Final Fantasy II is the one entry in the series that is rarely talked about. It always seemed that when listing oldschool FFs, you could find people who had good things to say about one, three, and everything after. But FF2 was oft skipped. I didn’t give it much thought until recently, when I started to become curious. It’s the only game that I knew nothing about. I had no concept of FF2’s characters, villain, abilities, anything.
Most online sentiment for FF2 is not very positive. Particularly for the original release, which was apparently brutal. But, the pixel remaster fixes all that and makes the game far more playable. So, I finally gave FF2 a try.
Too many random encounters
This is agony. The encounter rate is atrocious. It’s way too high, every few steps triggers a fight, making exploring dungeons a chore. The fights themselves are also really easy and straightforward, to the point that I played nearly the whole game on auto-battle. I wasn’t engaged with the combat, just auto-attacking through everything. With such a high encounter rate, I can’t imagine what it would be like if each fight was difficult. I probably would have tapped out and not finished the game.
The high encounter rate makes the pace of the dungeons grueling. Each dungeon is built like a maze, with multiple floors of winding corridors and dead ends. The exit to the next floor isn’t clearly marked, and is usually hidden behind a door. The game loves to fill dungeons with empty rooms, that means you’ll be going in and out of doors with little to no reward, butting up against dead end hallways, and doing it all while the high encounter rate bogs down the whole experience. This makes dungeons a frustrating grind, which is unfortunate considering there isn’t much else to the game other than its dungeons.
Thankfully, the pixel remaster gives you tools to mitigate this. You can turn encounters on and off with the press of a button. And, there is a boost option in the configuration menu that allows you to apply experience multipliers, so you can level up faster by doing less fights. I still find it frustrating that I have to go noodle in the options menus, and turn off combat—a core feature of the game—to enjoy it. I’d much prefer having the encounter rate reduced overall, with more exp from each fight, so we could just play the game from beginning to end without any hinderances. They could’ve added a classic mode for those who wanted to play through a grinder like the original release.
Flat characters
I didn’t find the main cast interesting at all. There’s not much to them, nothing interesting is revealed about their past, and their relationships with the other characters are sterile at best. This is true for almost all the NPCs in the game, from the princess who gives you your early quests, to the final villain. There’s no substance to any of them.
The rotation of guest characters doesn’t fare much better. They all fall into the same category, uninteresting and flat. The only intriguing thing about guest characters are their interesting visual designs, but that only goes so far. Even then, they lack a sense of uniqueness in combat, since each character has the same moveset and spells. Unless you keep the guests with their original weapons, like the dragoon with a spear, there isn’t much that differentiates them. They don’t even get special abilities like jump, steal, chakra, or any of the other Final Fantasy staples. All this makes the guests feel like just another unit, easily replaced with a blank soldier rather than a named character.
Proto-Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy II has many of the hallmarks that would become the norm for the series, like guest characters and character deaths. But, being an early entry in the series, none of it is fleshed out yet. The characters and villains are loosely tied together, but not in a way with any meaningful depth. The guest characters feel shallow, and the deaths are often lacklustre (except one that I thought was well done). All in all, FF2 very much feels like a proto-Final Fantasy. An early version filled with all the narrative beats that would become standout moments in the following games. The characters and story arc even feel like an early version of Final Fantasy IV, like FF2 was the rough draft to FF4’s final edit.
Conclusion
I thinks it’s fascinating from a historical perspective, but on its own I can’t say it’s a good game. I would not recommend playing it, especially if you don’t already have an interest in the history of the series or that of JRPGs. If you do play it, I’d suggest making shameless use of the experience multipliers in the boost menu, and turning encounters off whenever they start to annoy you.
The boost multipliers and toggle for encounters help a lot, but I still find it frustrating that I have to turn off a core aspect of the game. The most fun I had was when encounters were off and I was only fighting monsters from chests and bosses. Which made me wish they’d modified the encounter rate and experience by default, and then gave players some kind of classic option for those that want the grind.
Despite all that, Final Fantasy II grew on me in the end. This is clearly an important part of Final Fantasy’s foundation, one that future FFs would build off of. Even if I can’t wholeheartedly recommend FF2, I’m still glad to have experienced it.