#19: Final Fantasy II

Sword-T!

For those who may not be aware I have a generic gaming blog which updates each weekday. One of the main topics covered there is a Final Fantasy marathon where I'm playing through all the games in order. Earlier this year I played through Final Fantasy IV and posted about it here.

Final Fantasy IV was released in the US as Final Fantasy II. Square hadn't ported the actual FFII or FFIII over to North America and figured it would be too confusing to jump from I to IV. Which was probably true at the time, but doesn't work out that way now. At any rate, I'm playing all North American SNES games so for the rest of this post I'm going to refer to the game as Final Fantasy II and only really talk about the game in the SNES cartridge.

A dark knight's life is full of regrets.

At any rate, I don't really have a strong desire to play again in full, but I'll play a little bit to get some screenshots. Instead I think I want to talk about the different parts of a game and compare Final Fantasy II to the 18 games I've covered so far.

Cecil is no Yzerman.

Plot - Well, most of the games in the early SNES days didn't have anything even vaguely resembling a plot. Final Fight had a kidnapped girl. Super Mario World had a kidnapped princess. ActRaiser had a reviving god plot going on. Drakkhen actually had a decent plot. Final Fantasy II blows them all away. Ancient evil coming back to life, an epic backstory, surprise lost brother... It absolutely takes the cake of every game played thus far

Character Development - Most of the games have no character development at all. Mario doesn't grow as a person during his game. The Chessmaster is good at chess? ActRaiser actually has a reasonable amount of character development among the NPCs manning your temples. It's actually pretty good. Final Fantasy II again blows them all away. You've got the dark knight who redeems himself and becomes a paladin. The ninja that has his parents brutally deformed by a mad scientist who grows as a person when he kills them. The young girl who gets sucked onto another plane where time flows faster. All the NPCs in Mysidia treat you differently at different parts of the game. The spoony bard and the old man. A love story. Pretty much every other game thus far has been an exercise in mechanics. FFII has actual characters in an actual story.

Chocobo!

Graphics - Viewed through today's lens the graphics of all the games are mediocre to poor. Compared against each other FFII actually has pretty good graphics. It makes use of the mode 7 graphics to handle airship flight which is pretty sweet. I wouldn't say it has the best of the games I've played thus far (Super Mario World would get that call I think) but it's definitely above average.

Sound - Simply put, Nobuo Uematsu is awesome. Some of the games have had terrible sound (I'm looking at you, Chessmaster) but FFII has incredible music. Not just the music though! The sound just fits. Definitely the top of the pack.

Jump up! Jump up! And get down!

Gameplay - Well, FFII innovated substantially over previous Final Fantasy games. It's hard to really judge gameplay head to head against something like Final Fight, which is a completely different genre. But Final Fight was bad for a fighter and Final Fantasy II is good for an RPG.


Overall, I really can't complain about any aspect of Final Fantasy II at this point in the SNES timeline. It's a masterpiece.

Rating: S