2/5 ★ – NiGHTS108's review of Final Fantasy II.

I knew we’d see this soon enough. Final Fantasy II is sadly the first Final Fantasy game I’ve played that I would not call good. This game is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a fantasy and for once I do not like that. I can appreciate this game on some level due to how kinda ambitious it can be sometimes, but it just doesn’t come together. I’ll start with the gameplay changes as this is what I feel most strongly about, this is the first Final Fantasy game to use a more traditional MP system instead of FF1’s tiers like most RPGs, and that’s about the only part of the gameplay I’d call conventional. Levelling up works pretty differently here, revolving around that character’s behaviour and what happens to them over the course of the game. You don’t get traditional XP, if a character gets hit a lot, their HP will increase, use more magic, their magic strength increases, etc. It happens pretty sporadically across the game as there’s not really levels for your characters. This acts as something of a substitute for the class system in the last game. The problem is this ends up being a really stiff and clunky system and it’s what the entire game revolves around which isn’t great. Especially lategame, if you decide you want a character to have something of a class change, it’s basically impossible without way too much frustrating grinding because of how deeply integrated the class is by then. This is something kinda similar to the amazing Materia system in FF7, but one reason that worked so well was the sheer amount of customisation it had. Here you’re pretty much just always locked in. This is kind of a theme with Final Fantasy II if we’re being honest… It seems to be trying a lot of super ambitious stuff which I respect it for, but in almost every case it ends up falling flat on its face because this is an NES RPG. It kind of reminds me of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest in that regard, another NES sequel in a beloved series that slips up hard primarily due to overambition. One new thing this game adds is the ability to level up both a character’s ability with weapons and magic. With weapons… I don’t even get why this is in the game to begin with. Like, most weapons play the exact same, so it’s not really doing anything other than greatly limiting your equipment choices. Also for whatever reason, the FIST of all things is easily the most powerful. If you take of that fancy Excalibur and Blood Sword, it turns out all the characters in this game have iron fucking knuckles, because your little pixelly noodle arms can kill most enemies in one or two hits by the end and even bosses become dead simple. This ends up kinda fucking up the balance of the game though as when doing this you probably won’t be getting hit so you won’t have much health or defence for the final dungeon… And do you see the problem yet… This whole game is just a Jenga tower waiting to fall over. It’s trying to juggle all these different elements which are cool on paper, but simply do not work in execution. Oh yeah, magic sucks shit in this game. For some god damn reason, every magic spell is level 1 when you get it, so even if you’ve been using magic spells like the whole game, you’ll still have to grind your epic super cool Ultima ability up to speed once you get it… Ugh… Even the party members don’t really work. You have three party members the whole game and sometimes a fourth will tag along too sometimes, but the problem is, say it with me, it fails in execution. Of course, the 4th party member will have subpar stats at best when you get them, so after the halfway mark of the game they’re basically useless. This is a really long review so far, I don’t even passionately hate FF2 or anything, this game is just really really weird and I need to talk about it. What else is there to say? Uhhhhhh, the story wasn’t great? I can’t really decide if this one is better than the first’s. It’s definitely trying harder but that’s kind of the problem… (That applies to the whole game.) It’s a surprisingly gruesome story where a lot of characters end up dying near the end, even towns are destroyed by hurricanes, for some reason. The thing is, the characters are so flat and lifeless that I had a completely straight face whenever anything was happening with the story. If anything I’m glad Cid died so he could finally give me the airship 95% through the game. Should have died sooner honestly. I also don’t care about the twist villain, who basically pulls the same shit as the last game but not as interesting which is shocking. Also there’s a lot of stuff that’s, like, completely unrelated to the story. For some reason the princess character gets captured every two seconds, and half the time this doesn’t even contribute to the plot, like when she gets caught in a colosseum, for some reason? I feel like there’s a lot of stuff going on in the plot but it’s all fluff, I’m not actually invested with any of the characters. Okay maybe it is worse than the first game. Oh yeah also the dungeons suck shit in this game, all of them, I’m not even gonna sugarcoat that, I actually dreaded playing all of them, they’re so lifeless and bland and they constantly have these “booby trap” doors which just lead to rooms with really high encounter rates. Like that’s some Mario Maker shit, come on. I feel like I could go on about this game for a long time but I can only nitpick so much. It’s one of the most ambitious yet confusing games I’ve played. Almost never have I seen a game fail in execution as much as Final Fantasy II right down to the core story and gameplay. To end on a positive note, I do genuinely appreciate how much this game separates itself from the first. It shows that even early on, Square really were dedicated to trying bold, ambitious ideas for the series which is definitely something I’ll take over just more Final Fantasy I. I’m sure it’ll work out for them eventually :) Still better than Dragon Quest I though. Grade: D+ Difficulty: C-