I fired up Final Fantasy II on my Nintendo DS Lite a week or so ago, and have messed around with it for about three hours now. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that the game messed around with me, as it only took about a half hour for me to get totally confused and lost.I figured the beginning would be easy—you know, a kind of “hold your hand while we lead you through a confidence-building mission” thingie. But such was not the case (for me, anyway; I may have just missed the whole tutorial thing). The subtle differences in gameplay, a completely different leveling system, and the increased amount of text threw me to the mat and stomped all over me.

Compared to FFI there seems to be much more text in this game, at least in the introduction. It took me about a half hour before I finally got to do something other than to die in a plot-triggering slaughter. But after plodding through all the conversation, the basic story seems to be this: an evil empire has taken over the land. My party of four adventurers, who were nearly killed while fleeing the invasion, has vowed to join causes with the rebels and overthrow the empire. But as tends to be the case with RPGs and love, things get a bit complicated, and I was a bit sketchy on some of the generalities, let alone about the complicated details.I do know this though: one of our party is missing. Three of us were rescued while unconscious, but the fourth was apparently not found at the site of the battle. No one knows where he is, but rumor has it that he might be in the city of Fine, which was recently taken over by the evil empire.

Subtle hinting (go to Fine!) pointed us to the city and so off we went, fighting our way against the minor leaguers of the monster array. But fighting—at least the leveling system—is totally different in FF2 than in FF1. So I got a bit confused. Furthermore, in FF1 if you have a object needed by an NPC, the NPC just knows this and takes it from you. This doesn’t seem to be the case with FF2, where you have to actually pull the item from inventory and give it to the NPC. And then there’s the whole thing with “secret words”, which I’m still not sure I’ve figured out the reasoning behind.

Anyway, the gobs of introductory text, the new leveling system, and the other minor changes in gameplay meant that I set off for Fine with the confidence of a stutterer in a debate club. We all know in life that confidence is half the battle, so you can probably tell where we are going with this.

I ended up traveling between the same three towns over and over for about two hours, accomplishing little more than the slaughter of a couple of hundred goblins and legeaters. Since we all know there is an infinite supply of goblins in the world, and since infinity minus 200 is still infinity, we were getting a bit frustrated. After a while I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and there didn’t seem to be much help of any kind in any of the towns I was told to check out.

And then I came up with an idea. A simple, wonderful idea: read the manual! Aha! The manual cleared up much of the mystery behind the secret words, the leveling system, and clued me in to the item-handoff element of gameplay. Some of the fog started to lift.

Still, it wasn’t until I figured out how to get to a bar on the outskirts of Fine that things started rolling. I’ll spare you the details because I’m not sure I understand them completely, but I got a ring there from a guy who was a friend/lover of the rebellion leader and a brother to this guy who wanders around a different town all bummed out but was apparently pretty important in another city. This ring proved that I had gotten to Fine, which made the leader of the rebellion trust me enough to send my party on a mission to get some mithril. The ring did nothing for the brother, who still just walks back and forth behind the inn in town.

But back to the mithril. It is, of course, guarded by soldiers of the empire, who have taken the males from a town in the mountains and forced them to work in mines digging the stuff out. The women of the town have begged our party to save the men, and that’s where we are now: looking for a cave in the mountains so we can save the men of this small town, in hopes that will lead us to some mithril.

Where all this is heading I’m not really sure, and I still have no idea where the fourth member of our party is. This isn’t really a concern at the moment, as the rebellion leader has lent us a rent-a-magician for the time being.

And somewhere in all of this, I may have totally missed finding a fuzzy animal to ride on.

Status: Lost

(written on September 11, 2006)

I don’t know what happened to all the guys dancing in the woods, but let’s face it: they couldn’t have been all that concerned with the plight of the world in the first place if their response to worldly peril is to go dance in the woods all day long. I can just see it now.

Townsfolk: Evil monsters are attacking our world!
Heroes: Oh.
Townsfolk: What should we do?
Heroes: Um, let’s go stand in a circle in the woods and dance.
Townsfolk: Huh?
Heroes: Eventually some real heroes will show up and we can tell them what to do.
Townsfolk: Huh?
Heroes: Someone get the repetitive Japanese game soundtrack and let’s go!
Townsfolk: Huh?
Heroes: Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to dance we go!

I’ll just assume that they are still out there, dancing in the woods.

The game took me a little over 46 hours to finish. I’m guessing that about 10 of those were spent Cluelessly Lost, which isn’t bad for me.

My characters reached Level 87. I cheated three times.

Overall, I liked the game quite a bit. The random encounters were gentle enough, the puzzles were decent, if not easy, and the variety of fighting and locales was good. There is a lot of exploring to do in the game, and it’s all quite fun.

Having said that, there are some playbalance issues with the game. Since I’ve finished the game, I’ve read a bit about it, and apparently the four dungeons that are unlocked after you get each of the four crystals are actually bonus dungeons that were not included in the original game. While these four dungeons were entertaining enough, the experience gained and weapons earned in them make the core game ridiculously easy. The final battle was over in a matter of seconds, which is a shame considering how tough of a fight the boss was in the third optional dungeon. Also, most of the random combatants in the back half of the game could barely touch my party, and we had enough cash to buy a small planet by the mid-point in the game. All these factors added up to make the game easy on the whole. The tricky part was figuring out where to go and what to do.

Overall, though, considering the age of the game, I’ll give this remake of the game a 75%. Enjoyable, but not great. I wish there was an option to turn off the bonus dungeons, or a better way to tell the player that the dungeons are optional.

Up next…

Final Fantasy II

(written 1 September 2006)

Victory! Khaos has fallen. Balance has been restored and our heroes have triumphed!

Shortly after I wrote the previous entry, we stumbled onto the last level of the final dungeon. Khaos showed up and gave us a long speech about time-travel and such. We sharpened our swords and waited around patiently while he droned on and on. I’m not quite sure of everything he said, as I always get confused with time travel plots in English, forget about Japanese, and we all knew that this was simply a prelude to mixing it up, so we figured listening closely wasn’t all that important. Sure enough, eventually he shut up and we got down to the business of trying to kill each other.

Surprisingly, the final battle was anticlimactic. Within a minute or two, Khaos crumbled like a Jenga tower in a tornado. My first reaction was he spent too much time figuring out how to time-travel and not enough time figuring out how to fight us. But anyway, we were then taken to a final screen where some scrolling text complemented us on our great job and told us that all was right with the world again. Good for us.

Done! Yeah! One game down and um, humm, I don’t even know how many games are in this series. Oh well, one down and more to go!

Picture Credit: Final Fantasy Compendium

(Written 30 August 2006)

Well, we’re in what I’m guessing is the final dungeon, but I’m pretty lost. There are passages that go this way and that, and stairs that go up and down. I went up two levels and now I seem to be going back down two levels. Two minus two equals zero in my book, and that’s what it feels like I’ve accomplished since getting in this dungeon. Where am I? Where am I going? To top this off, there are constant encounters everywhere. Can’t go more than a couple of steps without another wave of annoying beasties jumping us. I think I’ve killed about a billion of some of these things.

Status: Lost

(Written 28 August 2006)

The preliminary cave went on and on and on. My goodness, this thing was huge. There were levels with good fairies and nasty fairies, levels with people turned into zombies by an evil train, and levels with clueless dwarves who had lost all their stuff. And yes, you read that right: there was a level with an evil train that turned villagers into zombies. Now that’s something you don’t run into every day. It was as if the level designers did acid and got to work. I thought I would never get out.

But finally, we conquered the final boss of the preliminary cave on level 40 and received…a cheap sword? What? Tricky Final Fantasy, playing jokes on us! After we killed the final boss we got a cheap sword, sure enough, but when you transport off the level, you arrive at another level with a treasure chest. This treasure chest had the Ultima Sword, which is nearly twice as powerful as Excalibur. Woot! Time to head off to the final battle!

Actually, though, for a 40-level dungeon, it was quite fun. There were a variety of levels, none of the levels was painfully big, and the combat wasn’t so prevalent as to get in the way of exploring. All in all, fun.

Status: Killing Stuff with a Purpose!

Photo by AviatorDave.