What a miserable grind of a game. First off, I'll say that nearly every aspect of the story and characters are an upgrade from 1. There's actually something beyond finding the item a town needs and defeating the monster in order to save the kingdom.
In 2, that's still the basic idea behind your journey, but there's so much more to each character and the drama is increased by actual conflicts and struggles. There's a rebellion, tragedy, betrayal and several areas that surprised me because they exceeded the generic fantasy setting and plot of the previous game. I didn't expect the story from a game that released in 1988 to hold my attention so well. The tale of the dragoons, wyverns, and their last remaining survivors was particularly good.
What's not an improvement is the battles and leveling system. I know that games should try to improve and innovate after first otherwise you risk running something out that is stagnant or feels too similar, but what Final Fantasy 2 shows is how you can completely botch fundamental mechanics.
Without getting too deep, characters level up skill use with weapon types, instead of individual skills like "strength, magic, etc". These are actually still in the game, but are largely inconsequential compared to how important it is to level up your skill use with whatever weapon type you're using, "sword, axe, staff etc".
The problem is that these are use-based, meaning you need to get successful hits on enemies in order to level them up, and since there are few enemies in the game that take very many hits, you end up barely being able level up your weapon use without hitting YOUR OWN team members, which is the best way to grind for higher stats.
This is absolutely dreadful because there are so many difficulty spikes and enemies that will wreck your party out of nowhere that you never get a good understanding on if you need to grind, or if you just got unlucky. Many times I found I just needed to retry a boss or enemy in a chest and their random attacks lined up in such a way that I was able to win.
This isn't even mentioning how spells don't operate in the same way physical weapons do either. You get spell books that you teach your characters and instead of their own individual stats creating a powerful spell, the spell ITSELF is what levels up, which means if you're say...at the end of the fucking game and get a really good spell, it's level 1, and likely needs to be grinded a few levels to be viable, which is a real pace killer and a great way to dash any enthusiasm about a fancy new spell.
You acquired Ultima? the best spell in the game? It barely does 100 damage to normal mobs. You might as well use the level 14 fire spell you've had since the beginning.
This game is such a whiplash of crushing battles and trivial bosses that it throws the entire game balance off. I'd also like to say I couldn't imagine playing through this without the pixel remaster's ability to turn off random encounters. The final level Pandaemonium is a very cool area art-wise, but suffers from completely dull dungeon design, which is the same for basically all of the dungeons in this game. For whatever reason they decided that a million rooms with nothing in them and dead ends with no rhyme or reason, was fine. You never think when going through floors, you just walk until the end.
With a staggeringly easy final boss thanks to the blood sword I can say with confidence that around 90% of the spells, items, weapons and armor are basically useless. It's so easy that I actually wouldn't recommend using the blood sword if you want a challenge or rewarding experience because it feels like cheating when you kill the final boss in 4 turns.
But that's what I would recommend if I knew for a fact you would be as sick of grinding by the end of this game as I was. You could go back to the real game of final fantasy 2, which is the endless monotony of hitting your own party members and healing for hours on end in an exercise of tedium even for jrpgs, or you can haste, berserk, and blood sword your way to Final Fantasy 3.
In 2, that's still the basic idea behind your journey, but there's so much more to each character and the drama is increased by actual conflicts and struggles. There's a rebellion, tragedy, betrayal and several areas that surprised me because they exceeded the generic fantasy setting and plot of the previous game. I didn't expect the story from a game that released in 1988 to hold my attention so well. The tale of the dragoons, wyverns, and their last remaining survivors was particularly good.
What's not an improvement is the battles and leveling system. I know that games should try to improve and innovate after first otherwise you risk running something out that is stagnant or feels too similar, but what Final Fantasy 2 shows is how you can completely botch fundamental mechanics.
Without getting too deep, characters level up skill use with weapon types, instead of individual skills like "strength, magic, etc". These are actually still in the game, but are largely inconsequential compared to how important it is to level up your skill use with whatever weapon type you're using, "sword, axe, staff etc".
The problem is that these are use-based, meaning you need to get successful hits on enemies in order to level them up, and since there are few enemies in the game that take very many hits, you end up barely being able level up your weapon use without hitting YOUR OWN team members, which is the best way to grind for higher stats.
This is absolutely dreadful because there are so many difficulty spikes and enemies that will wreck your party out of nowhere that you never get a good understanding on if you need to grind, or if you just got unlucky. Many times I found I just needed to retry a boss or enemy in a chest and their random attacks lined up in such a way that I was able to win.
This isn't even mentioning how spells don't operate in the same way physical weapons do either. You get spell books that you teach your characters and instead of their own individual stats creating a powerful spell, the spell ITSELF is what levels up, which means if you're say...at the end of the fucking game and get a really good spell, it's level 1, and likely needs to be grinded a few levels to be viable, which is a real pace killer and a great way to dash any enthusiasm about a fancy new spell.
You acquired Ultima? the best spell in the game? It barely does 100 damage to normal mobs. You might as well use the level 14 fire spell you've had since the beginning.
This game is such a whiplash of crushing battles and trivial bosses that it throws the entire game balance off. I'd also like to say I couldn't imagine playing through this without the pixel remaster's ability to turn off random encounters. The final level Pandaemonium is a very cool area art-wise, but suffers from completely dull dungeon design, which is the same for basically all of the dungeons in this game. For whatever reason they decided that a million rooms with nothing in them and dead ends with no rhyme or reason, was fine. You never think when going through floors, you just walk until the end.
With a staggeringly easy final boss thanks to the blood sword I can say with confidence that around 90% of the spells, items, weapons and armor are basically useless. It's so easy that I actually wouldn't recommend using the blood sword if you want a challenge or rewarding experience because it feels like cheating when you kill the final boss in 4 turns.
But that's what I would recommend if I knew for a fact you would be as sick of grinding by the end of this game as I was. You could go back to the real game of final fantasy 2, which is the endless monotony of hitting your own party members and healing for hours on end in an exercise of tedium even for jrpgs, or you can haste, berserk, and blood sword your way to Final Fantasy 3.