Final Fantasy II (PSP) - A Mixed Execution Sequel
Final Fantasy II (PSP)
A Mixed Execution Sequel
Intro
Final Fantasy II is the next step in my goal of playing through every mainline game in the Final Fantasy series. Going from I to II was an interesting contrast between the two. Where the first one was very charming in how simple it was for the first game in this franchise, the second one tries to do things to reinvent itself and to try and evolve. And as the title shows, I see it as a mixed bag, not good, and not really bad in how they execute these changes, all of which I'll talk about in this post.
History
Final Fantasy II is definitely the weirdest when it comes to the numbering of the mainline games. Mainly, when the games originally came out. This is something some of you might have heard of before reading this, but for those who don't know, when FFII came out in the US in 1991, it was actually Final Fantasy IV with the original II released on the Famicom in 1988. One year after the first Final Fantasy was released in Japan. But that doesn't mean Square didn't try to get the original FFII released on the NES for the US market. There was even marketing material and a sample cart with the beta translation of the game.
But with the release of the SNES (Super Famicom in Japan) fast approaching for the US market, Nintendo didn't want attention to be taken away from their new product from a major release. And with Square already working on FFIV for the Super Famicom, Nintendo decided to go straight into translating that game for the US market. They would then call it Final Fantasy II, to not confuse consumers. Only for it to cause decades of confusion ever since... The US wouldn't get the original FFII until it was remade for the PS1 in the "Final Fantasy Origins" Collection. This collection also includes Final Fantasy I.
Now, this talk of weird numbering with the mainline series is far from over. The weird numbering system doesn't correct itself until FFVII on the PS1, but that is a story for another time.
When it comes to the actual development of the game, it was developed with the idea of this one being more story-driven, because of this, the game had to cut out the choosing of your party's classes because of the now-named main characters. The developers also went with the idea of nurture rather than nature, hence why they added a whole new level system and overall different ways to play.
Story
When the story starts, the differences between this game, and the first are clear to see. It starts with the naming of your character, and while you can name these four whatever you want, they now have portraits and assigned names to them. We're not dealing with a blank slate party members anymore, we can't choose our character's classes and names, these characters already have identities, relations, and goals... Well kind of, I'll talk about these four later. Once naming is done, were introduced to a quick recap scene explaining what is going on in this world. The Palamecian Emperor has called forth monsters from the underworld, to gain control of the entire world. This conquest forces the Wild Rose Rebellion from their home, as they move to the town of Altair. The conquest of the Palamecians is fierce with many fleeing from their homes, including our four main characters, Firion, Maria, Guy, and Leon. The four losing their homes, and their parents because of the empire.
After the recap scene is done, we are immediately thrown into a battle, where everyone immediately dies.
Yeah, the game starts with a forced battle and a loss, while these types of battles can be kind of annoying in other RPGs, if done right it can be pretty effective for a story. This one succeeds because of two things, one, because it's in the beginning so it's not like you have an idea you would win, and two because it helps in setting the tone for the game. Final Fantasy II can get pretty dark, especially compared to the first game, there are many examples of death, failure, and loss when it comes to the game's story... Combine this with the gripping recap intro, and I was certainly intrigued.
After waking up from near death, Firion, Maria, and Guy find themselves in Altair with the Wild Rose Rebellion. Leon, however, is nowhere to be found, presumably lost at the hands of the empire. The remaining three then prove their worth to Princess Hilda to join the rebels in taking down the empire, as they now have a personal stake in the conflict, with the three losing their home, and Maria losing her brother Leon. Remember, while I played the PSP version for this post, it still has the DNA of a Famicom/NES RPG that was released one year after its contemporary, in fact, when starting a new game on NES, it immediately throws you in the battle and sets up the plot going forward, with any manual that was included filling in gaps. This is a really engaging plot for 1988, by the end of the beginning minutes, I was already interested in where the rest of the story was going.
To help with engagement, the game introduces a keyword system. Essentially an early form of multiple-choice dialogue options in more modern RPGs, like Skyrim, Mass Effect, and Outer Worlds. The way it works is by having certain words of dialogue that you can ask other NPCs about while in the world. You first learn the word which is usually highlighted in red, after learning said word, you can then ask different NPCs about the word to get information on the word and help in pushing the plot forward. It's a way to make the player feel involved with the dialogue and the story, and I think it's a pretty neat idea, I just wish it was used better.
I know it's an NES RPG, but all this system really does is make story progression more annoying. I'll get more into this in the gameplay section, but all it leads to is you using multiple different words on different NPCs in the hope that you'll get the right one to move on in the story. There isn't new dialogue for older words that you use, and if the NPC has nothing to say for that certain word, they just look at you confused as to why you even asked them this in the first place, as shown with the single question mark in the textbox. While I like the idea, it's just not executed well overall, and I feel like if the keyword system, was just substituted for regular dialogue and telling you context clues on where to go next, nothing would change for the game's story progression.
Presentation
Just like the first game on PSP, the PSP version of FFII is just as good, with the sprites, backgrounds, spell effects, and attack effects. They're all just as good as they were in the first one. Hence why I won't spend too much time on them here. Something I will talk about is the game's music. I didn't give too much time to the music of the first game, mainly due to me not having much to say about the music, it was pretty good, with the music being redone from the PS1 version of the game. For FFI and II on PSP, they reuse the soundtracks of each game from its PS1 port, so if you ever decide to play either version, you will have the same music for both of them.
But the music is good here, I like the battle theme, and the overworld theme continues the darker theme that the game goes for, but I think my favorite would have to be the wild rose's theme. It's the theme that plays whenever your with the wild roses and it fits so well here. It gives off a serious tone like the overworld theme, but also gives emotions of courage and hope. Sure the empire might have won the battle now, but that doesn't mean the wild roses are out of the fight. It's a great motivational song and it works with the Empire vs rebel plot.
Gameplay
New Leveling System
Now it's time for the gameplay, the part of the game I feel fairs slightly better, but there are still things that I had some problems with that I want to talk about. After going through the first conversations of the game, and making sure my party of three is in tip-top shape, I head out into the world and start doing some grinding. Generally, when it comes to RPGs, I like to get a few levels on my characters for them to be as strong as they can. It was around this time that I remembered that the leveling system is very different compared to the first game. While II doesn't have classes that you can choose yourself, giving you a bit of freedom when it comes to customizing your party, it does substitute it for a system, which I think is such a good idea on paper. Instead of you getting predetermined stat increases with each level up, you can now increase any stat however you want. Each stat is separated and increases in level depending on how much a character works on the stat.
This includes all the weapon types in the game, every magic spell in the game, and all other stats like Attack, Accuracy, Defense, Evasion, and Magic Defense. It also includes your HP and MP, but from what I could tell, you would always gain HP after several battles, so that isn't a problem, and more MP is gotten by using most of your MP, which is then increased. Again I think this is a great idea on paper, as it still gives you tons of freedom to customize your party how you want. For example, if you want Firion to fight barehanded, you could do that, and his barehanded stat would increase. Sure Guy starts with a giant Ax, but if you wanted him to use a bow and arrow, you could do that. It's still a very freeing system, and it allows players to level their party how they want to. Now, you might have noticed that I have been saying, "This system is great, on paper." And that's because it would be a great system... If it wasn't for how easy it is to make yourself overpowered.
After remembering the change in the leveling system, I went and did some research on the system to see what I had to do to raise each stat. There's a really good GameFAQs post talking about what increases each stat in the game. And here, is where I learned to raise the evasion stat, to do this, you have to use equipment that raises evasion, shields. And another thing this game adds is duel-wielding equipment in each hand, so I wanted to try something. I would grind like normal for a little bit, then I go back to Altair and buy two bucklers for the three. I equipped them with both bucklers in each hand, went back out, then did grinding again, only this time I'm defending until the enemy runs from battle. Having two of each piece of equipment makes it faster to level up the equipment's skill, by the time my grinding is done, I'm at a point where the enemies can barely touch me.
But that's not all, after I was done with my evasion grinding, I needed to level up weapon stats and cure for Maria. This would usually take a while to do if it wasn't for the peninsula of power being right outside of Altair. I didn't talk about this in FFI, but both games have a glitch where spawn tiles cut into areas meant for weaker encounters, this is due to the shape of the land cutting into a stronger encounter spawner. This small area spawns enemies that are much stronger meant for later parts of the game. These enemies can give more exp after being defeated, and there is a slime enemy that has a lot of hit points. So I level up my fire spell to 4, waited until I got a slime encounter, killed all of them with fire except for one, and then I just had my party whale on him until he died, giving me stupid amounts of experience. And remember, the slime can't hit me, so I'm basically bullying this guy until he goes down. Except, I don't want his lunch money, I want the experience he's going to give me for my weapons.
After a while, I started doing stupid damage with my weapons, combining this with a leveled-up cure spell, even if an enemy could hit me, I could easily heal it before they could hit me again. And by no point in the game after this, did I feel like I had to level up to get stronger. And this is just what I figured out on my own, I did some more research and saw there is a spell called teleport, and if it's leveled up high enough, it basically becomes a one-hit kill spell, sending entire groups of enemies to the shadow realm... And you can get it in the fourth town! It's crazy how easy it is to take advantage of this system, especially with something like the peninsula of power being right outside the first freakin' town!
Now, typically I don't have problems with overpowering, but that's usually because the game makes it hard for you to do so. Heck, I don't even have a problem with the peninsula of power in general, I used that a bunch in FFI to raise my party's level, but you can't go there until a little later in the game, at least until after you get your ship. In FFII, it's right outside the walls of Altair, the game is practically giving this to you. And that's the main problem, it's too easy to get to this point, there's no other exploit you need to learn, and there are no harder enemies you need to fight other than some of the ones in the peninsula. The biggest hurdle you have to face when doing this is your patience, and that's not a good enough barrier to prevent overpowering.
I absolutely commend the devs for wanting to try something new with its leveling system, but it just wasn't executed well for it to be seen how it is. If the beginning better supported the system, I could see this being a really fun leveling system for an RPG. And from what I could tell from some research, Square would use a similar system to this in their SaGa franchise, so it's clear that the devs of that game thought there was something there. But let's not open another RPG rabbit hole when we're already barely deep in this one.
Annoying Story Progression, and Dungeons
Alright, now that the leveling system section is done, let's talk about the last parts of the gameplay, story progression, and dungeons. I mentioned that the keyword system makes story progression more annoying, I say this because of the constant backtracking that is used for story progression.
The world is smaller than it would look, at least that's what I felt when playing. Because of this, the game uses a lot of backtracking between different towns to make it feel bigger. Usually, I'm fine with some backtracking, one of my favorite video game franchises is the Metroid series, a series about exploring a planet and backtracking back and forth to different places to unlock new areas to explore. But where in Super Metroid or Metroid Dread, you get a new item and can use that item to unlock a new area, slowly creating a mental map for yourself, Final Fantasy II's backtracking is basically;
Princess Hilda: Greetings adventures! Go to this place and talk with this specific person!
You: K.
Specific Person: My dying wish, is that you take this ring back to the princess, you don't need to say anything else.
You: Sure thing dude.
Princess Hilda: Thank you for talking to that person go and talk to this person to help our cause.
You: Ok...
Other Person: You are from the Wild Roses? Can you help us with this problem?
You: A dungeon?
Other Person: Yes, a dungeon.
And then after doing some backtracking, you'll eventually get to a dungeon, and while the dungeons in the game are fine overall, there is one part of it that makes them so annoying. In the dungeons, there are several instances of multiple trap doors, with only one door being the one that continues the dungeon. The trap doors lead to rooms that have nothing... No treasure, no other characters in it, just an empty room with higher encounter rates in them. You always spawn in the middle of the room too, so you could run into two battles at a time, and at this point, these battles aren't a problem, so it's a waste of time. But you still check the door, because they might have an item in them. The moment I started to really get annoyed with this was when I was finding the two masks for Mysida. One of the masks was behind a boss fight between four rhinos and the other was behind six doors.
Ending
With the gameplay talk all said and done, let's move on to the ending. The three have done a lot, they took down the empire's war airship, the Dreadnought, and got the Ultima spell (which I never used), went inside a Leviathan, met a pirate who was so ready to join us all it took was us beating up her men, freed the town of Fynn, and took down the Emporer after he summoned a tornado to try and take it down after being bested time and time again. Unfortunately throughout the game, the main three didn't really evolve or have any bit of character development. This wouldn't be a problem if it was like FFI and we set our party how we wanted. But because they're named characters, I would like them to develop, I can't really tell you much about Firion other than he's the main guy. Maria doesn't really have anything other than Leon being her brother, and Guy's biggest development was when we needed to talk to beavers, and he says, "Guy speak beaver."
And I think the main reason is that there isn't a moment to do so, there always doing something in the story, to the point where the game doesn't take a moment to flesh them out a little more. The rotating fourth-slot characters wind up being more interesting half the time, only for them to die for some reason. Anyway, after defeating the Emporer everyone celebrates, until a buzzkill runs into the room, and yells that Leon is the Emperor's right hand the Dark Knight, and is taking the throne. The buzzkill then dies on the spot for no reason, and all of us go to the Emporer's castle to confront him. When we get to him, Maria's like, "Brother don't do it, the Emperor's dead!" And Leon's like, "It's over Maria! I have the high ground!" I'm paraphrasing, but before we can even fight him, out of nowhere, the Emporer returns in a super mega-devil form, with him saying he gained powers from Hell, and sell his soul to the devil. Everyone in the room is like, "WHAT!" Meanwhile, I'm just sitting there baffled at this point.
So we escape the castle, and Leon joins us after our other fourth character died. We then go after the Emporer, battle him, kill him, and then finish the game. Our characters decide to leave to find more adventure, while Leon says he will go out on his own because he was a bad guy for a little bit, so it might be awkward to adventure with the three. Also, he doesn't really explain why he joined the empire, doesn't say it was mind control, or the Emperor promised him something, he just got kidnapped, joined the enemy, and immediately turned good. Firion says they'll meet again, and the game is finally over.
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