O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
While my attempts to play the original Final Fantasy usually failed because of how hard and outdated it was, while also having a really simple story, Final Fantasy II in addition to the difficulty and chunkiness was also really weird. All of my attempts quickly hit a wall and every time I’ve tried to check on some guides to help me start, I’d read about some bizarre but seemingly necessary tricks where you’d grind for a few hours by hitting your own party members. With the Pixel Remaster version I was finally able to give the game a proper look and appreciate what it tried to be. Even though it still has some questionable decisions.
What’s possibly most important to note about Final Fantasy II is that unlike the first game in the series, this one is focusing very heavily on the story. It’s not a very complicated story, of course, but it’s considerably deeper than I’ve expected it to be, with very distinct characters and quite a few well delivered moments and twists in the tale. The playable characters are all named (though, you can rename them) and each of them has distinct personality and look. For the first time in the series your party often changes, as only 3 of the 4 characters you name at the start are available through the entire game. Thus the fourth slot is often taken by an NPC with their own goals and unique characteristics, something that FFIV would later expand upon greatly. And you even get a unique take on a dialogue system, with “key words” that you can “learn” and “ask” NPCs about. It’s not exactly Morrowind, of course, and it’s not much deeper than if the dialogues were simply linear, as they tend to be in the series. But it was an interesting experiment nonetheless.
But that’s not the biggest experiment of the game. What FFII is best known for (or more like infamous) is how the stats and abilities of characters develop in the game. There’s no conventional experience and leveling up system here and instead each separate stat and ability has a chance to improve as you use it. Losing HP or MP in the battle means you get a chance to increase the maximum values for them after the battle is won. Using spells and certain weapon types means having a chance to slowly improve them, making their use more powerful. And stats are tied to actions, like attacking, using white or black magic and etc. It’s a really neat idea and something that has been experimented with in other games and series. But the success of this approach always hangs on the implementation.
In the original game, I feel, the implementation was way too challenging which lead to that infamous grinding, where your go into battles to hit yourself and abuse bugs. Not helped by the fact that while conventional levels don’t exist, the difficulty of areas seems to be tied to invisible thresholds, where if you try to go into a harder area early, you simply do 0 damage to enemies, while they just one shot kill you, until you upgrade your stats, abilities and equipment enough to go beyond the threshold and be able to fight them normally.
But in the Pixel Remaster version, a lot of the huge annoyances have been fixed. Just like with the PR version of FF, most of the limitations of the NES original are gone, with no “ineffective” hits and now even using two weapons automatically re-aims the second weapon attack in the same turn if the first target is down. HP is increased from time to time even if you don’t take damage and seemingly at a higher rate. Same goes for MP and stat improvement in general. Most of the time, there’s no need to even consider grinding to just go through the game – as long as you don’t flee all battles or try to avoid them, you’re slowly but surely improving and getting to the stat levels expected by the game.
Yet it’s not entirely without grind. First quarter of the game, for example, can very easily be done without using magic at all and by just attacking everything. But then the game introduces enemies and bosses that have extremely high physical resistance and must be fought with magic. If you haven’t leveled that up at all, your characters have level 1 spells, that barely do damage, and almost no MP to use at that point. And so the grind starts. It’s worth noting that while spells used outside the battle (the ones that can be used) still improve with each use, the stats and MP doesn’t. And later on, from time to time, the game will throw unexpected and annoying difficulty spikes at you that, unless you’re using very specific equipment or leveling up specific abilities, you might have a hard time getting around without grinding for a bit. Which is, frankly, annoying in the game even at fast forward auto-battle speeds.
The biggest issue the game has, though, is that several enemy types have a status effect that disables your party members tied to their basic attack. And in what seems to be the balance change made specifically for Pixel Remaster, that status effect now has either the 100% or almost 100% chance of hitting your party member, even if they have high stats and specific equipment that protects them from said status effect. The attack may do 0 damage, but the effect will work, as long as it’s not a miss. And what that means, is that if you ever get ambushed by 4 or more enemies that have basic attacks with such status effects (like stone, instant death, paralysis), you’re basically dead before you can even take a turn. No matter how good your party members are and what equipment they have, they will all be out of the battle in the first turn.
If not for the really strange design choices like this, I would’ve loved Final Fantasy II in the Pixel Remaster form. It really feels like a huge step up from the simplicity of the original Final Fantasy in terms of story and even dungeon design. The music is as wonderful as ever in the series. The art is great. And most of the gameplay in PR is fun, with the way your characters improve actually being fun, as every single battle is a chance for a stat or ability improvement. But those strange instant death ambush encounters and difficulty spikes do get annoying after a while, which sours the experience a bit. Still, it is a great remaster of a game that is far more fun and interesting than I expected it to be and I’m glad that I’ve played it.