Let’s Check Back In at Town

I am not here to try and convince anyone that Final Fantasy II is a good game. As I noted in my review of the Famicom version, the game has its interesting moments, some cool ideas that would go on to influence design in its direct successors as well as the entire SaGa series, but overall it’s a big mess. The leveling is strange, the encounter rate is too high, the story requires a lot of back-and-forth fetching… it’s all too much, too slow, and too weird. I want to like the game… but I just can’t.

When I went through and played the Famicom version (with an English patch because I don’t know Japanese) I came to the decision that I would never play through the game again. It just didn’t work for me. And, technically, I haven’t. I’m working my way through the Pixel Remaster collection and this is a new version of the game, so I didn’t lie. But I have now played through a second iteration of the game and, even with improvements, bug fixes, and general Quality of Life changes, this game still just doesn’t work for me. Like, at all.

Having played through the game once before, I knew the basics. Go to the princess, get a quest, go out into the world. Come back, do it all again. It’s a simple structure, and with the castle at effectively the center of the world it works well enough early on. It’s not a big slog, when you’re one or two towns away, to head back and get the next step of your long quest. You’re heroes. You have things to do. This is your mission. But it’s as the game draws on that things begin to get pretty awful.

About halfway into the game you’re tasked with finding a fortress. Everyone in town who, up until now, has been pretty good about directing you (go to this island over here, or off to this mountain to the west) suddenly clams up. “Oh, they must be around here somewhere…” is all you get. No direction, no clue, not even a hint. Just go out and find something. That was when the structure of the game really hurts because you’re suddenly left with an entire world to explore and, looking at the map, you realize you’ve only really looked at a quarter of it and there are huge stretches where what you’re looking for could be hiding.

This is an issue that could have been mitigated if the game were structured differently. I look at Final Fantasy as a good example. In that game you start off with a very limited scope of where you can go. The first early quests only open the world up by tiny degrees, and then even when you finally get a ship it’s locked on a small sea and you have to do more to open the world. The second you do, by blasting open a canal and letting the sea out into the ocean (causing untold ecological damage, one has to assume), the very next place you can explore is right there, right outside the canal. You’re directed, not with words but by the very structure of the world, as to where to go next.

Final Fantasy II never does that. It holds your hand not through structure but via hints from NPCs. You’re given your quest each time, what you need to do and who you need to talk to as well as where they’ll be found, and send on your merry way. The second the game stops you’re left with an open world and no clue where to go or what to do because the world is vast and you’ve barely seen any of it. And even that wouldn’t be so bad if the encounter rate weren’t absolutely abysmal.

The encounter rate in this game is just way too high. Five steps, get a fight. Six more steps, get another. When you’re out exploring the world, trying to figure out where anything can be, it becomes pretty overwhelming. It wouldn’t be bad if there were some direction as to where to look, such as the structure of the world indicating where you should go, or an NPC giving you an actual useful hint, but the back half of the game apparently thinks you’re just going to go out and explore the world all on your own and just know where everything is.

The high encounter rate, though, also raises another hilarious issue: the balance of the game is awful. While the Pixel Remaster version fixes many of the basic bugs of the game (such as removing the ability to input commands over and over in a single fight to auto-grind up your party) it doesn’t fix the problems with the basic structure of the leveling. You can very quickly (even without boosts) get your party up to an ungodly level of power against early mobs, and then as the game progresses in difficulty you’ll still be more powerful than the enemies just by grace of how overleveled your abilities are in comparison.

Plus, honestly, the game doesn’t do a great job of balancing out magic and weapons. I started the game with all three of my main characters using weapons, not magic (which, yes, is against what most players would recommend), and they all got very strong very quickly with all the weapons available. I could do hundreds of points of damage in short order with no effort, and mobs fell quickly (which made the fights go fast even if there were still far too many of them, wasting my time). But magic is criminally underpowered, doing single digit damage for the first few levels, and then double digit damage against mobs for most of the rest of the game. Against a single target magic could do well, 200 to 300 points of damage. But at the same time, my weapons were cranking out 800 damage against the same target, or my bare hands could do even more. Why bother with magic?

And bear in mind this is playing the game without boosts. If you play with boosts, and use the “improved” health leveling which gives you flat health bonuses after every few encounters (as opposed to needing to be damaged to get more health) suddenly you’ll be walking around with mega-tanks within the first hour of the game. It’s horribly broken. Boosts and balance actually make the game more imbalanced, which I’m sure was the opposite of what SquareEnix intended with this game.

“So don’t play with boosts and turn off encounters entirely,” I hear you say. And that’s fair. You could. But then are you really playing the game as intended at that point? You can make the game easier or harder for yourself but at a certain point you’ve changed the game so radically that you are no longer getting anything close to the intended experience. I wanted to play through a pretty, lovingly recrafted version of the game but I wanted something similar to the experience of the original game. Technically I got it… but it wasn’t much fun to play.

The things I liked about Final Fantasy II are still here in the Pixel Remaster, but I just have to admit those few good ideas don’t balance out an otherwise flawed game. There are moments in this first sequel that I liked, but the overall experience is too grindy, too choppy, too annoying to make me want to come back and experience it again. Even in this prettier, boosted experience, Final Fantasy II has too many flaws to make it more than a curiosity to experience once and then never again.