overdrive's Final Fantasy II review

Great review, Rob. To be fair, I always enjoyed the idea of leveling up what you used. It's sort've the Rune Quest system (which later formed the basis for the Elder Scrolls system). But yeah, I also know of its potential abuses. I actually think I may own the game for the GBA; my girlfriend in college had a copy.

I have the PSX and PSP versions, which I believe both fixed some of the balance issues Rob noted in his review. I really need to spend some time playing through to the end of some of the early FF titles I haven't completed. I don't have nearly as much personal experience with 2-5 as I would like to have. Then I'm mostly good except for 11 and 12...

FF2 actually came out before the first SaGa game; it wasn't based on SaGa's system, it was the other way around. Minor point, but it's significant.

I can't think of a game before FF2 that used a system with discrete stat increases. It addresses one of the problems I always had with RPGs when I was a kid, the irrationality of getting strong through experience points. I mean, just because my fighter ground some goblins into goblin paste and spread it over a piece of bread and made a sandwich doesn't mean my mage should get smarter because he watched the spectacle. Goblin paste is not brain food.

While the system they came up with for FF2 has abuses, it was bold and it was (as far as I know) first. It was a bold game. Having a library of words you can say to NPCs was also bold. So was killing a character. I will be the first to admit that FF2 has some broken mechanics, but it has a lot of very positive features too. Unlike a bad game, I think FF2 breaks in ways that still renders it enjoyable.

I was thinking the same thing, dagoss (about FF2 being the first to employ the stat increases based on specific type of action, I mean). I just wasn't sure if FF2 came before SaGa. I thought it did, but for all I knew, there was some obscure SaGa NES title and the series didn't actually begin on the SNES the way I remembered. If that were the case, i figured Rob would likely be more hip to it than I would. After all, he's the guy reviewing a Famicom title!

Ugh. SaGa.

I owned SaGa Frontier for the longest time. I continually thought I would be able to best it but each time it just wrecked me. A ridiculously hard game where you can easily get yourself stuck and have to completely start over. And the story, graphics, and world scenarios were just not good enough to warrant such pain.

I eventually sold it for a hundred dollars on Amazon! That game was rare, I guess.

Perspective time!

The reason FF2 and SaGa feel so similar to each other is that both projects were directed by a man named Akitoshi Kawazu.

The least SaGa-like of the games, SaGa 3 (released as Final Fantasy Legend 3 in USA) was developed by many of the same people who would go on to make Final Fantasy USA (which was Mystic Quest).

Kawazu's style tends to be rather experimental, with some of his games (Like Romancing SaGa 2) being fantastic, while others (Unlimited SaGa) being too experimental for their own good.

☆~ The more you know

Wow. The thought that FF2 came before ANY of the SaGa games did come as news to me. I knew it was out before the Romancing Saga games, but I guess I figured it would have come out before at least the first Final Fantasy Legend. Probably just because that was GB (before Color) and so damn primitive. So thanks for that catch. Review lightly altered in light of that.

And Zipp, I almost would have liked Saga Frontier...except for how to beat final bosses in about every scenario, you probably will want to do everything you can. After doing the magic-gaining quest and other things 3-4 times and realizing you have another couple trips through them, it's hard to maintain any desire to continue playing. Especially when you consider things like how one guy (Lute) had virtually no character-specific stuff, meaning ALL YOUR WORK up to the final boss of his chapter will be stuff you did many, many times before. I beat 3-4 scenarios and quit around the final boss of the other ones because I just couldn't bear to do any more work.

I do want to pick up the translated version of Romancing Saga 3 again. I only messed with it for a few hours, but it seemed like a lot of fun.

Remember that when Nintendo pushed for the localization of Final Fantasy here in the United States, the JRPG was already becoming a big deal overseas. Final Fantasy II hit the Famicom in 1988, and the first Final Fantasy made it to North America in 1990 (shortly after the release of Final Fantasy III in Japan).

The Game Boy was released in June of 1989, a year or so after Final Fantasy II was released in Japan, and Final Fantasy Legend wasn't released until around six months later (not all that long before the release of Final Fantasy III).

If you're curious about such things, the information isn't any further away than the HonestGamers games database. ;-)

According this type article, there was a rough prototype of a FF2 localization that surfaced awhile ago:

http://www.lostlevels.org/200312/200312-ffan2.shtml

Hm? FF2 was rereleased on the GBA in North America.

Zipp, that was a whole separate localization effort, and "re-released" is the wrong phrase because it was never released here the first time. When Square-Enix reworked the first two games in the series for PlayStation, they made fresh localization efforts, changed up some of the game mechanics, and released the result in North America. Then they ported that effort to the GBA down the road, and then later they released the two games as separate titles for the PSP. So Final Fantasy II has definitely been released in North America, but not in 8-bit form.

Yeah, I'd call that game a remake, since it was esentially rebuilt from the ground-up. The FF1 game for PSX/GBA plays like an entirely different game. FF2 wasn't as drastically different, but still different (and still just as abusable...).

Yeah, I haven't played the GBA FF 1-2 cart, but from asking people here about it, I got the idea that both games were altered a good bit to make them more accessible to more modern gamers who weren't raised on the idea that a person SHOULD BY GOD HAVE TO GRIND FOR 5 HOURS in order to move more than three steps away from the first town.

And yes, this post does mean I'm entering into the gamer version of that grumpy old guy telling kids about how he walked uphill (both coming and going) 10 miles to school every day in three feet of snow. Damn...EmP was right...

I don't know about FF2, but I will say I disliked the FF1 changes. They took out daily spell amounts and replaced it with damn mp! It totally destroys the challenge of the game, since the big balancing aspect of magic in the first one was that you could only use it a few times before you had to go back to town to recharge it. With mp, and then ether on top of that, you can just spam spells, making red wizards the most powerful character in the game.