💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 10

[simias]

Final Fantasy 2 Beginner Club W10

Week 10	2026-03-06T15:00:00Z
Previous week	💍 Final Fantasy 2 - Week 9
Home Threads	FFBC / FF2BC

Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

Final Fantasy II script

Stopping point

Finish the game

週刊完璧主義通信

Technically nothing is really “missable” this week since we finish the game and so we can’t lock ourselves away from anything, but you’ll probably want to make sure that you collect Excalibur and Masamune this week which are both accessible this week and easily missable on your way to the final boss.

More details

Last week we managed to defeat the Emperor and then confront the Dark Knight! But suddenly, the Emperor rose from the grave to claim his Empire back and bring Hell on Earth.

Finn

You can discuss with Hildaたち to understand what you have to do: to prevent the Emperor from using the forces of Hell to conquer Earth, we have to actually enter the Pandaemonium to banish him. How do we get there you ask? When conveniently a new path is now accessible: the Jade Passage awaits. You can ask the people in Finn for its location, but I must say that I struggled to make sense of them when I played the Famicom version. Conveniently in the Pixel Remaster you get a small cutscene showing you where it is when you first exit to the world map.

Anyway, if you still struggle to find it, it’s on the Mysidian continent, all the way to East. It looks like a small round lake on the world map.

Before we go there however we want to do a quick detour by Dist to bring the bad news: Richard, the last of the Dragon Knights, is dead.

Dist

Talk to the woman and mention the 竜騎士. She’ll thank you for informing her and will reward you with Excalibur, the heirloom of the Dragon Knights.

Jade Passage

Get ready for the final challenge. This is just one big dungeon leading to the final boss, but it’s bigger than anything we’ve seen yet. It’s broken down in two parts: first the Jade Passage then Pandemonium, but there’s no opportunity to rest or save (outside of autosaves and ちゅうだん in the Pixel Remaster). In the original Famicom version it means that dying against the final boss means having to redo the entire dungeon. In the Pixel Remaster you can reload immediately before the boss.

You can still use teleport at any moment to return to the world map if you want, but you’ll have to redo the entire dungeon from the start if you do.

In the area of the Jade Passage with the big waterfall, there’s a hidden shop behind the foot of the waterfall:

In the Pixel Remaster they show a black mage in the waterfall so it’s easier to spot:

Pandaemonium

More dungeon! This section is a lot more labyrinthine than the last, you’ll have to explore to find all the treasures. There’s one that’s very easy to miss:

Get to the room with a lone pillar at the top-right, there’s a fake wall on the right side that leads to a room off-screen with the 正宗まさむね. In the Pixel remaster the tile with the fake wall has a shifting texture to identify it. In the original there’s nothing at all.

The Iron Giant (鉄巨人, stylized in katakana in the game as テツキョジン) can be found in the 5th, 6th and 7th floors of Pandaemonium. It’s a random encounter with a very low probability (similar to DEATH MACHINE in FF1) but it uses the boss theme instead of the normal battle theme. It’s not nearly as strong as Death Machine, but it drops some of the best gear in the game.

The Iron Giant will become a recurring enemy in future games.

Map

Miscellaneous

Read this after you’re done:

Infernal symphony

As we already discussed these past weeks, the soundtrack of FF2 is a bit hit-or-miss compared to FF1, but there are a few standout tracks. The soundtrack of the final dungeon is one of those in my opinion:

https://youtu.be/GANINrVaM-g

I don’t always like the Pixel Remaster arrangements, I feel like they tend to neutralize some of the originality of the score by opting for a safe “orchestral” rendition that’s in vogue nowadays, but I must say that I like what they did here. It’s not subtle, but it’s effective:

https://youtu.be/aDBKqQl40l8

Here’s a comparison of various versions, I quite like the Wonderswan version as well:

https://youtu.be/r4zFZgwpu4M

This melody will be reused in Final Fantasy IX but with a very different mood.

Soul of Rebirth

In the original and Pixel Remaster, the story ends here. In some ports however there is Soul of Rebirth, additional content that follows our fallen comrades Scott, Joseph, Min’u and Richard in the afterlife as they go through their own quest to help Firion and the others defeat the Emperor from the other side. This ties into their apparition in the final scene of the main game where, finally at peace, they can leave the world of the living behind them.

Participation

• I’m playing along
• I will catch up later
• I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this section yet
• I’m a filthy preplayer but I’m here for the discussion

The Final Fantasy 2 polls!

polls

What did you think of the pacing of this club?

• I played at my own pace and didn’t attempt to stay in sync with the club
• I wanted to keep up with the club but external circumstances prevented me from doing so
• It was too fast for me, I fell behind
• It was challenging but I managed to keep up
• It was fine
• I could have gone a bit faster but I didn’t mind
• It felt slow but I still followed along
• It was too slow and I ended up filthy preplaying

What’s your experience with playing games in Japanese?

• This is the first time I play a game in Japanese
• I have played a few (≤3) games in Japanese
• I have played a bunch of games in Japanese

How difficult was it for you to play this game in Japanese?

• Very hard
• Quite hard
• Somewhat challenging
• Easy
• Trivial

How useful was the spreadsheet for you?

• What spreadsheet? (Didn’t use it at all)
• I used it a bit but I could easily do without it
• I could have played without it, but it would have been significantly harder
• I don’t think I would have made it without the spreadsheet

How would you rate this game?

• Great
• Good
• Underwhelming
• Bad

Now the fun stuff

Note that you don’t have to rank every entry every time if you don’t want to, you can just rank the top entries and ignore the others.

Favourite main party member

• フリオニール
• マリア
• ガイ

Favourite temporary party member/meat shield

• レオンハルト
• ヨーセフ
• ミンウ
• ゴードン
• レイラ
• リチャード

Favourite Dungeon

• Semit cave
• Ice cave
• Kashuorn castle
• Dreadnought
• Wyvern cave
• Arena
• Finn castle
• South island
• Mysidian cave
• Leviathan
• Mysidan tower
• Tornado
• Castle Paramekia
• Pandaemonium

Favourite enemy sprite

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Best death of an ally

• Scott, mortally wounded while fighting for the Kingdom
• Joseph, crushed by a boulder
• The king, bossing people around
• The wyvern, poisoned by the Empire
• Min’u, opening a door
• Cid and countless civilians, tornadoed to death
• Richard, facing the demon emperor

Should Firionil have tapped that?

• Obviously not, it was a blatant trap, he would have been murdered.
• That snake lady kinda THICC tho…

Best music

• Battle theme
• Rebel army
• Town
• Main theme
• Castle Pandemonium
• Imperial army
• Chocobo theme
• Tower of the magi
• Ancient castle
• Dungeon
• Battle theme 2
• Finale
• Game over

Best Final Fantasy so far

• Final Fantasy 1
• Final Fantasy 2

[Akashelia]

Love the polls!

“Best death of an ally” ouch that one hurts a bit.

[JupiterJesus]

Part 1

I started off by hunting for whatever monsters I didn’t have in my zukan. I think there were only four missing, so I got that out of the way quickly now that we have an airship, woo!

The monsters in this dungeon are no joke. Especially now that this useless turd is on our team… Leo getting merced after every few battles is a given. For some reason he develops really slowly, even though we’re fighting tough monsters. The dragons in the boxes hit hard enough to one shot Leo, and physical attacks did very little to them. I might have even party wiped at some point in the Jade. Once I got all the chests, I ported out to tent up and have a go at the final area later.

Basically no Japanese today, besides a bit of confusing clues about the “Jade” and Mysidia, and the stuff about the Excalibur. Even so, there were several new words for me. I loved the speculation that the emperor lives in Satan’s own castle. How does Gordon even know that? He sounds pretty sure of himself!

I don’t have much confidence that Leo will be useful by the time I get to the end.

Achievements: Memory Lane (learned all passwords), Sword of Myth (Obtained Excalibur)

[simias]

on characters, spoilers for the ending

I see that Maria is winning the poll for now. Admittedly it’s the only party member who has any real personality in her interactions in the game. Guy could be fun if they had given him more to do, it was unexpected when it turned out that he could talk to those beaver things, but I think he had like 3 lines in the entire game.

I feel like Firion starts this trope which is unfortunately going to continue in many (although not all) FF games where the protagonist is also the least interesting party member.

I found the temporary party members more interesting generally. I was genuinely moved when they reappeared briefly at the end. I feel like it was gutsy to go for such a dark ending, where almost everybody is dead and the situation with Leonhart is left in the air.

[Sisthra]

Roll credits

Personally loved the last dungeon! Cool music, cool scenario, really loved all the minibosses in the trap chest.
(Zombie Bogen that used Flare 16 of all things was the last thing I expected! I suppose he did say he would be seeing us in Hell… And that absolutely random Tiamat encounter lol. Was kinda expecting to see the other 3 pop up
My first reaction in the first few encounters this week was “MAN I miss Richard already…”
Leonhart got oneshot a lot with his HP being barely over 1000. He hits quite well but he was more useful by learning both Haste and Berserk and helping boost Firion to stupid level of power. Usually against the minibosses in the first turn Firion would get a level 8 and level 3 Berserk from Guy and Leonhart, + Haste from himself.
Gave him Excalibur in the dominant hand and the Defender in the other, and he was hitting for something like 5k a turn. Bosses being resistant to physical damage didn’t seem to matter once the buffs stack high enough.
So I got to the Emperor and had to put the game in pause because I was going out, picked it back up again hours later and started the fight all excited!!
And I… Obviously forgot… To give Firion the Blood Sword lmao
So I didn’t even get to use it!!
(I also must have missed the Masamune… somewhere…)
Berserk + Haste Firion still stabbed him to death without much problem, the rest of the cast was basically there to pour buffs on him and act as decoys for attacks.
Emperor killed Maria, hit Firion once and tried to nuke Guy (who tanked it like a bro btw), and that’s all he got to do before Firion sword windmilled him to death. Again.
Compared to the Final Fantasy I final battle, it was a bit anti climatic, but I don’t think the game was expecting 4k+ damage in a turn.

The little ending cutscene was cute, especially seeing all our fallen allies again…
(Sorry Min’wu, I didn’t use Ultima in the end… Why use the ultimate magic when angrily stabbing someone 30 times really fast works so much better???)

The plot is obviously a big step up from Final Fantasy I, especially for the time.
The characters don’t have much characterization yet, but it’s nice that we can start to see glimpes of it. Just the fact that our party actually spoke and had their own opinions makes them a little bit more fleshed out than the FF1 Warriors of light, which are basically completely up to the player to fill in.
There’s quite a lot of npcs, and the fact that the fourth party member is always a guest, while a bit annoying from a gameplay perspective because they always trailed a bit behind or felt not worth to give them good equipment, gives each segment of the game their little “arc”.
Some things could have been handled better, like the useless plot points lol
What was the point of getting the Mythril?
Shrug
What was the point of getting Ultima? Shrug (I guess we can forgive this if we assume it is ““canon”” that the party really did have to use Ultima to truly defeat the Emperor)
I still had a lot of fun in the game! There were admittedly some moments where I turned encounters off because I was basically not getting anything out of them, and the encounter rate felt just a little bit too high, especially when 1/3 of a dungeon is backtracking through the many, many, MANY empty useless dead end rooms. (I could have never played the Famicon version)
Not sure what design choice led them to this, but it did make FF2 stand out.
That and the many turtles in the first couple weeks lol
Maybe the weakest part of the game is the Emperor himself. He doesn’t even get a name in the actual game! He gets a name only in the official novelization which is almost lost media, and then the Dissidia spin off made it canon.
(If you’re wondering, it’s “Mateus”)
We also don’t get a shred of motivation for why he’s conquering/destroying the world by summoning monsters from literal hell, except for the Evulz, but I guess I can’t really expect deep motivations for a game of the time so it’s fine.
Also, fun fact, his future redesign was allegedly inspired by David Bowie’s role in the movie “Labyrinth”, which had come out just a couple years before FF2

… I can see that…

As a little bonus, here’s Firion and Emperor Mateus’s designs from the various Dissidia spinoff game, where they also get a tiny, tiny bit more of characterization, at least.

(Ehyy look at that Blood Sword cameo right over there!)
Being a fighting game, every character gets their little unique moveset directly inspired by their game. Since FF2’s big unique thing was the weapon proficiency system, they obviously had to show it in Firion’s moveset somehow, and they did it in the most ridiculous and amazing anime way possible. “Ok so Firion’s really, really got at using all his weapons. Let’s show this by having him keep them all equipped at the same time”

You can play “spot how many weapons he’s carrying”. It’s ridiculous and I love it.
He was probably some poor animator’s worst nightmare in every cutscene he popped up because of all that potential clipping.
(He’s also shown commanding them mentally and having them fly around and return to his hand with magic sometimes. Which does look pretty badass so good for him.)
Meanwhile Emperor’s Mateus moveset is all about setting “traps” which explode with a delay or after the opponent has touched them, with barely if any direct moves to damage the opponent, I suppose to show that he’s some “master of cunning” and strategy or something.
That or it’s a meta reference to all those trap chests/doors/whatever
Have fun playing “spot the reference” in this short cutscene from Dissidia Duodecim
https://youtu.be/U0H9K1A9pjE

[simias]

reply

@Sisthra

Berserk + Haste Firion still stabbed him to death without much problem, the rest of the cast was basically there to pour buffs on him and act as decoys for attacks.

I actually like doing that in all RPGs (boosting a single character and having them deal all the damage) because it always felt unfair as a kid that I would gang up on a single boss with 4 warriors. 1 warrior and 3 cheerleaders feels more 武士道-like.

@Sisthra

There were admittedly some moments where I turned encounters off because I was basically not getting anything out of them, and the encounter rate felt just a little bit too high, especially when 1/3 of a dungeon is backtracking through the many, many, MANY empty useless dead end rooms. (I could have never played the Famicon version)

I did have a map open at all times when doing the dungeons on Famicom, the encounter rate is so high and the encounters themselves so much slower that I couldn’t bear to deal with the useless detours and dead-ends all over the place.

Strangely enough the encounter rate felt worse in the Pixel Remaster, but I think it’s because of what I mentioned in a previous thread: with auto-battle and being able to run it feels like you spend all your time in mindless random encounters and then a minuscule amount of time actually exploring. On Famicom you actually have to think a bit during the encounters (because no retargetting, mainly, but also because the game is generally a fair bit harder) so your brain remains a engaged to optimize the encounter, and then you get a bit of time leisurely walking in the dungeon before the next one triggers.

@Sisthra

Maybe the weakest part of the game is the Emperor himself. He doesn’t even get a name in the actual game! He gets a name only in the official novelization which is almost lost media, and then the Dissidia spin off made it canon.
(If you’re wondering, it’s “Mateus”)

Yeah Garland wasn’t amazing in FF1 but he had a little more going for him. It also makes it hard to forgive Leonhart for joining force with evil incarnate just because he lusts for power.

I appreciate the Dissidia lore, I don’t really like fighting games so it’s a big blind spot in my FF knowledge.

[JupiterJesus]

Part 2

The final dungeon was obnoxious. The freaking encounter rate, combined with the sheer number of floors and the design where you’re expected to run a circuitous route around an enormous room to get to the next floor… Still better than FFI’s final dungeon though. With the high encounter rate, I didn’t even have to farm for Iron Giant, he just showed up randomly while passing through.

I love how we just got Excalibur, then an hour later we get an even stronger sword. I think I was doing 2k damage per hand (dual wield) without any buffs at lvl 11 skill. Hardly matters as at this point its just a walk to the end. This is maybe why I rarely finish JRPGs - the end never feels satisfying, so I start doing the extra content and then fall off…

My favorite part was how they really leaned into this actually being Christian Hell. Tiamat from D&D is in there, even though she’s technically from D&D hell, not Christian Hell, but D&D Hell is based on Dante’s hell too so I guess its fine. Zombie Bougan fights us after telling us he’d see us in hell. Astaroth and Beelzebub, major princes or whatever of Christian Hell. Beast Demon is just Gottos, but sent to Hell now? I still want to know what happened to Lucifer. Did the emperor shove him in a box, too?

As for the emperor… I was a bit confused. I put Excalibur in Firion’s offhand, and it did 0 damage (<200 on a crit), but I knew that it did 1500-2k damage normally. I also know that other dual wielded swords typically did plenty of damage. The holy spear I had in someone else’s hands also was weak. Is this a “holy damage” resistance? Seems odd. Doesn’t matter, because he went down even with Firion doing barely any damage, no buffs. Mostly he went down to lvl 16 flare and lvl 11 Ultima. At one point he stole 2k health from Firion, so I thought shit was about to get real, then he did nothing threatening the entire rest of the fight and I autobattled to the end… eh.
Achievement cleanup:

The cap for levels is 16… I can’t for the life of me get past TEN, despite casting flare over and over and over for the entire final dungeon! Everythings dead by the time you can cast the spell enough times to get any experience, and the requirements are so high after lvl 10. Even getting cure up there requires actually taking damage, so it isn’t any easier. What I ended up doing was finding a group of high level enemies and casting Flare on the whole group (since group damage kills the damage), then healing the enemies. Set to autobattle and go eat dinner. Once they’re out of mana, they autoattack the enemies to death and the battle ends. Since you can only level one spell at a time this took several long battles, but I wasn’t there for it so it was fine. Pointless? Yep. If I’d had to be actively engaged, I’d have skipped it as it would have taken hours of mind numbing grinding. I had to try something different for weapon skill, and finally settled on whacking a white dragon over and over with the weakest swords in the game.

Almost had a heart attack when Legendary Treasure Hunter didn’t pop, because I wasn’t about to play the whole game again. It showed I was missing three chests… then it popped when I went through a portal to the next floor.

Final specs:

[JupiterJesus]

Dammit I had to play the final dungeon with the sound off and had no idea what music I was missing. Must change my best music vote… It’s also fun to realize that entire section of FF9 was yet another reference to a game I never got to play.

[Akashelia]

characters

@simias

Guy could be fun if they had given him more to do, it was unexpected when it turned out that he could talk to those beaver things, but I think he had like 3 lines in the entire game.

Who?

@Sisthra

redesign was allegedly inspired by

wow that looks really Final Fantasiesque indeed fun links / pics, thanks for sharing!

[Kelsyy]

Finished! I said I’d never replay the game after I beat it last time. This time for real lmao.

Week 10

I ran past every single chest this week. They can’t entice me anymore!

He went down in two blood sword swings. The first one did 9999 damage. Very cool.

Less than 10 hours of playime, no encounters goes zooooom.

The music is the highlight of the game right here for me lol.

Nerding out over the final boss music

The final boss theme is one of my favorite pieces of music in all of final fantasy. Something about it just REALLY hits all the right notes for me. The modulation remix is the highest level song I can play in theatrhythm at an 11 or so. I REALLY like the remix.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DagZwI6tBRI

I can only find a theatrhythm version lol. Shootout to theatrhythm in general. Highly recommend, especially as we keep playing more games!

There are more remixes of this one, including a dissidia remix, but this one is my favorite.

The PR remix was interesting as well. I also really like the OG famicom version. It’s just such a good song in general.

The more FF games we play, the more I’ll get to talk about the music and remixes. FFIII in particular has some insane remixes I can’t wait to share.

[Daisoujou]

I did it! I’ve written a review on Backloggd that I spent some time rambling on so that’ll be much of my final thoughts for the game: Daisoujou's review of Final Fantasy II | Backloggd

Maybe it’s not entirely new information for those who read my comments along the way, but there it is. I like and hate FF2, it’s really good/bad.

Very quick couple W10 thoughts

Glad I started stockpiling elixirs cause this final dungeon really is a gauntlet. We came really close to losing actually against the blue varient of The Thing + 2 of those horsemen that do like 1000+ damage each. Could’ve had my run end somewhere in the final dungeon off that. The final boss with blood swords is just funny though he looks extremely cool.

Leo had no health and I didn’t bother to train him but he hit nice and hard.

This is my 60th game completed in Japanese!

[simias]

reply

Yeah that mirrors my impressions. I respect the ambition and how much they were willing to risk it, but there’s also a lot that doesn’t work at all.

Admittedly I feel like my opinion of the game soured a bit during my 2nd playthrough on the Pixel Remaster while doing this club. I think that the streamlining of everything actually made the game worse overall, if a lot more accessible. As you mention in your review, in the original version once you figure out how the various systems work there’s quite a bit of strategy in most encounters all the way to the end of the game. It’s not like FF1 where the 2nd half of the game is pretty nonthreatening.

[Daisoujou]

It was so funny how all the complaints about annoying dungeon designs had me thinking they would just be big elaborate labyrinths because people talk that way often about any dungeon crawling that passes a certain point of complexity, and instead it was just… closets. Forever. In some ways there’s no game like this one.

[simias]

I don’t think anybody mentioned it last week but there was peak FF2 gameplay last week in the tornado:

If you took the I path leading to the center entrance you end up with 4 doors, all of which lead to an empty room. You just waste your time visiting all 4, then you have to backtrack.

By the way I also think that the lack of good bosses really hurts the game. It’s especially weird given that they then have random chests be defended by unique demons in the pandemonium.

[Akashelia]

@Kelsyy

Less than 10 hours of playime, no encounters goes zooooom.

Wow that’s pretty fast!

Congrats to all the finishers so cool that we’ve played two FF in Japanese already!

@Daisoujou

This is my 60th game completed in Japanese!

Congrats on that! 58 less than you here but I’m still happy xD

[Thworthwar]

Just wanted to post that I finished the game as well. I really don’t think I would have made it without the club, as it was a little painful towards the end.

Yeah, I agree with what everyone was saying. Fighting at the end felt pointless in the pixel remaster, and when you layer that onto the dungeon design being ‘endless closets’ as Daisoujou put it, it made it rough. I did like some of the cool world changing things that occurred with cities being destroyed and characters actually dying. It felt like a more complete world, but strangely enough I though FF1s story with its twist was overall more compelling… despite it not totally making sense.

[Daisoujou]

Congrats on finishing!

The Famicom experience of the end was… mixed. Like I said it’s actually quite threatening since the trip is so long and those enemies really do pose a threat; I went through a ton of elixirs when running out of our main out-of-fight healer’s MP and had a very close call to dying to a random encounter. I’m sure I could have worked to outpace it but I do think it’s a real strength of this game that it didn’t really hit a point where things became a formality in this version, often RPGs see you breaking away from the curve too hard sometime midgame.

That said, it did just… wear on me. Very giant dungeons at the end, very high encounter rate, very slow fights on this console, etc. There’s not quite enough variety to stop the feeling of being ready to stop doing more fights from overtaking everything else.

[frequent4832]

I really badly want to finish the game so I can click the polls and read the discussion but I’ve been finishing all the Steam achievements first since I was reasonably close just through playing normally and following Simias’s guides for missables. I don’t plan to go for completion in any of the games after this since they each take more effort than the last.

Achievement hunting

• Memory Lane (Learned all passwords.) and Adventurous Wayfarer (Traveled to all the map locations.) - Total freebies thanks to Simias.
• Magic Tactics (Leveled up one magic spell to skill level 16.) - I just walked around in the waterfall-lava and spammed cure from the menu after every step. Slightly annoying that I only ever got one Aspire tome and I gave it to my black mage, not my white mage.
• Weapon Tactics (Leveled up one weapon type to skill level 16.) - It turns out you need a certain number of attacks in a given fight before the experience even starts counting, and by late-game the fights just don’t last long enough unless you’re sandbagging. So I equipped Firion with my two worst swords and had Maria sap the MP of some magic-heavy monsters so they could be used as punching bags. After that I could just leave the game running in auto-battle, but there was some guesswork about when to move on from a fight since you stop gaining exp once you’ve leveled up but there’s no indication of that until you hit the post-battle screen. Took maybe 30 minutes once I landed on the setup. The upside is Firion now hits like a truck with 5k+ damage per round without buffs.
• Legendary Treasure Hunter (Collected treasure from 100% of the chests.) - Not particularly hard since I normally go for all chests anyway. I had a lot of doubt that I might have missed a chest somewhere along the way, not helped by the fact that Steam’s tracker was showing 3 left when I knew from my copious abuse of maps that there were only 2 more in the dungeon. It popped when it was supposed to, though.
• Field Research - Professional (Completed 100% of the Bestiary entries.) - This one definitely took the most focused effort of any of the achievements. 3 separate times (before entering Jade, before leaving Jade, and before the final boss) I had to go through the entire list and wander around for some fights I wouldn’t be able to get later. Iron Giant was predictably the most tedious, but I got him this morning before work so now I’m at 127/128 entries, just missing the Emperor himself.

All that’s left now is to finish off the last boss tonight. Look forward to an unhinged rant about game design sometime soon.

[frequent4832]

Unhinged rant about game design

Wow, this game was bad. I’m racking my brain for a game that I liked less and yet played to completion, but coming up empty. It’s rare to see a creative work that fails so completely at everything it attempts.

• The characters have names and personalities! But that mostly just serves to highlight how nothing they do makes any sense. By the end, my favorite main character was Guy, because he had made it through without ever doing anything to make me hate him by virtue of not really doing anything at all.
• Your party can change with the story! But in practice, it just leaves you with a rotating punching-bag slot of characters who you never want to invest in because they’ll wander off with all your gear at the most inopportune time.
• Your skills level up based on how you use them! But by lategame, they don’t level up at all unless you jump through arbitrary, unexplained hoops. It’s either way too hard or way too easy, depending on how much homework you did and your tolerance for AFK autobattling or spam selecting/canceling abilities, depending on the version.

I could go on. Obviously, the great triumph of the game is the move to a more dramatic story and a living world. Moments like entire towns being destroyed or changing sides are jaw-dropping, and the ambition of the game developers is on clear display. This style of story has since become the single defining trait of a Final Fantasy game, even as every other feature about them changes between installments.

But I can’t help feeling like this game is just a rough draft, built under an uncompromising deadline and released in an unfinished, shoddy state. Even just looking at the Famicom sprites and listening to the music for the polls, it’s unmistakable that absolutely everything needed a polish pass that never came.

[simias]

FF2 defence force

I don’t feel so harshly about the game, I found it interesting enough that I could overlook the many, many issues. It’s definitely rough though, even for the time.

I was surprised that Wikipedia states (without source) that

Upon its release, Final Fantasy II received highly positive reviews in Japan[…]

I can’t imagine this game in this state receiving “highly positive reviews”, but I guess it was a different time. Apparently Famitsu gave it three 9/10 and one 8/10.

Does somebody know where I can find a digital copy of the December 23, 1988 issue of Famitsu? I would be really curious to read these reviews.

That said the same Wikipedia article then says (equally without source):

Due to negative feedback, the next title Final Fantasy III (1990) reverted to the original combat system.

That seems a little contradictory to me but I guess the players back then really engaged with the story/world?