According to who? Oh, just e-celebs and zoomers making shit up as usual
>Upon release, Famicom Tsūshin (now Famitsu) gave the original Famicom version a score of 35 out of 40, based on a panel of four reviewers giving it ratings of 9, 9, 9 and 8 out of 10. This made it one of their three highest-rated games of 1988, along with Dragon Quest III (which scored 38/40) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (which scored 35/40). It was also one of the magazine's five highest-rated games up until 1988, along with Dragon Quest II (which scored 38/40) and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (which scored 36/40).[41] The 1989 "All Soft Catalog" issue of Famicom Tsūshin included Final Fantasy II in its list of the best games of all time, giving it the Best Scenario award.[50]
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I played it long before youtube or e-celebs and haven't since. I didn't even know about how broken the "experience" system was, the game just didn't excite me. It has been 20+ years, so take this with a grain of salt, but it didn't keep my attention like I or V.
>I
>V
>Interesting
?
I just preferred one. Creating my party and going on an adventure was fantastic. FF2 doesn't offer anything saga doesn't do better imo.
The level up system is kinda cringe but it’s got charming characters (Everyone except Firion is a moron it’s funny)and the music is great on the GBA remake.
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Also the ask system is based forgot about that.
>The Password is Wild Rose. Remember it well.
didn't like it as a kid playing on ps1, or a teen playing on gba, but revisited it a few years back (gba port again) and really enjoyed it.
The NES version is too insufferable to play to the point that Sakaguchi has to rebalance the PS1 version of FF2 while leaving FF1 mostly untouched.
ok and?
I first played the GBA version. I was 13 at the time and really just starting to get into RPGs but even then I knew there was something that felt off and I didn't like about 2 compared to 1. I actually enjoy the game more nowadays understanding how to abuse the system and have a good amount of fun breaking the game. I've also played a decent amount of the SaGa games and have a bit more of an appreciation for it being a very experimental proto SaGa. The freeform character building was extremely innovative for the time with nearly every other contemporary having fixed classes with linear gain xp and level up progression. That being said I having played and nearly beaten every main line FF don't think there is a bad one. I would definitely put 2 as some of the weakest games down with 13 and 15 but even the worst FF games do have some redeeming qualities and I think they all worth playing at least once.
This game gets overlooked by imbeciles who adopt the consensus opinion without giving it a fair try. It’s not a bad game at all. I really enjoyed using spells in this game. The stat progression system is very fluid. For it’s time the story isn’t bad either. Loved the revolving cast of temporary party members. Minwu is based.
It's a good example of people playing it wrong and hating it because of that.
And this
>imbeciles who adopt the consensus opinion
>square-slop is rated highly by journos
Riveting stuff
you aren't allowed to talk about games that were made before you were born
>can't get HP right even after releasing your second game
did Dragon Quest also do these shenanigans with hitpoints either being random on level up or turning into a shitty sandbox grind
bot post
Its the safe pick to hate on. There *has* to be the bad one, but if you say it about any other FF, you'll trigger a stampede of angry millenials. No one gives enough shit about 2 to fight against the tide.
Square-sloppers are the lowest of the low, it is what it is
People who attach -slop to everything are the lowest of the low. They are getting worse than frogposters.
idk, 3 was pretty shit. i didnt mind 2
3 is my least favorite. I like 8 because of its aesthetic and uematsu’s contribution but the junction system is straight moronic. I feel like later iterations of 2 (gba, pixel remaster) are much more playable.
Why are you guys discussing ancient games? Take this to /vr/ and stop filling the catalogue with slop.
There are no good new games. New games are slop.
This would have been way funnier if you actually mentioned a modern game to talk about instead, but you were probably afraid of tipping your hand even more and revealing the bait.
Commit next time. You had nothing to lose.
It’s an okay game. I’ll give them credit for at least trying something new with the progression system, which is a neat idea for a system but poorly implemented (see also: TES). Aside from that it’s pretty standard FF for its era. I played and finished it and would likely never replay it, but it’s not terrible.
It probably works better if you don’t cheese and exploit the system to break it at the start of the game like everyone does, too.
The growth system wasn't particularly new for the time, other games like Dungeon Master already had a very similar learn by doing system before FF2, FF2 was admittedly more granular than the competition, which wasn't really a good thing in practice either due to horrible balancing, but that's about it.
What FF2 did achieve outside of being the stepping stone for the SaGa series was setting setting some narrative tropes in stones for the genre and introducing the idea of the revolving door of guest characters when it comes to gameplay, or rather adapting both of those things from tabletop campaigns to videogames.
>caring about what famitsu thought
talk about how to spot a zoomer
You can just run Sword and Cure on your entire party and dominate with no grind. Game is made 10x more difficult by trying to engage w the mechanics.
There are a handful of enemies and bosses that are not susceptible to physical attacks. The optimal play style is to engage with the mechanics and thoughtfully develop your party to master different weapon types and magic disciplines.
This game will always continue to utterly mindbreak metagays who can't help but break the game for themselves.
It's one of the top 3 FF titles for a reason. It's still extremely ambitious for the platform it's on. Looking at SaGa & other later games you can't help but wonder how it might have turned out being developed in the 6th or 7th gen instead.
>It's one of the top 3 FF titles for a reason
lol
>enter the final dungeon
>get ambushed
>die instantly with no counter play
>equip items that supposed stop it
>ambushed by 6 Coeurls
>they do nothing
>get beaten to death over a 10 minute period
I didn't like it.
Look at the artwork for this game. Amano was a beast. Why can’t studios hire talented artists anymore? Everything just looks like anime slop.
I played a bug fixed and translated version of the famicom version, but my gripes were
>4th character slot keeps changing because of unforeseeable story reason, which means
>gear and spells are forever lost on that character and makes your time not worth grinding anything with them
>most spells are not worth grinding for, their effects are minor, mostly miss and only get good enough at higher levels
>grinding spells can be tedious if done incorrectly, instead of spamming spells multiple times in a battle, cast all the spells you need once and finish the battle asap
>spells cast on groups take ages to get through and become even more ineffective
>keyword system is novel, but only recent keywords are relevant
>half of inventory gets taken up by pointless key items by the end of the game, unless you play with the QoL patch or PR
worthwhile spells imo:
>all the damaging spells,cure and life obviously, blink, curse, blind, sleep, haste, beserk, osmose, esuna because limited inventory and maybe silence
What I weirdly appreciated, every random battle matters and lets you shape your characters by the spells you cast and the weapons you use, when other games' random battles are mostly irritating and get in the way of the actual game.
I'd say, you could play FF2 out of novelty or curiosity, to see how the retro titles played out,
but I think you can safely skip on FF1 and FF2, didn't play FF3 though.
And if you do plan on playing them, play the PRs.
The Keyword system wasn't really novel, it was the same thing Ultima games did, FF2 merely streamlined it for the Famicom so you didn't have to actually type the keywords like in Ultima games.
>What I weirdly appreciated, every random battle matters and lets you shape your characters by the spells you cast and the weapons you use
That's one of the reasons I really like Kawazu's games, every fight has tangible rewards, it's not just a step forward towards the end of an EXP bar, you always gain something out of it.
It was a major improvement coming from the more standard AD&D style of FF1, even if FF2 was horribly unbalanced it still conveyed that sense of constant growth, something that was kept and polished with the SaGa games, together with all the other systems he came up with for FF2 and more.
>worthwhile spells
You forgot the most OP spell - Teleport. You get it super earlier on and can grind it to 16 by end game with minimal effort, by level 6 it can insta-kill most enemy mobs and even works on bosses, hilariously.
FF1 is fantastic you goober. The series never recaptured that sense of adventure and being able to create your own party makes it very repeatable.
FF1 was mostly Kawazu and Ishii fricking around, the series never recaptured what FF1 tried to do because both of them left after FF2 and Sakaguchi never had any interest in what FF1 tried to do.
That spirit was carried over to SaGa, with SaGa 1 and 2 being successors to FF1 and FF2, but SaGa in general keeps a lot of what made FF1 what it was, from the focus on gameplay, party building and exploration to the narrative tropes.
Too bad SaGa shits the bed with scaling.
BR isn't scaling, might as well complain that the enemies you fight in any RPG get strong as you progress
> because both of them left after FF2
They left after 3.
Also, they came back for 11
Kawazu wasn't involved in either of those, and Ishii did some minor graphic work for 3 only because Sakaguchi was pestering him, 11 was a similar situation, he was part of the original dev team because Sakaguchi begged him to work on it, but he still left very early right after he finished working on Rise of Zilart.
Kawazu had no involvement with 11, some of his team members like Takai or Matsui did, he came back as the emergency director for 12 because the suits were in panic mode and they needed somebody with enough experience to prevent a total collapse after Matsuno bailed and he was the best man they had for the job, he did accept but reportedly wasn't at all happy with what he found out when he got there and checked things.
Explains why I love SaGa so much then I guess. I really need to play the gameboy ones. I hopped on with frontier and have played most stuff since including unlimited.
have you tried The Secret of Varonis?
It's basically SaGa 1 (aka FF Legends 1) but legally distinct
Funny you mention that, I added it to my list after seeing someone mention it either here or on a rare decent Ganker thread. I wonder if it was you.
I'll bump it up the list if it's going to give me FF1 or SaGa vibes.
>I wonder if it was you
who knows
2 is a bad FF, but it’s so bad it’s good again. I love it but it’s impossible to rank. Reminds me of a great B horror film.
Man do I miss the Amano art. I'd love nothing more than to finally get an Amano looking game now that graphics can match the designs instead of the endless parade of k-pop shit.
I think if they made an FF using the technique Arcsys or Vanillaware use for their games they could come up with something cool using Amano art, I'd love to see them try (and it'd be a lot more cost-efficient than constantly trying to push for the highest graphical fidelity)
It's fun if you just play it normally. The idea is cool. I think about it like this, in older Pokemon games you are effectively handicapping yourself if you are training an equally levelled party, yet this makes the game more "fun" despite knowing you can easily break it steamrolling with 1 party member
FF2 is one of those games that make you go "hey, this isn't that bad!" for a while until a certain point.
The game starts decent and if you don't try to exploit its progression system it appears to be a decent sequel to ff1...
But then you realize how crap the pacing and progression is and then the game just completely falls apart, worse yet you eventually realize that ignoring the exploits will come to bite you in the ass later.
>lots and lots of backtracking through the same towns and areas during the first half so have fun fighting trash mobs every 5 steps. Thanks to the progression system these fights will only not feel like a waste of time unless you ise them to spam spells to level them up.
>most early areas throw very weak enemies at you but then suddenly it will throw wayyyy stronger foes at you frequently, if you weren't doing exploits to level up your spells then your magic will be borderline useless once you realize you need certain spells for these tougher fights.
>if you decided to level up the wrong spell for the occasion or hell just acquired a new spell, you will have to wait an eternity until it becomes useful.
>unclear advantages and disadvantages for certain equipment. Shops only show how much attack and defense they increase (up to the ps1 port) so you might have ruined your int or evasion without knowing it.
>Difficulty rarely feels right. You are either fighting trash too often, realizing that your spells are near useless unless yet your regular attacks will still melt through most enemies or you get ambushed outta nowhere by enemies that are insanely stronger than the monsters in the rest of the dungeon.
>dungeon level design is littered with wienerblock rooms and dead ends. I don't mind this that much but add the spawn rates and it turns into pure tedium very quickly.
2/2
FF1 had better pacing and progression even if it also had its issues with so many spells being bugged but I think ad an overall experience ff2 is just way less enjoyable. It is too easy yet too grindy/monotonous at the same time.
It feels as if the devs were able to come up with a great world and an experimental rpg system but realized too late that they weren't able to create enough content for the game so they added a lot of backtracking and made spell progression absurdly slow to try to pad out the game without adding enemy types that wouldn't be ridiculously easy but still not sub-boss tier for some areas and dungeons.
tl;dr
Bad pacing, glacial spell leveling up system, monotonous dungeon design and enemy formations hurt a game that should've been great. Game feels rushed also.
The other complaints like being able to hit yourself to get stronger, losing some stats at random and the lack of character development aren't that big of a deal.
People just say it's bad because they don't understand how the leveling system works (and the dungeon designs are pretty shit ngl)
>People just say it's bad because they don't understand how the leveling system works
how? It's the most basic "do something you get better at it" system out there.
I say this as someone who recently beat the PSP version like a year ago and never once stopped to hit myself to gain HP
It ranks pretty low for me, but I still get upset when I see other people rank it at the bottom because I know they never played it.
I tend to recommend playing the PS1 port of FF1 since it is the most traditional one while fixing most of the bugs and also looking and sounding really well.
Meanwhile with FF2 I recommend playing the PSP port even if its the easiest one since you have to endure the game the least with that one. FF2 is just the type of game you eventually just can't wait to finish thanks to its horrible pacing, even if you were willing to play it with an open mind.
Haven't bothered to try the pixel remasters so no idea if that one's actually worth playing as intended.
The Pixel Remasters are basically HD versions of the PS1 versions
So it has FFI Vatican magic and FFII stats that can degrade?
I don;t think there is stat degrading in 2PR but 1PR keeps the classic D&D style magic system
No.
Did everyone decide to suddenly replay or reappraise this game recently? I just finished it for the first time this week as it was the only numbered FF I had left to play. I always kind of dismissed it probably because of what I'd heard growing up but it's a totally good and definitely important FF game. I really enjoy seeing how all the series tropes come together bit by bit across the early games. The leveling system didn't really bother me at all and I wouldn't mind playing more JRPGs like it (SaGa I suppose?).
Now recently I had heard people whose game opinions I respect saying how good the story was and especially how the emperor is a top tier FF villain. I liked the story just fine and while the emperor undeniably has a great look I just don't see what the fuss is outside of that. It's admittedly very cool to die and then take over hell and come back, but he really only gets a few scenes and half of them are him ranting or dying like a stock genre villain. Am I missing something? I want to understand lol
>I just don't see what the fuss is outside of that.
You fail to see the bigger picture
>Emps has literally already won at the start of the game, 99% of the known world is already under his heel
>Spend the early game slinking through his OP soldiers and basically doing terrorism, even so the Emperor still manages to put a wrench in the rebellion's plans over and over and get most of the key agents killed
>Has the Dreadnought, a sick gigantic warship that make Cid's airship look like a joke
>You fight tooth and nail against him and he doesn't even care when you manage to infiltrate and sabotage the Dreadnought
>Kidnaps the princess, puts a Lamia as a fake to get you killed and taunts you when you go rescue her
>Everyone's at a loss on how to fight him to the point you have to go get a super ancient forbidden nuke just to be sure you can kill him
>Motherfricker whips up a magical castle inside a frick huge tornado just to dab on you
>When you think you got him he just keikaku his way through hell and comes back stronger than before
>At that point he also killed most of your party members
>also starts tearing apart reality and overlapping the real world with Hell itself, which he rules after having overthrown the fricking devil
It's the only villain in the series that felt like an actual threat, there were no midbosses like Edea or FF9 Garland to hype him, no last minute bait and switch like with Necron or Zemus, he was no glorified victory lap fight like Yu Yevon, he wasn't running away from you like Sephiroth and didn't get his last boss status through fraudulent writing like Kefka, he simply was THE big cheese, the one and only, and from the very beginning of the game.
you make a very compelling argument and I don't disagree with anything you said. looking at the actions of his army as well does help his case, I just wish he had as much personality and panache as his design suggests. like there's that great Amano art of him seducing Hilda but you don't witness anything like that in the game. but still, you make good points and I can't deny the guy put numbers up on the board, more than some can say.
It was a 1988 game, you really couldn't do much with writing back then, you had to make characters speak through their actions rather than speech bubbles, something that has been gradually forgotten unfortunately.
I do genuinely miss the pantomime acting that went away once everyone started getting voice acting, they sure did a lot with a little
>It was a 1988 game, you really couldn't do much with writing back then
What the frick is this even supposed to mean? Were words less effective in 1988 or something? Fricking moron.
When you have less than 128 Megabits to work with you actually don't want to waste any of them on words, if you weren't a moronic zoomer you'd understand how limited games were back then and why RPGs in particular didn't focus on constant walls of texts and cutscenes
I unironically think FF2 is a better take at a dark fantasy setting than FF16.
Yeah, there's no character development for most of the characters and the plot is at the end of the day simple but the sense of how dire the situation is and how utterly outmatched the party is compared to the emperor is really damn well made for such an old title. There's no shonen anime bullshit at the end trying to make things feel better, it is just you trying to mitigate the destruction caused by the emperor and his forces.
> it is just you trying to mitigate the destruction caused by the emperor and his forces.
(and failing half of the time forgot to add)
Not a bad point, XVI muddles its message often and not in a 'gray morality' way. I think I would say that FF2's is my fav story of the NES games fwiw. Also FF2's Mysidia has five magic dealers while I think XVI's doesn't even have one, I think that settles it.
Kawazu likes dark fantasy a lot, writers like Fritz Lieber, Roger Zelazny and Tanith Lee were his main inspiration for his fantasy settings, which is why even in his more lighthearted games there's still a certain sense of tension and urgency in the background, see the miasma in Crystal Chronicles for instance.
Most of the development for his character is usually done through actions rather than words, Firion & Co. don't speak much but they go through a lot, Josef sacrifices himself for them, they inspire Gordon through their courage, Leila falls in love with Firion after seeing how heroic he is etc., while it is largely unspoken there's certainly a lot of drama going on.
And when it comes to development there's also the full circle of Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon getting their ass obliterated as the first thing you see, but the game ends up with this same exact party, now much stronger, blasting through the same imperial knights and much stronger foes to show how far you got from the start of the game.
Again, it's the little details that might not be about words, but still hit hard when you stop and think about it.
>Did everyone decide to suddenly replay or reappraise this game recently?
Nah, there's been a steady influx ever since the PR's launched and some seem to be taking the advice of not using a guide to heart and enjoying it for what it is.
IIRC the PR's also launched on console and got a nice little update on PC to fix the fonts too.
Maybe a tiny drip feed into II since the SaGa remasters & remakes started but I doubt that's made a huge difference.
Maria and Leila are top shelf FF cuties
I'm playing the PS1 version, currently at the Dreadnought. I kinda enjoy the game but I hate the magic system (takes way too long to level up your spells).
I've heard the GBA, PSP and Pixel Remaster versions have makes this less grindy. Are those versions in general better and worth restarting the game on another console?
Magic level and weapon skill increases are way faster from what I remember. GBA also has some extra content and PSP has different sprites which I don't really like.
I wish Kawazu would give us a FF2 remaster/remake the same way he has been doing the SaGa games.