Final Fantasy II: A retrospective

I bought Final Fantasy II in a pawnshop one hot summer day in the mid 90s, when word of the PlayStation was looming over and 32-bit gaming was about to invade our living rooms. I had bought my SNES over a year ago as I had my SEGA Genesis Mark II first, me being a sega fan more than nintendo back then, but also wanted to ever try the SNES for its own games that I never got to try on the Genesis. Having played the first Final Fantasy on the NES, I was pretty much interested on playing a sequel, being that I never knew that by the time we had it on SNES, it was actually part 4 in the series and that we had missed out on the original sequel plus part 3 being that the first game was shown later on 1990 for the NES, a year before the SNES made its debut along with FF4 being translated as "2" in the US.

As such, I never thought about it much being that I never knew about said sequels, and tried to connect as much that I saw on this game in contrast to the NES one, something that actually kinda worked seeing how it shared many things with the prior title such as the 4 nefarious Elemental Fiends with new names and bodies trying to stop you as you went on to gather the crystals and such. Otherwise I was impressed on how instead of giving names to characters that seemingly had no back-story, now you played with characters that not only had said back-story, but also developed as you played through. It felt very much inspirational than anything else.

I also remember beating this game more than once, even going as far as drawing maps of the various caves I would play through and locations of treasures and the like. I was that dedicated back then. I still got the memory of when I first saw Zeromus and how DIFFERENT that last boss looked in such game where medieval-style monsters were the norm, as well as his rocking theme song which I can still hear as I type this.
Then the satisfaction of seeing him felled as I finish the game for the first time and enjoying its ending. I was very happy to see what became of each character that joined the party to save their world and all that, leaving me with a unique sense of accomplishment.

Of course some years later I learned all about the missing sequels we never got to see over the US plus the fact that 2 and 3 were actually 4 and 6 respectively, along with the fact that 5 was never even mention at that time. At least not that I ever read on gaming magazines that is. Even though FF7 made its way on the playstation and it was engraved with the correct sequel number, I really never got to play it until years later when I found a used copy at some movie/gaming trading store. Unfortunately the game had a nasty glitch on which it would freeze as Cloud and another character would get into the Golden Saucer ride. In case you are wondering, I always chose Tifa to get inside with him.

Anyway back to FF4. I still own my SNES cartridge and treasure it like no other. This is one of those games that did change my gaming life and still leaves an important impression within me.