>terrible class/leveling system >big political story that's the focus, characters and their personal stories seem to come second >you always have a rotating fourth slot for guest characters so you never really have a 'full' party you can invest in and feel happy about, there's always some new butthole you have to build up to go to that area's dungeon or whatever
that's why i dropped it anyway
controlling a cast of characters that either don't have a stake in the narrative or are completely inconsequential outside of the narrative sucks though, it's the same reason XII was such a trainwreck. Vaan and Penelo are the only characters in your party with an actual personality and they have frick all to do with the story and all the other characters only exist to vomit exposition about all the boring political stuff that isn't interesting.
>controlling a cast of characters that either don't have a stake in the narrative or are completely inconsequential outside of the narrative sucks though
Depends, what does this have to do with FF2 where every single party member is part of the narrative?
they happen to live under occupation and like one of them has a brother that gets killed or something but that's it lol, you could replace them with nameless soldiers that never speak and it would have like no impact on the first several hours of the game which is what i played. if that's solved later on that's great but i'm not playing 100 hours for the story to actually matter, thanks.
Firion was adopted by Maria and Leon's family, Guy was also a close friend, all of them saw their loved ones die after the imperial troops razed their town and hunted them down like cattle, if you say they have no relevance to the overall plot you're quite literally mentally impaired, much like 90% of FF fans however.
Awful gameplay. Play it and see.
They shitcanned the designed and gave him his own series as a containment method. (Saga) and never let him work on FF ever again.
The AI and path finding routines in that are atrociously bad.
So are the boss battles.
And here's the schizo who hates Kawazu and comes up with his own deranged headcanon again, the usual circle is complete
11 months ago
Anonymous
>it's the audience's fault the story sucks and is boring
lol
11 months ago
Anonymous
So first the problem with the story is that characters don't have any stakes in it, now the story just sucks...because it just does.
>terrible class/leveling system
It's a total joke. The optimal build is just to have everyone run berserk+weapon+cure. Trying to balance a party makes the game HARDER than just unga-ing through it. You could very easily just have an entire team running fist+cure+berserk.
I still can't believe that made it into the rereleases. Meanwhile FF3 does something similar where you're more or less required to run 2 damage + 2 healers in the final boss, but at least lets you play around for most of the game.
This is my biggest issue with the game. Endgame content completely centers around the blood sword because it's basically the only way to do appreciable damage to any high-defense enemy. Any other weapon is only gonna do a fraction of the damage that the blood sword does, and you can just totally forget about any offensive magic at all
>The optimal build is just to have everyone run berserk+weapon+cure.
Much like how in FF1 the optimal party is four black belts spamming attack, or how in FF5 the optimal party is four dual wielding MK spamming infused !RapidFire, or how the optimal FF6 party is four people spamming Ultima...
This
Even though the game clearly has issues, but that's not saying much considering every FF has issues anyway, people love to dogpile on FF2 because the people who did like what it tried to do moved onto SaGa and never looked back, it has no more issues than any other FF.
This
Even though the game clearly has issues, but that's not saying much considering every FF has issues anyway, people love to dogpile on FF2 because the people who did like what it tried to do moved onto SaGa and never looked back, it has no more issues than any other FF.
People hated this game decades before "e celebs" even existed you fricking zoomzooms
Sure thing bro, the game that set up most of FF's original elements and also made people like Matsui enroll as devs for the company because of how impressive it was was actually always hated.
The leveling system is actually pretty ambitious, but the game has quite a few equipment interactions that they simply refuse to explain to you on top of the typical buggy as frick Nasir programming that make a chore to play blind
Is this the one where you're supposed to hit yourself in battle because you get more HP the more HP you lose?
Have you played it? >you are a person that only fights when they have to = you don't play this game at all >you are a person who tries to only grind the lowest amount possible aka you just never run from battles >you travel from one town to another town >you fight and lose to a boss, because you did not grind cure, you did not grind being hit to gain HP, you did not grind NEARLY enough to play the basic game, you drop the game >you are a person who loves mindlessly grinding >you played the game, like it, and make a contrarian thread on Ganker asking why people don't like it
That's you. That's the kind of person you are. Majority of people don't like grinding, even less are ok with grinding, and the people who apparently really like grinding nearly does not exist.
>Majority of people don't like grinding
I don't mind the actual act of fighting multiple low-level battles in a row with the goal of levelling up. My main problem with grinding is I don't want to feel like I'm cheating the game. I don't want to get to level 100 in the first area of the game and then blaze through the rest of it, but how do I know when to stop grinding? I want the upcoming battles to be appropriately difficult but not literally impossible, and the issue is that I don't know what level I need to be for that to happen. Odds are I will underestimate the intended level, die a few times against the boss, then grind some more, and now I'm overestimate and suddenly the boss is too easy.
>I don't want to get to level 100 in the first area of the game and then blaze through the rest of it
True, I can understand that. What USUALLY happens, is that a boss kicks your ass really badly, and you find out, there is no weakness you didn't exploit, or some item you forgot that makes the battle easier, its simply, you aren't strong enough. So you need to grind. And without knowing when to stop, you kinda just do it until you can so "ok, I can beat the boss now". Only to quickly realize after that, you become too strong. But usually, like in most games, all you need to do is just never run from fights, and that is enough grinding. I've played FF1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15, and literally, the only time where never running wasn't enough grinding, was in fact, in 2. Because of how it works, gaining levels means nothing if your cure spell isn't high enough to make it worth it. I know it gets a lot of flack, but I really liked how long FF3's dungeons tended to be, because you never needed to do extra grinding if you never run, plus the job system let you always enjoy exploring what you could do, if you got bored you could just swap to another job, see how it works out between save points.
I do hate the grinding meme. I’ve also played FF 1 through 9 and the only times I’ve had to grind was 2 to make sure I had good enough stats because a boss was kicking my weak ass or 5 because I do the FJF every year and I might have some weird ass party that needs certain abilities unlocked or just more strength to continue, and that’s only on those runs, regular ones don’t need grinding.
Man, after trying out DQ1 I have no idea how that franchise popped off. Actually really works well for some cheap ass mobile game made today, where you just grind to beat the next dude to grind and beat the next dude as infinity, but it’s not what I expected as the start of a huge jrpg franchise
>Is this the one where you're supposed to hit yourself in battle because you get more HP the more HP you lose?
This is changed in Pixel Remaster, you'll get HP after a # of battles (think it's witihin a random range, not positive). So just by doing battles normally you'll get more HP.
You'll still need to do stuff like use up MP to increase your MP though.
That's good. What's not good is world design like the Xenohomosexuals like to do.
Putting new monsters in a more clearly defined different area makes sense. Putting level 80 monsters in the literal path of a story quest where you'll be level 30 not so much.
This allows you to go frick off to all of the map if you're not a moron.
>"At the time, when Square tested the game out and saw the Ultima bug, it was definitely a problem, and Sakaguchi said “How did this happen? Fix it.” However, the person that programmed it replied with the following statement: >“All of that legendary stuff, it dates back to an age that didn’t even have proper techniques. If you were to look at such things now in the present’s point-of-view, it would be natural that they look inferior. For this reason, it’s a given that Ultima’s abilities would be bad.” >“As for those who struggled and ultimately acquired it only to find out that it’s useless… well, that’s something that often happens in life. So, I’m not going to fix it!” >Naturally, Sakaguchi was rather irritated by that reply and said “whatever, just give me the source,” so he could fix it himself. As it turned out, the programmer had ciphered the source, so he ended up being the only one who could do anything with it, and it was just left the way it was.
What the frick was his problem?
Awful gameplay. Play it and see.
They shitcanned the designed and gave him his own series as a containment method. (Saga) and never let him work on FF ever again.
The AI and path finding routines in that are atrociously bad.
So are the boss battles.
Have you played it? >you are a person that only fights when they have to = you don't play this game at all >you are a person who tries to only grind the lowest amount possible aka you just never run from battles >you travel from one town to another town >you fight and lose to a boss, because you did not grind cure, you did not grind being hit to gain HP, you did not grind NEARLY enough to play the basic game, you drop the game >you are a person who loves mindlessly grinding >you played the game, like it, and make a contrarian thread on Ganker asking why people don't like it
That's you. That's the kind of person you are. Majority of people don't like grinding, even less are ok with grinding, and the people who apparently really like grinding nearly does not exist.
I like grinding, but not the kind of grinding that this game requires. Like when Bravely Default came out, I grinded the shit out of that game. It was comfy, just sitting on my couch with my 3DS, watching TV. FF2's grinding requires special levels of autism.
but then again its the second in the series, they were trying out new stuff, it wasnt until FF3 that jobs were even a thing. (and FF3 sucks ass story wise)
its not a bad game as a sequel to the original, it has a more interesting story thats doesnt repeat the original one.
Its bad only when you compared to literally all the other sequels which are obviously improved and superior.
>it wasnt until FF3 that jobs were even a thing.
Classes from 1 are essentially the same thing.
FFII tried to allow it in a way that was more open but they really just didn't have the capability to do so on the hardware and some of their programmers were moronic on top of it.
IT wasn't really a bad concept just a horrible execution. Games like The Alliance Alive do the system better where you also lose stats for being bad.
As someone who played the Famicom, PS1 and PSP versions of the game, here are the main issues with FF2: >Leveling / stat system is nice on paper, but very badly executed, and insanely grindy; the GBA/PSP/all future releases made it way less grindy and made you randomly gain stats after almost every battle >Magic leveling system is a pain, you need to cast spells dozens of times to level it up once, and certain spells are required for progression. Also in the Famicom version, leveling magic will reduce your strength/attack, and vice versa >World map is awfully designed. There's super high level areas just a short distance from the starting area, and it's never clear where the borders are >Rotating 4th party member sucks. Most of the time they are way weaker than you and thus just end up being dead weight >Certain stats like Evasion are just broken as frick >There's tons of hidden mechanics that the game just does not explain at all, like how you're supposed to level Evasion >Final dungeon has enemies that hit you for a % of your max health, so if you grinded really high HP, lmao you're fricked gg >Dungeon design is awful. All of them are just mazes with dead ends that have nothing in them, and they keep re-using this stupid fricking "3/4 doors but only 1 is the true path and the others are fake doors that lead to an empty room" thing, it literally gets re-used in almost every dungeon
They were trying something different, like a lot of "2" games did in the NES era, and it obviously wasn't liked because FF3 went right back to the same formula as FF1 but with a more fleshed-out job system.
Of course, Ganker and /vr/, being the contrarians they are, will just insist that anyone who dislikes this game is "parroting youtubers".
I shouldn't need to elaborate if you actually played the game, let alone multiple versions of it, you'd instantly know just how many statements about mechanical details are wrong.
Even without considering that, anyone who isn't a lobotomite would instantly smell bullshit when somebody says nonsense like
dungeon has enemies that hit you for a % of your max health, so if you grinded really high HP, lmao you're fricked gg
Since enemies that hit for % damage (protip, they've been around since the early-mid game, all undeads hit for % in FF2, which is why the game forces you to go through three main dungeons full of it at different points in the game, to make sure you always have HP leveled up) would kill you in the same exact amount of turns whether you have 10HP or 9999HP.
>Final dungeon has enemies that hit you for a % of your max health, so if you grinded really high HP, lmao you're fricked gg
Unless I’m missing something here I still feel like I’d want high health
>10 minutes in >get out of the first town >step one pixel out of the intended early level zone >level 50 enemies using Nuke on you
yeah that sure is fun
the leveling system is very grindy but the gba/psp version more or less fixes that. maybe it flew too close to the sun at the time since the same system is now used in a lot of other games
Learn by doing systems weren't novel for the time, games like Dungeon Master had similar mechanics before FF2, the thing that made FF2 different and more complex was the existence of growth malus, which was canned both in the SaGa games and FF2 versions past the WSC/PS1 because it really didn't do all that much to begin with.
The game's not particularly grindy on that respect either, because you have a twin system with stats and weapon proficiencies that grow side by side so you can get strong really fast as long as you focus your growth.
The actual issue was that magic leveling was not tied to stats but had a separate leveling mechanic tied to casting, and it was quite slow, but even there in practical terms it was not really an issue outside of making elemental spells kinda worthless past the early game, which is something ever single FF suffers from, there's no sense in leveling buffs past level 3 (or just use tomes) and Cure will be spammed so much you'll have it at high level without looking, not to mention how busted the NES version is when it comes to status effects.
I didn't hate it, but maybe it's because I was lucky and realized early on I could manipulate my characters' HP going up by taking damage in battles on purpose. So that's exactly what I did, and after about an hour my characters went from having 60-100 HP to around 450-800 HP. It wasn't always clear where to go though, and it also sucked when I realized I fricked myself out of getting Excalibur. Not that it mattered, since I clobbered the Emperor by dual-wielding blood swords and he was dead in just three turns.
Also, it's important to remember that you can in-game save scum and keeping taking several steps at a time until you reach a town where there's amazing spells and gear, if you're willing to take a dozen game overs along the way.
Final Fantasy III is hands down a much more enjoyable experience, from the job system to the story progression and setpieces and so on.
I assume people have heard the original complaints from the NES version where trying to improve skills would lower other skills, making the entire system some sinister dance of two steps forward, one step back.
Once later versions streamlined the stat leveling, fixed the bugs, and made it to where progress can only be gained, not lost, it's actually not a bad game.
The keyword system is half-assed and a pointless contribution, but it's not like there are that many to begin with.
I agree with the original anons saying most of the hate come from online personalities perpetuating critiques from 30 years ago without having played a more modern version themselves.
It's no work of art, but it's still a fun game.
The keyword system was an elegant way to handle Ultima style conversations on a console RPG, eventually that style of RPG dialogue died pretty quickly though and FF2 was just too small a game to use it to its fullest, honestly it would have been way better in the Ultima games themselves than FF2, ironically enough.
At the time it was a good feature.
Your other choices were:
1) The original Ultima style dialogue prompt, which was the same exact thing but way more wordy and slow, because not only did you have to type shit all the time, you had no keyword memorization feature even though NPCs were coded to react to specific keywords you might or might not catch, so you'd spend hours not only typing shit manually to multiple NPCs, but also trying to figure out what you needed to ask in order to progress.
2) Extremely simple Yes and No dialogue prompts of the rest of the industry who didn't adapt to Ultima's conversation system, it was faster for sure, but not particularly immersive.
For all its faults, the keyword system was one of the first baby steps towards the more modern prebaked answer sets we have now, it seems bad nowadays but back then it was one of the better ways to handle more immersive and reactive dialogues with NPCs.
Because people keep parroting eceleb bullshit like hitting yourself for HP when that's not even a good idea and it fricks you over later in the game. The right way to play if you want to break it is to grind evasion and abuse instant death spells.
Cause it's shit. But I did only play through NES. Perhaps other versions are more agreeable, but then again is it really FF2 if you're not going through the video game equivalent of CBT?
This is one of the things I still remember for how stupid it was, it didn't matter if you took 20000 damage in a fight, if you healed back up by the end of the fight and finished at (close to) your starting/higher HP you wouldn't gain any HP, so either you were in manageable fights where you'd still comfortably make it out, never gaining HP, or suddenly you were getting one-shot by some gigas fricker.
>Really easy to break >Deviate a bit from the path and you will encounter shit that is clearly way higher level than you >The beggining is very boring >Last boss is a fricking joke if you have a swords guy and Masamune >Music is tolerable, not the best, not the worst >Every 4th party member just dies >The way you talk to NPCs is cool at first, gets repetitive and forgotten after a bit >That last dungeon
Those are all the things I remember from FF2, it is lite-SaGa, but not in a good way.
It isn't the worst game, but I would understand the frustration from someone that got stuck at some part of the game, especially at the beginning.
Also, the mob encounter rate is kinda high, not sure if other versions of the game ever fix this, but you can't move in some places for more than 8 steps without finding an encounter.
I love it. Love how open world it is and lets you play your own way so long as you don't go out of your way to break it by hitting yourself for 20 hours. It's a shame that the defining Final Fantasy game for the rest of the franchise ended up being IV, which in my opinion is complete dogshit.
All the terrible cliches started with IV - the hallway adventure design, the boring 'use strong element' game design, the debuffs not doing anything, the shitty triply fake death plot beats, the out of left field final boss you never heard of throughout the game, the scattered themes and general narrative incoherence...
>not disproving any of my points
sure was sad when monkguy died oh wait he didn't
and the old man and the bard and Rydia and everybody else in the fricking game
sure was fun to go through ICE DUNGEON eating shit for half of it only to find FIRE SWORD in a chest and feel 'powerful' by doing the only obvious thing you could and having no alternative options to express yourselves in gameplay than doing the exact specific thing the game wants you to do
At least FF2 is unique and tries to be an inventive videogame. I will defend FF8 for the same reason.
Look, FF2 does have neat concepts, but it really isn’t just that good. I’m not lying about the good parts though, I’ve seen them realized in Saga games and while I have not played them all yet, playing what is essentially an open world turn based jrpg with classless progression is really fricking cool.
Unfortunately FF2 is just a slog of a prototype
Yeah, I agree that FF2 is flawed. 'Bring 99 potions' is a meme for a reason. But I had fun with it, which can't be said about the more linear entries.
FF3 is a very strange game too, felt like a step down from 1 somehow, with fewer options traded off for meme dual wielding shenanigans.
Yeah 3 is a weird one. Out of the original 3 games, 1 is my favourite, simple enough class based rpg, it’s neat to just kill some time. 2 has its flaws we’re all discussing but 3 just feels so odd I don’t know why. I like the class stuff but the events that happen through the game just leave me with nothing, it’s weird. Also doesn’t help that ff5 and BD are just better versions that I replay a bunch
>but 3 just feels so odd I don’t know why.
Because it's an awkward attempt by an improvised dev team at fusing the rigid class based system of the first game with a linear, more involved plot structure from the second game, but those people weren't all that involved in the development of the first two games so they didn't really understand the thought processes behind those, why some things were made in certain ways.
In FF1 you were free to do whatever you want with your party, it was YOUR adventure through and through, you were always in control, in FF3 you are forced to switch to the flavour of the week class instead, because a gimmick dungeon wants you to use them for some reason.
In FF2 you have a party with definite characters with their own stories and roles in the overall narrative, the main trio has their personal beef with the empire, people like Josef, Minwu, Gordon etc. all had their own personal stories, they were temporary party members but they had a reason to be there, their sacrifices further empower the story, they give you more reasons to keep fighting against the emperor, in FF3 you're just a bunch of nobodies again put against Xande, a villain that gets the bulk of the main story focus and ends up being replaced at the very last moment by a green fart cloud with breasts that comes outta nowhere, the story falls flat, there's no characters with a strong presence, no archetypes to establish like FF2 did.
Basically, it was aimless and uninspired, FF4 was also horribly uninspired but at least it had the decency of copying FF2 a bit more in terms of plot, even though it faked the sacrifices from Jos...ehm Jang and the likes.
>Level up by doing shit
So, does ot work like Elder Scrolls where you have character levels + skills, or are characters just stat sheets that dynamically improve based entirely on your actions (not tied to traditional character levels)?
FF2 has always interested me, but I never really took the plunge.
it's similar to TES but magic gets stronger by using it (you don't have curaga for exemple)
you should try out the gba or psp versions. The game story is pretty much a skeleton but it was pretty "dark" for it's time. i'd recommend a guide for dungeons though for better or worse they actually feel likes real dungeons lol
They dont even know shit like that because they have never actually played the original (or translation fan ROM). They only fricking touched the remakes and re-releases where every combat action is much faster and entire mechanics have either been rebalanced or removed outright and then talk a big game screaming "zoomer!! Filtered!!! Muh eceleb boogeyman!" like obnoxious contrarian unbearable morons when they literally know fricking nothing
The re-releases of FF2 are practically the same, bar bug fixes and balance changes.
11 months ago
Anonymous
No they arent. Shut up holy shit.
The only one that comes close to being a "better graphics but mechanically authentic" remake was the PSP I&II release which due to the PSP part is underrepresented among people who played any iteration of the game
Unless you have played the 8-bit original please stop trying to act like a special snowflake and calling people zoomers when defending a game you havent actually experienced properly
11 months ago
Anonymous
>The only one that comes close to being a "better graphics but mechanically authentic" remake was the PSP I&II release >Removed Vancian casting from 1 and stat malus from 2, and had several other rebalances >Mechanically authentic
Anything past WSC/PS1 is not mechanically authetic FF1/2, and if you actually played those you'd know.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Shut up
First playthrough mostly blind. Frick you and all you fricking liars defending this game as anything other than shit.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>Unless you have played the 8-bit original
I literally have. My only complaints with it where >any response speed below 7 makes the game a slog >gaining evasion is moronic and never happens intentionally >some random encounters are horse shit (random Adamantoise in Gordon's Castle and the fricking Gigas)
Besides that, it's one of the best famicom rpg's, and was regarded highly at the time.
>Muh NES version tho
By that measure every FF is a terrible game simply because they were buggy as frick, but I sure don't see you people complain about NES FF1 for having 90% of your spells being completely useless, the thief being nonfunctional and other related issues, nor do I see you complaining about FF6 for having dozens of gamebreaking bugs, nonfunctional stats, nonfunctional status effects, loads of unexplained mechanics and so on, it's only FF2 that gets the flak for some reason, every other FF guilty of the same crimes gets a pass because no e-celeb made a rant about it.
11 months ago
Anonymous
zoomer here, I played some updated version of FF1. How could they release these games in such a broken state originally? How did this series ever gain a beloved reputation like that? Was there just nothing better in the market or something?
11 months ago
Anonymous
Back then being buggy as frick was the norm, honestly all the way until the end of the 90's most games out there, especially RPGs, were an insane bugfest, late 80's/Early 90's even more so, a lot of devs were notorious for shipping games that were barely fricking playable, if not straight up unplayable at launch, see Troika's games, hell the reason Ultima 9 killed the franchise back then was precisely because it was almost impossible to play, it ran like absolute ass and was loaded with bugs and glitches.
Even the beloved greats that we still play like DOOM 2 were absolutely chock full of bugs, but back then the tech and industry level just weren't there, we didn't have anything better, standards were lower, so people were less anal unless the games were catastrophically buggy and straight up unplayable.
11 months ago
Anonymous
FF1 wasn't very popular on the JP market, especially since it came out around the time that Dragon Quest 3 did. It was a lot more popular in the NA market, mainly because there wasn't much else available. By the time that DQ3 came out in NA, it was years later and FF1 had established a big fanbase.
The FF1 game had a bunch of bugs, but nothing that ruined the game too much. You could easily play any class and not really notice them. White Mage healing as much as Red Mage wouldn't be noticeable unless you used both for healing to compare, Thief run being bugged was hard to notice since some fights were just un-runnable, and many spells just not working could be chalked up to them not being very effective. Remember that magic wasn't listed as "adds +25% to your evasion stat" it was just "boosts evasion". So people could just assume that a spell added some minor amount that meant little and avoided that spell.
By comparison, play Famicom FF2 and you run into a roadblock where enemies are too tough... and it's hard to figure out how to progress. Or it's incredibly easy to overdo things in the other direction, grind too much and become unkillable for most of the game.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>The FF1 game had a bunch of bugs, but nothing that ruined the game too much.
Thief might as well not exist in NES FF1.
All offensive spellcasters are pretty much dead weight because none of the damage spells scale with INT as they should, moreover almost all of your buffs are bugged and do not work, this makes Black Mage and half of Red Mage completely useless, especially when Warrior/Black Belts are so damn strong.
Tents save your game BEFORE they restore your spell charges, which leads to weird situations on loading where you end up with no spell charges despite having used a Tent.
Status defense is also bugged as enemies with embedded status infliction on normal attacks will bypass your status defense, e.g. Medusas or wieneratrice will still petrify your characters on melee hits despite their protections, but will not petrify them through their spells.
ALL of the weapons with racial attributes are bugged in the NES version, every single one them, your Were-Buster won't inflict extra damage on were beasts, the Light Axe won't inflict extra damage on undeads and so on.
And there's more and more bugs on the NES version that make two thirds of the game mechanics nonexistent.
11 months ago
Anonymous
FF3 is fun even with NES emulation to this day. Its a legit good game even with its time. FF2 was unbearable and I only played through it because of my autism wanting to play all mainline entires. FF1 is better than FF2 but still yeah even 1 is not a very enjoyable game. Its basically a fetchquest grind where most spells are bugged and no twists or story to speak of which is why I always laugh when buttholes try to act all high and mighty like they are veterans when hyping up FF1
>Yes, the original version the west could play is good, HOWEVER, the original Japanese only version is terrible therefore the game is terrible!
11 months ago
Anonymous
FF2 never had an english/NES release so unless you speak japanese you can only play it through a romhack. The only reason I mentioned them separarely is because if I only mentioned "original" some fat moronic neckbeard would have tried to pull a gotcha on me thinking they caught me in a lie because there is no proper official original for Westerners
Most people instinctively shit on anything that deviates from the accepted norms.
On the other hand FF2 has some design issues in the way it handles its growth system >HP/MP flags only rise on HP loss, undeads/Parasites were created to support this system but there's also some fricky way to abuse this, most notably Swap spam >Agility is broken and flags are tied to shields, leading to dual shield "builds" that maximize AGI growth and turn you invincible since nothing can hit you >Spell growth was simply too slow to be functional as a "increase level through use" >Having both variable stats and weapon proficiency leads to statistical overkill on the player's side and make the game a joke
It was fine on paper but lots of oversights and mistakes happened, which is why SaGa was made, to polish and expand that idea, and from the very first game all of the aforementioned issues were fixed, although some others came up, like AGI being still too important in SaGa 1/2 but for a different reason, as it ties into attack accuracy and in the GB version there's not a lot of weapons with AGI growth flags., basically, FF2 stumbled so SaGa could fly.
Want to level your defense and HP stats? Enjoy deliberately letting enemies hit you to grind those stats higher! I'm not even joking, that's the way the system works. It's anal as frick to do
Literally the only problem I have with the game is how gay the dungeon design is. 95% of doors lead to empty rooms full of an encounter every step you take. It's all so fricking annoying. Anyone who criticizes the game for the level mechanics is a moronic gay.
>Shitty ass code system >Leveling system is actually dogshit >You know that spell ultima? Good luck using it without loads of grinding (ps it's also bugged in at least one version) >Revolving door 4th party member (they die often times) >Encounter rate is fricking off the rails >dungeon design is horrific to boot >Story is just bleh
FF was a guttertrash series of games until 4. It's biggest contribution to the genre was how turns were taken in FF1 >inb4 JOB LEVEL apologists try defending 3
FF1 is a fun romp (especially the remakes if you aren't into vancian magic/copious bugs)
FF2 is FINE if you're into wacky systems but it's easily skippable
FF3 has always been pretty shit and FF5 is just FF3 but better, never understood the defenders for that game
What you are in for, is grinding getting hit to increase your HP, grinding casting cure to increase its healing level, grinding attacks to increase the attack stat, basically, whatever grinding you went through in FF1, triple it.
>He's an actual artist that just happened to work on video games, you don't see that a lot these days.
You don't see a lot of actual artists these days, period
Didn't hate it, but i played it for like 1 hour and never played again, its just too old and i didn't cared enough to continue, then i heard from here that Romancing SaGa was FF2 but better in every way and THAT bored me to tears (at least 3 did, don't know about the rest) so i can only assume FF2 would be even worse
I actually think Pixel Remaster actually makes it playable. Also, it seems to have had the most effort in the art and music (with the exception of FF6 which got the most effort).
The "leveling" system was pretty terrible. Yes, it turned into something good eventually - after over 10 years of revisions - but this doesn't make the original game any better than it was on release. The plot gets really dull partway through, and the big bad becoming the King of Hell is a lot less exciting after having to grind through all the layers of Hell just to meet him. The constant characters dying was certainly novel back when it released, but it feels like there's just a character treadmill after some time.
Some people also didn't like the keyword system, although I felt like it wasn't too obnoxious. Or maybe I was just numb from the story at that point and had lost all caring about the game I had.
The leveling system is the worst in the series. I commend them for experimenting, but it was a failed one. If not for the cancel glitch it'd be unplayable from all the grinding. That and the final dungeon is an hours long trek with no saves.
Because it's a shitty unfun game thanks to it's obtuse and garbage leveling and gameplay systems that makes the game a giant chore. Kawazu in general is a hack who seems to think that the point of making games is to fill them with autism instead of making shit that people actually want to play.
It has the worst experience system in the history of humankind, you can understand what was the objective of the developer and I guess it worked in paper but in reality nobody was going to play it as intented, also the story and characters suck, I can literally only remember that due that talked with beavers.
I want to get through it but it's incredibly tedious with random encounters and enemies which just take 0 damage. Dogshit enemy design, dogshit random combat. Sometimes my sword hits a Black Flan for like 300, others it's just 10 or 0.
>maria always missed and died so she stayed as a lvl 1 character for the whole game >step on the wrong tile. Get killed by overleveled monster
It happens
>terrible class/leveling system
>big political story that's the focus, characters and their personal stories seem to come second
>you always have a rotating fourth slot for guest characters so you never really have a 'full' party you can invest in and feel happy about, there's always some new butthole you have to build up to go to that area's dungeon or whatever
that's why i dropped it anyway
The only issue is the first thing
controlling a cast of characters that either don't have a stake in the narrative or are completely inconsequential outside of the narrative sucks though, it's the same reason XII was such a trainwreck. Vaan and Penelo are the only characters in your party with an actual personality and they have frick all to do with the story and all the other characters only exist to vomit exposition about all the boring political stuff that isn't interesting.
>controlling a cast of characters that either don't have a stake in the narrative or are completely inconsequential outside of the narrative sucks though
Depends, what does this have to do with FF2 where every single party member is part of the narrative?
they happen to live under occupation and like one of them has a brother that gets killed or something but that's it lol, you could replace them with nameless soldiers that never speak and it would have like no impact on the first several hours of the game which is what i played. if that's solved later on that's great but i'm not playing 100 hours for the story to actually matter, thanks.
Firion was adopted by Maria and Leon's family, Guy was also a close friend, all of them saw their loved ones die after the imperial troops razed their town and hunted them down like cattle, if you say they have no relevance to the overall plot you're quite literally mentally impaired, much like 90% of FF fans however.
And here's the schizo who hates Kawazu and comes up with his own deranged headcanon again, the usual circle is complete
>it's the audience's fault the story sucks and is boring
lol
So first the problem with the story is that characters don't have any stakes in it, now the story just sucks...because it just does.
>terrible class/leveling system
It's a total joke. The optimal build is just to have everyone run berserk+weapon+cure. Trying to balance a party makes the game HARDER than just unga-ing through it. You could very easily just have an entire team running fist+cure+berserk.
you would also want one person with sword due to the busted Blood Sword
I still can't believe that made it into the rereleases. Meanwhile FF3 does something similar where you're more or less required to run 2 damage + 2 healers in the final boss, but at least lets you play around for most of the game.
>I still can't believe that made it into the rereleases.
fun fact, the PS1 version had TWO of them
This is my biggest issue with the game. Endgame content completely centers around the blood sword because it's basically the only way to do appreciable damage to any high-defense enemy. Any other weapon is only gonna do a fraction of the damage that the blood sword does, and you can just totally forget about any offensive magic at all
>The optimal build is just to have everyone run berserk+weapon+cure.
Much like how in FF1 the optimal party is four black belts spamming attack, or how in FF5 the optimal party is four dual wielding MK spamming infused !RapidFire, or how the optimal FF6 party is four people spamming Ultima...
The primary difference being in FF2 it takes more investment to create an unoptimal party than just letting them attack every round.
But enough about FFXII
Ecelebs told them to
This
Even though the game clearly has issues, but that's not saying much considering every FF has issues anyway, people love to dogpile on FF2 because the people who did like what it tried to do moved onto SaGa and never looked back, it has no more issues than any other FF.
People hated this game decades before "e celebs" even existed you fricking zoomzooms
Sure thing bro, the game that set up most of FF's original elements and also made people like Matsui enroll as devs for the company because of how impressive it was was actually always hated.
>Decades
>Original generation of ecelebs showed up 16 years ago
Gee...
The leveling system is actually pretty ambitious, but the game has quite a few equipment interactions that they simply refuse to explain to you on top of the typical buggy as frick Nasir programming that make a chore to play blind
Is this the one where you're supposed to hit yourself in battle because you get more HP the more HP you lose?
>Majority of people don't like grinding
I don't mind the actual act of fighting multiple low-level battles in a row with the goal of levelling up. My main problem with grinding is I don't want to feel like I'm cheating the game. I don't want to get to level 100 in the first area of the game and then blaze through the rest of it, but how do I know when to stop grinding? I want the upcoming battles to be appropriately difficult but not literally impossible, and the issue is that I don't know what level I need to be for that to happen. Odds are I will underestimate the intended level, die a few times against the boss, then grind some more, and now I'm overestimate and suddenly the boss is too easy.
If you aren't losing HP, doesn't that mean you're winning?
Your entire line of reasoning is bizarre
>I don't want to get to level 100 in the first area of the game and then blaze through the rest of it
True, I can understand that. What USUALLY happens, is that a boss kicks your ass really badly, and you find out, there is no weakness you didn't exploit, or some item you forgot that makes the battle easier, its simply, you aren't strong enough. So you need to grind. And without knowing when to stop, you kinda just do it until you can so "ok, I can beat the boss now". Only to quickly realize after that, you become too strong. But usually, like in most games, all you need to do is just never run from fights, and that is enough grinding. I've played FF1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15, and literally, the only time where never running wasn't enough grinding, was in fact, in 2. Because of how it works, gaining levels means nothing if your cure spell isn't high enough to make it worth it. I know it gets a lot of flack, but I really liked how long FF3's dungeons tended to be, because you never needed to do extra grinding if you never run, plus the job system let you always enjoy exploring what you could do, if you got bored you could just swap to another job, see how it works out between save points.
>you never needed to do extra grinding if you never run
And you never run because if it fails you die lol
I do hate the grinding meme. I’ve also played FF 1 through 9 and the only times I’ve had to grind was 2 to make sure I had good enough stats because a boss was kicking my weak ass or 5 because I do the FJF every year and I might have some weird ass party that needs certain abilities unlocked or just more strength to continue, and that’s only on those runs, regular ones don’t need grinding.
People who complain that FF is grindy have ONLY played FF and maybe pokemon
DQ would make them cry.
Man, after trying out DQ1 I have no idea how that franchise popped off. Actually really works well for some cheap ass mobile game made today, where you just grind to beat the next dude to grind and beat the next dude as infinity, but it’s not what I expected as the start of a huge jrpg franchise
>Is this the one where you're supposed to hit yourself in battle because you get more HP the more HP you lose?
This is changed in Pixel Remaster, you'll get HP after a # of battles (think it's witihin a random range, not positive). So just by doing battles normally you'll get more HP.
You'll still need to do stuff like use up MP to increase your MP though.
Awful world map
Still remember the first time I played it and died to a vastly higher leveled mob just because I took a few steps north from the starting area.
That's good. What's not good is world design like the Xenohomosexuals like to do.
Putting new monsters in a more clearly defined different area makes sense. Putting level 80 monsters in the literal path of a story quest where you'll be level 30 not so much.
This allows you to go frick off to all of the map if you're not a moron.
>Putting level 80 monsters in the literal path of a story quest where you'll be level 30 not so much.
None of this happens in the game.
mostly the horrible levelling.
>"At the time, when Square tested the game out and saw the Ultima bug, it was definitely a problem, and Sakaguchi said “How did this happen? Fix it.” However, the person that programmed it replied with the following statement:
>“All of that legendary stuff, it dates back to an age that didn’t even have proper techniques. If you were to look at such things now in the present’s point-of-view, it would be natural that they look inferior. For this reason, it’s a given that Ultima’s abilities would be bad.”
>“As for those who struggled and ultimately acquired it only to find out that it’s useless… well, that’s something that often happens in life. So, I’m not going to fix it!”
>Naturally, Sakaguchi was rather irritated by that reply and said “whatever, just give me the source,” so he could fix it himself. As it turned out, the programmer had ciphered the source, so he ended up being the only one who could do anything with it, and it was just left the way it was.
What the frick was his problem?
Fricking Nasir
Most of Nasir's games were buggy as shit. Even his last one for Square (Secret of Mana) was a mess.
Awful gameplay. Play it and see.
They shitcanned the designed and gave him his own series as a containment method. (Saga) and never let him work on FF ever again.
The AI and path finding routines in that are atrociously bad.
So are the boss battles.
>did even MORE work so that the bug couldn't be fixed
I can't even be mad.
The needful is denied sir!!!
damn, that's moronic but i have to respect his autism
>As it turned out, the programmer had ciphered the source, so he ended up being the only one who could do anything with it
did this man also provide poor quality copper ingots?
>Ultima is SUPPOSED to be bad
>get cool fourth party member
>they die
>repeat
anyone shocked by aeries getting killed literally didn't play final fantasy before 7
Because it is bad, but that font is kino.
Have you played it?
>you are a person that only fights when they have to = you don't play this game at all
>you are a person who tries to only grind the lowest amount possible aka you just never run from battles
>you travel from one town to another town
>you fight and lose to a boss, because you did not grind cure, you did not grind being hit to gain HP, you did not grind NEARLY enough to play the basic game, you drop the game
>you are a person who loves mindlessly grinding
>you played the game, like it, and make a contrarian thread on Ganker asking why people don't like it
That's you. That's the kind of person you are. Majority of people don't like grinding, even less are ok with grinding, and the people who apparently really like grinding nearly does not exist.
I like grinding, but not the kind of grinding that this game requires. Like when Bravely Default came out, I grinded the shit out of that game. It was comfy, just sitting on my couch with my 3DS, watching TV. FF2's grinding requires special levels of autism.
mainly due to how you gain stats in the game which leads to a dumb meme of "hit yourself for 3 hours to get all the HP you need"
but people loved that shit in TES games
No jobs
the leveling system is pretty ass
but then again its the second in the series, they were trying out new stuff, it wasnt until FF3 that jobs were even a thing. (and FF3 sucks ass story wise)
its not a bad game as a sequel to the original, it has a more interesting story thats doesnt repeat the original one.
Its bad only when you compared to literally all the other sequels which are obviously improved and superior.
>it wasnt until FF3 that jobs were even a thing.
Classes from 1 are essentially the same thing.
FFII tried to allow it in a way that was more open but they really just didn't have the capability to do so on the hardware and some of their programmers were moronic on top of it.
IT wasn't really a bad concept just a horrible execution. Games like The Alliance Alive do the system better where you also lose stats for being bad.
As someone who played the Famicom, PS1 and PSP versions of the game, here are the main issues with FF2:
>Leveling / stat system is nice on paper, but very badly executed, and insanely grindy; the GBA/PSP/all future releases made it way less grindy and made you randomly gain stats after almost every battle
>Magic leveling system is a pain, you need to cast spells dozens of times to level it up once, and certain spells are required for progression. Also in the Famicom version, leveling magic will reduce your strength/attack, and vice versa
>World map is awfully designed. There's super high level areas just a short distance from the starting area, and it's never clear where the borders are
>Rotating 4th party member sucks. Most of the time they are way weaker than you and thus just end up being dead weight
>Certain stats like Evasion are just broken as frick
>There's tons of hidden mechanics that the game just does not explain at all, like how you're supposed to level Evasion
>Final dungeon has enemies that hit you for a % of your max health, so if you grinded really high HP, lmao you're fricked gg
>Dungeon design is awful. All of them are just mazes with dead ends that have nothing in them, and they keep re-using this stupid fricking "3/4 doors but only 1 is the true path and the others are fake doors that lead to an empty room" thing, it literally gets re-used in almost every dungeon
They were trying something different, like a lot of "2" games did in the NES era, and it obviously wasn't liked because FF3 went right back to the same formula as FF1 but with a more fleshed-out job system.
Of course, Ganker and /vr/, being the contrarians they are, will just insist that anyone who dislikes this game is "parroting youtubers".
Considering how most of the shit you wrote is plain wrong, yeah, you certainly do give the impression that you're parroting youtubers.
thanks for proving my point
What point? That you wrote several incorrect statements about the game's mechanics on top of adding literal youtuber opinions?
>doesn't refute any of it
want a cracker, polly?
>you are wrong!
>you are parroting youtubers!
>doesn't elaborate at all
(You)
I shouldn't need to elaborate if you actually played the game, let alone multiple versions of it, you'd instantly know just how many statements about mechanical details are wrong.
Even without considering that, anyone who isn't a lobotomite would instantly smell bullshit when somebody says nonsense like
dungeon has enemies that hit you for a % of your max health, so if you grinded really high HP, lmao you're fricked gg
Since enemies that hit for % damage (protip, they've been around since the early-mid game, all undeads hit for % in FF2, which is why the game forces you to go through three main dungeons full of it at different points in the game, to make sure you always have HP leveled up) would kill you in the same exact amount of turns whether you have 10HP or 9999HP.
Where does the game explain that equipping any of 90% of armor pieces basically gimps your chance to hit with any kind of spell?
>Final dungeon has enemies that hit you for a % of your max health, so if you grinded really high HP, lmao you're fricked gg
Unless I’m missing something here I still feel like I’d want high health
Because they didn't play it, or only played the first like 30 minutes.
>10 minutes in
>get out of the first town
>step one pixel out of the intended early level zone
>level 50 enemies using Nuke on you
yeah that sure is fun
I wish that shit was in more games, honestly.
It sends a strong message, you know?
I never actually played 2 and am going through the series again int he PRs, that shit was funny.
It should happen in more games
High level enemies near starting zones is great and makes the world feel more believable.
I like when it filters and pisses the frick out of people like Dunkey (Xenoblade 2).
stumbling upon pic related was funny back then
I love the fear and the danger
>you're wrong because you obviously didn't play the game!
>still no elaboration
I accept your concession
Most people play the game wrong because ecelebs keep parroting the meme about hitting yourself to gain HP.
the leveling system is very grindy but the gba/psp version more or less fixes that. maybe it flew too close to the sun at the time since the same system is now used in a lot of other games
Learn by doing systems weren't novel for the time, games like Dungeon Master had similar mechanics before FF2, the thing that made FF2 different and more complex was the existence of growth malus, which was canned both in the SaGa games and FF2 versions past the WSC/PS1 because it really didn't do all that much to begin with.
The game's not particularly grindy on that respect either, because you have a twin system with stats and weapon proficiencies that grow side by side so you can get strong really fast as long as you focus your growth.
The actual issue was that magic leveling was not tied to stats but had a separate leveling mechanic tied to casting, and it was quite slow, but even there in practical terms it was not really an issue outside of making elemental spells kinda worthless past the early game, which is something ever single FF suffers from, there's no sense in leveling buffs past level 3 (or just use tomes) and Cure will be spammed so much you'll have it at high level without looking, not to mention how busted the NES version is when it comes to status effects.
I didn't hate it, but maybe it's because I was lucky and realized early on I could manipulate my characters' HP going up by taking damage in battles on purpose. So that's exactly what I did, and after about an hour my characters went from having 60-100 HP to around 450-800 HP. It wasn't always clear where to go though, and it also sucked when I realized I fricked myself out of getting Excalibur. Not that it mattered, since I clobbered the Emperor by dual-wielding blood swords and he was dead in just three turns.
Also, it's important to remember that you can in-game save scum and keeping taking several steps at a time until you reach a town where there's amazing spells and gear, if you're willing to take a dozen game overs along the way.
Final Fantasy III is hands down a much more enjoyable experience, from the job system to the story progression and setpieces and so on.
I assume people have heard the original complaints from the NES version where trying to improve skills would lower other skills, making the entire system some sinister dance of two steps forward, one step back.
Once later versions streamlined the stat leveling, fixed the bugs, and made it to where progress can only be gained, not lost, it's actually not a bad game.
The keyword system is half-assed and a pointless contribution, but it's not like there are that many to begin with.
I agree with the original anons saying most of the hate come from online personalities perpetuating critiques from 30 years ago without having played a more modern version themselves.
It's no work of art, but it's still a fun game.
The keyword system was an elegant way to handle Ultima style conversations on a console RPG, eventually that style of RPG dialogue died pretty quickly though and FF2 was just too small a game to use it to its fullest, honestly it would have been way better in the Ultima games themselves than FF2, ironically enough.
the keywords seemed like such a bad idea, it just amounted to spamming everything whenever the need arose.
At the time it was a good feature.
Your other choices were:
1) The original Ultima style dialogue prompt, which was the same exact thing but way more wordy and slow, because not only did you have to type shit all the time, you had no keyword memorization feature even though NPCs were coded to react to specific keywords you might or might not catch, so you'd spend hours not only typing shit manually to multiple NPCs, but also trying to figure out what you needed to ask in order to progress.
2) Extremely simple Yes and No dialogue prompts of the rest of the industry who didn't adapt to Ultima's conversation system, it was faster for sure, but not particularly immersive.
For all its faults, the keyword system was one of the first baby steps towards the more modern prebaked answer sets we have now, it seems bad nowadays but back then it was one of the better ways to handle more immersive and reactive dialogues with NPCs.
>you criticized the game? this can only mean you didn't play it and are just parroting youtubers!
Why is Ganker like this
Because most anons are like that, you fricking moron.
not an argument
Nice opinion what youtuber did you get it from?
Scott the Woz, actually.
Because people keep parroting eceleb bullshit like hitting yourself for HP when that's not even a good idea and it fricks you over later in the game. The right way to play if you want to break it is to grind evasion and abuse instant death spells.
which e-celebs? are they in this thread with us? I don't watch E-celebs.
>everyone parrots that you need to hit yourself to get hp
>finished the game with 3k hp without doing that once
here were my stats at the end of the PSP version, never hit myself.
My big beef was that I didn't get agility/evasion and it took a guy streaming 2PR and explaining it that opened my eyes
Cause it's shit. But I did only play through NES. Perhaps other versions are more agreeable, but then again is it really FF2 if you're not going through the video game equivalent of CBT?
This is one of the things I still remember for how stupid it was, it didn't matter if you took 20000 damage in a fight, if you healed back up by the end of the fight and finished at (close to) your starting/higher HP you wouldn't gain any HP, so either you were in manageable fights where you'd still comfortably make it out, never gaining HP, or suddenly you were getting one-shot by some gigas fricker.
Guy speak beaver.
>Really easy to break
>Deviate a bit from the path and you will encounter shit that is clearly way higher level than you
>The beggining is very boring
>Last boss is a fricking joke if you have a swords guy and Masamune
>Music is tolerable, not the best, not the worst
>Every 4th party member just dies
>The way you talk to NPCs is cool at first, gets repetitive and forgotten after a bit
>That last dungeon
Those are all the things I remember from FF2, it is lite-SaGa, but not in a good way.
It isn't the worst game, but I would understand the frustration from someone that got stuck at some part of the game, especially at the beginning.
Also, the mob encounter rate is kinda high, not sure if other versions of the game ever fix this, but you can't move in some places for more than 8 steps without finding an encounter.
I love it. I've been a fan since 2008.
I love it. Love how open world it is and lets you play your own way so long as you don't go out of your way to break it by hitting yourself for 20 hours. It's a shame that the defining Final Fantasy game for the rest of the franchise ended up being IV, which in my opinion is complete dogshit.
All the terrible cliches started with IV - the hallway adventure design, the boring 'use strong element' game design, the debuffs not doing anything, the shitty triply fake death plot beats, the out of left field final boss you never heard of throughout the game, the scattered themes and general narrative incoherence...
>I have chosen to be contrarian
ok
>not disproving any of my points
sure was sad when monkguy died oh wait he didn't
and the old man and the bard and Rydia and everybody else in the fricking game
sure was fun to go through ICE DUNGEON eating shit for half of it only to find FIRE SWORD in a chest and feel 'powerful' by doing the only obvious thing you could and having no alternative options to express yourselves in gameplay than doing the exact specific thing the game wants you to do
At least FF2 is unique and tries to be an inventive videogame. I will defend FF8 for the same reason.
Look, FF2 does have neat concepts, but it really isn’t just that good. I’m not lying about the good parts though, I’ve seen them realized in Saga games and while I have not played them all yet, playing what is essentially an open world turn based jrpg with classless progression is really fricking cool.
Unfortunately FF2 is just a slog of a prototype
Yeah, I agree that FF2 is flawed. 'Bring 99 potions' is a meme for a reason. But I had fun with it, which can't be said about the more linear entries.
FF3 is a very strange game too, felt like a step down from 1 somehow, with fewer options traded off for meme dual wielding shenanigans.
What eceleb told you that
Super Eyepatch Wolf.
Yeah 3 is a weird one. Out of the original 3 games, 1 is my favourite, simple enough class based rpg, it’s neat to just kill some time. 2 has its flaws we’re all discussing but 3 just feels so odd I don’t know why. I like the class stuff but the events that happen through the game just leave me with nothing, it’s weird. Also doesn’t help that ff5 and BD are just better versions that I replay a bunch
>but 3 just feels so odd I don’t know why.
Because it's an awkward attempt by an improvised dev team at fusing the rigid class based system of the first game with a linear, more involved plot structure from the second game, but those people weren't all that involved in the development of the first two games so they didn't really understand the thought processes behind those, why some things were made in certain ways.
In FF1 you were free to do whatever you want with your party, it was YOUR adventure through and through, you were always in control, in FF3 you are forced to switch to the flavour of the week class instead, because a gimmick dungeon wants you to use them for some reason.
In FF2 you have a party with definite characters with their own stories and roles in the overall narrative, the main trio has their personal beef with the empire, people like Josef, Minwu, Gordon etc. all had their own personal stories, they were temporary party members but they had a reason to be there, their sacrifices further empower the story, they give you more reasons to keep fighting against the emperor, in FF3 you're just a bunch of nobodies again put against Xande, a villain that gets the bulk of the main story focus and ends up being replaced at the very last moment by a green fart cloud with breasts that comes outta nowhere, the story falls flat, there's no characters with a strong presence, no archetypes to establish like FF2 did.
Basically, it was aimless and uninspired, FF4 was also horribly uninspired but at least it had the decency of copying FF2 a bit more in terms of plot, even though it faked the sacrifices from Jos...ehm Jang and the likes.
>Level up by doing shit
So, does ot work like Elder Scrolls where you have character levels + skills, or are characters just stat sheets that dynamically improve based entirely on your actions (not tied to traditional character levels)?
FF2 has always interested me, but I never really took the plunge.
it's similar to TES but magic gets stronger by using it (you don't have curaga for exemple)
you should try out the gba or psp versions. The game story is pretty much a skeleton but it was pretty "dark" for it's time. i'd recommend a guide for dungeons though for better or worse they actually feel likes real dungeons lol
>or are characters just stat sheets that dynamically improve based entirely on your actions (not tied to traditional character levels)?
this.
There are no character levels, just stat sheets that get higher as you do things and spells that get stronger as you use them
This sounds based as frick. Why do people hate this?
>This sounds based as frick. Why do people hate this?
it's very daunting
another issue with 2, important shit like that is not mentioned
They dont even know shit like that because they have never actually played the original (or translation fan ROM). They only fricking touched the remakes and re-releases where every combat action is much faster and entire mechanics have either been rebalanced or removed outright and then talk a big game screaming "zoomer!! Filtered!!! Muh eceleb boogeyman!" like obnoxious contrarian unbearable morons when they literally know fricking nothing
The original FF2 was a fricking terrible game
The re-releases of FF2 are practically the same, bar bug fixes and balance changes.
No they arent. Shut up holy shit.
The only one that comes close to being a "better graphics but mechanically authentic" remake was the PSP I&II release which due to the PSP part is underrepresented among people who played any iteration of the game
Unless you have played the 8-bit original please stop trying to act like a special snowflake and calling people zoomers when defending a game you havent actually experienced properly
>The only one that comes close to being a "better graphics but mechanically authentic" remake was the PSP I&II release
>Removed Vancian casting from 1 and stat malus from 2, and had several other rebalances
>Mechanically authentic
Anything past WSC/PS1 is not mechanically authetic FF1/2, and if you actually played those you'd know.
Shut up
First playthrough mostly blind. Frick you and all you fricking liars defending this game as anything other than shit.
>Unless you have played the 8-bit original
I literally have. My only complaints with it where
>any response speed below 7 makes the game a slog
>gaining evasion is moronic and never happens intentionally
>some random encounters are horse shit (random Adamantoise in Gordon's Castle and the fricking Gigas)
Besides that, it's one of the best famicom rpg's, and was regarded highly at the time.
>Muh NES version tho
By that measure every FF is a terrible game simply because they were buggy as frick, but I sure don't see you people complain about NES FF1 for having 90% of your spells being completely useless, the thief being nonfunctional and other related issues, nor do I see you complaining about FF6 for having dozens of gamebreaking bugs, nonfunctional stats, nonfunctional status effects, loads of unexplained mechanics and so on, it's only FF2 that gets the flak for some reason, every other FF guilty of the same crimes gets a pass because no e-celeb made a rant about it.
zoomer here, I played some updated version of FF1. How could they release these games in such a broken state originally? How did this series ever gain a beloved reputation like that? Was there just nothing better in the market or something?
Back then being buggy as frick was the norm, honestly all the way until the end of the 90's most games out there, especially RPGs, were an insane bugfest, late 80's/Early 90's even more so, a lot of devs were notorious for shipping games that were barely fricking playable, if not straight up unplayable at launch, see Troika's games, hell the reason Ultima 9 killed the franchise back then was precisely because it was almost impossible to play, it ran like absolute ass and was loaded with bugs and glitches.
Even the beloved greats that we still play like DOOM 2 were absolutely chock full of bugs, but back then the tech and industry level just weren't there, we didn't have anything better, standards were lower, so people were less anal unless the games were catastrophically buggy and straight up unplayable.
FF1 wasn't very popular on the JP market, especially since it came out around the time that Dragon Quest 3 did. It was a lot more popular in the NA market, mainly because there wasn't much else available. By the time that DQ3 came out in NA, it was years later and FF1 had established a big fanbase.
The FF1 game had a bunch of bugs, but nothing that ruined the game too much. You could easily play any class and not really notice them. White Mage healing as much as Red Mage wouldn't be noticeable unless you used both for healing to compare, Thief run being bugged was hard to notice since some fights were just un-runnable, and many spells just not working could be chalked up to them not being very effective. Remember that magic wasn't listed as "adds +25% to your evasion stat" it was just "boosts evasion". So people could just assume that a spell added some minor amount that meant little and avoided that spell.
By comparison, play Famicom FF2 and you run into a roadblock where enemies are too tough... and it's hard to figure out how to progress. Or it's incredibly easy to overdo things in the other direction, grind too much and become unkillable for most of the game.
>The FF1 game had a bunch of bugs, but nothing that ruined the game too much.
Thief might as well not exist in NES FF1.
All offensive spellcasters are pretty much dead weight because none of the damage spells scale with INT as they should, moreover almost all of your buffs are bugged and do not work, this makes Black Mage and half of Red Mage completely useless, especially when Warrior/Black Belts are so damn strong.
Tents save your game BEFORE they restore your spell charges, which leads to weird situations on loading where you end up with no spell charges despite having used a Tent.
Status defense is also bugged as enemies with embedded status infliction on normal attacks will bypass your status defense, e.g. Medusas or wieneratrice will still petrify your characters on melee hits despite their protections, but will not petrify them through their spells.
ALL of the weapons with racial attributes are bugged in the NES version, every single one them, your Were-Buster won't inflict extra damage on were beasts, the Light Axe won't inflict extra damage on undeads and so on.
And there's more and more bugs on the NES version that make two thirds of the game mechanics nonexistent.
FF3 is fun even with NES emulation to this day. Its a legit good game even with its time. FF2 was unbearable and I only played through it because of my autism wanting to play all mainline entires. FF1 is better than FF2 but still yeah even 1 is not a very enjoyable game. Its basically a fetchquest grind where most spells are bugged and no twists or story to speak of which is why I always laugh when buttholes try to act all high and mighty like they are veterans when hyping up FF1
>Yes, the original version the west could play is good, HOWEVER, the original Japanese only version is terrible therefore the game is terrible!
FF2 never had an english/NES release so unless you speak japanese you can only play it through a romhack. The only reason I mentioned them separarely is because if I only mentioned "original" some fat moronic neckbeard would have tried to pull a gotcha on me thinking they caught me in a lie because there is no proper official original for Westerners
Most people instinctively shit on anything that deviates from the accepted norms.
On the other hand FF2 has some design issues in the way it handles its growth system
>HP/MP flags only rise on HP loss, undeads/Parasites were created to support this system but there's also some fricky way to abuse this, most notably Swap spam
>Agility is broken and flags are tied to shields, leading to dual shield "builds" that maximize AGI growth and turn you invincible since nothing can hit you
>Spell growth was simply too slow to be functional as a "increase level through use"
>Having both variable stats and weapon proficiency leads to statistical overkill on the player's side and make the game a joke
It was fine on paper but lots of oversights and mistakes happened, which is why SaGa was made, to polish and expand that idea, and from the very first game all of the aforementioned issues were fixed, although some others came up, like AGI being still too important in SaGa 1/2 but for a different reason, as it ties into attack accuracy and in the GB version there's not a lot of weapons with AGI growth flags., basically, FF2 stumbled so SaGa could fly.
Want to level your defense and HP stats? Enjoy deliberately letting enemies hit you to grind those stats higher! I'm not even joking, that's the way the system works. It's anal as frick to do
That's going to occur through natural play. I don't see the issue.
Play the game. Try it out. Don't let me convince you otherwise, you'll see.
Literally the only problem I have with the game is how gay the dungeon design is. 95% of doors lead to empty rooms full of an encounter every step you take. It's all so fricking annoying. Anyone who criticizes the game for the level mechanics is a moronic gay.
>Shitty ass code system
>Leveling system is actually dogshit
>You know that spell ultima? Good luck using it without loads of grinding (ps it's also bugged in at least one version)
>Revolving door 4th party member (they die often times)
>Encounter rate is fricking off the rails
>dungeon design is horrific to boot
>Story is just bleh
FF was a guttertrash series of games until 4. It's biggest contribution to the genre was how turns were taken in FF1
>inb4 JOB LEVEL apologists try defending 3
3 would have been fine if it was 4jf friendly.
FF1 is a fun romp (especially the remakes if you aren't into vancian magic/copious bugs)
FF2 is FINE if you're into wacky systems but it's easily skippable
FF3 has always been pretty shit and FF5 is just FF3 but better, never understood the defenders for that game
what youtuber did you parrot that from
fartsniffer369 (me)
Scott the Woz, moron.
I 100%ed FF1 today and am going to start FF2 this week, what am I in for?
What you are in for, is grinding getting hit to increase your HP, grinding casting cure to increase its healing level, grinding attacks to increase the attack stat, basically, whatever grinding you went through in FF1, triple it.
I've always loved this middle eastern inspired art.
Oh and people don't like FF2 because of the leveling system
still the coolest looking male MC of FF
>tfw no modern "artist" could do even half as good a job as Amano
eagerly waiting for art to regain its former glory some distant day
Sadly, he's ignored because people like to parrot opinions instead of playing games themselves.
He's an actual artist that just happened to work on video games, you don't see that a lot these days.
>He's an actual artist that just happened to work on video games, you don't see that a lot these days.
You don't see a lot of actual artists these days, period
Didn't hate it, but i played it for like 1 hour and never played again, its just too old and i didn't cared enough to continue, then i heard from here that Romancing SaGa was FF2 but better in every way and THAT bored me to tears (at least 3 did, don't know about the rest) so i can only assume FF2 would be even worse
dawn of souls best prelude
Idk but I've always hated the classic arstyle. It always makes it look like some Arabic fantasy shit from Aladdin.
I actually think Pixel Remaster actually makes it playable. Also, it seems to have had the most effort in the art and music (with the exception of FF6 which got the most effort).
The "leveling" system was pretty terrible. Yes, it turned into something good eventually - after over 10 years of revisions - but this doesn't make the original game any better than it was on release. The plot gets really dull partway through, and the big bad becoming the King of Hell is a lot less exciting after having to grind through all the layers of Hell just to meet him. The constant characters dying was certainly novel back when it released, but it feels like there's just a character treadmill after some time.
Some people also didn't like the keyword system, although I felt like it wasn't too obnoxious. Or maybe I was just numb from the story at that point and had lost all caring about the game I had.
The leveling system is the worst in the series. I commend them for experimenting, but it was a failed one. If not for the cancel glitch it'd be unplayable from all the grinding. That and the final dungeon is an hours long trek with no saves.
Because it's a shitty unfun game thanks to it's obtuse and garbage leveling and gameplay systems that makes the game a giant chore. Kawazu in general is a hack who seems to think that the point of making games is to fill them with autism instead of making shit that people actually want to play.
The only thing it has going for it is the music
I do enjoy that ff2 and 8 are amongst my least favourite but have good soundtracks
I love the Emperor David Bowie villain though.
It has the worst experience system in the history of humankind, you can understand what was the objective of the developer and I guess it worked in paper but in reality nobody was going to play it as intented, also the story and characters suck, I can literally only remember that due that talked with beavers.
I played the pixel remaster of FF2 and it was a better and more unique video game experience than the actual garbage that is FF8.
I want to get through it but it's incredibly tedious with random encounters and enemies which just take 0 damage. Dogshit enemy design, dogshit random combat. Sometimes my sword hits a Black Flan for like 300, others it's just 10 or 0.
The speed of all combat actions is an albatross around the entire games neck
>maria always missed and died so she stayed as a lvl 1 character for the whole game
>step on the wrong tile. Get killed by overleveled monster
It happens
unfun
made by this guy
Our lord and saviour
That's based, I don't see the problem.
It's a corporate way of saying "filtered".