Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

I am back having just finished Final Fantasy II and am going to, like I did with the first game, talk about the game and give my overall impressions of what I liked and didn’t like about the game.

For purposes of clarity, and for those who have not read my Final Fantasy I review, I am playing the Pixel Remastered version of the games, which happen to have some streamlined aspect as compared to the original versions of the game.

There is a lot to talk about, so let’s get started!

Plot and Game Play

The plot of Final Fantasy II is immediately different from the first Final Fantasy game, having only some enemy types shared among them and establishes the series to be an anthology series rather than a purely sequential one.

In this game we are playing as three individuals, Firion, Maria, and Guy as they have just managed to escape with their lives after the Emperor of Palamecia decided to cause havoc and take over the world. Unfortunately, Maria’s brother Leon gets separated from them, so spirits are low.

The group are rescued by Princess Hilda, and while she and her attendant Minwu help you get back to shape, she is hesitant to allow you to help fight against the Emperor. You then go on a series of quests to show your dedication to the rebellion, as well as getting help from a number of other characters along the way.

Immediately the game changes how game play works compared to the first game in that your characters are not strictly confined to classes like the first game. Their stats are geared towards certain directions and play styles, but you can have them with any variety of equipment and spells that you can tune the play style.

This is because leveling up has also changed in that instead of gaining levels in the traditional RPG manner, your skills with weapons, spells, and stats level up individually based on what you do in battles.

For example, the more you use a sword, the better your sword skill goes up, the more you use the Fire spell, the stronger it gets and so on. Stats also increase based on the weapons you use, as well as how much HP and MP is lost or used in battle can increase the amount you may gain as the game goes on.

The game also introduces a password system, a system where sometimes characters say a word during a conversation that you press Learn to lean the word and then you can ask other characters about that word to gain more information and lead you to where to go in the game.

Much like the previous game, you traverse on the overworld and endure random encounters while also going into dungeons to also face random encounters and collect treasure, though the various modes of transportation are spread out and make more sense than the first game where you got a Ship, then Canoe, then Skyship, it goes Canoe, the Snow Craft, the new Chocobo (which I accidentally missed during my playthrough, sadly), Ship, then Skyship.

Game Play Experience

There are a lot of things that I enjoyed about this game over the first one. First of all, I do like the fact that instead of random character classes, we are playing named characters that are going through an actual story.

The characters have a personality to them and have certain reactions to certain events, and there are even humorous moments like Guy being able to talk to beavers, which needs to be done to progress the mission.

What’s more, there are moments of tragedy, where characters who join your party to help you accomplish a quest may die sometimes. And not in a “a monster randomly killed them while they were doing something,” sort of way, but in a way that is tragic and to serve the narrative on how this war is affecting people.

A lot of named characters in this game die is somber moments that help show this game is darker than the first game. Where in the first game you are always progressing forward and you have a feeling of triumph and success, in this game it always feels like we have a major victory, then followed by a major loss.

At some points in the game, towns get destroyed, and one of the more heartbreaking moments was talking to random NPC’s and hearing how their dialogue had changed.

That’s another improvement over the first game, a majority of NPC’s in the game have unique dialogue and dialogue that changes when certain events occur in the game, sometimes being joyous when a good event occurs or tragic when something bad occurs.

The story has become more personal in that your characters feel more involved in the world and goings on rather than nameless heroes who help save the world. You are a ragtag group of rebels trying to save the world from a power hungry Emperor, and while you get some small victories, it is still a war where bad things happen to innocent people, a much more compelling story in my opinion.

While the story and character aspects of the game have dramatically improved, there are also plenty of game play elements that have improved, namely the combat in my opinion. There is more challenge to the game, and there is less of what I called Pokémon All Attack Syndrome in the first game.

I used much more variety of spells in this game than I did in the first game, and not all of them were offensive or healing spells. I used buff spells more often, some debuff spells, and it didn’t feel pointless when I used them. Enemies were often pretty tough and there were instances where I wandered into areas in the early game where I fought enemies that would take the characters out in one hit.

What’s more, this game encouraged me to swap out weapons and tactics as the enemy variety was much more expansive than the first one. Some enemies were susceptible to magic more than regular attacks, which meant that I had to add some spellcasting to my characters and have them build that skill up.

The decent variety of weapons that provided different effects allowed me to swap some around on certain characters in order for them to be able to use those weapons. Armor functioned in a similar way that while it may increase certain stats and dramatically lower other stats, it wasn’t locked to a class like the previous game, so any character can where any armor and use any weapon and any spell. It felt more customizable to the play style I wanted each character to have.

The other named characters of the game also were a shining light in that they had personality and were much more memorable than many characters in the first game. There was Paul, a thief who had a snarky remark, Princess Hilda who was a strong willed character who would actively fight for her people, Minwu as Hilda’s advisor and White Mage who has believes that the fates have come to guide what will happen, the debut of Cid as an old man who uses his Skyship to ferry you around, and so many more characters that breathe life to the world of the game.

Nitpicks and Complaints

While there were a lot of improvements made to the game, there are also some things that I wasn’t too much of a fan of.

Let’s first talk about one of the biggest changes to the game, and that is the leveling system. While I understand what the game was going for, there are plenty of things that made leveling up a slog sometimes.

Some things made sense, use a sword to level up the Sword skill, but leveling up stats was much more confusing and less intuitive. The idea that the more hits you take you level up your HP is not directly intuitive and great in the early game where your characters are much more susceptible to damage and could potentially die in early combats much easier.

At a certain point when you level up your skills high enough, around Level 8 or so from what I noticed, leveling things up was much slower and took more time to do. So if I wanted to level up a spell to higher levels, it would basically need to be the only thing that I need to do, and while that works fine in the early game, when you get some of the late game spells it can be really ineffective since you get less benefits from it being an early spell level.

The next thing that was not that great in my opinion was the Password system. Again, I understand in theory what they were trying to do, have you talk to more NPC’s to get more information to progress the game. The thing that made it less than ideal was how tedious it was to figure out which words worked where, feeling more like tedious busy work than I think the developers intended.

There was also a front row and back row system in the game, again made sense in theory. The front row had more chances of being attacked and did more damage in melee, whereas the back row was more effective at using ranged weapons and spells. Frankly this was an aspect of the game that I didn’t really mess around with and while nice as an option, I didn’t use enough to see how effective it was in practice.

The dungeons in the game were decently designed, however there were many rooms in the dungeons that were the same empty room, just with a different tile set to match the aesthetic of the dungeon. While not every room in every dungeon should have something, reusing the same room over and over again was boring and made me less inclined to explore some dungeons.

While the side characters of the game were all great, I do have to say I was personally less impressed with the Emperor as the main villain of the game. Maybe I missed some dialogue, but him just wanting to take over the world was not really all that interesting to me.

There are some aspects towards the end of the game that make him more interesting, but that is very much an end game aspect that doesn’t last too long to make much of a difference, as opposed to Garland from the first game where his late game twist felt much more interesting.

The Emperor served more as a narrative device than a character in my opinion and was pretty weak. There is also a twist involving another character in the game that was much more interesting, but I think that needed more spots where it was talked about and mentioned to have made more of an impact.

Overall Score: 8/10

There was so much that the game had improved on in terms of getting me invested in the story and characters of the game, hampered by some tedious game design decisions and in my opinion a less than stellar villain.

The combat was varied in terms of how to deal with enemies, but the leveling up was unintuitive and tedious.

The story of the game was much more memorable, and if it used a much more traditional leveling system then I think I would have rated the game even higher than I already did.

The next game in the series is Final Fantasy III, and like I said in the previous review, it will take me some time to finish the game, so don’t expect the next Casual Chat to be a review of the third game.

See you all next time!

Lali-ho!

From, J.M. Casual