Final Fantasy II breaks away from tabletop traditions - and is better than its reputation
I played the black sheep of the FF family for the first time
(After a long pause to dive into Tears of the Kingdom, I’ve resumed my playthrough of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series. My thoughts on FFI and its pretty straight adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons can be found here.)
Let’s get this out of the way: the story of Final Fantasy II is not good. It’s three-quarters a Star Wars lift and then takes a hard, completely untelegraphed turn into Christian mythology in the endgame (man, it would really have been nice if anybody at all had mentioned concepts like Hell, the Devil, or any religious stuff in general in the first 15 hours of the game!). Points to Square for trying something new with having actual named characters as opposed to player cyphers, but personalities are so arch that they basically don’t matter — your group is essentially comprised of “the leader,” “the dumb barbarian,” “the girl,” and “the fourth one.”
All conversations are tropes, emotions are always at 11, and NPCs die all the time, in ways that video game scripts hadn’t really managed to make affecting yet. The first time you lose your rotating fourth party member (he gets crushed by a runaway boulder), it’s a little sad because of how sudden and shocking it is. By the sixth time it happens, you’re over it. (This is an issue that definitely persists into the series, BTW, and was my least favorite part of Final Fantasy IV the last time I played it.)
Comparing FFII to I on story, it’s not even close for me — the time loop trick of I, with that kickass second-person ending narration, absolutely tops the “stop the evil Emperor who is also somehow the Devil” plot of II.
But — wildly hot take here — I actually had more fun playing II than I.
Unique Progression
FFII is often regarded as the worst Final Fantasy game, in large part because of its progression system. Instead of your party members gaining levels that improve their stats across the board, II incrementally improves only what each character puts into practice in battle. So, for instance, if you have a character who tends to cast a lot of spells, their magic ability will get better, but their physical attacks will not. If you give your beefy fighter an axe, they’ll git gud with that weapon (being able to deal multiple hits in a single round of combat), but their sword or knife skill will still be paltry. It’s a really interesting design choice, if not the most accessible one. You see what they’re going for, trying to make something a little more ambitious and, I guess, “realistic” than the fully D&D-inspired leveling system of Final Fantasy I.
Of course if you know the history of these games, you know that this stat-specific leveling was abandoned right after this game, and a return to the blanket “your character is level X” system of Final Fantasy I basically stuck for the rest of the series.
(Side note, isn’t it interesting that so many early Nintendo sequels seemed to be made without a lot of care for replicating what came before? I’m thinking of Super Mario Bros. 2 [US edition] and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in particular. Maybe this was an age before nostalgia? Something for me to think about.)
Maybe it’s partially because, 35 years later, the experience system in FFII feels like a novelty, but I quite enjoyed it for what it was. I encountered a specific episode in the game that really sold me on its appeal. I call it “The Esuna Struggle.”
The Esuna Struggle
You may remember my FFI piece talking about the nadir of my experience in that game, wandering around the world looking for wherever the hell I was supposed to use my newly acquired “Levistone” item, which the game was not invested in helping me figure out at all. Final Fantasy II gave me the opposite of that.
About halfway through the game, I was towards the bottom of a dungeon and had run into an encounter with some monsters in a treasure chest (some Chimera, I believe) who used their Bad Breath ability to try to turn my whole party to stone. They got everyone but my main magic-user, Maria, who use wearing a Ribbon and thus immune to all status effects. Maria’s magic was good enough to take out those punks by herself, but after the battle, I found that I didn’t have any items or magic to cure the Petrify condition. That left me with a critical choice: did I warp out of the dungeon after getting almost to the end (seriously like two rooms away), or did I press forward with just Maria and see if she could beat its boss on her own?
The really slick thing about Final Fantasy II’s experience system is I didn’t have to do either. Instead, I Googled what cured Petrify, and I found out that a sixth-level Esuna spell could undo the effect. I only had Esuna leveled to four at that point. BUT thanks to FFII’s progression system, I could just sit in that dungeon room grinding out encounters with weak monsters, casting Esuna fruitlessly on my stone bros, until finally I had put enough work into using that spell — even unsuccessfully — that I could proc a couple more levels in it and actually restore the other members of my party! Not going to lie, it felt like a real triumph, like actual purposeful grinding with a clear and reachable end goal. It felt badass, honestly, and even a little realistic. My character put a lot of effort into learning one particular spell to save her companions, and it paid off. That’s cool as hell.
(Now it turns out that that particular dungeon didn’t end up having a boss encounter, so Maria could have walked through the rest of it on her own anyway, but that’s besides the point that in that moment… she became a star...!)
The Key Terms System
Another interesting development in Final Fantasy II that the rest of the series didn’t stick with is the Key Terms system.
And while the combat mechanics of FFII pull away from tabletop, this played like an attempt to bring actual roleplay elements into the game. It’s very light, mind you, but I still found it effective, especially for an (originally) 8-bit title.
How this works is every once in a while, an NPC will drop an important term in conversation, which will be conveyed in red text. At that point, the game allows you to “Learn” the term, storing it in a databank that you can later access to “Ask” important NPCs about it. Granted, it’s always fairly telegraphed when you should do this and what terms should be asked to which characters, but still — most RPG video games, especially pre-21st century, put you on rails of having one set conversation with every NPC you run into. I thought it was super clever of any classic game, but especially one from 1988, to allow you to customize conversations based on what information you had and what else you wanted to know. That’s something that I would have loved to see carry forward in the series, and I’m curious how FFIII feels after its predecessor established such a high bar for character interaction.
Man on a Mission
Speaking of character interaction, the plot in FFII is compelled forward much more by direct dialogue than in the prior game. For most of its playtime, the game is heavily mission-centric — you have a home base in one location or another, and the NPC in charge of your Rebel army lets you know what you need to do and where you should be going to do it. Though there are a few mechanical downsides — notably, that you end up walking back and forth between towns a lot in the early game, sometimes for one simple conversation — this also helps the pacing feel a lot more protected and clear than FFI (again I note how inscrutable it is to know what to do with the Levistone). It’s nice that there’s pretty much always an obvious person to talk to when you need direction, and the times when that person can’t talk to you, the game’s story pretty clearly gives you an alternative. There were only a couple moments in my playthrough of FFII where I felt unsure of where to go, and I was always able to work out next steps with a little bit of critical thinking or careful exploration, which helped me keep a momentum that offset a bit of the early game repetitiveness.
Final Thoughts
The FF fandom’s general response to II is right on: this is a strange game that sticks out among the 2D titles for some curious mechanical choices. I disagree with the fandom at large, though, that that makes it bad. Granted there are a ton of quality-of-life improvements in the Pixel Remaster that just aren’t present in the NES version, but if we assume that these updates are more or less the definitive editions of the games, then I do think we could stand for a bit of an FFII reevaluation.
I’m not sure that the experience system established here would have worked for the rest of the series, especially since Final Fantasy in general is so known for its customizable job/class system that gets honed in a lot of the games around this one. I do feel like the Key Terms system could have lasted a while longer, at least until video game development allowed for more dynamic dialogue trees in general. And it seems like a mission-based plot driver has slipped in and out of the series throughout its history, sometimes successfully (Final Fantasy XIV) and others less so (Crisis Core).
My biggest takeaway from all those systems is this: Final Fantasy II is a game that’s invested in giving players the tools they need to succeed. In an era when games were mindlessly punishing in pointless ways (and I count FFI among them), it felt strikingly modern to have one offer such a careful player experience. There are still challenges in FFII to be sure, but it seldom felt cheap or unfair. I didn’t spend 90 minutes wandering around the world just to need to step onto a random tile in the desert. Instead, I often had clear objectives that still left room for improvisation. I could get more than one piece of critical information at a time thanks to a surprisingly robust keyword system that encouraged conversations. And I could sculpt my party with a fine chisel instead of a mallet, training in particular skills if I ever ran into a sudden deficiency. If every Final Fantasy game were like this, I think it would wear on you. But to have just the one — well, I just think it’s neat.
~~The Plugs Section~~
(Like some dang podcast, I’m gonna use the end of all my posts to plug stuff I want folks to know about)
The Kickstarter pre-launch page for my next big publishing adventure, Rock & Roll Greatest Hits, is live now. It would really help me with the algorithms if you “followed” it (even if you don’t want to back the thing! This is a no-commitment follow!)
Mortified Chicago, the live lit/comedy show I coproduce (in association with WBEZ!), has its next show at the historic Studebaker Theater on Saturday, September 23 and it’s gonna be cool. Tickets are available now.