Final Fantasy II is not well liked. In nearly every list I can find ranking the Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy II sits square at the bottom. Tellingly, for many American fans, Final Fantasy II doesn’t even mean Final Fantasy II; it means Final Fantasy IV, released in America as the second game in the series.
Where did it go wrong? Did it go wrong? If you’ve followed my work, you know that I have some contrarian impulses. Could I possibly… defend Final Fantasy II? And how did the franchise go from a company-saving hit to an embarrassing misstep so quickly?
Welcome back to Fantasies Revisited.
“A long lived peace is at an end.”
Final Fantasy II sets a different tone right from the start. In Final Fantasy I, you start off by choosing ‘jobs’ for your four characters. Those jobs define their physical appearances. Here, however, the game asks you to name four characters with distinct looks and no definable class. From there, the game sets the scene: The Emperor of Palamecia has summoned an army of demons and monsters and moved to conquer the neighboring Kingdom of Flynn. Quickly defeated, Flynn’s army fractures into a rebellion, reuniting in a small town far from the captured capital.
In that flight, four young people who watched their parents get killed in the fighting flee. One of them sacrifices himself so the other three can escape safely. Now a trio, the three youths make their way to Altair, a town where the Princess of Flynn is gathering a rebel army to try to take back their lands. There, they join up with the rebels and begin to undertake missions to help arm the burgeoning military and overthrow the tyrannical Emperor.
But the Emperor’s power is unnatural. He meddles with forces beyond his control. And, in fighting him and seeking their lost friend, the trio risks hell on earth.
“The Emperor of Palamecia has called forth monsters from the underworld and has begun his campaign for world conquest.”
JRPG design can feel kind of staid. In Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987), you leveled up in combat. This basic system has by and large persisted over the history of the genre. Which is why it’s interesting to me that Final Fantasy II (1988) tries to genuinely change things up with a system that’s more Skyrim than Dungeons & Dragons.
In it, characters level up based exclusively on the skills they use in combat. Cast Cure? Cure will get more powerful, and your ‘Spirit’ stat is more likely to increase. Swing a sword? You get better at swinging swords, and your character gets physically stronger. It’s mostly intuitive, though there are some strange touches that can make it feel unpredictable.
I genuinely really like this system in theory, but… it’s a game from 1988. There were a lot of limitations on what it could do. And, unfortunately, those limitations ended up sinking an innovative system. Casters are always going to be at a weakness here, because it costs precious resources to cast a spell, while swinging a weapon is always free. So every character ends up being a different flavor of fighter with some other stuff tacked on top. This also means that you’ll likely have to spend time grinding spells to get them up to snuff for the game’s final dungeon.
The balance is off, but that would be a pretty minor inconvenience if the combat was fun. And look, I get that turn-based combat isn’t fun for everyone, but I enjoy it. So trust me when I say: Final Fantasy II‘s combat might be a series low-point. See, a lot of enemies have the ability to paralyze the target on hit. What happens when enemies paralyze your entire party? You just… sit there. For turn after turn. Hoping you can survive, but knowing that the enemy is just reparalyzing you every turn. And then you die, or limp past the battle needing to waste a lot of resources reviving and healing an entire team.
As a design choice, this feels more at home in Dragon Quest I or Phantasy Star I. Those games sought to ‘punish’ players who pushed too far in their explorations. Final Fantasy I could be challenging, but its ethos was to reward players who tried something new. Here, the combat is difficult, but not in a rewarding way. Instead, as with the worst encounters in Persona and Shin Megami Tensei games, hard counters hit players brutally.
“A rebel army arose in the Kingdom of Fynn to thwart the emperor’s plans.”
But combat isn’t the only place that Final Fantasy II tries to innovate. As you speak to characters, for instance, the game will sometimes highlight certain words. You can ‘learn’ those words, which later on allows you to ‘ask’ other characters about them. It’s a neat idea, an early attempt at making game dialogue more interactive.
Unfortunately, as with the combat, the limitations of the era means it never lives up to its potential. You can learn phrases and ideas, but typically the only characters who respond to them are ones who are necessary in that quest chain. This means you have a dozen words in your inventory, but most of them are meaningless for most of the game. In reality, it makes dialogue feel weirder, and just gives you another inventory screen.
That said, while the system doesn’t totally work, I do think it’s valuable. It pushes players to pay more attention to the dialogue, which means the signposting will be more obvious. Beyond that, as CRPGs would soon prove, players like having agency in dialogue. This system is shallow, but it is still an interesting attempt at something that would only later become an invaluable part of RPG design.
“But the rebels’ castle fell to an all-out assault by the empire.”
In discussing Final Fantasy I last week, I made note of the inspiration the series took from tabletop RPGs, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. Final Fantasy II actually steps away from that, just a little bit, creating more mechanical systems that would be clunky and difficult to track in pen-and-paper games. The monster design is still torn straight from a Monster Manual, but there’s more video around the game.
If dungeon crawling is another essential aspect pulled from tabletop gaming, Final Fantasy II amps up the complexity of the dungeons considerably. Unfortunately, some of this expansion falls prey to the same kind of artificially-inflated difficulty of the combat. Final Fantasy II has a lot more dead-ends than the previous game. Unfortunately, these dead ends are often hostile or uninteresting in execution.
For example, empty rooms are a common way to slow players down here. You see five doors; two lead to treasure, two lead to empty rooms, one leads further into the dungeon. You don’t really have any way of knowing which is which. This adds loading time and encounters without really showing the player anything new or offering any interesting rewards.
Many of the things early Final Fantasy pulled from tabletop gaming are positive. But at times, Final Fantasy II feels more hostile than most games in the series. It feels like playing a tabletop RPG where the DM is antagonistic instead of supportive. Yes, game, you can paralyze me over and over again. You can create weird boring dead ends.
But why are you? I don’t believe that video games have to be fun. I think there’s room for more antagonistic gameplay design. But anyone who has ever played a bad Soulslike knows, antagonistic gameplay is about more than just hostility. It is about trying to predict what the player will do so you can trick them, teach them something new. Then, you can recreate that scenario, and test the player — or pull the rug out from under them. Final Fantasy II doesn’t really do that. It’s hostile, but not necessarily interesting.
“Left with little choice, the rebels withdrew to the remote town of Altair.”
Final Fantasy II doesn’t really work. That said, it’s a better game than it gets credit for. The Star Wars-esque story is leagues ahead of what was being done in many other JRPGs at the time. There are memorable characters and effective dramatic beats. And you can see the game trying, pushing at the boundaries of the genre. It makes sense that, while the game has a bad reputation now, it was initially met with incredibly positive reviews in Japan.
After all, many of these ideas would become more normalized in RPGs. The idea of skills leveling with use defined The Elder Scrolls, among other Western RPGs. And giving players more say in dialogue beyond simply ‘yes/no’, ‘accept/reject’ mechanics is likewise completely standard in many RPG subgenres. Final Fantasy II doesn’t do them well, but they were still interesting and innovative here.
As with Final Fantasy I, however, the Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster is the best way for new players to experience the game, in my opinion. That said, pretty much everything noteworthy about the game draws from the original, for both good and ill. Final Fantasy II was a strangely influential game, if not a well loved one. A must-play for Final Fantasy completionists, but sloppy and strange enough that casual fans will likely be put off by some of its choices.
And with that, Part II of “Fantasies Revisited” is complete. Join us next time as we take a detour away from the Pixel Remasters and mainline games for a semi-related oddity: 1989’s The Final Fantasy Legend.
See you soon.