Final Fantasy II is a game that was first released for the Japan only Family Computer; Not even for the NES! Most fans think that it's a terrible game. They're right. However, it has some interesting things going for it, and even those questionable mechanics everyone hates have some glimmer of hope and intrigue in them.
What sucks?
Stat growth makes little to no sense. It's the first thing everyone talks about when condemning FFII, and that's character development. Players say that the best way to grow is to hit your own teammates. I never did that, so I have no idea why people say such things. Maybe in older versions of the game, that was a viable strategy, but the enemies did plenty of damage to my characters. I know modern reworkings had HP growth happen after several battles, so that hasn't been a good criticism since 2002. But what is said for other stats still rings true.
To gain strength, you need to use your attack command. That makes sense and is fine. To get more stamina, you need to take damage. That makes sense and is fine. But for every other statistic, it's cumbersome. The above examples are common actions that feel to naturally grow over time. However, spirit, intelligence, and magic can get tedious. You have to use white and black magic, respectively, to increase those stats, but you use them so infrequently that they never feel a worthwhile time investment. You'd have to spend hours upon hours, doing nothing but grinding, to get those to a high level. Without equipment, Maria and Firion's magic stats were in the upper 30s. Their strength was pushing sixty! And to hurt that even more, each magic spell has its own level, which needs to be used far too many times to be of value. Say you're up against a boss weak to fire. You'd need to spend even more hours upon hours to level up your fire spell to make it even remotely close to doing any good damage. In Souls of Rebirth mode, Minwu had max spirit and magic. He also had a level eleven (out of sixteen) cure. His best use of the spell did 1200. It's better than a high potion, 100 percent, but it feels a bit low for such a time sink. His Ultima did over 4000, so I'm confused about how all magics work. And that is the stuff you have control over. I have no idea how you raise evasion or agility. They say shields do it, but I've seen them increase without it. Not only that, but what does the percentage next to it mean? At one point, Firion had one magic evasion point. The percentage was 50%. Guy had a one as well but with a 0%... Armor seems to have an effect, but at no point is there any indication of how. This may have worked in 1989, but it doesn't now in 2002, 2006, or 2021.
Magic, in general, seems weak. I have examples above, but even enemy spells are worthless. At no point in the game was I struck for more than 500 damage. The one exception is the SoR final boss. Our magic never grew much either, so I never felt like I had to use it except for a few mobs with high physical defense. But even then, it was marginal. A level nine Ultima should do more than 400 damage. I looked into it, and it appears that Ultima's damage is based on the user's total levels from all their weapons and magic. So to get any use out of the spell, you'd need to be trying to master everything. That's called tedious. If I play again, I'll just use Flare. You get it in the same dungeon, after all. I have no idea how levels work for status effects, good or bad. Rising the levels seems to aid its accuracy, but what about its effectiveness? But because they're so situational, once again, you'd need to grind for hours upon hours to see a noticeable benefit, at least from debuffs. Protect and whatnot seemed to land well enough at around level three or four. Despite how good it is, I wasn't gonna raise curse any higher than I did. At level three, it didn't proc once.
The main characters are bland. Firion is just a dude, Maria is a prototypical girl, and Guy speaks beaver. They somehow know each other and have been friends for a long time. Other than Maria being Leon's brother, we don't know anything specific about them. How did they meet? When did they become friends? Go into detail about Guy learning beaver! By, god, man, how do you not expand upon that! Because of their one dimensional personalities, a lot of things don't make sense. How does Guy speak beaver? Is there a reason Leon didn't try to get back with his friends? It's weird that people like Cid have more backstory than our main cast, and I kinda hate it.
Why do so many dungeons have trap rooms? The encounter rate is high enough as is, especially with the ambush frequency, so why add rooms with a 75 percent chance of being attacked with every step to your game? It slows down the game and makes it boring.
Which is already a big enough problem. Because of the encounter rate, low MP pools, and weapon experience values. Your best bet in the game is to attack as often as possible. This leads to you just spamming the attack command because there's nothing else. You're out of MP, and Final Fantasy hasn't added job commands yet. There's no stealing, jumping, aim, x-attack, etc., so what else can you do? Running away rarely worked. I held down the fast forward button on my controller for nearly every battle, including bosses. Otherwise, I wasn't going to trudge through all of this.
Many scenes can be anticlimactic. Minwu's sacrifice for a spell that does 50 damage to a random grunt is the most obvious. Our man died for no reason. Leila being a-okay after the Leviathan annoyed me, as did the fallout with Josef and Nelly. Josef didn't need to die if Gordon had bothered to tell us where he's going. Ricard is the only person who actually got a deserving scene, but, of course, that was offscreen. We weren't there, and the game is pretty on point with not showing us what the main characters don't know, so that's fine, at least. Not having an omnipotent narrator is a design choice, and there's nothing wrong with that. Also, we should have spent more time with Scott before he kicked the bucket. It fell flat because we had no idea who this dude was.
The Emperor is just a dude. He has no backstory, explanation, or value to the plot other than he's evil. He's a villain for the sake of being a villain. He doesn't even get a name!
The Soul of Rebirth content is not worth it. It's three hours of agitation to bring a slight bit of closure to our fallen comrades. Had anyone, at some point, said something to the effect that "the Emperor split into two, and we need to defeat both sides to truly kill him," maybe it would have worked. Instead, our living allies, somehow, inform our dead friends of what's going on. It just raises more questions than it answers.
Those are some glaring problems, and I understand why FFII has the lowest Metacritic score of the franchise by about twenty points. However, in this pile of rubble are a few great things.
The music, obviously, is top notch. The world map gives me the wanderlust I crave, but it also tells me that something in this world is wrong. Final Fantasy III's Eternal Wind is happy and upbeat in a world that's dead, but Final Fantasy II doesn't shy away from the horror of what's going on. It's as perfect as anything in the series. The town theme is relaxing, which usually works. I'd argue Bafsk should have gotten a different tune, but it's 1989, so what can ya do? Meanwhile, the Dungeon theme song is foreboding and spooky. It works everywhere.
The battle mechanics are sketchy, but it leads to something that could work. I've never heard anything negative spoken about the SaGa games' system, and it's similar. I also haven't dabbled much with them, so I don't know specifics. I know the games are beloved by those who've played them, so it makes me wonder if Square figured out what went wrong and fixed them for future attempts. I've always thought the idea of building characters like that could be fun. Why wouldn't Vivi get buff swinging his mace over and over? It works for Skyrim, after all. The framework was built here in 1989. It didn't have to be perfect in its first test run. It could be argued that you should have ran it out on a less prominent game first, but maybe Final Fantasy wasn't as cutting edge as we think it was back then. Either way, everyone's learned from it and moved on. We're all better for it!
I really like the side characters: From Minwu to Ricard and Scott to Cid. Throw in a Hilda for good measure, and the game is filled with a deep cast of heros. All of whom have more lore to them than Firion and co. In my "Best Character" series I've been running, the main cast got a combined score of six. Minwu and his ilk also got six, but the NPCs got a seven. Maria is the highest with seven points, but Hilda, Cid, Paul, Scott, Josef, and Ricard are equal or better than her. If Leila weren't so low, I wonder how the numbers would work? I also wonder how the numbers would look if Leon did something... Either way, they're all excitable characters who exhibit a lot of personality and growth, unlike our four main heros.
The world changes. Various towns we've frequented get wiped off the map at one point, and the random encounters change. This is explained and gives Mateus a point in his favor for once. A few NPCs we know die, and it gives weight to the game. It's something that becomes infrequent in later installments. The world alterations especially. FFVI and IX are the only games that the world map really changes because of the villain's actions. I think we do it in FFV? The battles never change regardless. It's fun to see in such an early game, and I'm sure it would have come as a shock to a young me, unprepared for something. I can see myself being upset that Cid's gone; Confused and unsure of where to go.
I liked the keyword system. It can add a bit of depth here and there and doesn't really hurt anything. It could have been used to a much greater effect, but it's perfectly fine here. At the very least, it gives the player some more feeling like they're in charge, even if it's small. It is we who has to select an item/word, and it's not done automatically for us.
FFII has the largest options for character builds than others in the franchise. Because no one character is locked into one weapon, armor, or magic type (ignoring ultimate weapons), you can build them however you want to. Speedy duel wielding axeman? Go for it. Arcane archer sounds fun, yeah? Why didn't I make a time mage dragoon!??! Because it is convoluted and poorly explained, there's no shame in throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what works. Explore, destroy, and break the game as your leisure. There's plenty of challenge run potential if you're even slightly interested.
Final Fantasy II is as flawed as any game can be from a gameplay perspective. It hasn't aged well at all, and I understand the hate it gets. I'm not even going to say it's undeserving. Mostly because I didn't like it that much. Without the PPSSPP frame skipping, I'd have dropped this fifteen hours ago. But, there is some fun to be seen here. It's filled with interesting concepts that didn't work now but have worked elsewhere. I would love to play a re-imagining of the game that fills out the stat confusion, streamlines the magic experience, and adds depth to the combat. Throw in some new story bits about the side characters I've come to love and make our main cast feel like people instead of cardboard cutouts. It could change the perception of Final Fantasy II drastically. It's an experiment, and this is the time capsule I chose to do. Was it worth it? ... ... ...sure. I didn't cheat this time!
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