This review contains spoilers
By now, Final Fantasy 2 is infamous for being arguably the worst mainline entry in the series, but I was curious, is it really that bad? Yes, yes it is.
It didn't take me long to feel this way since after about 10 minutes of grinding in the overworld, I went about 6 steps south of Altair and ran into high level enemies that killed me. That's my first, of many, issues with Final Fantasy 2. If you don't go exactly where the game wants you to, you'll stumble on late-game enemies that kill you, and you won't be able to flee from them either since levelling up Agility in this game is non-sensical. I hate the levelling up system in this game (or lack thereof). The Nature vs Nurture system of Final Fantasy 2 makes sense in concept, the more you do something, the better you are at it, and this works for some stats like Strength being tied to how many times you use the Attack command or the potency of your Magic spells being determined by how often you cast them. But to use this system optimally you have to do some really non-sensical things. Firstly, to get the most HP upgrades, you're best off taking of all your armor so you take more damage. If you want to increase Agility, you need to increase Evasion, to increase Evasion, you're best off defending while the enemies absolutely wail on you. If you want to level up the Life spell so characters are revived with more than 1 HP, the best thing to do is constantly kill and revive your party members like its I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Granted, none of this is ever necessary since the game is pretty easy all things considered (to the point of being mindless), but it just goes to show how poorly implemented this system is. Also, this system just does not work for magic spells, by the time you get spells like Holy, Flare and Ultima you're never using them because they're Level 1 while your other spells like Fire are level 10 and above.
The way stats are raised isn't even my main issue with the game, it's the dungeons. It's like they're designed to be as frustrating as humanly possible. This is because these dungeons are completely loaded with dead ends, or they have a treasure chest with a Monster-in-the-box, FF2 is the first to introduce them, yey... There's also an absolutely ungodly amount of trap rooms where you're thrown into the middle of the room, and these rooms have such a sky high encounter rate that you'll often fight 2 battles in these areas. These dungeons also drag on for about 4-10 floors and it's exhausting and the constant encounters everytime you take 5 steps drove me nuts. The dungeons are designed to drag on as long as possible to drain you of your MP so when you fight the boss at the end, you're Fucked, because the bosses have an absurd amount of physical defence so magic is the only real way to damage them. FF1 dungeons were basic but you never felt like the designers were going out of their way to piss you off like they do here.
Another thing I don't get is the temporary party members that assist you throughout your adventure. Minwu and Josef are useful, but Leila, Ricard and Gordon suck, they have no magic, die in record speed and you never want to use them because having them perform actions decreases the chance of your other characters levelling up. Leon also joins way too late for him to be useful.
The reason they're temporary is because most of them die. FF2s story is surprisingly depressing and it's the high point of the game for me. Right from the start you see the Empire wreaking havoc and that continues for the entire game as NPCs you once interacted with get killed by the Dreadnought and towns get completely destroyed to the point where you can't go to them anymore. It does wonders in establishing the Empire as a threat and some moments are genuinely gut-wrenching like when you inform Nelly about Josef's death. There's too many deaths for them all to hit hard though and the characters are all very basic, but the story is a huge step up from FF1 regardless. I also like Emperor Mattheus as a villain, you feel his presence for the entire game and him going to hell and overcoming Satan is hilariously badass, he's my favourite villain out of the ones from FF1-5. The music (atleast on the PSP) is pretty solid, with highlights for me being Magician's Tower and the Rebel Army Theme.
The PSP version also does a lot of things to improve on the original FF2. Grinding spells doesn't take forever, you don't have a limited inventory, spells aren't insanely expensive and improving one stat won't lower a different one in this version.
But even with the improvements, it doesn't salvage what I think is a pretty terrible game overall. I can appreciate FF2 for introducing a lot of series staples like being the first game to have Cid, Chocobos, the Ultima Spell, Phoenix Downs, enemies like Flans, Malboros, Behemoths, Bombs etc. Most importantly though, I admire the fact it set the precedent for other games to follow by having a standalone story that doesn't tie into the previous game. But appreciating and enjoying something are two different things, and I got almost no enjoyment from playing this.
It didn't take me long to feel this way since after about 10 minutes of grinding in the overworld, I went about 6 steps south of Altair and ran into high level enemies that killed me. That's my first, of many, issues with Final Fantasy 2. If you don't go exactly where the game wants you to, you'll stumble on late-game enemies that kill you, and you won't be able to flee from them either since levelling up Agility in this game is non-sensical. I hate the levelling up system in this game (or lack thereof). The Nature vs Nurture system of Final Fantasy 2 makes sense in concept, the more you do something, the better you are at it, and this works for some stats like Strength being tied to how many times you use the Attack command or the potency of your Magic spells being determined by how often you cast them. But to use this system optimally you have to do some really non-sensical things. Firstly, to get the most HP upgrades, you're best off taking of all your armor so you take more damage. If you want to increase Agility, you need to increase Evasion, to increase Evasion, you're best off defending while the enemies absolutely wail on you. If you want to level up the Life spell so characters are revived with more than 1 HP, the best thing to do is constantly kill and revive your party members like its I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Granted, none of this is ever necessary since the game is pretty easy all things considered (to the point of being mindless), but it just goes to show how poorly implemented this system is. Also, this system just does not work for magic spells, by the time you get spells like Holy, Flare and Ultima you're never using them because they're Level 1 while your other spells like Fire are level 10 and above.
The way stats are raised isn't even my main issue with the game, it's the dungeons. It's like they're designed to be as frustrating as humanly possible. This is because these dungeons are completely loaded with dead ends, or they have a treasure chest with a Monster-in-the-box, FF2 is the first to introduce them, yey... There's also an absolutely ungodly amount of trap rooms where you're thrown into the middle of the room, and these rooms have such a sky high encounter rate that you'll often fight 2 battles in these areas. These dungeons also drag on for about 4-10 floors and it's exhausting and the constant encounters everytime you take 5 steps drove me nuts. The dungeons are designed to drag on as long as possible to drain you of your MP so when you fight the boss at the end, you're Fucked, because the bosses have an absurd amount of physical defence so magic is the only real way to damage them. FF1 dungeons were basic but you never felt like the designers were going out of their way to piss you off like they do here.
Another thing I don't get is the temporary party members that assist you throughout your adventure. Minwu and Josef are useful, but Leila, Ricard and Gordon suck, they have no magic, die in record speed and you never want to use them because having them perform actions decreases the chance of your other characters levelling up. Leon also joins way too late for him to be useful.
The reason they're temporary is because most of them die. FF2s story is surprisingly depressing and it's the high point of the game for me. Right from the start you see the Empire wreaking havoc and that continues for the entire game as NPCs you once interacted with get killed by the Dreadnought and towns get completely destroyed to the point where you can't go to them anymore. It does wonders in establishing the Empire as a threat and some moments are genuinely gut-wrenching like when you inform Nelly about Josef's death. There's too many deaths for them all to hit hard though and the characters are all very basic, but the story is a huge step up from FF1 regardless. I also like Emperor Mattheus as a villain, you feel his presence for the entire game and him going to hell and overcoming Satan is hilariously badass, he's my favourite villain out of the ones from FF1-5. The music (atleast on the PSP) is pretty solid, with highlights for me being Magician's Tower and the Rebel Army Theme.
The PSP version also does a lot of things to improve on the original FF2. Grinding spells doesn't take forever, you don't have a limited inventory, spells aren't insanely expensive and improving one stat won't lower a different one in this version.
But even with the improvements, it doesn't salvage what I think is a pretty terrible game overall. I can appreciate FF2 for introducing a lot of series staples like being the first game to have Cid, Chocobos, the Ultima Spell, Phoenix Downs, enemies like Flans, Malboros, Behemoths, Bombs etc. Most importantly though, I admire the fact it set the precedent for other games to follow by having a standalone story that doesn't tie into the previous game. But appreciating and enjoying something are two different things, and I got almost no enjoyment from playing this.