan Princesses in the afforementioned room (in the SFC / SNES versions anyway). I don't recall the exact values, however randomly encountering Flan Princesses is very rare, something on the order of 1 in 64 random encounters. Then to obtain a Pink Tail the Flan Princesses have to drop the tail, it cannot be stolen from them. Therefore you'd have to encounter them, defeat them, and then be lucky enough for them to drop the tail. This is almost worse.

In Final Fantasy IV each monster has one or two items that can be dropped or stolen, and then a few rarer items that will only be randomly dropped. The Pink Tail is the rarest drop the Flan Princesses will make (the more common is Elixir). I think this number was on the order of 1 in 16 battles may result in a drop of a Pink Tail.

If my memory is correct and those odds are correct, the numbers are scary. For every 64 battles you fight in that room, only one should be the Flan Princesses. For every 16 times you encounter them, they should drop a Pink Tail only once. Let's say it takes two minutes to stroll around, have a random encounter (that isn't the flan princesses) and retreat. You should then randomly encounter one Flan Princess battle every 128 minutes (that's a little over two hours). To make sure you get at least one Pink Tail, and let's say you're unlucky and it takes 16 tries, it will take you 128 minutes times 16, which is 2048 minutes, or about 34 hours to get a Pink Tail, at least statistically. At the point in the game where you can even begin to fight Flan Princesses you may have already clocked that much time (more or less) in the game on the whole!!

On top of all this, the Flan Princess battle is very strange. First when you go into battle, there will always be about five flan princesses. Unlike regular Flan they are generally susceptible to physical attack. As the battle progresses the typical battle music will change to the Chocobo Theme. Then things get strange. Slowly your party members will go berserk, that is they will just randomly fight the Flan Princesses without your input. They won't be cast berserk, they'll just "become" berserk. It's random every time as well, who goes berserk and when. This isn't terrible but it's not that good. Obviously you can't heal your party if you can't control most of them, especially Rosa or Cecil with their white magic. Also you can't unleash your strongest attacks, like Rydia's black spells or summons if she's berserk, which you need because the Flan Princesses are rather strong and have high HP. Therefore you party needs to be very strong in order to survive the battle.

Obviously these compounded odds make obtaining a Pink Tail nearly impossible. Indeed facing these odds is the ONLY way you can obtain a Pink Tail in Final Fantasy II SNES, which is why I don't recommend attempting it. In fact, I tested the odds one time using Final Fantasy II SNES on an emulator. I ramped up the frame rate in ZSNES to 9x (makes the game run super fast) and scurried about in the Flan Princess room. I think in a real time hour or so I may have fought one maybe two flan princess battles (running from the others). This was like 2 or 3 hours of un-accelerated game time (the game clock of course also ticks away faster so you can see the real elapsed time). Not a very pretty scenario.

Fortunately in every other port / version of Final Fantasy IV there is nice trick to whittling the odds down to a manageable level. This trick involves the Alarm item (sometimes also called Alert or Siren). The Alarm item, when used as an item from the menu, either on the world map or in a dungeon, initiated a siren-sound and you immediately entered a "random" battle with a local monster. However the important note here is that the random monster that attacks you is the rarest encounter for whatever area you are standing in is. Therefore if you use this item in the room where the Flan Princesses are, you will always initiate a battle with the Flan Princesses!

Now, there aren't many instances of the Alert item to be had. Indeed I think in the whole game there may be one or two in treasure chests. Though some monsters do drop them, or they can be stolen. The best strategy is to save at the last chance save in the Lunar Subterrane, return to the Flan Princess room and initiate a fight. If you win and they don't drop the Pink Tail, reset the game and try again until you get a pink tail. Essentially make it work out that you trade one Alert for one Pink Tail.

The reason you can't use this technique in Final Fantasy II SNES is because the Alert item was dummied out of the game. I therefore recommend using the Gunslinger Code with a Game Genie to obtain adamant armors in that version.

Once you have a Pink Tail, take it to Adamant Grotto and give it to the tail collector and he will give you the adamant armor (it's ready to use, no forging or anything).

Here's the cool part. For EVERY Pink Tail you give the collector he will give you ANOTHER adamant armor. Therefore you can have more than one, since all the characters can equip the adamant armor it's worthwhile to get multiples. Although you really only need are five, since you only have five characters ever in one party needing to use them. This is why you want to do the reset method with the Alert item (as opposed to using multiple ones up for just one armor).