The game that started many of the Final Fantasy traditions. The story is dark and surprisingly ambitious for its time but still feels dated compared to other games in the franchise due to the limitations of the NES version. It has an interesting but flawed leveling system that isn't too much of an issue here because the difficulty is less brutal than the original. Just like the previous game the sprite work and new OST arrangements are incredible.
Puuuh this was rough...
Final Fantasy II is a troubled game with a lot of potential buried under a mountain of problems. They tried a lot with FF2 but sadly most of it didn't work.
The levelling system is creative and I can see the vision of characters that can be grown however the player likes and grow as you use them in the direction you use them, but in practice it just encourages poor behaviour and playing like a maniac. Even the "fixes" offered by future releases like Pixel Remaster basically amount to the game cheating your skills, health and attributes up more quickly, freely and frequently to lessen the need to stand punching yourself in the face like a lunatic for hours on end.
The dungeon design too is a competitor for the worst in the entire Final Fantasy franchise, unrewarding mazes full of monster-closets that punish instead of rewarding you for looking around and taking the time to try to find all the loot and secrets the game has to offer. Once again the only fix PR could manage was to tone down the absurd encounter rates.
But despite all this there's still something in the game worth saving in it's story and general 'vibe'. While the story itself is simplistic and repetitive, and the characters too underdeveloped to form attachments all that strong with, the tone of Final Fantasy II is nonetheless incredible with a fantastic soundtrack even by the series standard and a somber mood throughout. Do you know any of the characters long enough or well enough to shed a tear when half the cast bites it? No, but the fact the game is brave enough to repeatedly kill party members and have them stay dead is something in itself, even if the repetition makes it lose weight it still has feeling behind it when people stay dead unlike something like Final Fantasy IV where the characters keep showing up alive again later on.
There's a feeling throughout FFPR that of the 8-bit and 16-bit FF games, there's more like three attempts each at two games between the odd class-based and even evil-empire-story-focused entries in the 2D series, but while Final Fantasy IV and VI are both better story-tellers and better games that Final Fantasy II I think FF2 nailed the mood the first time around in a way only the latter half of FF6 competes with.
Final Fantasy II is a lot of good ideas and things to love left underdeveloped in a generally pretty poor game. I can imagine a world where FF2 got the modern Squenix re-imagining treatment like FF7PR or Strange of Paradise and turning out something incredible, but I'm not entirely sure that the original is actually worth playing today.
The levelling system is creative and I can see the vision of characters that can be grown however the player likes and grow as you use them in the direction you use them, but in practice it just encourages poor behaviour and playing like a maniac. Even the "fixes" offered by future releases like Pixel Remaster basically amount to the game cheating your skills, health and attributes up more quickly, freely and frequently to lessen the need to stand punching yourself in the face like a lunatic for hours on end.
The dungeon design too is a competitor for the worst in the entire Final Fantasy franchise, unrewarding mazes full of monster-closets that punish instead of rewarding you for looking around and taking the time to try to find all the loot and secrets the game has to offer. Once again the only fix PR could manage was to tone down the absurd encounter rates.
But despite all this there's still something in the game worth saving in it's story and general 'vibe'. While the story itself is simplistic and repetitive, and the characters too underdeveloped to form attachments all that strong with, the tone of Final Fantasy II is nonetheless incredible with a fantastic soundtrack even by the series standard and a somber mood throughout. Do you know any of the characters long enough or well enough to shed a tear when half the cast bites it? No, but the fact the game is brave enough to repeatedly kill party members and have them stay dead is something in itself, even if the repetition makes it lose weight it still has feeling behind it when people stay dead unlike something like Final Fantasy IV where the characters keep showing up alive again later on.
There's a feeling throughout FFPR that of the 8-bit and 16-bit FF games, there's more like three attempts each at two games between the odd class-based and even evil-empire-story-focused entries in the 2D series, but while Final Fantasy IV and VI are both better story-tellers and better games that Final Fantasy II I think FF2 nailed the mood the first time around in a way only the latter half of FF6 competes with.
Final Fantasy II is a lot of good ideas and things to love left underdeveloped in a generally pretty poor game. I can imagine a world where FF2 got the modern Squenix re-imagining treatment like FF7PR or Strange of Paradise and turning out something incredible, but I'm not entirely sure that the original is actually worth playing today.