Final Fantasy II

Originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, Final Fantasy II is the next stop on our quest to play every Final Fantasy game. FFII was a Japanese exclusive and was released just a year after the original Final Fantasy. It never made its way over to the US for its original system and took until 2003 to release in the US. Square wanted to create a game that was different enough from its predecessor but also welcoming to new players.

Prior to playing Final Fantasy 2 I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy and felt like I was ready to dive into 2 as soon as I rolled credits on the first. I tried to start this game the same way I started the original, by going in completely blind, but it was pretty hard to dodge the feedback the Final Fantasy II might be the worst Final Fantasy game of the entire series but was it really? I was determined to find out.

Side note, If you haven’t going back to read my Final Fantasy recap, I definitely think its a good starting point for this series. I’m playing most of the Final Fantasy games for the first time as a long time Kingdom Hearts fan. I have played a few FF games if you want to read the premise you can click the primer linked before this sentence.

Getting started, this game starts up with 4 named characters and no class selection from the start screen. Which is a huge departure from the nameless Warriors of Light in FFI. I’ll talk more about the characters and customization later but going from Final Fantasy I to this I was a little surprised. I know this is kind of a staple of these games moving forward but it’s nice to see the game taking risks early on. I guess that’s a running theme in FFII. The game mixes things up and takes some bold swings.

The game opens with the story of an evil empire planning expansion through the nation. A party of four children are out and get attacked by some dark knights and left for dead. Three of our four protagonists are rescued by the rebellion leading to the main party that carries us through the game. I’m going to try to leave the heavy spoilers for later in this post but I wanted to go break by break and talk about some of the things I liked and struggled with in this game.

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Mechanics

I really wanted to delay talking about this as long as I could because this feels like the part that everyone talks about with FFII. No matter which way I wrote this it just keeps coming back to this discussion so lets rip the bandaid off from the beginning. For those that don’t know and are coming into this blind FFII uses a system to determine stats and skills akin to that of something like Skyrim. The more you use something the more it levels up. This is interesting because it’s designed so that you can really play into anything you want. Early on this was a huge boost because Maria starts with a bow, a weapon I learned is relatively ineffective at doing damage, so I was able to pivot her into being a mage. For the first couple levels she was lagging a bit behind the other two characters but a couple times of having them defend and her kill enemies with spells and it felt like she was quick to catch up. The downside to this is that it’s also incredibly exploitable.

You may have heard Final Fantasy II called the game where you hit yourself. Lots of players have found that the quickest way to make your party extra bulky is by hitting yourself to take damage so that your HP skill increases. I’m not sure if the pixel remaster fixes the need for this but I can confirm that it is still a way to increase HP. That said I think I did this maybe once or twice before completely ignoring it as an option. My characters became relatively bulky pretty quick.

I do think the weapon system of this game lends itself to some creative design tho. Most weapons take up one hand slot which makes perfect sense. I think the game really wants you to use a weapon in one hand and a shield in the other. I however was determined to plow through this game so I opted for two weapons on each of my characters, one in each hand. This way I was doing two attacks with two of the same weapon and hopefully gaining more xp.

The system for leveling up feels like it should be complex. Post game I looked at a few guides to see how things level up and people have written extensive posts on how to max out your stats in this game. That said I was just fine not worrying about any of that. The game (at least the pixel remasters) throw things at you with such a high encounter rate that it I never really felt the need to grind out stats.

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Magic

While I talked weapons briefly magic deserves its own category in all of this. Magic in FFII levels like your other skills, the more you use it the more it levels up. How the game handles spell leveling is a bit strange tho. Each level of a spell raises the damage output slightly while also increasing the number of times it hits at the expensive of more MP. You also have no control over the level of the spell outside of just not leveling it up. In FFI your spell levels were tied to the level it was purchased at. If you purchased a lower level fire spell to cast it with less mana cost you could do that but here you’d have to purchase two fire spells and basically never use one unless you were desperate.

I guess I should mention that every spell you purchase/find starts at level one- including the two high powered spells the game tosses you near end game. Both of which require you to grind up their level to be even remotely useful. I ended up trying to grind up their levels up a bit but settled on letting Maria cast the spells she had already learned to get through the final push.

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Characters/Story

If you’re wanting to dodge some light spoilers feel free to skip this section entirely.

I enjoyed Firion, Maria, and Guy as characters although they were a bit one note. I think this game tries to give them personality enough to attach you to their characters but leave them vague enough so that you can fill in the blanks. I think each of them was compelling enough that I wanted to see them succeed but I also cared about completing this quest with them. That said the story itself felt very much inspired by Empire Strikes Back. I did later confirm that this is pretty much exactly the case. You can feel it inspiration.

Another area that I really struggled with this game was the fourth party member slot. FFII adds a revolving cast of characters that you meet throughout the game that come and go from your party. The problem with this is that often when they’re introduced enough to where it feels like they’re kind of locked into a class already but they’re still often way under leveled from your current party. I think this does a huge disservice to what could be an interesting cast of characters. Often times If they were the only members of my party to get knocked out I wouldn’t revive them unless I had to revive someone else. Which also led to them being even more under leveled than they were before. I think I might have cared more about this fourth party member if they were with you for more than a couple missions before the game decided that it needed to kill each of them off. I get that they were trying to go for a slightly heavier theme and they were also giving some of these side characters their hero moment but some of the deaths felt very unearned because I cared so little about the characters.

I can see the foundations that this game was laying out for future games and I think with more time in their stories I’ll probably appreciate this part of FFII a little more though.

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Keywords

Another interesting thing that FFII adds is this keyword system, by going around and talking to NPC occasionally these red words will pop up. If you have your character “learn” the keywords it will unlock extra pieces of dialog that often tell you where to go. I think this system was interesting because it allowed for you to have some choice in dialog options. What I think it struggles with is that if you don’t learn the right keywords it sometimes gets hard to figure out where to go. There were points in the game where I was missing important pieces of information because I never picked the right keyword or forgot to learn something. I still think this thing is neat enough if not just a minor annoyance.

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Pacing/The World

I know I’ve called out multiple places that I struggled with FFII but the pacing of the game overall might be the biggest area. It’s not terrible in the beginning but around 2/3rds of the way through the game tasks you with finding the ultima spell and then sends you on four separate quests that completely slow down the pace of play and are required in order to get the spell the game tells you you need to proceed. If you’ve read my thoughts on ultima above you understand why this is frustrating. Not only does it completely derail the games pacing but ultima feels completely useless when you get it. I guess this is neat in a way that ultima is the big grand spell of legend and when you acquire it it’s basically worse than anything you’ve already found. It almost feels metaphoric in some way but the game derailing its own pacing to make you get a weak spell is incredibly frustrating.

The other completely frustrating part of this is that there are multiple dungeons with multiple dead end rooms. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I would be going through a dungeon that would present me with like five doors and I would pick every wrong door before finding the right one. The problem with this is that often times opening the wrong door leads you to an empty room where you’re almost certain to get ambushed by enemies. I wouldn’t have minded this if it happened once or twice but this felt like every single dungeons gimmick. By the time I hit the end of the game I wanted nothing to do with the dungeons which is such a shame because FFII has some incredible dungeon backdrops. Castle Pandemonium at the end of the game felt exactly how I want the end of a game like this to feel but was slogged down with FFII’s awful dungeon design.

And lets not get me started on the floor is lava dungeon mechanic I complained about in FFI because that’s also back in this game too.

The other major problem with pacing comes in how enemies scale over the course of the game. Relatively early on enemies begin to do status effects as moves, some of which if applied to all of your characters at once cause insta death. The game does not shy away from enemies trying to inflict multiple status effects on your whole party. While the enemies themselves aren’t inherently difficult to beat fighting off the difficulty curve of maybe getting stunlocked out of the game is beyond frustrating. It creates a weird pace of play where you just don’t want to deal with combat.

It’s not all terrible though I guess. I liked the overworld in this game a lot and I think the travel mechanics were neat if not mostly rehashes of the first game. This game did also introduce chocobos to the mix which was a pleasant surprise.

Final Thoughts

I was talking to a friend the other night about this article and I think I finally landed on how I feel about this game. FFII isn’t really a bad game but its biggest fault is that its almost always compared to the original game. FFII released a year after the first and was desperately trying to ride the hype of the first game while standing out on its own. Because of this it tries really hard to introduce these systems that now feel like staples of gaming but in the vacuum of FFII kind of don’t work. The biggest thing that it succeeds at are the areas where its most like its predecessor which unfortunately makes it a slog to get through when you’re playing it back to back like I was. To farther drive home this point the first time Final Fantasy 2 was released in the US was bundled along side the original game, most people in the US probably also played the game the same way I did and ended up playing these two games one after another.

That’s not to say the game itself is all bad. I actually think the ability to level up every weapon on every character is pretty unique and I think with just a little more tweaking there something there that works really well. I liked that the game had a solid foundation of a story even if it didn’t really stick the landing in terms of where it wanted to go. I think Final Fantasy 2 is worth checking out if you’re interesting in playing this style of game or if you’re already curious about the game itself.

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Final Rankings:

I’ve really been thinking about how I’m going to end these articles and I think I want to start ranking the games overall. At this point it’s kind of tough with I my the context of I and II but I have to start somewhere I suppose. My current order for FF game rankings is:

• I

• II

It’s slightly anticlimactic but I do think it’s not necessarily better than the first in any groundbreaking way. I think they’re kind of interchangeable in a way. Both feel very foundational for the series as a whole and if I keep this list slightly fluid there’s a chance they could go up or down depending on how I feel later in the series. I will say if Final Fantasy II does end up as the worst game in the series the bar is still pretty high.