Final Fantasy II

So now Square had an issue- Final Fantasy had become the runaway hit nobody expected, and with the company back on its feet, they could begin developing games again.

“Hey!” Hironobu Sakaguchi (probably) exclaimed to his head designer, Akitoshi Kawazu one morning. “Final Fantasy was a hit! You know what that means? We need to make a sequel! Just think of it! We’ll make a bigger world, with more characters, more spells, more enemies! Those fuckers over at Enix won’t know what hit them! Ha-ha! Final Fantasy II will be the greatest RPG of our time! Tell your team and get to work! Don’t let me down!”

It seemed like it would work too. Except this particular morning, Kawazu had been hitting the bong pretty hard.

“Hey!” Kawazu (definitely) said to the FF2 team that same morning. “Alright guys, we’ve got to make Final Fantasy II. So here’s my plan- you know all that stuff people liked about the first Final Fantasy…?”

“Scrap it. We’re gonna change everything.“

And it just got worse from there.

As you can no doubt tell, that was definitely a real conversation that actually happened at the Square offices back in 1988. The specifics may have been lost in translation and the mists of time, but one thing remains true- they changed almost all of the key mechanics of the first game- and not for the better. More on that later.

So let’s get this straight. I don’t like this game, and I never have. Many years ago I completed the original NES version of Final Fantasy II (because… y’know. I’m a masochist) and vowed to never touch it again. So this time, like Final Fantasy I, I played through the PSP remake of Final Fantasy II to ease the pain.

It didn’t help that much.

Side note: I’ll also point out that the screenshot function of my PSP (which isn’t a very… er, legal function anyway) decided to stop working after playing this for about an hour- so many screenshots here are gonna be taken from Gamespot or whatever. I haven’t been able to get it working again, which means my playthrough of Final Fantasy III I just completed has no screenshots either. Bah. I’ll get it working as soon as I can.

Final Fantasy II tells the story of a group of youngsters whose home has been invaded by an ‘evil’ empire. Our heroes manage to escape their home town as it’s being raided, but their parents aren’t so lucky. The youngsters join up with a group of rebels and take part in a scheme to overthrow Emperor Palamecia and restore peace to the world.

So with that out of the way, all that’s left to do is take a look at the game, and what makes it such a wreck. Since Final Fantasy II was the first game in the series to have established characters as the player party, we’ll start there.

The Characters

Firion

Firion is the main character, and the hero of Final Fantasy II. There’s really not all that much to say about him either- he’s your typical RPG hero-type. After losing his adoptive parents when the Empire takes over his home town of Fynn, Firion manages to escape and joins the rebels- a group plotting to exact vengeance upon the Empire. See also: Luke Skywalker.

Guy

Guy is Firions best friend, and a borderline simpleton. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does have something to say, he seems pretty thick. I think he’s actually retarded. I don’t know. What I do know however is that this guy is best suited to be your party’s main attacker due to his crazy strength. He can also talk to beavers! Why? THE GAME DOESN’T TELL YOU.

Leon

Leon is another good friend of Firion, and he’s separated from the party literally about a minute into the game, and he doesn’t join again until near the end. You do run into him at other points during the game, except he is now The Emperors right-hand man, and Firion and company are all “WHO IS THIS MYSTERIOUS DARK KNIGHT HMM THAT VOICE IS FAMILIAR”. After the party kills the Emperor at the end, Leon tries to become emperor himself, but Emperor Palamecia is just too much of a hardass to allow it, so he comes back from Hell to stop him, and to forge the empire he’s always wanted. Badass.

Maria

Spell-flinger, Leons brother, potential love interest to Firion. Move along, nothing to see here.

There are many more heroes that join your party through the course of the game, but these four are the most important. There are many villains also, but let’s just look at the head honcho.

Emperor Mateus Palamecia

He’s the leader of an evil empire, with plans of world domination who eventually lets the power go to his head and blah blah blah. Nothing new. Not now anyway. Palamecia is arguably the first villain of this type in a JRPG, and seeing as almost every JRPG since has had a Palamecia of its own, I think it’s fair to say that Square succeeded in creating a decent villain. Look out for him in later games as Emperor Gestahl, President Shinra, Sorceress Edea, Queen Brahne, Maester Seymour, Vayne Solidor, etc. Palamecias character became a JRPG cliche, and I don’t think I can fault FF2 for that- like I said, for it’s time this was new stuff.

Also, he looks like David Bowie in Labyrinth. Just sayin’!

The game, and why it doesn’t work

The main problem with Final Fantasy II is simply the fact that it’s almost like the game doesn’t want you to beat it. Thanks to the inclusion of a new, bat-shit retarded leveling system, grinding for EXP no longer becomes an option if the game gets too tough. No sir, ‘leveling up’ in Final Fantasy II is an entirely different story to the usual JRPG grind-fests.

In Final Fantasy II, if you want your characters attributes to get better, then you have to use them. That’s it. It may sound good in theory, but if the developers had bothered to put more than an hour of playtesting in, they would have found (like I, and millions more have) that this new system simply doesn’t work.

For example, let’s say Firion has a lower HP stat than the rest of the party. How do you raise it? Well, to raise a HP stat, you’ll need that character to take damage. The enemy isn’t doing much damage, or won’t attack him? That’s cool- you can do it yourself. And more often than not, you’re going to find that this is the preferable option. The sheer stupidity of the fact that in this game, to grind, you seek out a random fight, ignore the enemies and then smash your own team members to make them stronger just boggles the mind. I cannot conceive of anybody at Square thinking this worked well in-game, even for a moment.

As I said, it seemed Kawazu was on the strong stuff.

And I’m bitching about the PSP remake! In the NES version, it was nearly unplayable it was so broken- to the point where I honestly think nobody playtested it before it shipped. It was that bad.

That’s just for HP though. If you want to increase a characters strength, magic, or similar attribute, you just need to use the Fight or Magic command a bunch of times, and when you finish the battle you MAY just receive an upgrade to that stat. Maybe. There’s no way of knowing if you will or not.

Magic spells also level up with use, meaning if you were to buy the Thunder spell at the start of the game, it would be a Lvl. 1 Thunder spell. To get it to Lvl. 2, you’ll need to cast it a bunch of times in battle. In the early stages of the game, this isn’t a massive problem, but later in the game when you get access to spells like Holy or Ultima, they start at Lvl. 1 as well, and you’ll need to use them literally hundreds of times each to get them to a level where they’ll actually be able to do decent damage at that stage in the game.

It’s ludicrous, it’s a waste of time, and worst of all, it isn’t fun. The game feels like a chore at best, and some kind of bizarre torture at worst.

That said however, Final Fantasy II introduced a hell of a lot of series mainstays, and for that, it gains some points. So let’s take a look at some of the things it brought to the series, apart from suffering.

Chocobos

Yes! Final Fantasy II was the game that introduced the world to the humble chocobo. For those who don’t know, chocobos are large, (usually) flightless birds which are used as steeds in the Final Fantasy universe. They first appeared here in FF2, and they’ve been in almost every subsequent game in the series. They’re awesome because when you’re riding one around the world map, you won’t be hassled by random monster encounters.

I always wondered what they taste like. Nobody ever talks about eating them in the games, which is strange because I reckon they’d be fucking delicious.

The Evil Empire

There is almost no other cliche that defines a JRPG quite as well as that of the evil, oppressive empire. It’s become almost a staple of the genre, that the main force opposing the heroes is an empire led by a cruel, power hungry leader. The evil empire as an enemy was almost certainly a cue taken from Star Wars (like a lot of other things in Final Fantasy II, I might add) but over the years it’s been an entity used in countless other RPGs from other developers, as well as in later Final Fantasy games such as VI, VIII and XII.

By the way, the man who leads such an empire is almost always a crazed, power hungry dictator with no regard for human life. If they aren’t, then they’re usually killed and usurped by someone that is. Kefka killed Emperor Gestahl in VI. Edea killed President Deling in VIII. Vayne killed Emperor Gramis in XII. See a pattern?

Cid

Final Fantasy II also introduced another series staple- and one that’s a little more odd. Since FF2, every main series FF game (and many spin-offs) have featured a character named Cid. For a franchies that doesn’t have a continuing storyline or world, this is a tad strange. It seems the guys at Square just chose a random name and decided to have one in every game. Cid is one of a few recurring names in the Final Fantasy series, along with Biggs, Wedge (Star Wars references!) and Gilgamesh.

Cid characters are usually very mechanically minded, usually appearing as engineers or inventors that aid the player party in some way. They’re also usually much older than the player characters, often acting as a father figure to the group- sometimes having a connection to one or more of the party members such as Cid Fabool in Final Fantasy IX or Cid Márquez in Final Fantasy VI.

Breakdown

Final Fantasy II, as far as I am concerned, is a terrible game. It fails on so many fundamental levels it’s a wonder it sold well enough to warrant Final Fantasy III. The gameplay consists of guiding Firion and co. on a wild goose chase around the world, and running into infuriatingly frequent random battles on the way. The battles aren’t fun- enemies are usually too hard and require *shudder* grinding to defeat- and as discussed, grinding in Final Fantasy II is an even more time consuming and boring process than in the first Final Fantasy.

While Final Fantasy II can’t live up to the grand, epic stories told in later entries in the series, you can definitely see that this is where it all started. Final Fantasy II was the first to have a proper story, with characters that spoke and had personalities of their own, and although it’s not that impressive these days, for its time Final Fantasy II was quite progressive with the way that it told a story, and it paved the way for future entries in the series.

Despite its numerous and atrocious shortcomings, and the fact that it’s in my opinion the weakest entry in the series, I find it hard to hate Final Fantasy II. When I consider the amount of things it introduced to the series and the influence it had on it, I’m willing to forgive it a little. That said, I really find this game hard to recommend to anyone.

I’m glad the series only gets better from here on out. Final Fantasy III, here I come.