While the gameplay premise sounds good on paper, the major glitches make this game quite easy with enough patience.
Final Fantasy. It was made as a going out gift, but ironically, it was so much
of a success that it allowed Square to avoid falling from the gaming world. As
with all successful video games, a follow up was started soon after. However,
as does happen with many sequels, it just didn’t live up to the hype and
expectations set forth by the original.
First off, before anyone who hasn’t played the original fears that I
will spoil the main plot details of the original, you’ve no reason to worry, as
this was, as is the case with most Final Fantasy games, in no way related to
the previous Final Fantasy. You take the role of three characters throughout
the game, with several characters filling the fourth slot every now and then.
It doesn’t really matter how much you train them because all but the final one
leave at one point or another and never return. Speaking of training, this is
the game’s biggest folly. The combat system no longer revolves around leveling,
instead favoring a system where your actions influence your statistics, eliminating
the class system of the previous game. For example, using a sword a lot will
improve that character’s proficiency with swords and their overall strength at
the cost of magical power due to lowered use of said character’s magical abilities.
While this may sound good, the game’s system bases these statistics off
of input of certain actions rather than actual executions of said actions. What
this means is, with enough patience and time, one can make ridiculous strides
in character status at a time in the game when the player shouldn’t have such
absurd strength. And to top it off, the character need not perform the action
for all of this to register. Instead, it truly is based off input instead of
execution. This would be fine if the game was playable without this major
glitch, but it’s not. The player would have to fight a ridiculous amount of
battles to prepare one’s self for the subsequent dungeon. The level-up sessions
aren’t even that fun in this game; instead, it’s a grueling and aggravating
exercise in “am I strong enough yet?”. Now I know that this is one of the major
traits of many RPG’s, but in other games, the leveling system will give you a
rough idea of how strong you must be to be able to survive the next trial. The
absence of such a system completely does away with any incentive to prepare for
the next dungeon that awaits the player when you take into consideration that most
of the good weapons you will equip your characters with are mainly found in the
dungeons that you prepare yourself for.
The game also features a password system (not as a save feature, but
rather a gameplay feature), which again sounds good on paper. The premise of it
was that you could learn certain phrases and words from people and say them
later to affect the outcome of the story. However, the passwords are often
times likened to the status of key items, where their only role in the game is
to advance the storyline further. Inns also got this kind of treatment. The
prices of the inns are affected by the amount of HP and MP your characters have
left. But unfortunately, the prices increase when your HP and MP decrease,
forcing you to raise gil by fighting the very monsters you were trying to avoid
until the inn healed you enough so that you could return to the overworld map
to fight them confidentially.
Other moves are just plain idiotic, like the lack of a shared pool of
items for the whole party, which forces each character to hold two items during
battle It just seems a bit backwards and dated compared to other RPG’s in which
characters drew from a shared collection of items. The Change spell, which is
supposed to (and does) swap stats with whomever you target, really seems to
serve no purpose. The old battle system’s flaw of the dead hitting, where a
character will try to hit a monster even if it already died, also remains
annoyingly intact. Plus when one uses curative spells from the menu, they will
get double the experience for it, yet will receive the same amount of
experience for casting a spell on one person as for the entire brigade.
The only positive
thing that I can really say about this game is that the battles move faster
than its predecessor, Final Fantasy. While things moved at a trickle in the
last game, fights here progress pretty quickly. I could also say that the game
lasts long at an amazing 40 hours, but that can also be said for almost every
RPG of the time, and those of this day and age. I could also give this game’s
dungeon exploration thumbs up, but it’s been done before and after, better I
may add. I might also throw in that the pacing of the game is even and
realistic, but this is in part due to dreaded leveling sessions that one might
imagine would’ve been eliminated with the absence of such a system.
The graphics just make this game worse. In no way do they improve upon
the last game’s rather archaic look. In fact, it pretty much recycles a lot of sprites
and textures from the previous game, much like the older Mega Man games on the
NES. Not only that, but there is minimal animation for anything; every action
consists of about 2 sprites, save the spells which involve 4-6 sprites at best
and at worst are just a random flash of the color that would naturally correspond
to that spell. However, there is a bit of positive. For example, the “Push
B-Select” map has been replaced with a globe, which for it’s time was rather
advanced. But the slow movement will show you why not many NES games attempted
to fit this feature into their game. The weird field-separating boxes that were
present in the previous game have been done away with in this, giving the game
a much more realistic feel. Obviously, with quasi-medieval lands and horse
sized birds, this game isn’t really aiming for that realistic feel, but it’s a
nice touch of realism that makes it feel like more than the table-top pen and
paper RPG that you’d play with aside your friends in your basement. Another
nice little element is the occasional airship will fly around from time to time,
which I just found as a nice example of a world that wasn’t so static,
something that hasn’t been attempted in many RPG’s of its time, up until the
dawn of 3D gaming.
The story is greatly improved over the previous game, a stark
difference from the generally bad and broken quality of the rest of the game.
For example, there are multiple characters with set names and personalities,
and they actually talk (including the protagonists, something pretty innovative
back when it was made). Without spoiling much, the basic structure of the story
is that four youths (three after the first mock battle) are trying to rebel
against an evil empire that is unleashing demons in an attempt to dominate the
world. I know, it sounds a bit like the plot to Star Wars, but it’s still a
much better story than the paper thin one of Final Fantasy. But some of the
plot relies on readings from the instruction manual. However, since most people
playing this game won’t have the instruction manual, some important details
will be left out (like the whole “unleashing demons from Hell” part).
The music, too, is one of the great points of this game. Nobuo Uematsu has
done a great job with all of the series’ music, and this game is no exception.
Its soundtrack really fits the rebellious feel of the story and is pretty well
for an NES game. It can get a bit repetitive at times but can’t that be said
for just about any piece of music? However, one blemish that does remain unique
to this game is the lack of boss music, like in other Final Fantasy’s. How can
one truly feel that they have reached the enemy that will test their skill and
dexterity if the same music that is used whilst fighting the game’s first
enemies is the very same medley that loops on within the background of the
battle between you and the Ice Gigas? The only battle theme that could be
considered boss music is reserved for biblical monsters (AKA Behemoth, the
mini-super bosses of the final dungeon and the Dragons) and the Emperor (but
not the epic first time you face off against him).
But pointing out the good points in this game is like trying to point
out the positives of a diet drink. In short, while most of the ideas were
pretty good and did at least try to bring some realism to the genre, it was
never properly executed, thus watering down what could’ve been a great game had
Squaresoft taken their time with this game during its debug phase of
development.