Late game challenges are prone to being less interesting than one might hope, in part from the fact that enemies don't really optimize very much later on while you'll have increasingly extravagant builds (hello, Marche dual wielding the holy sword Excalibur and/or God Save The Queen, both of which do Holy damage and lower the effective resistance of enemies to Holy by one step thus leading to you doing half damage to enemies that are supposed to absorb holy damage, full to immune, and MORE to everyone else lol) and in part because a number of later fights can be summed up as dumb gimmicks.
On the one hand, yes it does suck that there's no challenges worthy of the kind of minmaxing you can get up to in FFTA.
On the other hand, you can make a case for stuff like getting two early Excaliburs and becoming the Doubleking, or grabbing the advanced Thief skills at the first opportunity and getting all sorts of endgame stuff before the first boss, or assassins in general, being hilarious on its own.
SaGa tends to be super jank unless you do deep research into the mechanics and then it becomes a test of how hard you can break the system vs its ability to cheese you back. Like how you can kill the final boss of 2 by casting a low level Wall spell on him and then a low level Toad, and he instantly dies because the kill command is part of the animation and Wall still runs the animation even if it's going to absorb the spell.
It's an acquired taste, which is why the ideas behind it went to side-gigs instead of the mothership of the company.
Wishing you all the luck. I swear there's at least the basic skeleton of a good game in FF2, but its potential wasn't really realized until Kawazu brought the ideas over to the SaGa games.
I still like FF2 but it is absolutely an acquired taste.
My only knowledge of the SaGa games comes from one of the aforementioned video game magazines I read as a child. One of them covered the release of SaGa Frontier 2; SGF2 was the first time any game in the series had a release in Europe at all, so as part of introducing the game to an audience that likely never had heard of its series before, the article started with a retrospective on the SaGa series, Final Fantasy's weirder, hipster sibling.
I read that article many times obsessively as a means of absorbing knowledge of games that I couldn't play ("non-linear gameplay with eight possible protagonists" absolutely blew my tiny child mind), and in particular I was obsessed with the look of SaGa Frontier 2, because, I mean, come on:
It looks like a playable pastel painting.
Sadly, SaGa Frontier 2 would never be one of the... several dozens... hundreds? of Definitely Legitimately Acquired Games that my computer expert stepfather seemed to just spontaneously manifest out of his CD burner and which oddly enough were all lacking the game branding logo on their upwards side and fit into these flatter CD boxes with a PC-printed copy of the front cover of the game, which was how I primarily experienced most of the PS1 catalogue, and so I never got to play any of the SaGa games in the end.
I can't wait! I remember playing the PS1 version as a kid and not minding it at all. Though that begs to question whether it's because I was a dumb kid back then or it's legitimately 'cause I don't mind, but I've been fine with playing FF2 so far. I'm actually having fun with it, particularly using one specific party member. So I like to think that even "kid me" was fine with it (well, beyond the fact that i couldnt solve how to progress the story then...).
Though admittedly with that I'm specifically playing the Dawn of Souls version for quality of life reasons (and also just, well, easier to just feel like playing whenever I wanna), but still, it's not as bad as I thought it'd be, and I certainly didn't expect to like it as much as I am (nor get hit with nostalgia...WOW did it hit). I wanna say why that's the case, or really just more of my thoughts on the game in general, but I think I'll save that for later.
Meanwhile now I'm more interested in SaGa, as I was always curious about the series, specifically Romancing SaGa since that's the one I saw mentioned often.
Steam's insistence on introducing the games in French is amusing, but futile.
After Final Fantasy "saved Square" (I am given to understand that this narrative is inaccurate to the actual historical events but I don't have the details and I don't feel like looking it up right now), establishing the visual, mechanical, and thematic basics of the series to come, if in a fairly bare-bones, blank canvas kind of way, it's time to iterate with Final Fantasy II: Final Fantasy's bigger, bolder, more ambitious sibling, with actual characters, a real plot (maybe?), and new, revamped mechanics!
Boy, these mechanics.
We'll be talking about them.
Before we start the game, though, I'd like to do a détour by the "Extras" tab in Pixel Remaster. I didn't really pay it much attention in the first game; it had the Bestiary but the Bestiary wasn't really needed at any point. It also has a BGM section, which is neat, and…
…a gallery?
I didn't notice that the first time around. I wonder what's -
Holy shit it's a complete gallery of Yoshitaka Amano's concept art for the game. I love it. It's all there! The monster sprites, the environment art… It's beautiful.
Okay, going back to focusing on the game: this time, our starting screen is only asking us for names, not class picks or a party selection. Seeing as these look to be more like actual characters with some degree of personality, I decide to go with the proposed character names:
Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon.
Or rather…
Firion…
…Maria…
…Guy… …and Leon.
Goddamn, look at these character designs. I mean, they're goofy as hell, but they have this quaint old-timey fantasy charm, back when we put barbarian heroes in literal chainmail kangaroo slips and so on.
They look so dumb. I love them.
The opening is much more dynamic than FF1's.
So here we have our diegetic explanation for the monster-plagued world: the Emperor unleashed them from "the Underworld" to aid in his conquest of the world. So they're not just random monsters - they're active participants in an ongoing conflict.
Our four protagonists are orphans from Fynn whose parents died in the conquest (all of them? damn), and the very first thing that happens as the game opens is…
"Ah ah, we're doing an in medias res combat tutorial, I like this, that's-"
"Hm."
It's pretty hard to catch these things in time with the screenshot, but this five-hit combo does several hundred damage and kills Leon instantly.
Well, I suppose "first forced loss intro in JRPG" isn't a bad feather to hang to your hat either, assuming that it's indeed a first!
We are rescued off-screen by Hilda, the princess-in-flight of the Kingdom of Fynn, and Minwu, her… advisor? Or more likely by some of their soldiers. They deliver some exposition over our unconscious body, leaving Firion to wake up alone, before wandering out of the room and finding his friends… some of them at least.
Guy's only had a couple of lines so far, but he appears to be speaking in a vaguely caveman/barbarian kind of speech?
So, already we have at least the bare bones of simple characterization and in-group dynamics. Leon, unfortunately, seems not to have make it, dead or captured. Probably captured, given that he's got his own Amano art.
We proceed to the "throne room" (this isn't a palace, it's a big house in a village the rebellion had to flee too), and when our trio asks if they can join the rebellion, Princess Hilda rebuffs them, saying they're too young/weak to be of help.
That's interesting. Where FFI started us off as powerful warriors who could take on Garland as their opening act (though they still had room to grow, of course) and were immediately sent on a quest to save the world, FFII opens on the main character suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of the Empire's troops, barely avoiding losing their lives, and then being immediately told they're not cut for taking part in the rebellion. Huge shift in presentation here.
While not allowed to formally join the rebellion, the… Youths… Hm.
They're not Warriors of Light. They're the… Rebels? I need a fancy nickname.
Sure, why not.
The Wild Roses are given a password to identify themselves to rebellion members so they can still receive help. Hilda tells them that going to Fynn would be ill-advised, as the Imperials have taken it over and are highly hostile, but her advisor Minwu strongly suggests doing so because he can see the shape of our destiny and it involves going to Fynn. Also, it's possible Leon might be held captive there.
Of note is how the password works - look at that dialogue screen. For the first time, the party has "dialogue options" of a sort. That is, when people bring up a red-colored keyword, you can Learn that keyword, and then Ask about that keyword to anyone. In this case, Wild Rose allows you to trigger specific, rebellion-related dialogue from figures associated with the rebellion. If you have a key item, you can also bring it up to ask about it.
Incidentally, neat detail, check out the guy in the bottom left corner of this image - he's the standard Fynn/Rebellion soldier sprite. And interestingly, he's not modeled after a generic "medieval knight" - wide feathered hat, cape, bright primarily color? This is clearly some kind of musketeer. They may or may not actually have guns, but this situates the setting in a more early modern kind of aesthetic/vibe than FFI.
Well, before heading out on adventure, we are advised to go back to the first room, where we find…
A whole bunch of sages to explain to me the mechanics of the game.
So.
Let's talk about them.
This is a character's status screen:
Maria is weaker but more agile, Guy is slower but stronger. Very classical archetypes here.
The attribute spread is fairly straightforward. Strength determines how hard you hit with weapons, Agility informs your dodging chances, Mind affects your white magic spell, Accuracy and so on are derived values that include the appropriate stat and equipment, etc.
Just one thing.
Notice how there is no character level.
That "skill level" column on the right indicates your proficiency with a given category of weapons, like "all swords" or "bare hands." You level it up by using that weapon. Straightford and common, yeah?
The same is true of every trait on that character sheet.
Every single one.
You don't gain "XP" in the traditional sense in FFII, no, no no no. You gain "Strength XP" for hitting people. You advance your HP number by taking hits. You advance your MP by spending it on spells. You advance your sword proficiency by using sword, yes, but the same is true of spells - you don't buy Fire and Fira and Firaga here, you buy "Fire" and then every time you use it it advances that character's Fire proficiency, increasing both the level of Fire (Fire II, Fire III, etc), its damage, and its MP cost (and locking you out of the weaker but less expensive versions).
It's definitely… Interesting? I'm sure I'm gonna have some Opinions about it when I get, like, a super-spear midway through the game and I look and realize Firion still has only lv 1 in Spears.
We'll see.
In the meantime, time to head out, see the town of Altair, meet some NPCs!
Strong "spot the future playable party member" energy here.
Gordon is miserable because his brother Scott was struck down while they were fleeing and he feels like a coward.
a magic store in the first town and I have some gold, but I decide to try out the basics of fighting before getting into that stuff. So I head out of Altair to fight some goblins:
Interestingly there's a bit of an artistic shift from the previous Pixel Remaster: notice the "softer" contours, taller, more rounded trees, more rounded-edged city walls, and so on. Even the coastline is less jagged:
The world map. Bigger, with what looks to be a more "arctic" biome up north that didn't exist in the first game. Fewer deserts. There's no clear division between a southern and a northern hemisphere; while the game is clearly going to be throwing a thousand barriers to traversal in my way, the landmass has enough continuity that an evil empire growing to conquer the entire thing is somewhat believable.
Familiar faces.
Without magic, of course, combat is incredibly simple: just press attack until everything is dead or you are. The one complication is the introduction of a "row" system; characters in the back row both take and deal less damage from/with everything that isn't a bow or a spell. Maria comes equipped with a bow and is in the back row by default.
The leveling up screen.
With the familiar basics confirmed, I head back into town, and I'm going to split this post here for image length.
I briefly toy with the idea of going against the grain and making Maria a punchwoman and Guy a Magic Guy, but honestly I want to keep my life easy so I just go with what the basic stats incentivize. I buy Cure and Fire for Maria to start her off on her journey as the Caster Girl, and Thunder for Firion so he can do a sword and spell kind of thing.
As for Guy…
After a moment's thought, I decide to just up and steal something @ZerbanDaGreat did in their own recent playthrough they commented on Discord. You see, shields have their own stat, which determines your Evasion chance when equipped with one, but they aren't a weapon as such. If you dual-wield shield, getting twice the Evasion bonus, the weapon you're using to actually hit enemies is your fists. However, the devs anticipated the dreaded Shield Monk build, so unarmed damage is halved while dual-wielding shields.
But not skill growth. Your Evasion still gets trained, and so do your fists. The goal, then, is to train Guy into a dodge tank who will annihilate the opposition when he takes off his shields. Will this work? We'll find out!
With no clear objective other than "find Fynn but you will also probably die when you do," I just wander about the map to figure out my environs. Grassland snake encounters, forest goblin encounters, hornet swarms, so far so familiar. I found a swamp area heading south, and enter it…
Hm.
I am immediately concerned. While these are "mere" animals, Final Fantasy has so far followed a pretty strict ladder of animal threats - the early game is occupied only by common vermins such as snakes and large bugs. A rhinoceros is a huge escalation, so I decide to be on my guard and -
Oh.
Okay so overworld encounters in this one aren't strictly gated behind traveling tools. You can wander off too far and Just Fucking Die. Good to know!
Also, I hadn't saved since Altair, so… that's a near-total reboot. Fun!
So we reload, and try again. With the South being cut off by powerful wildlife, we head north. There's a small village on the way called Gatrea, but it has nothing of much interest beyond being a waypoint you can rest at. And after some journeying, here we are in Fynn!
The characters discuss among themselves that they should stay away from the soldiers. Because I have the reaction to the unknown of a cat, I immediately go interact with the soldier, who somehow immediately identifies the group as "Rebel curs!" and…
That's another wipe. Second in a row. Christ. What are these kids made of, tissue paper?
We reload again, go back to Fynn, and this time we avoid any Captain encounter. Which doesn't mean we get through without a fight!
The city is crawling with low-level monsters, which strikes me as odd until I remember that that is in fact the point of the plot, and these monsters are part of the army that conquered Fynn in the first place.
There's also… nothing else in town.
Even the shops are empty.
There's nothing. Literally nothing. Castle gate's closed, shops are empty, houses are empty, there are NPCs…
Lost and vaguely confused, I check a couple times, then with no clue where to proceed I leave Fynn. I go back to Altair to check if there's new dialogue, but nope. I try to journey past Fynn to the north to see if there's anything up there, and…
In the jargon, that's called a "beef gate." Technically it would be possible to go through, it would just be extremely painful.
Firion gets murked by a giant turtle and I have to hoof it back to Altair for the shrine.
At least in this game it's free.
It's only after asking around on Discord and getting some pointers that I finally understand what I've been missing: one NPC in Gatrea is meant to be your hint and I didn't realize what he was saying mattered and forgot about it until I talked to him again.
Now, in a sane game, this wouldn't have been an issue. Because I would simply have visited Fynn, found the pub, and talked to barkeep. But I didn't find him last time around. Why is that?
Well, you see, in order to reach him you have to "leave" Fynn through a fence to the north, without tripping over the invisible line that decides you left the town screen and drops you back into the overworld, then circle all the way around the town walls until you reach this place:
Inside are more soldiers (the party wipes again when I talk to one to find out if any of them has actual dialogue inside the inn; so far the game has been incredibly more lethal than FFI) and the barkeep.
The barkeep shows me a hidden door, and down that hidden door…
Scott, Prince of Kashuan, lies in bed mortally wounded. He gives me three messages - to his brother, that he is stronger than he believes and to have faith in himself; to the King, that Fynn was taken by the betrayal of one Count Borghen; and to princess Hylda, that he loves her. He then tells us to forget that last one, as "the confession of a dying man would only cause her pain."
Then he gives us his ring as evidence that we met him, and…
He ups and dies right here and there.
With these important words and this item, it's time to go back to Altreia.
On my way there I take a wrong turn somewhere and wipe to a pack of werewolves.
Back in town, I carry Scott's words to his brother and Hylda. Hylda asks me if Scott had any message specifically for her, very clearly hoping for some kind of closure or confirmation of the love they shared, and the Wild Roses tell her "nope," which, like, cold. But I guess he did ask for it. Instead, she tells me that we have proven ourselves worthy of taking full part in the rebellion, and tasks us with our first mission: the Empire owes its victory in part to its troops being fully decked in precious mythril armor, and so the rebellion must secure its own source of mythril.
In order to do this, we'll need to do some light traveling - using a canoe to reach a port town, then buying a trip on their ship, to a town that has an airship, and finally to Salamand. But first…
Our fourth playable party member! Minwu, the royal advisor! I've heard enough to know that he is the first of a rotating cast of "guest members," with the Firion/Maria/Guy trio remaining core, which is an interesting experiment in party design. We'll see how it plays out. Also, having taken one look at his spell list, Minwu looks like a beast. A hundred MP and at least a dozen lv 2-7 spells, although all of them are white magic:
So I guess he's going to be our crutch for now!
I think that's enough for a first round, this post is getting big tall as it is.
So that's our introduction to Final Fantasy II - more story, more characters, weird mechanics, weird party design, high lethality, high grind. This looks like it'll be quite an experience.
Confession: I had been waiting for you to start your FFII playthrough before starting my own, because I am mired by choice paralysis on how to build my characters, and was hoping to pick up some tips from your chronicles.
Minwu is the best character in the game. Not only is he the only temporary party member to serve a role beyond being a corpse you drag around, but he's also essential to being able to break the game early. That said, it requires some mildly out-of-the-box thinking to make him your best attacker as well as your best defender, at which point he busts a lot of the worldmap open.
FF2 does indeed have far more of a plot than the first game, though about 70% of that plot is just ripping off Star Wars. Unfortunately, not a lot of those benefits hit your party, who have about two describable character traits each.
You've definitely done a good job of showing off just how easy it is to run into something that'll just straight up murder you right out of the gate, that's for sure.
As others have mentioned earlier a massively cleaned up take on this game's leveling system is found in most SaGa games. At least when they're not doing something even more experimental with stat growth, that is.
(Nothing in the SaGa games, however, will compare in terms of ridiculousness with the single most absurd stat growth system I've seen in a CRPG. That particular honour goes to Ultima I where, and I swear I am not making this up, you gain stats by reading signs on the overworld.)
The characters discuss among themselves that they should stay away from the soldiers. Because I have the reaction to the unknown of a cat, I immediately go interact with the soldier, who somehow immediately identifies the group as "Rebel curs!" and…
That's another wipe. Second in a row. Christ. What are these kids made of, tissue paper?
This is being extremely generous. Firion has "protagonist" as his sole trait, Guy has "Tarzan" as his sole trait, and Leon has "brooding bad boy" as his sole character tait. Its only Maria who's deep and complex enough to get two character traits (specifically, "Girl" and "Leon's sister").
I mean, granted, Guy is a unique twist on Tarzan in that IIRC he was raised by beavers rather than apes, going by his ability to talk to them, but that's still only one character trait.
This is being extremely generous. Firion has "protagonist" as his sole trait, Guy has "Tarzan" as his sole trait, and Leon has "brooding bad boy" as his sole character tait. Its only Maria who's deep and complex enough to get two character traits (specifically, "Girl" and "Leon's sister").
I mean, granted, Guy is a unique twist on Tarzan in that IIRC he was raised by beavers rather than apes, going by his ability to talk to them, but that's still only one character trait.
Don't be absurd; Leon's primary character trait is being Darth Vader. (Also, I don't think there's any specific reason for that famous moment other than ripping off the Ewoks.)
From what I recollect, Guy was supposed to have the ability to talk to animals in general a la Marianne Fireemblem, but I don't think the game ever uses the ability apart from his convo with the beavers.
This is being extremely generous. Firion has "protagonist" as his sole trait, Guy has "Tarzan" as his sole trait, and Leon has "brooding bad boy" as his sole character tait. Its only Maria who's deep and complex enough to get two character traits (specifically, "Girl" and "Leon's sister").
I mean, granted, Guy is a unique twist on Tarzan in that IIRC he was raised by beavers rather than apes, going by his ability to talk to them, but that's still only one character trait.
I remember playing this on the Dawn of Souls version and getting stuck in some random corner of the map I was way under-leveled for. I managed to drag myself back to where I was supposed to be, hell if I remember how.
I remember playing this on the Dawn of Souls version and getting stuck in some random corner of the map I was way under-leveled for. I managed to drag myself back to where I was supposed to be, hell if I remember how.
I would say that particular version is the best version of FF2. Though its attempt to clean up certain subsystems has some mixed results or results in some inauthentic-feeling bits, it eases up on the hyper-unforgiving nature of the original enough to actually be playable. Also, its bonus dungeon, Soul of Rebirth, is by a wide stretch the best dungeon in the game, largely because it gives you a party with actual character and was designed by Not The FF2 Dungeon Design Team. (Soul of Rebirth also features one of the cleverest repurposes of a useless mechanic I've ever seen in a game.)
Ah, FFII, where the optimal tactic is to pick a fight with goblins, kill all but one, and then descend into intra-party violence until you're all out of MP and nearly dead, merk the goblin and run back to town, then repeat.
Confession: I had been waiting for you to start your FFII playthrough before starting my own, because I am mired by choice paralysis on how to build my characters, and was hoping to pick up some tips from your chronicles.
First thing I can report is that I have been informed Maria's thing is a trap because there are hidden somatic component-like rules that give certain weapons a penalty to spell effectiveness, and a bow has a like 80% penalty to magic power, so if you do like me and make her your wizard you also absolutely need to get that bow out of her hand ASAP.
