Final Fantasy II

This is a followup to my review of Final Fantasy I so if you want full context read that review. The TL;DR is i decided to play the first 1-7 in the series on the PSX.

Before i even start i had already read a little bit about this game. I checked this page too see the ratings and when i read one of the reviews here calling it the "black sheep" of the Final Fantasy series i have to say its accurate even tho ive only played the first game.

Its hard to talk about this game because many of the things i found enjoyable in FF1 were also in FF2, i had the origins port of the game afterall so graphically the games are practically the same. However there are some crucial differences between the 2. Its hard to list all of the problems with this game and the only way for you too really understand would be to play the origins port of the game like i did too understand all the problems with the second game. There are so many small problems as well as bigger problems but il list some of the things i disliked the most.

In my FF1 review i wrote that "this might be the hardest game i ever played" and now its the second hardest game. Even tho both games id say were difficult in their own sort of weird way, i think overall this was the more challenging game. Many of the annoying things with FF1 are cranked up to 10 with FF2. Bullshit encounters, RNG loot not making sense, Missing a hit, getting 1 shot, Bullshit enemy turns. But lets go more in depth

In my FF1 i also wrote that it had "the worst RNG mechanics in a game" yet here we are and FF2 wins again. Here is one of the crucial differences between the 2 games. In FF1 you have a level system in FF2 its activity-based progression, basically if you use a sword a lot you will level your sword ability, if you use magic a lot you level your intelligence, Mp and so on. Now there are some ups and downs with this idea but again overall its really sucky. When the game becomes a dice roll if you level a stat or get a certain amount of gold it just gets frustrating really quickly.

The biggest RNG blunder and i think the core problem of the game is who gets the first attack in a battle. This is from what i could tell completely random and there are 3 types of random encounters, 1 enemy attacks first, 2 enemy attacks twice and then you get a roll, 3 you strike before the enemy. And im not even going to tell you what happens most often its so obvious. The problem is when you get an encounter with 4 or more enemies that means they will get 8 turns before you can do anything. You cant cast a defence spell, you cant block any attacks, you cant counter attack nothing, there is nothing you can do those 8 turns and believe me, the amount of times i died because of it is ridiculous.

Too add onto this problem there are basically 3 types of enemies in the game. the enemies that do practically 0 damage in any encounter ever, the annoying enemies that drain 100-400 hp per attack but they dont kill you necessarily just drain your hp a bit. And lastly the 1 shot, enemies that just 1 shot you no matter what. The annoying category was probably the worst since you had enemies like howler and imps that would just cast fire and muddle respectivly making a battle last 10 years if you even survived.

One of my main gripes with the first game was that the flee mechanic wasnt consistant, so guess what in this game they just made it useless instead. I can count the amount of times i fled a battle on my 2 hands during the entire duration of the 26 hours it took me to complete the game. Small tangent here, with both FF1 and FF2 i tried to 100% the games, and whilst i basically got 100% in FF1 i only got about 80-85% of the stuff in FF2 so i think i have a fairly fleshed out picture of the game. Anyways back to the fleeing mechanic. In FF1 you could flee every other battle or so and progress further but here i was only ever successful in literally a handful of cases. My game theory is that its somehow tied to the activity-based progression system where if you flee more you get higher chances of fleeing. The next problem is for the first 8 hours of the game i didnt have to flee a single battle because all the enemies consisted of the first type of enemies, the ones that deal practically 0 damage so i never had to flee a single battle because they just didnt do any real damage. This is a massive problem late game as there are so many enemies that can 1 shot you its not even fun too play.

One of the things with both games that i didnt write about in my FF1 was that they were very very addicting. I played both games back to back in the span of about 1 and a half weeks and it took me a little over 50 hours to complete. It really started to effect my health and i was noticably getting angrier and angrier at the people around me. I played very few sessions, on average a session probably lasted more than 7 or so hours. Whilst i personally like being invested in a video game this felt a little too far and im probably going to have to slow it down for games 3-7.

The dreaded MP system, we have finally arrived at another core change that again has ups and downs but is mostly ass. In the original game you bought spells to a white or black mage (or red if you had one) and the spells had a level from 1-8. 8 were of course really op spells like fully revive a teammate or something and they were expensive. You only had 2 maybe 3 or 4 level 5 or higher spells so you really had to make them count. In this game all of that is thrown out the window becuase with the new activity-based progression you can buy any scroll in the game and give it to any character in your party. Only problem is the spells are also activity-based progression so the more you use a spell the more xp it gets and in turn level up. you cant buy a level 8 cure spell you have to grind it from level 1-8. Grinding MP xp in this game is hell itself, every use of a spell gives you 2 xp, you know how much you need to level it? 100. so thats about 50 times you have to use the spell to level it only once. And there are 16 levels total. Garbage system i hate it and i hope it goes back to the original system for FF3. the 1 upside this had was the life spell. Having 1 or even more party members dying is no problem in this game because for only 1500 gold (or gil as its called) you can buy a life spell for anyone in your party and they can instantly revive anyone at anytime outside of the towns. One change i actually liked.

The economy in the game makes no sense and gold is so useless in this game i cant even begin to comprehend it. When the game gives you a lot of freedom to customize your character they didnt give you a lot of ingame items to work with. I played with mythril axe for guy and he had those 2 axes for like 6-7 hours of the game. 1/4 he had the same weapon. You rarely switch weapons in the early game but after about 20 hours you get into the late game sections and can buy better armor and weapons. Potions and extra items just werent that expensive (apart from the elixir) and i quickly started getting thousands of gold stored up. By the end of the game i had 500k gold because i just had no idea what to do with the money. I couldnt buy more elixirs and eathers because my inventory was full, the money system was just trash.


But the biggest and maybe even greater core gameplay mechanic that they switched, maybe worse than the Rng, the mp system and gold system is the fact that you switch party members every other dungeon because in the story your friend gets taken by the emperor who is the main villain of the game and you dont get him back until 23 hours into the game. So what the game does is rotate random ass shitty characters every few hours or so that dont fit your playstyle and 15 hours in they are incredibly weak. I am DEAD SERIOUS when i write this, if i ever meet gordon in real life i will strangle him too death with my bare hands. He is the most useless teammate in video game history and he rivals the cane from dr jekell and mr hyde for most useless "tool of fighting". he starts with 64 hp at this point in the game i had about 300 on average for every party member so guess what pretty much all enemies 1 shot him. I hate this part of the game and i honestly feel they should have just let me play with my 4 characters that i myself created and not give me 5-6 random bullshit characters that are next to useless if you dont grind them for 20 hours.


Story wise the game has absolutely nothing to do with FF1 which i thought was kind of a shame since it would have been cool to have a continuing story in the games. The story itself is pretty meh, its about what youd expect from a high fantasy game like this. Its the same as in FF1 where i cant exactly criticize it too much since it was an early addition to the high fantasy jrpg genre.


One of the things i share in common with FF1 and this game is you would definitely have a better experience if you played it on an emulator so you can hard save in dungeons and speed through encounters. There is a game changing difference between the PSX and an emulated version of the game. The only people that really love or like this game are either the die hard final fantasy fan that appreciates all games and maybe even likes the original NES games or the people who emulated the game and could use rollbacks and save whenever possible.

I personally had a bit of enjoyment in the game especially the ending was really satisfactory. With my build i managed to beat the final boss in about 1 minute which felt amazing and i thought it was a rare moment where i was really happy with what i achived. Altough the game isnt perfect i enjoyed my 50 hours playing Final Fantasy Origins on the playstation. It was an authentic gaming experience one i havent felt in almost 10 years when i played TF2 for the first time. I liked this game a bit even tho the mechanics are probably the worst ever.

For FF3 im just gonna buy it on steam since there is no PSX port of the game unless you have a modded console or something.

Overall: Not the worst game ever but i swear Satan made it.

Final Fantasy II is a game that's basically gotten nothing but hate throughout its entire existence, always being seen as a bit of an outlier in the series in terms of quality and usually the first place fans of the series will point to for a game to say is just bad. Having played it now, it's a sentiment that I can somewhat see the justification for, but heavily disagree with, as I'd go as far as saying that this is just comfortably superior to the first game in a multitude of ways and one that does a lot of unique, clever stuff to a formula that was still only in its infancy, even if a lot of those ideas never really took off past this game. Everything nonetheless feels as if there were some pretty major steps forward taken when compared to how simplistic FF1 and a lot of other JRPGs from the time were, both from a mechanical and narrative standpoint, overall contributing to a deeply flawed, yet fascinating experience that I believe deserves far more credit than it tends to get.

The combat mechanics are definitely the most talked about aspect of this game, and for good reason, even if I think that they're actually a positive influence on the game's experience as a whole. Rather than your traditional systems where levelling up gives you a blanket boost to all your stats, this game instead has levels for each individual stat that only increase when things relating to said stat are used. This means that if you never use magic, it will never level up, and that if you're using it a lot, this can actually scale pretty nicely throughout. This system encourages both thinking a bit harder about team composition from the start, but also gives the player ample room early on to put together teams in a far more versatile way compared to being more heavily railroaded by choosing a specific class at the start of the game. It also naturally leads to the potential for a group of builds that are highly specialised that work off one another if you put the time into optimising and planning it all out to a much stronger degree compared to a more predefined stat growth system. With that said, it's not perfect in this regard either, as it ends up being pretty hard to properly experiment and change up your approach after a certain point just because trying to more heavily invest into things you haven't levelled up at all for the entire game just become too much of a hassle to use enough to make them feel viable. It's a strange balance that essentially simultaneously encourages a more free, creative approach, but then whisks it all away from you at around the halfway point.

I've also seen criticisms about how easily you can break the system through methods such as attacking your own team mates to level their defence and hp, but I don't see why this is considered such a problem especially since it's far from mandatory to grind for the most part, given that the game is largely either pretty easy or gives you situations where no amount of levelling would've help out. Providing such a flexible and exploitable system such as this ends up being to the game's benefit if anything, since it gives something extra for those looking to minmax their builds to absurd degrees and it's always a bit of fun to have methods of becoming an absolutely unstoppable force anyway. The main issue I really have with the system is the way that certain builds are just far, far less viable than they should be by all rights. The biggest example of this I have is that if you decide to make a dual wielding berserker character, their offhand follow up attacks are not affected at all by weapon proficiency, essentially making dual wielding an option that becomes genuinely useless in a lot of places late game, with similar things happening in other areas that lead to there being a lot less potential variety than it would first seem.

To add onto this issue, while being able to naturally improve stats and certain proficiencies throughout the game contributes to certain aspects scaling in a far more noticeable way, magic ends up being hurt in its own way. Paradoxically, this way involves fixing up a separate problem that even a lot of the best RPGs have, resource hoarding for the big moments. Because your magic will never level up unless you use it, the game essentially forces mages to be a more active role in combat where they're constantly utilising their spells, rather than keeping all the mana for the boss fights at the end of the dungeon. At first this is a clever system that rewards players for using their full capabilities throughout, but once the game starts getting more challenging and your spells continue rising in cost, it becomes a cumbersome process that's only really solved by keeping an insane amount of mp replenishing items on you, not to mention that in a lot of cases, you're still not using your most powerful strategies because you're instead just trying to level up a couple of specific skills. The end result stops being a case of feeling rewarded for properly using the capabilities of a character, and ultimately feels like using a different, counterintuitive approach to regular battles, only this time it also comes with an even stronger feeling of being railroaded if you're really looking to improve very specific attributes. Basically, on the whole the combat systems work really well and are an interesting shake up for 2 thirds of the game but end up falling rather flat in the last act or two.

Where this game ends up really excelling however, is in terms of narrative and how the player progresses through the game. It's a far more restricted sense of progression for the most part, with any access to a new form of overworld mobility coming with some sort of limitation that ends up opening the map far less than what the player first might have thought. This provides a stage to craft a far more cohesive, focused experience compared to the meandering, overwhelming nature of Final Fantasy I. There are still quite a few moments of the more cryptic nonsense you can expect from this era of the game genre but it's pretty few and far between compared to what you'd probably expect. The narrative also takes on a very different tone, putting the player in a position where they are clearly the underdogs and feel like that for most of the game. Rather than legendary heroes, your party is just a group of barely trained civilians wanting to join the rebel army who get absolutely obliterated by even the grunts of the corrupt empire that's taken a hold over the land. It's a cool premise for a fantasy game at this point to focus more heavily on what's essentially preparing for and staging a rebellion rather than just taking down an evil, magical entity, and it certainly makes the game feel more dynamic.

The body count is also unexpectedly high to the point where the imperial army truly ends up feeling like one of the single most evil entities in any game I've played recently. Cities get ravaged, towns have their entire population slaughtered, a significant number of named, important characters get killed off in the crossfire, it's just a nonstop bombardment of tragic circumstances that really drive the player to see the game through the end to get a sense of catharsis after witnessing it all. In general the characters outside of the main trio, who aren't silent but have considerably less individuality and personality than anyone else all feel thoroughly fleshed out and as if they have their place, you can definitely tell that after the success of the initial Final Fantasy basically nailed down the core gameplay, FF2 was an opportunity to experiment with and explore the writing of these games in greater detail, and I love this, since at their core, these games definitely can get pretty dry without the atmosphere and story to back it all up.

Despite finding so much of the game to have so much potential however, I'm not really a fan of how the difficulty in the last third is handled all too well, especially in the final 3 dungeons where the amount of enemies with really nasty status effects are EVERYWHERE. It never ceases to feel horrifically cheap if you get ambushed by a group of enemies with the capabilities to instakill you without a chance to do anything about it, or to just severely handicap you to the point where you'll probably end up dying regardless, and the later dungeons have these types of enemies being sent at you at ludicrous rates. The only real way to get around these situations in a lot of cases really is just having a lot of healing items and the luck to not be put into a situation that you lose because of something entirely out of your own control, and I'm just happy that I played the GBA version that allowed me to save whenever to reduce how catastrophic a single unlucky encounter could be. I still had positive feelings about the game by the end but they were ones that felt deeply strained without a doubt, especially with your permanent 4th party member being utterly useless when you first acquired them.

Overall, I think that Final Fantasy II is a bold and clever step forward in a lot of respects that just didn't quite stick the landing with all of its more transformative ideas. None of them feel especially terrible or anything, but usually feel a bit ill-conceived when applied to a longer experience and likely would have worked more cleanly in a smaller scale title. I can sympathise with a lot of the complaints that this game received, but I can't 100% agree with many of them either, as I think that this is a quirky, unique title with a very strong narrative for the era it was in. I recommend at least trying it out and having an open mind if you're ever looking into the early Final Fantasy titles, it's not perfect by any means, but it's still a cool game and an overall positive, albeit flawed experience.

Indicative of its times, Final Fantasy II was the experimental sophomore effort. Yet in spite of all the upended systems, it's actually the story that succeeds, depicting a cruel stage that enjoys ambushing its protagonists almost spontaneously, forcibly adding and removing party members at will. As usual, most other ideas don't fare as well, but are still interesting - namely the dialogue-puzzle throwback of 'keywords', and especially the use-based stat EXP system - an early demonstration of grindiness having purpose beyond levelling up or money, but remains a novel approach applied clumsily, as the overhauled RPG mechanics only amounted to more exhausting grinding. It's ultimately a mixed blessing, but with a more distinct personality and ingenuity compared to the first.

Final Fantasy II's biggest distinction from the rest of the series is its skill-based leveling system. It was innovative for sure, and it seems to have worked for Elder Scrolls years down the line, but it does not work for a turn-based NES RPG. Having a sprawling plot with characters, many character deaths, and twists aplenty was a good addition, as was the more involved conversations which let you learn keywords to ask other NPCs about. What's not good, though, is that this addition causes you to have to return to homebase in Altair over and over to relay information to Princess Hilda. This is a really annoying structure, and it's not just Altair you get dragged back to; walking there and to other places on the map over and over to ask about a new keyword gets old quick. The lack of autotarget in the NES version also gets old pretty quickly and makes leveling up your skills, and random encounters in general, an absolute chore. If not for that, I'd recommend the NES version, as the enhanced graphics of the PSP version don't really fit the primitive gameplay or lack of real character animations. But really even then, this is deserving of its reputation as the worst classic Final Fantasy game. Just start the series with FF4.

I suppose I’ll defend the indefensible. But only a little. The much-maligned Final Fantasy II was a bold experiment upon release, much like other NES sequels such as Zelda II. Final Fantasy II‘s most infamous change is the addition of its wonky leveling system, which rewards the player for performing certain actions in battle rather than simple presence. While I think this change did not work out particularly well, look at it from a historical standpoint: RPGs had not truly delved in to such a system at the time, and in hindsight making it work was probably more trouble than anticipated on the limited 8-bit console. We would see Final Fantasy III handle a similar idea more intuitively with its implementation of the Job System and skill levels associated with each job. While Squaresoft’s experiments have left us with what some consider a broken game, when played without abusing the system (difficult, admittedly), Final Fantasy II is reasonably challenging if a little annoying. Well, aside from the random double Giant formation that will murder you.

The game draws most of its aesthetic from Final Fantasy I, which has its ups and downs. Reusing sprites and tiles probably made the game quicker to produce, and it certainly breeds familiarity for the player who enjoyed the previous game, but from a modern perspective it makes the game look somewhat lazy. Uematsu’s compositions deviate quite a bit from the original, however, this time giving the game a moody and almost depressing quality. I say this as a compliment, as the music reflects Final Fantasy II‘s plot better than it deserves: this game’s not a happy go lucky adventure in the least. In fact, the story is brutal. Ever wonder why Squaresoft made so many characters cheat death in Final Fantasy IV? Well, it’s probably because they killed almost the entire cast in this game and people didn't respond to it so well. My suspicion is that Final Fantasy II failed to make the kind of bank the original game did, so the developers steered away from the darker tone. Final Fantasy III‘s child protagonists and lighter feeling make no argument to the contrary.

Personally, I don’t think the story holds up that great, but it’s to be expected. Final Fantasy II‘s villain lacks proper motivation, and given the smaller scale of conflict seen in the game, having a comprehensible villain would have made more sense. The game pulls a couple of nice plot twists and memorable scenes, but they are punctuated by long sections with little dialogue and the poor delivery expected of games in this era. Similarly, the dungeon design reeks of the developers being new to this. The game is loaded with fake walls and treasures that aren't worth it. This is partially because I believe the developers themselves did not understand the game’s mechanics in full, possibly because of a rushed schedule. In practice, balancing the battle system with the enemies the game offers (either too weak or too strong) is no easy feat.

With all of these flaws mentioned, one might think I hate Final Fantasy II like so many fans of the series. I don’t. I recognize that it’s a game made in another time, and the fact that I've enjoyed playing it twice despite all of its flaws says something. Maybe it’s just the mood of the game, particularly Uematsu’s score and the situation of the rebel base that strike a chord with me. It takes some getting used to, but making my characters follow stat paths that I've chosen is also fairly rewarding. I would definitely not recommend this game to players new to the series, but I do think Final Fantasy II is an important piece of history. What it represents more than anything else is Squaresoft’s willingness to explore new angles on their formula, even when it blows up in their faces. To this day, they've done that with every game in the series, so no matter how much I may dislike one game, there’s always hope for the next.