Final Fantasy Project Part 2 of 14: A Field of Wild Roses (FFII)

Hey it's taken me a little more than a month, but I've finally managed to battle my way through Final Fantasy II, which adds another countdown notch on the prison wall that is this project-- no I'm kidding, I'm not completely burnt out on Final Fantasy yet... although to be honest FFII did not help matters.  It was a rough ride, let me tell you. (Seriously, click the little "Read More" button and let me tell you.  It's the whole point of this article.)



[caption id="attachment_3511" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Had I played the original NES version that never got released outside of Japan, it would of come out of this (beautiful) box.[/caption]

Game: Final Fantasy II (ファイナルファンタジーII Fainaru Fantajī Tsū)
Released: December 17, 1988(JP), and then not until April 8, 2003 in the USA when it was remade for the Playstation
Version I Played: The PSP one again. (hey I like the portability!)
Total Play Time: 16:29
Gil: 909940 -- for some reason I was flush with cash the whole game!

Back in the day this game was released, it seemed like every sequel was a quirky change-up on the formula that made the original title popular.  Just look at Zelda II: Adventure of Link, it swapped Zelda's overhead view with a weird and crushingly difficult platform adventure (with a level up system!), and Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, which threw away the level by level progression and replaced it with one continuing world and added lots of RPG like elements.  Both these games are kind of black sheeps of their respective series (although their punishing difficulty might have something to do with it too, haha) and Final Fantasy II is no different.

While it isn't as vast of a change as those other late 80's game sequels (it's still a top down RPG with random battles) there is enough change going on to make things at least a little weird.  For one, there's the "Word Memory" system that has you memorizing keywords from NPC conversations in order to spout them back at other characters to gain more information.  Along with that, you can show a handful of key items to certain NPCs to advance the story as well.  I honestly really like this little system-- it adds a layer (albeit a fairly transparent one) of interactivity to the dialog, and makes the plot go along in seemingly better paced fashion.  In FFI it just seemed like NPCs existed to dump exposition on you, but in II at least it feels like you are interacting with the world.  This actually feels like a legitimate evolution of FFI's gameplay.  The game's story too, is considerably more complex than the one in the original game.  Instead of creating a party of four personality devoid husks of various classes, you have a party of 2 dudes (Firion and Guy) and a lady (Maria) that stick with you throughout the entire adventure.  The fourth slot is then reserved for a revolving door cast of "guest" characters-- which sounds pretty cool, but once we get into the mechanics of this game I'll let you know why this actually isn't that cool.  Since this game actually has some characters in it, let's tread new Final Fantasy Project ground and do some character profiles!

THE MAIN PARTY

Firion: The traditional JRPG hero, before that sort of thing was cliche.  Firion is the adopted brother of Maria and Leon, and is leader of the group and an all around heroic sort of guy.  He's more of a self insert for the player more than anything else, but god darnit if he doesn't have a pretty cool character design.  Check out that rad cape.  His stats are completely middle ground, which allows you to mold him in whichever direction you desire.  According to the game's original instructions, he has a soft spot for the ladies, but the game only sort of alludes to this when a Lamia tries to seduce him.

 



Maria: The party's resident lady-type.  She's primarily a magic user (white mage in my playthrough).  She cares strongly for her brother Leon, who goes missing early in the game and who (SPOILERS FOR A 25 YEAR OLD GAME AHEAD) in a realitivly unsurprising twist (unless you were playing this in '87 I guess) becomes a major antagonist for Maria and the party.  She's basically the strong and caring JRPG female character archetype.  Her and Firion appear to kind of have a thing going on.

 



Guy: Guy is the weirdest dude in the game, and one of the stranger characters in the FF canon.  He's clearly none too smart, as he seems to have a pretty loose grasp on the English language. (He seriously speaks in pretty broken English and always refers to himself in the third person.)  Apparently raised by beasts in the wild (according to a wiki entry... not so much the game) he has the uncanny ability to speak to...beavers.  Yes, beavers.  The instruction book to the GBA version of this game says he can talk to animals, but in the game itself you really only ever talk to beavers (it saves your life at one point, I shit you not.)  Guy is an absolute powerhouse (presumably due to some sort of retard strength) and in my game I had him dual-weiding axes. AXES. Guy is, for a lack of a better phrase, a pretty cool guy.

 

Leon: Maria's brother who vanishes for most of the game only to return as the evil Emperor's right hand man, The Dark Knight (no, not Batman.).  He's barely developed as a character and really not at all interesting.  He does spend a portion of the plot as the big bad guy after the death of the Emperor.  He does end up flip-flopping back to the side of good for no real explained reason other than Good Always Wins Because Evil Is Dumb. Or something.  He's like Kain from FFIV except without the proper character development to make you give two craps about him. Cool armor though, huh?

 

OTHER CHARACTERS OF NOTE

Minwu:Minwu is the right hand man of the former Princess of Fynn and current resistance leader Hilda.  He's the first guest to join you and is one of those wise old wizard types.  He knows a dumpload of white magic, which is handy to have around for the first of the game when you are still getting to know the ropes.  He ends up making the ultimate sacrifice so Firion can obtain the Ultima Tome.

 

 

Leila: She's probably my favorite character in this game.  A sassy and strong lady pirate who ends up joining the group after initially trying to rob them at sea.  She's always up for a fight and general pirate-y shenanigans.  She actually stays with the main party for a good chunk of the game and becomes an integral part of the resistance.  She starts equipped with both a dagger and a sword, which is a pretty B-A combination.  Out of all the characters in the game, she would make the best candidate for a spin-off game. Final Fantasy Pirates!

 

Cid: That's right, it's the first Cid! If you weren't aware, Every Final Fantasy (except FFI, where a Cid is only mentioned and only in the remakes) has a character named Cid who usually has some kind of connection to an airship.  In FFII, this Cid is no different, making his Airship available to the party pretty early in the game (for a price) and is integral to Firion and Co. in their quest to defeat the Empire's gigantic town-leveling airship, the Dreadnaught.  After his untimely death at the Empire's hands, the party is granted his airship to fly wherever they choose.

 

Ricard: The last of the Dragoons, a mythical group of dudes who can talk to and ride dragons.  Pretty cool, and the first of a staple class of Final Fantasy character.  Oddly enough, he doesn't have the Dragoon trademark Jump command.  I guess that doesn't come until later.  He's probably one of the more interesting characters in the game with the most explained history.  Plus he can ride a dragon.  Into a cyclone.

 

 

Chocobo: Yep, FF's iconic yellow birds make their first appearance in this game! Don't ask me about them though, I somehow managed to play through the entire game without seeing one.  Apparently they hide in the woods south of Kashuan Keep, and I managed to miss them entirely.

 

 

Of course there's and handful more characters, but I've gone on enough already.  The character design is definitely one of this game's strong points though.  Everybody looks especially cool and interesting.

[caption id="attachment_3544" align="aligncenter" width="608"] Man I love the Yoshitaka Amano art for this game.[/caption]

We've covered the good stuff, now to the not so good, mainly the battle system (which unfortunately is where most of the gameplay resides. It seems the same as FFI, but that's only because it looks similar. Under the hood the dang thing is a total mess. Instead of the experience point based system in the first game that worked so well (so well in fact that most games use a system like that, why change it?) every individual skill and spell has it's own skill points and levels. Say you wanted a stronger Fire spell, well the only way to make it more powerful is to use it. That's right, your skill levels are all independent of each other and you have to spend time leveling up each one. This leads to a ton of grinding in order to make sure all your skills are up to snuff. It's really annoying. It's a system that seems inherently designed to eat up all your time. You'll spend battles just spamming the same spell over and over again just to level it up. It's just not any fun at a base level. Conceptually it makes since, I mean if you want to get good at something, you've got to practice, but from a gameplay standpoint it doesn't work. FFII is a beautiful shiny apple that's rotten at its core (and there's probably a worm in there or something). The story is decent-- maybe too thin to be great and not simple enough to have an awesome fable/fairy tale feel to it-- the characters are well designed and decently compelling, but the base gameplay (the growth of your characters) is just kind of broken. Actually, in the original Japanese Famicom (NES) version it literally was broken. When you selected a command in battle, then canceled back out of it, you still obtained the points like it had been used! I guess that would cut down on the grinding, but I don't think it was meant to be there, as this glitch has been absent from every subsequent version of the game.

In the PSP version I did play they did attempt to curb the grind-fest by lowering the difficulty, but that isn't so much fixing the problem as it is throwing a sheet over it and asking you to pretend it's not there.  The difficulty is so much lower in fact, I beat the entire final dungeon with the 4th party member turned to stone the whole time. That shouldn't happen. The growth system is an interesting and innovate concept, but it doesn't work and I'm surprised they actually went through with it. I can't believe that during the development nobody stopped and said, “You know, this growth system makes sense and all, but it's not very fun.”...or maybe they were just trying to artificially add to the length of the game via never-ending grinding. I dunno, I don't want to believe that 1987 Squaresoft was that evil.

[caption id="attachment_3547" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The GBA version. Lookin' pixely, bro![/caption]

The game does do a good job pointing you in the right direction and leading you to your next objective. This probably comes from the larger emphasis on story that the game has. It's still not enough story though. It's weak. There's an evil Emperor and he's evil and kills people and stuff. Why? I dunno...cause he's evil I guess. The game doesn't seem to think it's necessary for the villain to have a motive, apparently. You're of course part of the rebels (named Wild Rose...so manly, right?) and you've got to stop him and his empire. You quest for the rebels, getting them stronger weapons to be able to face the Imperial Army, knocking their giant Death Star-like airship out of the sky, get the ultimate spell (named Ultima, naturally) and that kind of stuff. You eventually kill the Emperor himself, and all is well. A victory dance ensues. It's totally a false ending though (maybe one of the first in video game history? I dunno.) because the Emperor actually crawls back out of Hell itself arising in a (oddly pink and sparkly) dungeon named Pandaemonium. Then you go and kill him again, and the world is saved. While the idea of a villain that is so evil not even Hell can contain him is pretty awesome, there's no motive for the character's evil or any history behind the conflict between the rebels and the empire. It'd be awesome if I knew the reason for anything that's going on I guess. The game is also to reliant on killing off guest characters in a cheap attempt to up the drama. Seriously, at least six of the main NPCs are dead by the time the credits roll, some seemingly for no real reason. Cid dies after the cyclone attack presumably so the party can obtain the airship, but that's a pretty weak excuse to kill such an established character. Hell, one dude dies within the first 20 minutes of the game! There's better ways to inject drama and feeling into a story without just killing guys left and right. I guess this early in the development of JRPG games it probably seemed pretty revolutionary to permanently kill off a character, but it happens way too often and starts losing its impact after about the third time.

So would I recommend you play this game? Not really. The story is not quite good enough to warrant putting up with the broken battle system. Not even the cool character designs save it from just generally being a mediocre time sink. Sure, a couple of iconic trademarks of the Final Fantasy series grew out of this game, but in the end I really just don't think it's worth it. I loved and thoroughly enjoyed playing through FFI... but FFII just started feeling like work really quick. It's a neat piece of history, but don't bother.

 

PXT Final Verdict: Skip It

 

Now on to FFIII! This time I'm going to forgo any modern remakes and jump straight into the original (albeit fan-translated) original NES version. I'll probably livestream through a lot of my playthrough too, since it's not going to be on a portable! I'll keep you informed as to when this happens.