Final Fantasy II (NES) review "If one of them makes a habit of using swords in battle, that character will eventually be far more useful with that kind of weapon than any other. If another one specializes in casting spells, he'll wind up with tons of magic points. And if you regularly encounter weak enemies and ignore those hapless foes to have your party members beat up on each other, their hit points will go through the roof."

In the years before Final Fantasy VII made console role-playing games mainstream, it could be frustrating to be an American guy like me who enjoyed the genre. You just didn't know what would get ported over the ocean and a good number of the games that did reach our shores were plagued by shoddy translations. It's hard for me to not be a little bitter when I think of how my teen years could have been blessed by games like Dragon Quest VI or Final Fantasy V…or any number of quality titles.

However, there are some titles I am eternally grateful to not have seen on store shelves in my youth. Titles like Final Fantasy II. While I was on a retro binge and struggling through this Famicom offering, the main thing running through my mind was this strange feeling that if it'd been released in America during those early years of console RPGs, it would have killed any chance of that genre lasting long enough here to become successful. I wouldn't call the game horrible — it was just really awkward; sort of like tabletop gaming with a dungeon master who's a great guy, but pretty horrible at running a campaign.

It feels like Square wanted to make a follow-up to Final Fantasy, but wasn't sure exactly how to do so; which led to them grabbing a bunch of ideas and throwing them all together — no matter how ill-advised some of them were. The end result: a promising game with a good story that's horribly marred by a broken leveling system that eventually became what has been used in the SaGa games.

Let's start with that. It is the big deal-breaker, after all. Like you'd expect in an old-school RPG, you'll be controlling your party as they traverse a vast world and delve into towns and dungeons. While walking, you'll frequently be confronted by random battles. Instead of getting experience points for beating these creatures, you'll get the privilege of getting to see if the game's engine feels your combat performance warrants one or more of your characters getting stat boosts. If one of them makes a habit of using swords in battle, that character will eventually be far more useful with that kind of weapon than any other. If another one specializes in casting spells, he'll wind up with tons of magic points. And if you regularly encounter weak enemies and ignore those hapless foes to have your party members beat up on each other, their hit points will go through the roof.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that wasn't something the programmers intended to have happen, but trust me…getting more powerful through self-inflicted wounds is more tolerable than actually working for that extra durability. It seems like the amount of damage it takes to raise health must be proportionally related to a character's current max hit point total. I'd go long amounts of time with very few bonuses simply because I was in a dungeon or overworld area littered with weak enemies incapable of causing legit damage. When I play a RPG, I tend to grab all the best armor in a town before doing too much exploration, so I felt I was actually hurting my party by being prepared for future challenges. Not the best of ideas, Square.

But not the only bad one in this game. When you go into dungeons, you'll see a lot of paths leading to rooms. Most of these rooms are dead ends. Adding potential injury to this insult, for some reason whenever you enter a room, the game deposits your party in the middle of it. This means that simply sticking your head in to see if there might be treasure WILL lead to you risking getting thrown into a fight or two while slogging your way out. When you consider that, as was the case with many retro RPGs, the combat rate can get pretty intense in Final Fantasy II, having the game essentially force you into a bunch of extra battles just seems like a cruel joke.

The sad thing? There was a lot of potential buried beneath the lackluster game engine. Square made a legit attempt to tell a story in an eight-bit game and, for the time, it was pretty good. Of course, part of the reason this game never saw American shores possibly had to do with the story, as it does involve things like an evil emperor bombing the crap out of various towns AND said emperor turning death into a minor setback by coming back from Hell to resume his reign of terror. Nintendo of America did get a bit censorship-happy around those sorts of themes back in the day, so one can only imagine how badly this stuff would have been neutered.

At the very beginning of the game, a few elite soldiers working for that emperor utterly flatten your four-person group. Three of you wind up in a nearby town where you immediately get involved with a group working to unseat the baddie. The other guy has mysteriously disappeared, so for most of the game, that fourth spot in your party will be filled by a revolving door of temporary party members. With the same "get experience; level up; maybe add the ability to change classes eventually" sort of engine put into both the other two eight-bit Final Fantasy titles, I probably would consider this game a really good game of yesteryear.

Instead, Final Fantasy II is more a cautionary tale than anything else. A lesson in how a role-playing game can be ruined by a shoddy engine. Square probably wanted to do something different, instead of just rehashing what they did with the first Final Fantasy. An admirable goal, but when the end result is not just inferior, but easily manipulated, it comes off as an amateurish effort that falls far short of any other Final Fantasy of the NES/SNES era.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (July 19, 2012) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.