Total Time to Complete: 29 hours
Much like with the first game, I was a bit surprised at how long it ended up taking to beat this game again. I do remember that it did take longer than Final Fantasy I, but I assumed that it was just because of having more content. While that is true, I think the difficulty had a lot to do with it as well. That and the dungeons in this game were longer on average.
Final Fantasy II introduced many things that have stuck with the series ever since, but also a few things that haven't been revisited as of the writing of this review. Which, in my mind, is too bad, and I will get into the details later as to why that is. But suffice it to say that this game is a bit closer to what Final Fantasy has continued to be compared to the original game, especially in the experimentation department.
Exploration
CHOCOBO!!!
Since I don't want this to be a rehash of everything I said in the Final Fantasy I review, I'm just going to say that FF2 does nothing different from that one in terms of exploration. That is, Final Fantasy II is completely linear as it pushes you from dungeon to dungeon, and the dungeon design is the most interesting aspect of the game from an exploration perspective. In fact, FF2 is even more linear than FF1 as it doesn't offer one single side quest. At every single point in the game, there is only one objective, and the exploration minimizes down to figuring out who to talk to and what to say or offer to them in order to advance. Not exactly pushing any boundaries here.
The highlight of exploration once again comes from the dungeon design, and I would argue that they are even better in this game than the first. The dungeons in FF2 are long, themed perfectly for the settings, and are just the right amount of difficult to navigate. Unlike FF1, which featured many dungeons where going the wrong way netted you nothing save for more battles, this game will give you some loot more often than not. The dungeons tend to branch out a lot, but each branch has something worthwhile to get, making it more satisfying to fully explore every dungeon. Once again, I give full props for the dungeons in this game.
Battle System and Leveling
This is going to be the real meat of this review as it is the one area that is still quite unique to the series as a whole, and perhaps the entire RPG genre (though I haven't played as many as I would like, so my experience with other series is lacking). At least as far as the main series is concerned, no other Final Fantasy game has a leveling system like the one FF2 has.
The battle system itself is very much the same as FF1 with a couple tweaks. The first one you notice is that FF2 introduces the concept of having front and back rows. And unlike future entries in the series, when you have someone in the back row, they absolutely cannot be hit by melee attacks, only ranged and magic. This has quite the advantage for someone who you want to be protected more than everyone else, say your white magic caster. But on the other hand, it is also a bit of a disadvantage since that character gets hit so rarely that they fall way behind everyone else in terms of HP and defense. The enemies also have a front and back, where the frontmost two rows are attackable by melee and any rows behind those are not (not even by ranged weapons actually, only magic for whatever reason). But outside of this tweak, the actual mechanics of battle are very similar. The only other thing I can think of that is different is that any spell can be cast on single or multiple targets, which is common practice for FF now.
What is worth really digging into is the leveling system. Unlike most other FF games, FF2 does not use the typical concept of: you gain experience points, you reach a threshold for a character, they level up and gain stat increases based on the level and the character/class. No, no. Characters in FF2 gain stat increases by either using weapons, casting magic, or getting the crap beat out of them. There is no concept of levels or EXP, just the concept that when a character experiences something, either attacking or defending, they get more skilled in that area. This translates to: the more you attack with a certain class of weapon, the better you get at those weapons and strength increases; the more you cast a particular spell, the more powerful it becomes for each cast and intelligence (black) or spirit (white) increase; the more your character gets pounded on by the enemy, the more HP and defense they gain.
Personally, I love this idea. I love it so much, in fact, that if I ever get around to making the RPG that is in my noggin, I am going to use a similar system for leveling. It just makes so much sense to me, and it allows for a level of customization of characters that you don't normally see. Sure, it is not as exciting or varied as a tech tree, but it feels more organic than those other systems, and I find myself missing it already as I play the next game in the series.
That being said, it is also horribly broken. Putting the leveling glitch aside (if you are curious though, check the footnote), the actual leveling algorithms are not balanced. The parts of the system that do work well are the weapons, HP, and your general stats (though I still have no idea how some of them are calculated). The parts that do not work are pretty much anything related to magic. It takes way too long to level up any kind of magic so as to be worthwhile, and it is really hard to grok how MP increases work, so you get them rarely. Pretty much the only spell that got to a decent level was cure. This makes sense as healing the party is the most likely thing you would do outside of battle. But unless you have a character who is 100% dedicated to casting black magic, those languish in uselessness as they just take so long to get any better. It is simply more efficient to have everyone be an attacker. And this is a fine strategy until you run into enemies who have insanely high defense and are designed to be killed through black magic. Those battles end up taking forever and using up tons of MP that you don't really have. This all results in the fact that I had to warp out of several dungeons multiple times just because I didn't have the MP to get to the end (I opted not to stock up on really expensive ethers and elixirs).
I do not think that the balance problem is enough to bring down the whole system though. I still think it is novel, and with the right tweaking, it could've been an amazing experience. If I don't do it, I would love to see another game do something like this and do it correctly (perhaps another game does do a similar system, but I don't know of it).
Characters and Abilities
This is going to be pretty short because aside from the fact that the characters have names and voices this time, there really isn't a whole lot to say about them. Since every character you get in the game has access to all weapons and spells, they are essentially blank slates. It is still to your advantage to "class" out each character so that they gain stats in a desirable way, but who is what class is up to the player. The characters do start out with some variation in their base stats, but those are ultimately malleable into whatever is desired. I personally went with Firion as a red mage with a focus on black magic, Maria as the white mage/ranger, and Gus as another red mage with a focus on attack. The fourth characters all ended up being pure attackers. So all in all, there's not a lot to say about how characters play differently since they are fully interchangeable.
As far as the abilities go, there are a good number of things that are new to FF2 over the original. This is only in the realm of magic, as, like FF1, there are no other abilities to gain. The number of spells you have access to is quite large. There are enough white and black spells that no one character can learn all of either type, and each character can learn up to 15 spells, so that means a good 35 or so spells in total. Of course, this comes with the caveat that most of these spells are completely worthless, doubly so because of the leveling system issues mentioned above. Another problem with the spells is that until you actually have a character learn a spell, you don't really know what it does, though you can make educated guesses if you know the general lore of RPGs and FF specifically. But even then, the spell descriptions are often still too vague to know exactly what they do. This game could've done with a little less choice and freedom to make abilities feel substantial. FF1 did a good job of this by providing only three slots for each level of spell, but often more than three choices for each level, so you still had to choose which spells you wanted. But with the complete freedom in FF2 and the bigger range of choices, none of it seems to matter and you end up only using 10% of the spells anyway (Cure, Life, Esuna, maybe some black magic here and there).
That being said though, I actually do really like the overall idea of having just one spell for one particular action that levels up as you use it. As I said in the above section, this comes across as a more natural progression of mastery of a skill versus the arbitrary division of spells that all do the same thing, just at different strengths (e.g. Fire, Fira, Firaga, etc.). I just feel that in this game's case, there are too many spells to choose from for its own good. It is still nowhere near the number of spells you can get in later games, but those suffer from the same problem even more. The higher the range of choice goes, the less meaningful each option becomes.
Difficulty Curve
In this one case you are supposed to die though...
This is probably the area where the game goes the most off the rails for me. While the first game had the occasional spike in difficulty (I noted only two really significant ones that occur before the final dungeon), this one is all over the place. Right from the start you can easily wonder off in the wrong directions on the world map and get annihilated instantly. I understand that the purpose of this is to drive you in the correct direction, and in other games this is done really well, but it feels really off-putting here. When you are on the main path, the difficulty tends to ramp at a good pace, but then spikes again when you run into bosses or other random tough enemies that are completely out of proportion with the enemies around it. The bosses I can understand to some degree, but a lot of these are non-boss monsters that are just put there to mess with you.
On the whole, this game is much harder than FF1 and I will admit that the only reason I finished the game in the time that I did was because of how broken the Blood Sword is (and also abuse of the memo save system). If it weren't for that, this would've taken a lot longer to beat. There are so many enemies you face in the latter parts of the game that are ridiculously cheap. Two kinds of enemies come to mind. The first are the enemies that do a drain when they hit (meaning they absorb the damage they do to you). The problem with the way they hit is that their hits are proportional to your character's max HP. This means that no matter how much HP you have, they have the ability to kill you in two or three hits, depending on how powerful they are. On the other hand, the Blood Sword breaks the game in your favor using the same algorithm, so it drains away about half an enemy's HP each hit. The second are the enemies that cast high level confusion on your characters. Unlike the confusion effects in later games, confusion in this game pretty much means that your confused characters will attack each other 100% of the time, and getting hit does not remove the effect. So there are areas in the game where these enemies will make quick work of your team, and they don't even have to attack you directly to do it, they let you do the dirty work. Very few things are as frustrating in RPGs as getting into a state where you cannot do a thing to stop something like that from happening, and it happens a lot.
It's possible that this is the real reason why people tend to not like FF2, though the level system is often mentioned in the same breath. It is just brutally hard in a lot of areas, and for no real good reason. It doesn't feel like the dungeons are pushing you to think both strategically and tactically the way FF1's dungeons do (minus the ones mentioned in that review). This game just feels cheap and it's simply a matter of having the endurance and/or luck to get through. Definitely the most problematic area in my opinion.
Story Integration
Unlike FF1, there is something to actually talk about here. In FF2, the characters you control do actually have a voice, albeit ones that don't pop up very much. They do allow for some minor backstory with the main characters, but not much beyond that.
The true new aspect to the story integration with this game is in what it calls the Memory System. Essentially, when you talk to certain NPCs, they may mention a keyword, highlighted in red, that you can memorize and ask about later. Usually you start with asking the person who mentioned the word to get more information (and often more keywords), but you can also ask other important people to gather more information that is specific to them. The main reason this system is important is that it is often the only way to advance the story forward. This ends up happening a dozen times or so during the game. There are also some people that you need to give an item to in order to advance. This does provide an additional layer of interaction to the world, but it is very shallow compared to more modern titles. Still, I will give it credit that most modern games are much more guided when it comes to the kinds of questions you can ask of NPCs, while this game is much more open and you can ask any character about anything you want. Of course, most of the questions will result in blank responses, but it is still another way where the game shows its flexibility.
But on the whole, I don't really give this game any positive points for the story integration either. This simple system isn't enough to get over the fact that the game is still boringly linear. While the interaction is a nice addition, it doesn't actually do anything to vary the game in any meaningful way, so it might as well not even be there.
Conclusion
In the end, I generally agree with the common consensus that Final Fantasy II isn't a good game. While I can appreciate the team taking risks and going in a different direction altogether, it fails more than it succeeds, and the result is a game that feels hacky and frustrating through a large portion of it. It makes a lot of sense why they went back to the original FF1 formula when doing FF3, just with some cherry-picked mechanics that worked.
I do still think that there is a lot to take from this game though. I really do feel that if done better, the leveling system without levels could be a great system to work with. Lots of other games do similar things with upgrading individual stats rather than using standard levels, but the upgrades tend to be through purchasing (FFX, FFXII, and FFXIII immediately come to mind here). I think a system where stat upgrading comes from natural progression has real potential, and like I said above, I'd really like to see someone do it (if it hasn't been done before).
Current Ranking
Final Fantasy I
Final Fantasy II
Footnote
During battles, when you choose to attack or cast a spell, that action gives you points towards leveling that particular weapon class or spell. So, for example, attacking with a sword and shield will give me 2 points for each, and casting cure will give me 3 points. Once these points gets up to 100, you level up that class or spell. In theory, that means if you attack twice and cast cure once during a battle, you should get 4 and 3 points respectively. However, the glitch makes it so that you can completely game this process. Basically, if you have a character who is not the last character to choose an action for, you can select the action you want (all the way through to confirming the target), then back out of that decision, but still get the points. So if I choose to attack, I simply hit confirm twice to select the attack option and my target, then cancel to go back to that character, that character still got the 2 points. You can do this for as long as you want until you get the points for an attack or spell up to 100 and the next level, and the battle won't progress since you haven't actually chosen anything.
This glitch is the reason why I was able to beat the game so quickly the first time around. My characters' weapon and spell levels were all stupid high at each point during the game. I did not take advantage of this cheat this time around as I wanted the real experience as the designers intended.