Final Fantasy II
Main game
3.00 average rating based on 1069 ratings
- Developers
- Square
- Publishers
- Square, Square Enix
- Franchises
- Final Fantasy
- Series
- Final Fantasy
- Platforms
- Family Computer, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, Wii U
- Genres
- Adventure, Role-playing (RPG)
- Themes
- Fantasy, Open world, Sandbox
- Steam
- View on Steam
Release Dates
User Stats
How Long Is Final Fantasy II?
Related Content
Not as strong an entry as the first
This review is for the Family Computer version
FF2 is enjoyable, albeit a bit long-winded. It isn't a sophomore slump--there are plenty of great new ideas, and I personally truly enjoy the new leveling and classless system, as it offered more freedom to play my way. As an overall game, though, it falls a bit short of its predecessor.
A Charming Dumpster Fire of a Game I Like
This review is for the PC (Microsoft Windows) version
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.
Felt like a bit of an experiment - both good and bad (mostly good)
This review is for the iPhone version
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
Difficult to Rank
This review is for the iPhone version
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
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 …
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
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
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):
- Final Fantasy VI
- Final Fantasy VIII
- Final Fantasy
- Final Fantasy IV
- Final Fantasy VII
- Final Fantasy II
- Final Fantasy IX
- Final Fantasy X
Really Good Podcast Game
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.
Wierd but fun
What it says on the tin, it's a weird game, and kinda shallow but I enjoyed it about as much as I did the first one. It might be worth trying to play with a guide to avoid some of the early installment cheapness, but I had fun.
Welp, here I am again. Back to FF2, the one most people loathe but I found excellent, founding many FF tropes, and with a spicy plotline. I hope I enjoy it as much this time! I will be playing the original Famicom version, fan-translated. I am super excited tho! Plus just 3 games after this (including Mega Man II) to wrap up 88!
Doing a playthrough of this now, even in the PR version this game is still not it :P So much experimentation and good ideas, but all of them badly implemented, this is still the black sheep of FF games.
At least you can do the leveling exploit now in the PR to make it slightly more bearable.
I'm finding that aspects of how this game is structured would make it nearly unplayable for me without the ability to disable random encounters, namely in the back-and-forth of traveling between towns trying to find which NPC to talk to in order to advance the story, or accidentally wandering into a high level area. The leveling system is neat, but the enemy encounters are definitely feeling wonky after a certain point. Enemies are starting to dish out Stone and Confusion to my entire party frustratingly often.
But all of this is forgiven because of this game's atmosphere. The mournful tone of the music and the story... It HITS.
Very nearly locked myself by saving when I had 3 party members turned to stone and no Gold Needle or high enough level Esuna spell. Turns out it's probably a tactic at some points. Monsters targeted stoned characters and always missed, quickly growing my agility.
This is one of many quirks of the experimental leveling system.
I think there could be some comparisons with Zelda II, in that Square tried something new, it wasn't an outright failure, but it definitely wasn't the right way forward for the franchise.
My current take: The hate this entry gets is undeserved
It took me 2 hours and 36 in-game minutes, but I finally found the
The RNG in this game is insane. Sometimes you get ambushed by Coeurls and get TPK'd by death attacks before you even see your action menu, and sometimes you fight Astaroth and he doesn't use his drain attack a single time. Just wild.
Good to know this game still has enemy preemptive attacks with monsters that turn you to stone in a single hit, which is pretty much equivalent to death if your whole party ends up stoned. >.> Annihilated before I even got a turn. I think that's it for tonight with this game. Tomorrow's another day.
Edit: Turns out the game auto-saved right before I got into this battle since I had just entered a new area, so I didn't lose any progress. Another cool QoL feature, I guess. Wasn't mad about the death. It was kind of cool, given I hadn't wiped yet up until this point and I'm almost done with the game. Gonna rest and play again tomorrow. I'm really excited to start the Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster after I'm done with this.
Decided to start up Final Fantasy 2 Pixel Remaster, a game I'm not even very fond of to be honest. I just finished the FF3 Pixel Remaster still wanted more classic FF, I suppose. For some reason, I have a much greater appreciation for it this time around. The pacing is good, even though it's a little too easy for my liking, but leveling up stats and abilities is no longer a chore. You can cheese it and set up the spells you wanna level and auto-battle while AFK, but I don't recommend it. It ends up making you too strong. I actually recommend avoiding going out of your way to grind, as hard as it is to refrain from killing stuff since the pixel remasters make battling so addicting. That said, if you like grinding and don't care about giving all bosses/enemies the pushover status effect*, have at it!
I'm even liking the story this time around. Maybe it's because it's in the original Japanese script and takes itself very seriously which makes me want to, or maybe I just don't mind it as much since the improved pacing doesn't make me feel as underwhelmed by its steady trickle …
Decided to start up Final Fantasy 2 Pixel Remaster, a game I'm not even very fond of to be honest. I just finished the FF3 Pixel Remaster still wanted more classic FF, I suppose. For some reason, I have a much greater appreciation for it this time around. The pacing is good, even though it's a little too easy for my liking, but leveling up stats and abilities is no longer a chore. You can cheese it and set up the spells you wanna level and auto-battle while AFK, but I don't recommend it. It ends up making you too strong. I actually recommend avoiding going out of your way to grind, as hard as it is to refrain from killing stuff since the pixel remasters make battling so addicting. That said, if you like grinding and don't care about giving all bosses/enemies the pushover status effect*, have at it!
I'm even liking the story this time around. Maybe it's because it's in the original Japanese script and takes itself very seriously which makes me want to, or maybe I just don't mind it as much since the improved pacing doesn't make me feel as underwhelmed by its steady trickle of mostly cliche plot developments by today's standards, that occur just often enough in this version to make me want to continue forward. I don't know, but I appreciate what it does and how it contributed to later installments in retrospect, namely Final Fantasy IV. Never really saw the parallels as much as I do now. Oh, yeah. I'm playing that FFIV Pixel Remaster next. :o
*Not an actual status effect.
Also, how can you not appreciate the visual spectacle of the spells in these remasters/remakes??
This one isn't good, sadly. The level up system is completely gone and you increase your stats by...getting hurt. Many characters join your party only to quickly leave or die. The journey is largely forgettable along with the characters. Despite that, the villain and empire has quite a strong presence and it did have its moments (great soundtrack too).
Finally got around to beating this thing, along with Soul of Rebirth. I didn't mind the battle system so much, as I enjoy SaGa games but both FF1 and FF2 felt inferior to Dragon Quest/Warrior 1&2 on the Game Boy Color. It wasn't that bad but I don't see myself ever revisiting this game again.
The character development system may have been ahead of its time, but now it just feels poorly balanced. I found I was drawing out a lot of random encounters to grind out levels for all of my characters' many spells. I also think it deprives the player of the satisfying and straightforward guaranteed progression of a more typical character level system.
The plot is Star Wars. That's not strictly a bad thing; the story is solid and much more grounded and coherent than the original Final Fantasy's. It's just not very original. Characters are generally kind of forgettable, which means a lot of dramatic moments fall flat.
It has a neat conversation system where you can learn important terms and ask people about them. It's probably the closest you could get to something like Ultima IV without a keyboard. There's even a library late in the game that has tidbits about every key term.
Some fun innovations but kind of a slog overall.