Final Fantasy Retrospective: Final Fantasy II

 

If Final Fantasy is a flawed but ultimately successful experiment, Final Fantasy II represents growing pains for the burgeoning franchise. The “Terrible Twos” are more than just what human babies go through, it turns out that video games sometimes experience them as well. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy both experienced the Terrible Twos in different ways. Last week we explored the ways in which Dragon Quest‘s second game grew and the ways in which it fell apart near the end, and this week, it’s Final Fantasy II‘s turn.

It should be noted that, whereas Dragon Quest II came out eight months after Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy II came out a full year less a day after Final Fantasy, but the question is, did the extra time help the game or does it fall victim to its own problems and issues?

It’s clear when playing Final Fantasy II that the developers had learned much from the first game but still had a lot to learn about how to make RPGs; for every step forward they took, they would retreat back a step as well. I suppose that the first game sold well enough that they wanted to develop and release another one before they had fully learned how not to repeat the mistakes they made the first time around.

 

Cautiously Optimistic Beginning

The game once again starts with a screen of white text on a blue background, accompanied by the arpeggio that Nobuo Uematsu had composed for the series. Perhaps this song is once again meant as an introduction to another masterpiece of a soundtrack.  At this point in the series, his arpeggio has not developed a life of its own yet, or developed into the series trademark it will eventually become. It is still a prelude, but not yet the prelude.

The very next thing that happens in the game is a battle! Unlike the first game, which had players enter Cornelia and shop and talk to the king and find out what their initial quest would be, Final Fantasy II begins by introducing players to the battle system in a rather harsh way: the party is wiped out completely by enemy forces and left for dead. What most players probably miss, though, is that Maria is left alive after the first round. This is a good way to teach players about the importance of the back row. This is an interesting new feature of the battle system where players can assign characters to the back row and keep them safe from regular, physical attacks.

Another first for the series is discovered immediately after the party falls to the empire’s soldiers: a fully acted cut scene plays out where Firion is brought back to health by Minwu, then is reunited with Maria and Guy, although there’s no trace of Leon anywhere. Despite that Leon is Maria’s older brother, this rarely comes up again in the game until the group is finally reunited with him near the end, so perhaps the story wasn’t as well developed as it could’ve been. Still, the game’s narrative is far richer than what came before, and when it was first released, it represented a step up for both the series and for video games in general.

Another new feature, one which I wish had been developed further in future titles, is introduced when the group talks to Princess Hilda. A keyword system is used to further the story and give players new information if the right keyword and/or key item is used with the right person. However, as the list of keywords grows, this becomes more cumbersome than anything else, and most keywords stop working after their initial use.

Something which I admire the game for is that, compared to some games where characters might heed the call to adventure and immediately set out or resist the call at first but heed it when they have no choice, or are invited to adventure by the queen or king, Firion volunteers for the rebel army and is turned down. The party is flat out told that they’ve got no experience in battle and would be throwing their lives away. They are untrained and thus should not set out on an adventure. Of course, this will not stop Firion for he’s determined to help the rebels in any way he can, even if he has to go against Hilda’s command, but it’s rather interesting to start a game and be told not to save the world. This is something that generally doesn’t happen. Many Final Fantasy games start in the middle of the action, with characters already trained for war heading out to destroy a reactor or taking a final test as part of their class or coming home after liberating a crystal from a neighbouring kingdom. Sometimes the character is new to battle but is aided by a good friend, or a group of them fall down a hole and find themselves cutting their way through goblins on their way out. But each and every character heeds the call to adventure, finding support from family or friends or the rulers of their kingdom. The very second game to carry the name of Final Fantasy starts by discouraging a group of characters from attempting to save the world, and these characters must prove that they have what it takes to not only join the rebel army but to make a difference and rise up against the Palamecian Empire.

I consider Final Fantasy II to have one of the best stories in the series. While it’s nowhere close to the quality of storytelling later games would employ, like Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, this second game in the series tells one of the greatest stories from the NES era.

After the initial introductions to the game’s systems are through and the party is finally under the player’s control, the game’s battle system can finally be truly explored. Although initially experienced with all four character slots filled, the game’s core group consists of three party members as well as a rotating fourth as the plot demands. This sort of party structure would make a return in Final Fantasy IV, where the playable cast is large but as with this game, characters come and go as the plot demands and Cecil ends up being the only character who remains in the group at all times. It isn’t until Final Fantasy VI that the developers seemed to figure out how to have characters in reserve.

If there’s one thing that’s notable about the rotating cast, it’s that three of the guest characters die during the game, with a fourth important character dying in their bed during one of the game’s first quests. Yeah, sorry, spoiler alert: this game is full of death. But since four named characters die and there are four character slots, the sacrificed characters all come back in the Game Boy Advance version in a bonus story set during the last few hours of the original game, but I’m getting ahead of myself. As quite possibly the game’s biggest apologist, I can’t sing enough praises about what the game did well, and also about how the game’s remakes and ports improved the gameplay experience over the original version.

For example, just like with the first game, later versions would fix the battle system so that players no longer have to worry about losing turns when enemies die and characters swing their sword at the air. One of the biggest frustrations players had with the original version of the game, especially North American players who downloaded a fan translation and emulated it, was that they felt the need to attack their own characters in order to gain enough HP to survive the game. They need not have worried, the game is actually balanced well up until the very end (gee, doesn’t that sound familiar, Dragon Quest II?), and characters naturally will wind up with enough HP to survive whatever the game throws at them. Still, Square listened to players who had difficulties with some of the game’s challenges and starting with the Game Boy Advance version, HP naturally increases after a few battles are fought. This relieves some of the grind that players think they need to do and helps to move the action along.

This is largely why I chose to play the Game Boy Advance version.

One thing that Square still hasn’t done much about is how absolutely grindy spells are. Actually, before I go any further, I need to explain about how stats increase, in case this is your first time hearing about the game. Unlike most games in the series where attacking enemies earns experience points and characters level up after earning enough of them, characters in Final Fantasy II grow as a result of the actions they take as well as actions taken against them by enemies (and themselves in early versions of the game). Attacking sufficiently strong enemies will increase a character’s strength, using enough Magic will increase a character’s magic stats, whether Spirit for white magic or Intelligence for black, and sometimes MP if enough of it is used. Weapon masteries will increase if a weapon is used enough times in battle and magic will level up in a similar manner and become more powerful.

That said, players might as well favour weapon mastery over magic levels because outside of grinding Cure, leveling any other magic becomes an unenviable chore. Square has done little to address this and it remains one of the worst aspects of the game in all its forms. Not only is it incredibly grindy to level even one of the spells, it means that players will likely only ever use one or two spells per character. Any more would take far too long to build up.

Another thing I hate about grinding spells is that, although status magic is actually pretty effective in this game, it’s useless in its early levels. Something like the newly introduced Toad spell is going to fail 19 times out of 20 up until around level 5 or so, when it finally begins to be useful and actually starts transforming enemies on a regular basis. Before then, it’s a drain on MP and a waste of turns since it misses more often than not. It’s very clear that the game needed more development time so that this broken mess of a magic system wouldn’t have been allowed to exist. I don’t think even Yuji Horii would’ve liked grinding magic in this game. The reward just doesn’t feel worth it.

 

Adventure in the Wide Open Spaces

As Firion makes his way back towards his hometown of Fynn, he gets the opportunity to explore his surroundings and also a feel for battle. Eventually his power begins to grow and he can venture further out from Altair. One thing that becomes apparent to the player is that unlike the first game, Final Fantasy II is much more of an open world right from the start. Most of the map is open and available to the player, but while the game looks like an open world experience (sorry, Final Fantasy XV, you weren’t the first), it absolutely should not be experienced as one, not right away. Unlike Dragon Quest, which divided the world up with bridges and made enemies stronger on the other side of them, Final Fantasy II is made up of encounter zones with invisible borders and crossing into a neighbouring zone will cause players to be attacked by much stronger enemies than they’re ready for and their party will be completely destroyed. If there’s one thing Final Fantasy II‘s open world demonstrates, it’s why most of the good Final Fantasy games will guide players through a much more narrow path to the next story point. There’s literally only one place to go after leaving Cornelia in the first game. Once the player has saved the princess, they can cross the newly rebuilt bridge and find a cave to the north where a witch has lost her eye, then stick a pin in that plot point and find their way to the next town to secure a ship that takes them south, and so on. In fact, in most Final Fantasy games, there is only one place to go once you leave the starting town, and that’s to a nearby dungeon where the next part of the plot happens, and things continue from there.

Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII may receive criticism for how linear their gameplay is, but at least the games didn’t throw players into challenges they weren’t ready for. One thing that I respect the developers of these early games in the series for, it’s that they weren’t afraid to heed the advice of Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus. They took chances, they made mistakes, and their games were incredibly messy.

After acclimating to the game a little and getting past a couple plot points, players will find themselves in the first dungeon of the game, Semitt Falls. This is where the game gets a little messy. One of the features of dungeons in Final Fantasy II are empty rooms that serve as nothing more than traps for players. Once they enter, the room contains an encounter rate that’s much higher than in the rest of the game. The worst thing about these trap rooms is that often, several of them will be grouped together with only one room being the correct room, whether it contains the next objective or merely the stairs down to the next floor. These trap rooms are nothing more than a waste of the player’s time and sometimes the player’s resources if the dungeon is difficult enough or the player is somehow underpowered.

At the very bottom of Semitt Falls, guarding the Mythril is the first boss of the game, the Sergeant. The Sergeant exists to make me a liar regarding the game’s balance. There’s nothing like physically attacking a boss and doing absolutely zero damage to him. That said, my characters had their shield levels up to the maximum possible in Semitt Falls (level 4), so the Sergeant could barely hit us. We were hitting him for no damage and he was missing entirely. It was a battle of attrition where neither side could actually attrish.

It turns out that the Sergeant is supposed to be taken down with magic… except that given how bad the game’s magic is, players are basically punished for not wasting time casting and recasting their spells over and over again in anticipation of the bosses that require it. What makes the magic grind worse is that sometimes a character will exhaust their magic supply and not gain any extra MP. There seem to be either hidden values that aren’t being met, or the game employs a type of RNG that sometimes just doesn’t favour the player at all. Players will also find themselves getting hit without gaining any HP in return, for there doesn’t seem to be enough of a decrease. The Game Boy Advance version mitigates this somewhat with its automatic HP gains, but it doesn’t extend this courtesy to MP, nor does it seem like the magic grind is ever truly fixed in any version.

Fortunately, the next dungeon is in Bafsk and doesn’t require a lot of magic to get through. At this point, players who were punished by the Sergeant for not using their magic will have gained some and used it on their way to Bafsk, reloaded their MP at the Inn and ventured into a rather short dungeon with a key item at the end rather than a boss, and a free teleport back to the entrance to the town.

Unfortunately, Firion’s mission in Bafsk is to stop the Dreadnought from completion and he is too late. All he can do is stand there and watch helplessly as the airship flies away. It’s here that the game shows off how well it’s written. An NPC that the party already met named Cid, who provides airship services to the group in exchange for gil, knows how to take down the Dreadnought. When Firion arrives back at Poft, it’s looking like it was attacked rather badly by the Dreadnought, as if in retaliation for not being part of the Palamecian Empire yet. Paloom’s looking worse for wear, and not even Altair was spared the wrath of the empire’s monster of an airship. Details like this help bring a sense that this is a war that’s happening, rather than just something that the narration claims is happening.

A chain of keyword wrangling in Altair leads me to believe that the keyword system was inspired by text-based adventure games where players have to know what to ask and to which character in order to continue the game. When next the team goes questing, it’s to go seek out help in locating an artifact called the Goddess Bell. It’s during this quest that Josef joins the group and, spoiler alert, becomes the next casualty of war. This has a much bigger impact on the game than Scott’s death because up until now, playable characters just don’t die. The Warriors of Light from the first game didn’t die, and none of the playable characters from Dragon Quest die.

Josef’s death shows the player that in this war, anyone can die. This lesson would be lessened somewhat by the death of more characters that shared the fourth party slot, death being one way in which the game rotates out plot important characters to make room for others, since by the time a third guest character dies, it starts to become expected. So when the fourth slot is finally filled by its final, permanent party member, the expectation is that this character will also die at some point in the game.

The lesson learned from fighting the Sergeant is to not use up your magic resources and save some for the boss, and it’s a good thing the lesson exists because the next boss is an Adamantoise, who is also resistant to physical attacks, although not seemingly as much as the Sergeant is. After the Adamantoise, Borghen is fought. He claims that he’s suffered hardships because of Firion and fights him, but perhaps because the developers figured players would’ve exhausted their magic against the Adamantoise, Borghen is rather ineffective as a boss. It is his booby trap that kills Josef and sets up the trend of characters sacrificing themselves for the party.

Character sacrifice is one of the ways in which characters come and go from the party, and brings up a potential frustration for new and veteran players alike. In the first game, there were only ever four playable characters and so this was never an issue, but in Final Fantasy II, characters can potentially leave the party while equipped with some pretty decent gear. It’s entirely possible, for example, to give Gordon the Flame Bow, a weapon which is a lot more powerful than anything the player is typically able to get from a shop, and which is also a random drop from an enemy, and have him dealing decent damage during the Kashuan Keep sequence and all the way through to the end of the assault on the Dreadnought, only for him to leave and take the bow with him. The same thing happens when a character dies, their gear is gone forever. There’s incentive for veteran players who know when a character is going to leave or die to remove their gear first so that it’s not lost.

This has unfortunate implications for the Game Boy Advance version, for the game does remember the gear and stats a character died with and which makes the first of the two dungeons of Soul of Rebirth a lot more difficult than it needs to be, not that it makes much difference in the end, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing ends up becoming a problem until the developers finally solved it in 1994 with Final Fantasy VI, although this statement is a bit deceptive, given that:
–Final Fantasy III only ever had four party members total, just like Final Fantasy
–Final Fantasy V only ever had five party members total, but when Galuf pulled a Tellah, everything he was carrying copied over to his replacement, so nothing of value was lost (that sounds a lot meaner than I intend it to)
–Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest did the rotating guest party member thing, but the guest’s gear was unable to be changed

Final Fantasy IV, therefore, was the only other game to make gear permanently gone when party members up and ditch you at various points of the story. After that, and other than a very special case in Final Fantasy VII, playable characters would never permanently disappear with valuable gear. This was fixed in Final Fantasy VI by simply not killing any of the party members (well…), and by following the Mystic Quest model of making guest characters’ equipment be unable to be changed.

There’s a potential contradiction to this statement in the case of Final Fantasy IX, but I am getting so far ahead of myself right now. Stick a pin in that.

 

On the Long-Term Effects of Status Magic

In the first game, physical attacks became useless against the final boss without help from mages buffing the group. It’s important to have a balanced group in the game. Final Fantasy II makes it a little easier to balance the group since everyone can be a mage and a fighter at the same time, but the downside is that it feels like players have to be more selective with their magic. With only three permanent party members until the very end of the game, it can be difficult to decide who gets the Thunder spell, who gets the Fire spell and should the same character receive both, who gets the Cure spell, should a character receive buff spells like Protect, Shell and Berserk, should a character receive debuff spells like Blind, Sleep and Toad, and so on. Some players might give one character all white magic and one character all black magic and some players might spread it all out, giving a little bit of each to all three. There’s no real wrong answer, given that it was discussed earlier about how garbage the game’s magic system is.

When Berserk tomes get dropped into the party’s inventory, it becomes very clear that this is how the tough as nails boss fights from earlier need to be handled. Buff a party member, destroy the enemy. But as is the case with all magic in the game, Berserk starts at level 1 and must be used constantly to bring it up to anything resembling usefulness. It’s enough to boost a character’s attack a little bit at the start, but higher levels of the spell are certainly better. It’s also quite clear that the game was balanced around buffing the party with these sorts of spells, kind of like in the first game.

Toad is a brand new spell and adds to the list of status debuffs from the first game. Whereas debuffs like poison and petrification already existed, the second game adds a few more to the list. Of course, it’s easy to see how the entire party being turned to stone can be a game over. Imagine Firion and the rest of the group being fairly deep in a dungeon when they encounter an enemy capable of turning people to stone. This enemy casts the spell on Firion and he’s petrified, then before the rest of the group can find the Gold Needles they’re carrying, this enemy makes short work of the rest of them, leaving a group of very startled-looking statues on the bottom level of a deep dungeon. Considering how strong they had to be to get down there, it’s unlikely anyone else in the resistance would even be able to make it into the dungeon, let alone be able to rescue them.

The long term effects of these sorts of spells have also never really been discussed, as far as I can tell. There are a few instances of status debuffs lasting an abnormally long time, like in the case of the twin mages in Final Fantasy IV, a certain main character’s father in Final Fantasy VII or the petrification of one of Zidane’s friends, as well as Lindblum’s king and his baleful polymorphs in Final Fantasy IX. Dragon Quest V actually makes the long-term petrification of the main character a plot point, where he loses out on the first several years of his son and daughter’s lives as a result. Other than that, the long-term effect of something like petrification on a main character is unknown. Does it become permanent after a while? Who knows? It’s considered a game over to lose the entire party to this kind of status effect and in a game like Final Fantasy II, where the entire world is at war, it sort of makes sense. If the resistance is wiped out, no one will be left to rescue the party from a deep dungeon and it might as well be permanent at that point, even if it’s always able to be reversed.

Which brings us to Toad. Since being turned into a toad doesn’t prevent that person from using an item to change back (the aptly named “Maiden’s Kiss”, inspired by The Frog Prince), you wouldn’t think that becoming amphibious is a permanent state. However, when cast on enemies in this game, it’s an instant defeat spell and the former enemy hops away to live his new life in some pond somewhere, no longer feeling the instinctual need to clobber heroes. It essentially does the same thing to an enemy as a petrification spell or an instant death spell, which brings to mind all of the instant death spells that existed in the first game.

And sure enough, it just so happens that if the entire party becomes toads, the game is over despite that they might have enough Maiden’s Kisses to turn everyone back. What, does everyone suddenly forget how to use them once the last human party member is turned? Do their newfound instincts get the better of them and they find themselves hopping away, abandoning the resistance so that they can live their new lives in some pond somewhere, watching the world fall to pieces around them?

 

The stomping of boots awoke Maria from where she slept in the hollow of a fallen tree at the edge of a vast swamp. At least, she thought her name was Maria. Yeah, that sounded right. It had been several months since she had changed and the days that she remembered who she once was were getting fewer and further between. The last time she was lucid, she’d noticed spring flowers were just beginning to sprout from ground moistened by melted snow and now these flowers were in full bloom. Had it really been… what, a month? Maybe more than that? Time flew when you were a toad, she assumed. Then again, it was a good enough assumption that time held no meaning for one such as she, if she didn’t have to be anywhere in any sort of hurry any more.

The familiarity of the sound of the boots disturbing her swamp brought her to her most recent bout of lucidity. Curiosity got the better of her and as she peered out of her tree, she felt a momentary stab of fear and panic when she recognized the Palamecian Empire’s uniform on the troops. Were they here for her? Were those swords meant to slay her and her friends, as if being trapped as a toad wasn’t bad enough? Did the enemy somehow figure out what had happened to her, something the resistance had never been able to do, considering none of them had ever come to rescue her? But that moment of recognition passed as the meaning of those uniforms slipped from her mind. Things were always slipping from her mind these days if they weren’t of immediate importance to her survival. Perhaps her consciousness was gradually simplifying, the longer she spent in her new form. It would certainly explain why she was finding it harder and harder to hold onto her old self.

And could she even be changed back? She’d tried to use one of her Maiden’s Kisses but she could no longer read the labels on any of her flasks and vials. All of the Antidote, Ether and Potions she had been carrying looked the same to her as the couple of Maiden’s Kiss flasks, and she had a lot more of the former items than she did the latter one, so after a couple days of trying out as many of them as she could and feeling no different than before, she’d initially given up. It was apparently going to take forever to finally figure out which one would change her back and she had begun to suspect that her human mind was going blank for days at a time when she seemed to zone out for a moment and suddenly found herself surrounded by a foot of snow she hadn’t remembered seeing before. The longer she spent as a toad, the more comfortable her new form felt, as if she was always meant to be one and hadn’t known this until that fateful encounter with… she couldn’t remember what it was, but whatever had turned her into a toad.

At first, her and her friends in the resistance, Firion, Guy and Gordon, had sought each other for comfort and although she couldn’t understand what they were trying to say, and likewise she could sense that they were having similar trouble with her own frantic croaks and ribbits, she could draw comfort from her friends and they were drawing comfort from her. Those first few days, they all slept next to each other, to try to hold on to any sort of normalcy they could. They’d always camped out together during their missions, of course. But then, at around the same time she’d started losing time to the bubbling up of new instincts, she’d begun to notice that her friends weren’t all there either, often lapsing into the behaviour patters of their new forms. The sight of it terrified her and she’d pledged that she would do all she could to hang onto herself and not lose herself to toady instincts. But her resolve turned to despair on the day she realized she’d somehow missed an entire snowfall and knew that she, too, was devolving into the same behaviour patterns as her friends.

The stomping of boots through her swamp faded away and she thought her thoughts were going to fade along with them, but after a moment she realized she was still lucid. Part of her wondered if it was worse to prolong her moment of clarity and if she should just surrender herself to her toad mind once more, but she chided herself on her fatalistic attitude. Instead, she thought about seeking out her backpack again so she could try more potion bottles until she faded away once more. Who knows? She might luck out this time and find the one that would turn her back.

That was when she remembered that, along with her human mind, her memory was similarly impaired as a toad: with a start, she recalled the utter despair she felt when she got the last of her bottles open and sipped at the concoction within, only to find that she was still unchanged. It had been a couple months after the coming of winter and she had been making steady progress sampling her potions one by one. Although it had seemed unlikely that her Maiden’s Kiss had been saved for last, it seemed apparent because she’d not changed back yet. But then, with the last of her potions used up and none left in her bag, she realized that her toad body was permanent. There was no going back.

Now that she remembered the permanence of her new condition, she longed again for the oblivion of instinct and waited for it to take her mind over again. But as she sat there wallowing in self-pity, she noticed a cacophonous croaking nearby. Curious, she hopped out of her hollow log and discovered that her friends – former friends, she had begun to think of them, since there was as little left of them as there was of her at this point, she couldn’t even tell if they were still capable of moments of lucidity like her or if they’d fully given themselves over to their new lives – they were fighting! One of them, Gordon, was already defeated, dominated by Guy. She sat there for a moment, noticing how a lot of Guy’s ruggedly handsome features seemed to translate well to his toad form and chuckled to herself that Gordon was still a coward, even in his new form, and wouldn’t make for a good mate at all.

She startled when she realized where her thoughts were drifting off to. “Oh no, oh please no!” she thought to herself. “It’s bad enough I’m a toad now, please don’t make me suffer the indignity to mate as one!” But as Guy and Firion sized each other up, she couldn’t help but size up each of their potentials and found herself hoping Guy would prevail. He’d already proven himself once, she hoped he would do so again.

She made one more halfhearted attempt to banish these thoughts but as she watched Firion and Guy compete for the right to mate with her, her mind drifted away towards the simple notions of what was now her life and she hopped toward her friends to await the outcome of their battle. Once she had thought she’d fill the world with wild roses, but now a much simpler part of her understood her destiny was to fill her swamp with tadpoles.

 

Along with new status magic, Final Fantasy II introduces the concept of using one spell to dispel all status effects. Well, sort of. In the first game, there existed a spell to reverse poisoning, another to reverse petrification, and so on. In Final Fantasy II, all of these spells are consolidated down to two, one called Esuna and one called Basuna. Esuna cures status effects that linger after battle, like Poison, Amnesia or Stone. Basuna cures status effects that wear off after the end of battle, like Venom, Silence or Paralysis. It’s a bit much, if you ask me. Poison and Venom are the exact same status effect, except that one of them wears off and one does not. Amnesia and Silence are the exact same status effect as well, except that one of them wears off and one does not. Stone and Paralysis act the same as well, preventing the player from acting in battle, except that one wears off after battle and one does not. Having two separate spells for curing status effects seems similar to the padding of spells from the first game, in that it doesn’t serve any use other than adding to the number of spells you’re expected to take with you and level up.

Esuna and Basuna absolutely need to be leveled up or else they won’t be able to cure much. It takes several levels of use before Esuna can cure petrification, for example. In Dawn of Souls, it’s probably a lot easier to just carry curative items instead.

All of this is in service of the gimmick behind the spell Ultima. In Final Fantasy II, Ultima exists as a spell that is capable of great damage, but not only do you have to power it up like you would your other spells, it also gains power when your other spells are powered up. Essentially, to use Ultima, one must grind a ton of other spells first and given how bad grinding magic is in the game, Ultima might as well be useless. Just Berserk Firion and clobber the final boss until he’s dead.

Aside from introducing such things as Ultina, Toad and Esuna to the series, Final Fantasy II also introduces the Dragoons. Dragoons are, by now, a staple of the series. In Final Fantasy II, they’re a group of wyvern knights whom the empire utterly destroyed. The last Dragoon, Ricard, joins Firion in his quest at a point where the group has been swallowed up by Leviathan. Leila goes missing during this sequence and the group agonizes over where she could’ve gone… for all of two seconds before moving on and tidying up the fourth party slot for the next guy. By this point in the game, it’s rather blatant how obvious it is that a new character is going to be introduced: the previous fourth party member finds any and all excuse to leave the group.

An interesting thing about Ricard is that he comes equipped with the Flame Lance but according to his status screen, he has eight levels of proficiency in both spears and swords. The Dragoon has always been known for wielding spears, but early examples of the Dragoon in Final Fantasy, like Ricard and Kain, are able to equip more than just one type of weapon. In fact, from the beginning and through to the end of the SNES era, characters have always been able to equip more than one type of weapon and in Final Fantasy II, everyone can equip everything. It isn’t until the shift to the Sony PlayStation that characters in the series are stuck with rigidly defined equipment slots. Vincent from Final Fantasy VII can only equip pistols, for example, whereas Cloud can only equip swords. Quina can only equip forks and Zidane can only equip knives. Final Fantasy XIV takes it to the extreme where equipping a different weapon automatically changes your class.

One thing I appreciate about the Leviathan sequence is that it’s very short. Instead of being a dungeon made up of five or more floors with trap rooms and dead ends, there’s a small pathway leading to the main stomach area where everyone who was swallowed in the past are hanging out, then there’s a mouth with an enemy waiting, somehow neither being swallowed, nor bothering Leviathan in any way. Leviathan becomes inaccessible once leaving his body, so the various Gepettos contained within him never show up again. It’s hoped that they found their way out after we defeated the enemy blocking their way.

One thing that doesn’t make sense about the Leviathan sequence is that Minwu meets you in the tower, having arrived before you. Does that mean he already escaped Leviathan or did he even get captured by it in the first place? Everyone approaching Mysidia Tower would require a Crystal Rod and everyone with a Crystal Rod are swallowed by Leviathan. Considering how many people are stuck inside of him, there must be a gift shop somewhere selling them and making a fortune.

A clue could be found in the dialogue of one of the poor trapped people in Leviathan’s belly. They said that every time Leviathan opened his mouth, there’s a slight chance to escape but there are always enemies blocking the way. Whether this means that there’s always a new enemy if the old one gets defeated is anyone’s guess. It’s one hell of a security system for the Mysidia Tower, anyway.

That said, by this point in the game, bosses are a breeze thanks to the high strength of the party and the spell Berserk.

After escaping Leviathan and getting the Ultima Tome, a cyclone annihilates several cities. The cities are straight up destroyed and can no longer be accessed. As this is only the second Final Fantasy game, it’s a bit early in the series to be talking about series firsts, but this is the first true “point of no return”. Once the Ultima Tome is unlocked, the world is pushed to the brink and is very nearly destroyed, the Emperor a hair’s width from victory. But our heroes brave the cyclone and approach the Emperor, who sends waves of enemies after them before facing them himself, and he easily dies to warriors buffed by Berserk. He has so little HP that he dies in two hits.

Hilda acts like you’ve finished the game and there’s a victory scene where everyone dances, but this is the first final boss fake out of the series. Savvy players shouldn’t be fooled by this, given that the Ultima Tome is supposedly this important artifact that needs to be acquired but the Emperor can be defeated without it. If this is where the game ends, then Maria’s brother is never found and thanks to interactions with the Palamecian Empire’s Dark Knight, the party has begun to think that he seems familiar, but that plot thread is left dangling, too. On the Game Boy Advance, thanks to character portraits, the Dark Knight’s identity is pretty obvious. As an ending, defeating the Emperor in two hits and doing the victory dance would’ve been unfulfilling, but immediately after, the characters find out that the mysterious Dark Knight is Maria’s brother and has taken over as Emperor.

 

Maybe I’m A Leon

When the party confronts Maria’s brother to try to find out why he’s now fighting against them, the original Emperor comes back from Hell. I suppose it’s not outside the realm of possibility for someone who can summon a cyclone to be able to conquer Hell and return with even more evil powers, but up until the return of the Emperor, the game is very much a sword and sorcery epic grounded in reality, with very few truly supernatural elements. It’s not a breaking point for the game, since it does sort of feel like the Emperor is capable of this level of evil, but it’s sort of like how the mystery of the missing car in Dude, Where’s My Car? ended up being aliens.

So with the true final battle left to fight, our heroes rest up at an inn before setting out to rid the world of the Palamecian Empire once and for all. With most of the starting towns destroyed, conventional wisdom would state that this inn visit would likely cost a bit more than before, but Final Fantasy II does something a bit unique for the series and for RPGs in general. Instead of making inns more expensive the further you go in the game (for example, in Final Fantasy VI, Narshe’s inn is going to be a lot cheaper in relation to Tzen’s inn), the cost of your stay at the inn depends on how much HP and MP need restoring. It’s a nice touch which keeps your stay relatively cheap while your stats are low, and sort of reminds me of an American hospital.

That said, I’m never in any danger of going bankrupt while fighting the Palamecian Empire. Most of the best weapons and armour are gained from treasure chests or random drops, and the only items I ever need to buy are Ether and Phoenix Down. The Game Boy Advance version also does away with the very tight inventory limits of the original game, so there’s no reason to leave chests behind or throw away items. The game features plenty of single use items that cast spells upon use, but due to inventory limits in the original version, there was a lot more of an incentive to use them than there were in subsequent remakes and ports. At the end of my Game Boy Advance run through the game, I had accumulated 2527688 gil and beat the game with a time of 23 hours and 58 minutes.

The game’s final act really drives home the inherent flaw in the fourth character slot and its revolving door of characters. Whereas Guy, Maria and Firion can build up natural resistance to status ailments, Ricard joins the party without such immunities, so half the time he’ll be charmed into attacking Firion. It’s a good thing no one actually cast Toad on the party during my playthrough, or else Ricard would’ve surrendered to the urge to ribbit, every single time.

And then when Leon joins the group after being gone for twenty or so hours as the Palamecian Dark Knight, his status immunity is basically nothing. Malboros who don’t do much to the other three characters will give Leon all the sickness. It also is far too late to build up a lot of shield levels, so in the final boss battle, Leon is basically useless if the Emperor attacks him. Players also have no emotional attachment to this character, so for all intents and purposes, the final boss battle is waged between Firion, Maria and Guy, with Leon lying on the ground.

There isn’t even much time left in the game to grind magic with him, and the game knows it. Leon comes equipped with two weapons, strongly suggesting that he should just be a dual-wielding powerhouse. Since most characters who come without spells of their own will join with 5 MP, getting him his first increase in MP feels like a chore. Firion, Maria and Guy already are capable of laying waste to most things, so a battle would have to last several turns in order to allow for Leon to cast as much magic as possible with those 5 MP. Even then, a stat increase isn’t guaranteed, which means wasting an Ether to restore 5 measly points, wasting a Cottage, or wasting time flying back to Mysidia or Fynn to stay at the inn before trying again.

Leon is also the first example of a problem inherent to the Final Fantasy series. Although many characters join the party rather early in the game, and some will join around the mid-point, there will inevitably be one or two who don’t appear until later in the game’s narrative, which limits how involved they can be in the plot. Leon doesn’t get a lot of development other than being the Dark Knight and then suddenly being on your side when the Emperor returns, presumably because the enemy of Firion’s enemy is his friend. There also doesn’t seem to be much motivation behind Leon’s being a Dark Knight in the first place. The developers could’ve spent a little more time on him, figuring out his involvement in the plot a little better.

The last word on Final Fantasy II is that it’s a flawed game with a lot of little frustrations that can prevent players from enjoying their experience playing it. That said, it’s also a bit better balanced than most players give it credit for, if one overlooks just how underpowered characters in the fourth slot can be. I found my opinion of the game drastically reduced during my most recent playthrough, but despite that, I still feel that it’s an underrated gem whose Game Boy Advance port deserves a try thanks to the improvements it brings to the overall experience of playing it.

Dawn of Injustice

You can throw everything I said out the window, though, if you’re talking about Soul of Rebirth. It is trash. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t grind the fourth slot characters or because I unequipped them before they died so that I could use their equipment on my permanent characters, but trying to play Soul of Rebirth, I got the impression that I was severely underpowered for it. I want to say that this bonus story set alongside the main game is unbalanced, but I might have contributed to making it feel unbalanced so I can’t really be throwing stones here.

Soul of Rebirth stars three characters who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the world, plus Scott, who died in his bed and is the only character who spawns with appropriate equipment and stats, which is the main reason I’m wondering if the issues I have with it were of my causing and not the developers. Should I have stopped and grinded with Minwu a little more before he left the party? Should I have given Josef more magic and/or strength? More HP?

The trouble is, I knew about Soul of Rebirth from the last time I played the game and so as soon as I unequipped the characters and they died, I realized that I had messed up. I didn’t want to go back to my last save point and redo everything, so I had to hope that the dungeon wasn’t as bad as I remembered.

It’s worse. Minwu and Scott died twice before finding Josef, once from a surprise attack. The strategy quickly became Minwu casting his defense buffs and Cure spells and Scott chipping away at each enemy’s health. Granted, some encounters were relatively weak, the kind of enemies that Firion, Maria and Guy fought at the start of the game, but some encounters were stronger and could down a character in one hit. Then, even with Josef’s help, the group died again and almost died a fourth time, with Minwu delivering the final blow while everyone else lay on the ground defeated.

It’s during this part of the game where I discovered that beneficial status buffs can miss. There’s nothing like trying to cast Protect on your party and seeing it not applied to several characters.

Perhaps anticipating that players would need a lot of help putting the team together, the party starts with five Phoenix Down and ten Ether, all of which will be required to get through to the settlement of Machanon where players can rest up and prepare for the second and final dungeon of the game.

Another mercy afforded to players in Soul of Rebirth is that the damage output of the party skyrockets a lot faster than it does in the main game. Even though I unequipped Josef of everything before he died, and despite that he started off by doing about 60 points of damage per hit, after about ten minutes he was doing ten times that much damage. It seems that weapon levels will increase even against the “weak” enemies. By the time Ricard joined, Josef and Scott were both dealing more damage than the mighty Dragoon from late in the main game.

Unfortunately, this is the last mercy players will receive for a little while. After making it to Machanon, it’s quickly discovered that the party is not powerful enough to withstand the dangers of Arubboth, the other dungeon in the game, and that even the afterlife’s version of the Ultima Tome is beyond the player’s ability to acquire without a bit of grinding.

To put this in perspective, the Dawn of Souls version of Final Fantasy contains several bonus dungeons that unlock as each fiend is defeated, and these dungeons can be done without the need for any extra grinding. In fact, players will likely end up at level 99 by the time they’re done with all of the bonus dungeons, which renders the final boss rather weak and ineffective against the massively strengthened party. Soul of Rebirth is a separate Final Fantasy II adventure that requires a bunch of stat grinding in order to finish. Way back when I first played the game many years ago, my save file told me I’d spent seven and a half hours playing. That’s one hour getting to Machanon and six and a half trying to finish. If you thought Dragon Quest II‘s end game was tough…

The balance issues of Soul of Rebirth are rather obvious, even to a Final Fantasy II apologist like me. After getting to the point where every enemy in the first of the two dungeons are able to go down in one hit, you’d think that it’s time to move forward and finish the game, right? Nope. While the enemies in the first dungeon are doing less and less damage, enemies in the second dungeon will still be able to kill a character in a couple hits. They’re also pretty fast, so a lot of grinding for Agility is necessary in order to fight them. There are also a lot of magic users, some of which will cast spells that have a surprising success rate. Curse VI is one of my least favourite, since no one is immune to it without picking up equipment only available in Arubboth. Death VI is my other least favourite for the same reasons I hate Defeat in the Dragon Quest series. What’s worse is that there’s an enemy that can kill with a touch despite doing very little damage otherwise. Basically, the characters are expected to start in a mid-level dungeon and then once they’ve mastered it, go right into a final dungeon with no realistic way to prepare for it other than through hours of grinding that reach almost Dragon Quest levels.

One might think this is alright if you have the time to kill and don’t mind playing a Final Fantasy game that’s just massive amounts of fighting, but there’s just no sense of progression here. Most Final Fantasy games, even the very first one, don’t actually require a lot of grinding and value balance of gameplay rather than effort. It’s typically the Dragon Quest series that values effort over balance and is known for throwing higher and higher walls in front of players, gating them off from the next part of the plot unless they do thirty thousand push ups. It isn’t until the SNES era, maybe the PS1 era at the very latest, that the series starts to offer a more balanced approach to gameplay, turning to a high experience curve to keep up the illusion that the series requires hard work in order to proceed. By the time of Dragon Quest VIII, the series has adopted a much more western-friendly approach to the balance between gameplay and story. Dragon Quest XI reflects this kind of balance very well.

As I said, most Final Fantasy games don’t require copious amounts of grinding in order to proceed. At pretty much every point in Final Fantasy VII, for example, players are as tough as they need to be to rise to the game’s challenges. I don’t remember a single point where players are ever in over their heads. Even Final Fantasy VIII can be considered balanced if players use the junction system as intended. Final Fantasy XIII might be one of the only exceptions I can think of, but it’ll be a while before I’ll be covering that game. Anyway, my point is, each Final Fantasy game allows players to naturally progress. By the time players reach Fossil Roo in Final Fantasy IX, they’re already powerful enough to deal with the Feather Circles and Griffins that inhabit the dungeon, and just making it through will give them enough power to deal with the Outer Continent. At no point in the game is grinding even a required thing. The game is roughly 40-50 hours long if you’re taking your time, and none of that time feels wasted.

Soul of Rebirth feels like a mighty waste of time. If each playthrough of this bonus story consists mainly of grinding in one dungeon to survive the other, and takes approximately 6-8 hours to do it, it feels like I could be doing better things with my time, like working a standard day at an actual paying job. Even in the Final Fantasy series, I could be spending my time better: I could play over half of the entire Floating Continent section of Final Fantasy III, maybe all of it if I know what I’m doing. I could play over half of Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, about a quarter of Final Fantasy IV, or maybe finish the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII. And if I could choose a grind I’d rather focus on, I can get to level 16 in Dragon Quest in the same eight hours I’d waste trying to play Soul of Rebirth.

It is possible to finish it with enough perseverance. Unfortunately, it requires hours of grinding for agility, strength, HP, stamina and spell levels on weak enemies, and even then, only one or two spells at most because any more would just prolong things. After a few hours of that, players can choose to grind in Arubboth or try to make it to the final boss. In Arubboth, certain enemies will drop equipment that’s much stronger than what can be purchased in Machanon, but this gear randomly drops. Players end up having to go back to Machanon constantly to refill on MP because a lot of spells will be needed to withstand these stronger enemies at first. Protect, Wall, Shell, basically any defensive buff that Minwu carries. Berserk is a good one for Scott to cast on Ricard so that Ricard can one-shot enemies such as the Orukat. The Orukat can potentially drop the Diamond Cuirass, Protect Ring, Gold Hairpin or the Ribbon, all of which are better than the gear available in Machanon, but they can cast powerful magic spells and deliver devastating physical attacks. Without the proper immunities, other enemies like the Mini Satana can be a nightmare to deal with. They can cast any of a number of status magic spells on the party as well as an instant death spell and several offensive spells. One needs to be super prepared to even make it past the first floor of Arubboth.

Or one should just buy a lot of Ether with all the money accumulated during the grind, then make a run for the final boss while drinking down the Ether like it’s water after casting a lot of healing spells between battles.

To be fair to Soul of Rebirth, the second and harder dungeon does come chock full of treasure chests containing equipment that are significant upgrades for each of the characters, although this assumes that the player kept Ricard a spear-wielder and made sure Minwu always used staves. Eventually, even though the party set foot inside the dungeon so weak that even the smallest of enemies required a lot of buff spells to defeat, by the time they’re ready to face down the boss, they’re capable of killing nearly everything in one hit without relying on buff spells to augment their power. The last couple floors can just be run through with minimal attention given to the enemies fought.

Compared to the main game’s final boss fight, Soul of Rebirth’s seems a little toned down, less difficult. No character is left on the floor during the fight, but then all four characters pretty much spend the majority of the game grinding for stats and Minwu’s buffs are of sufficient level to protect everyone reasonably well. Everyone eventually acquires the proper immunities and enough defense to stay alive during the fight. Minwu has to heal everyone so much during the game that the Cure spell ends up pretty powerful and comes through in a pinch. The end result is a final boss battle that players can defeat without a lot of trouble, and it gives the dungeon an illusion of balance.

However, I can’t get over the fact that it takes several hours to build each character up from a state where they die in one hit to eventually being able to take on the final boss. Soul of Rebirth is probably the least balanced thing that Square’s ever put the Final Fantasy name on, and even though I wholeheartedly recommend players at least try the Game Boy Advance version of Final Fantasy II, I also recommend ignoring Soul of Rebirth and pretending it doesn’t exist.

 

Next week: supplementary material for Dragon Quest II; watch for the Dragon Quest III retrospective coming soon!