History Lessons: Final Fantasy II

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The very first game I played for this series was Final Fantasy. I had intended to play all the Final Fantasy games in order, to see how they evolved from the early games I remembered as a kid to the huge epics full of cinematic scenes they are today. But then I decided I should probably also cover the Dragon Quest series, which released first. And then I added a bunch of other Japanese-style role-playing games. And then some action role-playing hybrids. And then some Metroidvanias and Zelda-esque games. Now, after playing and writing about 30 games, I’ve finally reached Final Fantasy II, which Square released in Japan on December 17. 1988.

The real Final Fantasy II, that is. As a kid, the game I knew as Final Fantasy II was actually Final Fantasy IV, because the second and third games in the series were never localized for the US (until much later, as remakes). When I wrote about the first Final Fantasy, I lamented how it is essentially impossible to purchase and play it today, since it exists only in the form of remakes that often significantly change it, with new music and graphics, and even extra characters and story elements. That was before the most recent set of Final Fantasy remakes, the Pixel Remasters, were released. These are ostensibly an effort to provide more faithful versions of the early Final Fantasy games, and in the case of Final Fantasy II might be the best option, since the Pixel Remaster fixes some bugs and improves some game systems. Yet even these remasters include updated graphics and music, with much more detail than the original releases. Since I’m interested in the history of the series, including the limits of the original hardware, I stuck to emulation and played the original Famicom version of Final Fantasy II, with a fan-made English translation by a team led by Chaos Rush. As usual for Famicom/NES games, I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulation core to play.

I was a little scared to try the real Final Fantasy II, as I’d heard it was really difficult and confusing. Having played it now, I suspect much of that was due to people playing the fan-translated version without any manual. You see, despite some re-used art and the familiar side-on battle interface from the first game, Final Fantasy II works very differently, and players who don’t understand the rules will have a hard time. I’d hoped that the fan translation would have a translated manual as well (like the translation for Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei did), but alas, it does not. Instead, I turned to an online guide which explains the game systems. This goes into much more detail than the manual probably did, and as such could be considered a spoiler, but it at least helped me understand the new leveling system at the heart of Final Fantasy II.

Most Japanese-style role-playing games — including the first Final Fantasy — have characters accrue experience points through battle, eventually leveling up with automatic boosts to their statistics. Western-style role-playing games often asked players to allocate points between statistics and skills when characters leveled up, but their Japanese-style counterparts tended to do all this automatically, so players need not worry about optimizing anything. Final Fantasy II throws all that out the window. There are no character levels at all. Instead, characters improve their statistics and a set of different weapon skills based on what they do during combat. If a character attacks a lot with a sword equipped, they’ll improve their Strength and sword skill. They gain more health (“hit points”, or HP, per the common role-playing parlance) by taking damage, and increase their Agility by dodging attacks.

This extends to magic as well. Spells are divided into white magic (associated with the Spirit attribute) and black magic (associated with the Intelligence attribute), and each is learned at level 1. Cast it enough times, and it will level up, becoming more powerful but also requiring more MP to cast. Ah yes: Final Fantasy II does away with the Dungeons & Dragons inspired system of tiered spells with a limited number of casts each, in favor of the more common design where each spell costs a certain amount of magic points (MP) from the caster’s pool. That means characters can cast spells a lot more often.

All of this means that players can exert far more control over how their characters develop, by choosing what they focus on during combat. At least, they can in principle. In practice, there are a few things that limit one’s options. First, some statistics, like Strength and Intelligence, are opposed to each other. Raising one might lower the other. The fact that statistics can decrease is one reason Final Fantasy II is known for being difficult. Given how important magic is, players will want characters who can cast both white and black magic, but they won’t want their black mage to also make physical attacks, because doing so might decrease their Intelligence and make their spells weaker. Similarly, casting spells a lot will reduce their Strength and make their attacks weaker. The result would be a character who’s not very good at fighting or magic, which will make later fights pretty tough.

That means players will probably make a white mage, a black mage, and two physical fighters for their party. A little disappointing, since the open-ended leveling system will have players dreaming of weird hybrid characters. There’s still some room for flexibility, however. I made my white mage into more of a paladin type, who cast healing magic and also fought with staves on the front lines, taking advantage of the fact that the Spirit stat is not opposed to anything and will never decrease. Even doing that, however, I had to be careful, because some weapons, armor and shields come with a hidden “magic penalty” that is not shown anywhere in-game. I hope the original manual described this, because it’s very important to only give mages equipment with a low magic penalty. Players could easily hamstring their party’s magic by trying to give their mages armor that seemed objectively better, but actually has a high magic penalty. I ended up having to look up equipment in the online guide to check about magic penalties.

Other hidden quirks of the system could mess up players too. For example, characters only gain health if they take damage above a certain percentage of their maximum health within a single battle. But the game only checks for this at the end of the battle, comparing the character’s health to whatever it was at the start. That means players shouldn’t heal their characters until after the fight. Further, they should wait until the next fight to heal them, because the Cure spell is more effective (both in power and in how fast it will level up) when cast during battle. Also, casting the same spell multiple times in the same combat encounter yields diminishing returns when it comes to leveling the spell, so casters are wise to rotate the spells they cast (e.g. switching between fire and ice spells for attacks).

Once players know all this, however, the systems are really fun to play with. Final Fantasy II has a notoriously high rate of random battles, but these never feel like filler because each combat is a chance to level up spells and skills. Players can choose how they want to do this in each fight: try to end it decisively and quickly, or draw it out to give characters a chance to cast a few more spells or get in more attacks. They can even, if they choose, cheese the system a bit, by attacking their own party members (to gain more HP) or issuing commands and then cancelling them (since even cancelled commands count towards leveling skills or spells). But I never needed to use these tricks. In fact, I rarely needed to spend any time dedicated to grinding. I really only did that once, in fact, but it’s related to one of my main complaints with the battle system, which is about MP.

Ideally, I wanted my black mage to be casting spells all the time, to train her spells and increase her Intelligence. But that would burn through her MP quickly. There’s no option to simply do nothing during combat, so if I wanted to conserve MP for an extended sojourn into one of Final Fantasy II’s many dungeons, my only choices were to attack, use an item, or try to flee. Since attacking could cause her Intelligence to decrease, I didn’t want to do that. Characters can only use one of two items they have actively equipped, and I usually didn’t have anything worth using (or wasting) anyway. That left fleeing, but if the character successfully flees, I forfeit the combat and don’t get any skill or stat boosts. Early in the game I still picked this option often, since the attempted retreat usually failed, but it was annoying.

The solution, naturally, is to get more MP. But this is quite difficult to do. Like with HP, characters must use a significant portion of their MP within a single battle in order to increase their maximum MP pool, and most fights are over before that can happen, as the spells take out enemies quickly. When I found myself facing a difficult dungeon with tough enemies, but lacking enough MP to effectively deal with them, I was at a loss for what to do. Then I remembered that a certain nearby location was filled with extra-tough soldiers that I wasn’t meant to be able to defeat. Unless…? With some clever tactics, I was able to face these foes one at a time and barely pull through. And since they had a ton of health, I could cast spell after spell at them before they fell, and soon saw my black mage’s maximum MP increase quite a bit. They dropped some nice items, too! That was all I needed to best that tricky dungeon, and I never really needed to grind again, as I found other ways to deal with limited MP pools later in the game.

The actual battles are often interesting little challenges too. Final Fantasy II introduces a front and back row during combat, not only for the player’s party but also for the enemies. Only the front row can be targeted with physical attacks, so it pays to put mages in the back. I kept my white mage in front for much of the game so he could attack with staves, but eventually had to put him in back because many monsters inflict nasty status effects with their attacks. Fortunately, I’d learned (from the guide, admittedly) the value of fighters with high evasion. By equipping shields and avoiding heavy armor, I was able to train up fighters who could evade nearly any attack, thus avoiding both the damage and any associated status effect. This also raised their Agility, letting them act faster in combat and often dispatch enemies before they had a chance to act. This reminded me of my fast, agile fighter Zan in Dragon Quest III, who was one of my favorite characters. With two agile fighters on the front line, I had a solid defense.

They could only hit enemies in the front rows, however, so I often had my mages casting spells to strategically hit monsters lurking in back. There are a bunch of elemental resistances and weaknesses to work out — like using fire magic against undead — that keep magic interesting, as well as various buff and debuff spells that can change the tide of battle. Some spells, especially white magic spells, aren’t that useful until leveled up, which is annoying. The spells that cure status effects are great examples: at low level they can only cure a few relatively harmless effects like sleep or poison, but players will need to get them leveled up so they can help when characters are turned to stone or afflicted with confusion later in the game. I often had my white mage cast these whenever he had nothing better to do, just to slowly get them powered up. It was worth it, though, because in the late game my party was pleasingly powerful, able to handle some really nasty foes.

While I’m complaining, however, I do wish there was more info provided about items and equipment. These often have hidden properties (and not just their magic penalties!) that are not immediately apparent. At one point I found a sword in a dungeon that was more powerful than my fighter’s current spear, so I happily equipped it. Then I found my fighter was landing fewer hits per attack than usual. I took another look at his stats and realized the sword was far less accurate, so I switched back to the spear. Later, I looked up the sword in the online guide and learned that it can inflict a very useful status effect on enemies — one that was particularly useful when I was trying to increase my maximum MP, as I described above — making it a worthy weapon to keep in reserve and swap in when appropriate. This is cool! It adds interesting decisions to combat! But how was I supposed to know about it? Unless this particular sword was mentioned in the manual, there’s no way to find out that it has this ability. Most players will completely miss it.

OK, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the mechanics in Final Fantasy II, because they’re really different from the genre norms and make for an interesting play experience. But what about the rest of it? The story and world? Well. When writing this series I noted that the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games didn’t yet have the strong narrative design that would become a defining characteristic of Japanese-style role-playing games. Instead I found rough seeds of it in Phantasy Star and the first two Ys games. So it was a surprise to find that the signature storytelling I knew from later games in the ’90s is all right here in Final Fantasy II, nearly fully formed. Our heroes (who the player can name, but were later canonized in remakes as Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon) begin the game on the run from the evil Empire of Palamecia, which is ruthlessly conquering the other towns and kingdoms. After getting trounced by the Empire’s black knights, they are nursed to health by a group of rebels, and proceed to join the cause and fight back. Directed by the rebel leaders, they must seek aid from nearby towns, secure resources to help equip the resistance effort, and embark on more dangerous quests further afield as the Empire accelerates its war efforts.

In fact, the story has many similarities to the game that I knew as Final Fantasy II: Final Fantasy IV. And not just because both deal with an evil Empire/Kingdom that’s trying to take over the world. Final Fantasy II has an ally who disappears early in the story, and a mysterious Black Knight working for the Empire who has a familiar voice. Pre-set characters join and leave the party at specific points in the story. One of the Empire’s terrible weapons is a huge airship. Final Fantasy II also establishes the series tradition of games that are almost completely disconnected form one another, set in a different world from the first game, while simultaneously being the first game to feature several recurring elements from the franchise: the character of Cid, usually associated with airships; chocobos, unofficial mascots for the series (although here they are semi-secret and I didn’t find any); dragoons; the Ultima spell.

The world is also remarkable. Where the first Final Fantasy carefully funneled players through a linear path as they explored, with vehicles that could only dock or land in specific places, Final Fantasy II is wide open. Not only can the ship make landfall wherever it pleases (as in the Dragon Quest games), players can walk pretty much everywhere too. Tough monsters will cut many expeditions short, especially if wandering in the wrong direction right at the start of the game, but the world felt far more real and alive due to its openness. There are even a lot of wide empty spaces that players never need traverse. Just because the Empire are a global threat doesn’t mean the story has to cover every inch of the world. It’s a setting for the story to take place in, rather than a place built to serve the story, which I appreciated.

I can’t give such praise for the dungeons in the game, however, which become increasingly frequent as the story progresses. Their design is lagging behind other games in the genre: Dragon Quest III makes great use of vertical space in its dungeons, requiring players to ascend to higher floors and then carefully drop down to lower ones in order to access certain areas, and Ys II features the incredible Solomon Shrine area, full of interconnected paths at three separate elevations, as well as people to meet and puzzles to solve. Final Fantasy II just has corridors, stairways to other floors, and the occasional secret door that lets the party pass through a wall. Only the color scheme and general layout separates one dungeon from another, and they quickly start to feel the same. Especially given the prevalence of “trap rooms”: doors leading to small rooms with high encounter rates. These are everywhere in most dungeons, but every once and a while a door will lead to a treasure room or a stairway instead, so players will need to check every door anyway. The trap rooms get old fast.

Still, the battles and leveling system are interesting enough that I was willing to forgive Final Fantasy II for its simple dungeons. I also enjoyed hunting for treasure, even if it meant stumbling into a lot of trap rooms, because so much cool stuff in the game must be found, rather than bought. I was short on money early on as I acquired key spells and weapons, but later on I was rolling in money and instead finding the stuff I needed in chests or even dropped from enemies. At one point, I found the best axe in the game early, because of a lucky drop from a mini-boss encounter. My main fighter wasn’t particularly skilled with axes, but I gave it to him anyway and had him train up with it, and he was dishing out a ton of damage by the end of the game. If I hadn’t found that, I might have switched him to swords instead, or even stuck to spears.

And I remain astounded that the narrative style that would define the genre for years to come is already nearly perfected here. There are a few parts where players must figure out what to do next — and use a cool keyword system that lets them collect conversation topics and ask different people about them — but mostly the story is a linear affair with clear objectives. It’s impressively lengthy too, I’m guessing the longest game to come up in the series so far. I expected a more gradual evolution before we got this type of tale, but here it is; Final Fantasy established its identity early, I guess. Although I’ve read that Final Fantasy III continues to experiment with new mechanics, letting characters switch between different classes (“jobs”), something I remember from Final Fantasy Tactics but which never appeared in the mainline Final Fantasy games that came to the US. I’m looking forward to seeing how that works when my timeline reaches 1990.

Overall I enjoyed Final Fantasy II a lot. An English language version for the US market was in development, but by that time the Super Nintendo was hitting shelves, so the English version was canceled in favor of porting over Final Fantasy IV instead, hence its renumbering in the US. Honestly, I probably would have struggled with the more complex systems in Final Fantasy II at the time, but it’s a really fascinating design. When The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall released in 1996, its promotional campaign made a big deal about the way player characters improve their skills by using them, instead of by arbitrarily fighting monsters, yet Final Fantasy II had the same idea almost eight years earlier. It’s definitely worth checking out. As I said in the beginning, you’ll need to use emulation to get the original Famicom version running (with this fan translation added), but there’s a good case to be made for playing the recent Pixel Remaster instead. It makes a lot of tweaks, like making statistics never decrease so players are free to try more hybrid characters, fixing dual-wielding so it actually works, and making the Ultima spell a bit more ultimate than its disappointing incarnation in the Famicom original. It’s probably more fun to play, but if you really want the original experience (as I did) you can always use emulation.

This was our final game of 1988, so next time we’ll be moving on to 1989! Stay tuned.

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