I wasn’t always a Final Fantasy II defender, but upon revisiting the title a couple years ago for the first time since I was a young teen I was shocked by how smooth that game actually goes down. Like most games the internet latches onto as eternal targets, it’s not actually that obtuse, not actually that difficult, doesn’t actually require an outrageous amount of planning and self-flagellation to excel at. Sure you COULD min max your party by hitting your own characters for hours or whatever, but there’s no real incentive to do that, ESPECIALLY since all of the remakes of the game significantly sand down the rough edges of the NES original. When I look at Final Fantasy II on its own merits today, I see a game that tried a lot of interesting stuff and succeeded at a lot, with beautiful presentation and ambitious, successful storytelling…but I also see a game that was already constrained by the fledgling expectations imparted by its nascent brand. I’m convinced that that game is as rejected as it is in large part because it’s just, y’know, it’s not what Final Fantasy feels like, even in a day and age where what Final Fantasy feels like is entirely ephemeral, and even though it did much more to define the look and sound of the series than its predecessor by far. So what does Final Fantasy II look like if it gets to be the game that it truly wants to be? If we give battle designer Akitoshi Kawazu the keys to the kingdom and put him in the chairs of director and designer and (co-)writer, really just let this guy who is clearly ambitious and hungry and ready to do it, just go nuts?
It looks like The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makai Toushi SaGa, one of the most enchanting and definitive debuts I’ve ever played. This game, it must be said, whips ass. Everything about Final Fantasy II is here and much more intense. The famous and hated stat increase system is back, but now siloed to one of three character classes and seemingly much more random in its effectiveness and distribution. These guys, the Mutants, can only equip half as much stuff as a normal human, but the tradeoff is they can do magic and innately learn special abilities, which appear randomly after battles based on the character’s unseen level, and disappear just as randomly and just as often. It created a great push and pull where I had to make the choice between armoring up my initially quite fragile Mutant party member more or sacrificing a couple of those equipment slots to give her some equippable offensive magic, because for about the first half of the game that’s by far the most effective combat shit you have, and you never know when their flame ability might just disappear and be replaced by a counterspell, or a useless poison ability, or even an elemental weakness instead.
These choices make up all of the game, a constant push and pull of resource management that is at its most dire in the early goings when money is tightest but never completely fades away. Human characters don’t level up at all – they only increase stats by purchasing a small variety of potions from shops that will upgrade strength, agility (all weapons scale off of one or both of these stats in various ways, occasionally weirdly), or HP. They have double the equipment slots of a mutant, but they need that stuff because they never get abilities, can’t use magic, and their defense stat is entirely dependent on their gear. The third class is Monsters, who are simultaneously the simplest and most complex class to manage. They only have their innate skills to work with and can’t learn new ones or equip anything, but when you kill guys in fights, sometimes they leave behind MEAT, and if you have a monster character EAT THAT SHIT, they’ll turn into a DIFFERENT monster. The game doesn’t ever explain any of this system or how it works to you and I didn’t look up the mechanics of it, so as far as I can tell it seems to be based on your monster’s hidden level and a pokemon-esque intersection of monster types interacting with each other in various complex ways behind the scenes (there is actually a LOT of obvious pokemon DNA in this game, it’s very clearly a huge influence on those). Not knowing how this works, my monster was probably the worst guy in my party for most of the game but by the end I had lucked into some combinations that were getting him some sick forms and abilities, it’s really just fun to see what you’ll get next. I highly recommend playing a monster blind.
Compounding all of this is how much the loop of this game revolves around the grind for caaaashola. Everything has a numerical durability, everything. From your swords to your spells to your psychic powers to your monster’s tail swipes, every possible action in the game will have, at absolute most, fifty uses, and frequently as few as ten or twenty, often even lower than that. For natural abilities topping off is as simple as resting at an inn or, for monsters, devouring a fallen foe and/or transforming, but for equipment there is no recourse but to simply Buy More Shit, and, hopefully, Better Shit. Couple this with the way human characters’ developments revolve entirely around buying them increasingly expensive potions and the economy becomes a much more important part of this game than most. This does mean there’s a lot of grinding in FFL, especially in the early game, but there’s also an emphasis on precise resource management that’s not so severe in most JRPGs. It’s a vibe akin to my perennial fave Dragon Quest 1, where you really have to be certain that you’re ready to strike out again before you leave the vicinity of your current safe zone, because getting caught with your pants down far from a town is the only situation where the game will REALLY punish you. And the stakes ARE high – each character comes with only three lives, and aside from the leader of your party who you select at the very onset of the game, if they die three times they’re dead for good. You CAN buy more hearts for characters but these items are the most expensive thing you can purchase for the majority of the game, and it’s obviously better to just not put yourself in a situation where you need them. That means not only keeping on top of your resources but also your stats, as much as is possible and it’s within your control. There’s a lot to juggle in FFL, so even though the combat is pretty simple and often unchallenging, I never felt disengaged from the experience.
It helps that, although I do think that all of these systems and the ways they interconnect are a ton of fun, they are supported by an incredible world, presented beautifully. A mysterious world constructed around a gigantic tower, one that houses myriad other worlds, all menaced by the same demiurge. These civilizations are all strange and beautiful, as notable for their mundanity as they are for their weirdness. This is a world of species parity, where cannibal monsters share towns with human characters, feeding you the same canned NPC dialogue. An early quest has you hooking a small-time king up with a slime villager (who reciprocates his feelings but is being threatened by a local bandit leader, who maybe you kill with your GUN that it's not unsusual for you to have in your medieval fantasy town) and later you find that they’re happily married and expecting a kid. This is just part of the fabric of life here, entirely unremarkable, and when you later find a plane within the tower where a race of gargoyle men has enslaved everyone else it’s bizarre and terrible and everyone is really fucked up about it.
And they ARE fucked up about it! Something that separates this game from many others on its platform and even in its time generally is how talkative your party is. Not just your main guy but everyone in the party has spoken dialogue in story scenes. The simple decision to just flag different characters to speak the dialogue rather than just one general voice or your lead person lends them a lot of character. There’s an implication that Party Member 3 is the subject of one of the three kingdoms in the starting world the tower springs from based on their familiarity in dialogue with the king there. Party Member 2 is noticeably more downtrodden and pessimistic than the others but no to a degree that they will dissent to action, just enough to vocally not want to give a shit about the philosophical underpinnings that begin to become obviously important to the quest the longer it goes. ALL of your guys have a fierce sense of justice but in a funny hotheaded way. In more than one encounter they cold-bloodedly execute defeated villains who are begging for their lives, or start bar fights for no reason, because he man, you shouldn’t have been a shitty bad guy if you didn’t want to get beheaded by us, or you shouldn’t have acted like a tough shit if you didn’t want to start shit. It’s funny and charming and just MORE character than I was expecting from such an early Gameboy game, something that’s been true of practically every element of it, from the depth of the mechanics to the verve of the characters to the color of the world itself.
The tower itself is eldritch in the true sense of the word: uncanny, impossible, vaguely sinister, and moreso these things the higher you climb. The worlds contained within become stranger and more foreign with every step, from sunlit islands hiding undersea kingdoms to a world in the clouds terrorized by a sky-demon and his gang in their flying castle to literally just post-apocalyptic Tokyo with all of the strange implications that implies. This nuclear wasteland and its inescapable, invincible, wrathful fire demon that stalks you across the world map until you can gather the tools and sacrifice the friends necessary to neutralize its defenses is not the ultimate revelation of the game, only one more step up the staircase. Each of these main scenarios is unique with a thoughtfully constructed narrative device and a creative main quest objective that goes beyond just following a the right pathways until you reach the boss and being strong enough to kill it. That Tokyo section even ends with what I can only describe as a Gameboy-tier setpiece climax on a bullet train, it fucking rules! There is SO much ambition packed into these ten hours.
Even the standard Kawazu shit that people hate works here, imo. Stuff like the healing pools you come to rely on in between towns in the transitional floors in the tower being frequently fake as you get higher, or hitting a room where all of the floor tiles have been replaced with stair tiles and not knowing which of them will actually end up being stairs lends itself to the uncanny wrongness of the location. The classic Wizardry-ass, AD&D-esque traps and puzzles do a good job of adding color to the world but they don’t meaningfully harm you if you’re adequately prepared for exploration; they’re more like fun pranks between you and the designer than cruel gotchas. It’s all tuned very well imo, and I feel like I can say this with some authority because I DID beat this game in under ten hours without a manual or looking anything up on the internet. It’s just not that demanding if you’re willing to meet it halfway.
That’s all you really need to do with Kawazu, is something I’m learning. This game has a lot to it, and it IS, on purpose, more challenging to get a handle on than most of its contemporaries. But it balances that high barrier to entry with a deep and varied playground, and it balances the complexity of the mechanics with combat encounters that don’t really pick up in difficulty until well into the back half of the game, even as it’s fairly hard to get to far ahead of power curve. If you can stick it out there’s a truly magical world waiting for you here. I didn’t even mention the music holy shit! One of Uematsu’s early greats. Guy was knocking it out of the park for this weird little Gameboy game. That’s how much I loved this, I FORGOT about the absolutely SLAM DUNK-ASS music. This game rips ass, WHAT an opening statement for a series. The bar is SO high.
It looks like The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makai Toushi SaGa, one of the most enchanting and definitive debuts I’ve ever played. This game, it must be said, whips ass. Everything about Final Fantasy II is here and much more intense. The famous and hated stat increase system is back, but now siloed to one of three character classes and seemingly much more random in its effectiveness and distribution. These guys, the Mutants, can only equip half as much stuff as a normal human, but the tradeoff is they can do magic and innately learn special abilities, which appear randomly after battles based on the character’s unseen level, and disappear just as randomly and just as often. It created a great push and pull where I had to make the choice between armoring up my initially quite fragile Mutant party member more or sacrificing a couple of those equipment slots to give her some equippable offensive magic, because for about the first half of the game that’s by far the most effective combat shit you have, and you never know when their flame ability might just disappear and be replaced by a counterspell, or a useless poison ability, or even an elemental weakness instead.
These choices make up all of the game, a constant push and pull of resource management that is at its most dire in the early goings when money is tightest but never completely fades away. Human characters don’t level up at all – they only increase stats by purchasing a small variety of potions from shops that will upgrade strength, agility (all weapons scale off of one or both of these stats in various ways, occasionally weirdly), or HP. They have double the equipment slots of a mutant, but they need that stuff because they never get abilities, can’t use magic, and their defense stat is entirely dependent on their gear. The third class is Monsters, who are simultaneously the simplest and most complex class to manage. They only have their innate skills to work with and can’t learn new ones or equip anything, but when you kill guys in fights, sometimes they leave behind MEAT, and if you have a monster character EAT THAT SHIT, they’ll turn into a DIFFERENT monster. The game doesn’t ever explain any of this system or how it works to you and I didn’t look up the mechanics of it, so as far as I can tell it seems to be based on your monster’s hidden level and a pokemon-esque intersection of monster types interacting with each other in various complex ways behind the scenes (there is actually a LOT of obvious pokemon DNA in this game, it’s very clearly a huge influence on those). Not knowing how this works, my monster was probably the worst guy in my party for most of the game but by the end I had lucked into some combinations that were getting him some sick forms and abilities, it’s really just fun to see what you’ll get next. I highly recommend playing a monster blind.
Compounding all of this is how much the loop of this game revolves around the grind for caaaashola. Everything has a numerical durability, everything. From your swords to your spells to your psychic powers to your monster’s tail swipes, every possible action in the game will have, at absolute most, fifty uses, and frequently as few as ten or twenty, often even lower than that. For natural abilities topping off is as simple as resting at an inn or, for monsters, devouring a fallen foe and/or transforming, but for equipment there is no recourse but to simply Buy More Shit, and, hopefully, Better Shit. Couple this with the way human characters’ developments revolve entirely around buying them increasingly expensive potions and the economy becomes a much more important part of this game than most. This does mean there’s a lot of grinding in FFL, especially in the early game, but there’s also an emphasis on precise resource management that’s not so severe in most JRPGs. It’s a vibe akin to my perennial fave Dragon Quest 1, where you really have to be certain that you’re ready to strike out again before you leave the vicinity of your current safe zone, because getting caught with your pants down far from a town is the only situation where the game will REALLY punish you. And the stakes ARE high – each character comes with only three lives, and aside from the leader of your party who you select at the very onset of the game, if they die three times they’re dead for good. You CAN buy more hearts for characters but these items are the most expensive thing you can purchase for the majority of the game, and it’s obviously better to just not put yourself in a situation where you need them. That means not only keeping on top of your resources but also your stats, as much as is possible and it’s within your control. There’s a lot to juggle in FFL, so even though the combat is pretty simple and often unchallenging, I never felt disengaged from the experience.
It helps that, although I do think that all of these systems and the ways they interconnect are a ton of fun, they are supported by an incredible world, presented beautifully. A mysterious world constructed around a gigantic tower, one that houses myriad other worlds, all menaced by the same demiurge. These civilizations are all strange and beautiful, as notable for their mundanity as they are for their weirdness. This is a world of species parity, where cannibal monsters share towns with human characters, feeding you the same canned NPC dialogue. An early quest has you hooking a small-time king up with a slime villager (who reciprocates his feelings but is being threatened by a local bandit leader, who maybe you kill with your GUN that it's not unsusual for you to have in your medieval fantasy town) and later you find that they’re happily married and expecting a kid. This is just part of the fabric of life here, entirely unremarkable, and when you later find a plane within the tower where a race of gargoyle men has enslaved everyone else it’s bizarre and terrible and everyone is really fucked up about it.
And they ARE fucked up about it! Something that separates this game from many others on its platform and even in its time generally is how talkative your party is. Not just your main guy but everyone in the party has spoken dialogue in story scenes. The simple decision to just flag different characters to speak the dialogue rather than just one general voice or your lead person lends them a lot of character. There’s an implication that Party Member 3 is the subject of one of the three kingdoms in the starting world the tower springs from based on their familiarity in dialogue with the king there. Party Member 2 is noticeably more downtrodden and pessimistic than the others but no to a degree that they will dissent to action, just enough to vocally not want to give a shit about the philosophical underpinnings that begin to become obviously important to the quest the longer it goes. ALL of your guys have a fierce sense of justice but in a funny hotheaded way. In more than one encounter they cold-bloodedly execute defeated villains who are begging for their lives, or start bar fights for no reason, because he man, you shouldn’t have been a shitty bad guy if you didn’t want to get beheaded by us, or you shouldn’t have acted like a tough shit if you didn’t want to start shit. It’s funny and charming and just MORE character than I was expecting from such an early Gameboy game, something that’s been true of practically every element of it, from the depth of the mechanics to the verve of the characters to the color of the world itself.
The tower itself is eldritch in the true sense of the word: uncanny, impossible, vaguely sinister, and moreso these things the higher you climb. The worlds contained within become stranger and more foreign with every step, from sunlit islands hiding undersea kingdoms to a world in the clouds terrorized by a sky-demon and his gang in their flying castle to literally just post-apocalyptic Tokyo with all of the strange implications that implies. This nuclear wasteland and its inescapable, invincible, wrathful fire demon that stalks you across the world map until you can gather the tools and sacrifice the friends necessary to neutralize its defenses is not the ultimate revelation of the game, only one more step up the staircase. Each of these main scenarios is unique with a thoughtfully constructed narrative device and a creative main quest objective that goes beyond just following a the right pathways until you reach the boss and being strong enough to kill it. That Tokyo section even ends with what I can only describe as a Gameboy-tier setpiece climax on a bullet train, it fucking rules! There is SO much ambition packed into these ten hours.
Even the standard Kawazu shit that people hate works here, imo. Stuff like the healing pools you come to rely on in between towns in the transitional floors in the tower being frequently fake as you get higher, or hitting a room where all of the floor tiles have been replaced with stair tiles and not knowing which of them will actually end up being stairs lends itself to the uncanny wrongness of the location. The classic Wizardry-ass, AD&D-esque traps and puzzles do a good job of adding color to the world but they don’t meaningfully harm you if you’re adequately prepared for exploration; they’re more like fun pranks between you and the designer than cruel gotchas. It’s all tuned very well imo, and I feel like I can say this with some authority because I DID beat this game in under ten hours without a manual or looking anything up on the internet. It’s just not that demanding if you’re willing to meet it halfway.
That’s all you really need to do with Kawazu, is something I’m learning. This game has a lot to it, and it IS, on purpose, more challenging to get a handle on than most of its contemporaries. But it balances that high barrier to entry with a deep and varied playground, and it balances the complexity of the mechanics with combat encounters that don’t really pick up in difficulty until well into the back half of the game, even as it’s fairly hard to get to far ahead of power curve. If you can stick it out there’s a truly magical world waiting for you here. I didn’t even mention the music holy shit! One of Uematsu’s early greats. Guy was knocking it out of the park for this weird little Gameboy game. That’s how much I loved this, I FORGOT about the absolutely SLAM DUNK-ASS music. This game rips ass, WHAT an opening statement for a series. The bar is SO high.
3 Comments
They called it Makai Toushi SaGa in America because they thought the brand association would help it sell better here
This review really sold the game for me, going on my backlog for sure!
MeowPewterMeow
2 years ago