Final Fantasy II (1988)

This is based on the Pixel Remaster.

This game is so strange - I can't, in good faith, recommend it, but it does so many things I like and think were implemented in later games in a much more interesting way. I rated it two stars instead of one due to its aspirations and a certain weird charm that neither of its companions on the Famicom/NES had (FFI and III shared DNA, but in many ways this game is a whole and entire experience unto itself).

I'd definitely recommend for this current release to just play the game as intended, without trying to max out stats or anything. I'd also recommend that while a walkthrough is likely unnecessary (unless you're really trying to get all those passwords), going online for maps of each dungeon would be helpful - the game makes itself "hard" by having a lot of fake out rooms (which is absolutely ridiculous).

Beat this only if you're a true fan of the series to mark it off a list; otherwise, skip this (and the first game) and move onto FFIII.

After 27hrs I'm done with FFII. I will say, I really enjoyed the experience on iOS with the pixel remaster.

Obviously this game has its faults, but as I understand, many of these have been mitigated a bit in pixel remaster (Specifically HP increases) so the grind really wasn't so bad for me until Pandemonium. Here's a non-complete list of stuff I liked and didn't like:

Good

• Story and character development - shifting characters in parties, named characters with backgrounds, etc. -Chocobos!
• Key Terms/Conversations

Bad

• Leveling was obviously a failed experiment
• too many niche spells that need to be leveled and aren't useable
• Late game spells/items that need to get leveled forcing a grind
• Characters become a bit too siloed early, leaving little variability to playstyle

This is a difficult game to rank. I played the new Pixel Remaster version, and I played it on my phone. I think playing it otherwise would have been a significantly different experience.

Look and Feel

First of all, the art syle and music are absolutely beautiful. It's so much easier to get invested in game when it just looks and sounds great. No surprise here, as I just finished playing the Final Fantasy I Pixel Remaster.

Story

So, the overarching story isn't much to write home about. BBEG wants to destroy the world, or whatever. However, how you progress through the story is what was a lot of fun for me. The party tags along with a small resistance group that gets more powerful throughout the game. Your journey finds you chasing death blimps, snowmobiling in the mountains, communing with dragons, reinstating monarchs, and diving into the literal depths of hell. That's pretty cool!

The time between these set pieces can be a little redundant, as you're often forced to just walk back to the home base to get your next task, but it does make you feel like you're actually executing missions for the resistance. Not only do you have to go do the thing, but you have to make it back to report.

Overall, I liked the story. It was fun and it wasn't convoluted like later titles.

Levelling System

I think the biggest controversy in this game is the levelling system. Instead of the classic character levelling of the previous game (and that features in most Final Fantasy titles since), all skills are levelled by use, sort of like the skill development system in Skyrim. This makes it difficult to gauge how strong your characters are in relation to the where you are in the game, but it also makes for extremely customizable gameplay that encourages you to use various skills. For example, I rarely employ status effects in Final Fantasy games, but if you get your status magic level high enough, it can be really effective, so there's an incentive to pick your favourite magics and use the heck out of them.

The weapon levelling system is a bit convoluted, and I never bothered to learn how it worked until the post-game, but it was never really an issue for me. I never felt under-levelled, and I wasn't concerned about maxing anything out until the post-game anyway. It sort of created Mario Sunshine syndrome: it's great for a regular playthrough, but kind of bad for a 100% run. However, there are also ways to grind weapon levels pretty easily, so it's not so bad.

Equipping my characters is one of my favourite parts about RPGs, and the levelling system adds a cool element to it. Maybe you've found a really cool spear, but none of your characters have levelled up their spear skill. Do you equip it and take a temporary set back while you level up, or wait for a weapon your characters can more readily use? It just adds another layer of strategy and customizability, which I like.

Overall, I really liked this levelling system. It made me feel like each of my characters were unique to me, and at any time I felt like I could change them up if I didn't like the direction they were going. You also get a healthy dose of new characters, so there are opportunities to experiment with different playstyles. I'll get to the characters in a second.

Battles

Because of everything I talked about above, I liked the battle system overall. However, it gets super redundant. There are just so freaking many of them--the random encounter rate is super high and most of them don't really require much thought. Just attack attack attack. Luckily, the Pixel Remaster lets you auto battle based on your last inputs, so you at least don't have to select your action every time.

One of the huge problems is the status effect rate of enemy attacks. It's 100%. If there is a status effect associated with an enemy's attack, it will land on you. That's a huge problem when you, say, get ambushed by Cockatrice's, which can turn your entire party into stone before you even see your action menu. Or Coeurl's, which can literally insta-kill your entire party before you even see your action menu. Fortunately, the autosave feature in the Pixel Remaster is very forgiving, so it's rarely a huge setback when the RNG decides to murder you with no chance of defending yourself.

Characters

This is the first time we get a true cast of characters, as opposed to the set four from the original. Knowing nothing about the game going into it, this was a huge surprise to me, and it was always fun seeing how different characters got involved with the story. The character development isn't quite what you see in later titles, but it's nice to at least see some personalities and motivations.

Dungeon Crawling

Unfortunately, this is a particular weakness of the game. Visually, the Pixel Remaster does a great job of making each dungeon look different and somewhat unique. But mechanically, it's all exactly the same. Giant square rooms with mazes and a bunch of floors. Find the treasures and move on. A few dungeons had trick walls, which is kinda fun, I guess. Trick rooms, however, are a big pile of suck. Like 90% of the rooms in these dungeons have nothing in them. That's just annoying, though I get why they're there.

Overall Impression

I really liked this game. In fact, there was about a month of overlap between me playing this and playing Final Fantasy X (which I hated) (also I play games really slowly; I'm a busy guy lol). I liked playing Final Fantasy II way more than I liked playing Final Fantasy X.

Final Fantasy II is an easy 4-star game for me. Where does it land amongst the other Final Fantasies? Unfortunately, I think it's still near the bottom of the games I've played so far. While it had a lot going for it, there were also a lot of boring stretches going through the dungeons and watching my characters attack over and over again. The highs weren't as high, but the lows weren't as low. I'm going to put it an inch ahead of Final Fantasy IX, which I felt was a great game but poorly paced.

Here's my current ranking (which I'm constantly changing my mind about):

1. Final Fantasy VI
2. Final Fantasy VIII
3. Final Fantasy
4. Final Fantasy IV
5. Final Fantasy VII
6. Final Fantasy II
7. Final Fantasy IX
8. Final Fantasy X

Beat the original NES version sometime around 2009 right after beating FF1. I had Firion use swords and spears and a mix of black and white magic. He was more of a fighter than caster and was more into doing elemental damage with spells than using support magic. Maria used bows and fists and was the spell caster of the team, being both the healer, support and nuker. Guy was like a paladin using axes and maces with white magic. The 4th character slot just tagged along and was not built up.

I played the game like a normal Rpg for the beginning until I started running into enemies that were too difficult. Then I had to grind, which consisted of fighting weak enemies outside of town while the party attacks each other to near death and using the cancel method to use a weapon or spell 100 times in a single battle to get ranks up. I never had to worry about mp and all the grinding paid off by making the game reasonably easy.

This is the worst mainstream Final Fantasy and the one I would least want to play again. Even though the game has great story and characters, and standard FF set pieces and gameplay, the disaster of a leveling system seriously holds the game back. I like the concept and prefer systems like these over traditional leveling, but the implementation is terrible. Ultima Online and Daggerfall did it properly. All that would have to be done to fix the system would be to grant hp gains by comparing maxhp to the enemies being fought and give gains regardless of damage taken, and combine spells into a few schools such that using any spell in that school would improve all spells in the school. Ultimately the main problem I had with the game was the mind numbing tediousness of leveling up magic.

I'm enjoying this game. Classic Final Fantasies are good, relaxing games if you're in the mood for some braindead level-grinding.

Spent all day yesterday afternoon playing this, and then suddenly my RetroPie handheld setup lost power & rebooted itself (I assume not enough power coming from the battery). I guess I need to tweak the battery monitoring script so the low battery alert happens sooner. Anyhow, "Not a problem, I've been saving my game," I thought.

I thought wrong. Apparently RetroPie/RetroArch doesn't actually write the battery save file to the SD card until you quit the game (which never happened in my case, since the power cut out mid-game).

On the bright side, I was able to recover my 3-4hrs of progress in probably 2-3hrs last night, now that I knew what to do.

(playing the Famicon/NES version) at first I absolutely hated it, put it even below XV, but wow does it grow on you. So influential on other RPGs as it develops. And so many FF tropes

And the plotline gets ultra saucy!

Indeed, I really really like this storyline. Among the best in FF. This might be better than Legend and X hmmm

ff2 psp is a really good podcast game. What I mean by that is that it's a great game to play while listening to a podcast (duh). It requires the perfect amount of attention.

The gameplay is better than ff1 psp, music is worse. Make sure to get a version that comes with extra content (gba/psp/mobile) since, unlike ff1, the extra content is actually really good, at least the extras from gba. psp/mobile adds even more extra content on top of that that I didn't bother with, but it comes with the gba extra content, better music than gba, and better graphics than gba, so I recommend the psp version. Just don't bother with the Arcane Labyrinth.