It’s hard for me to comment on Final Fantasy II without comparing it to Final Fantasy I. I’m actually looking forward to this aspect of this whole adventure, as I get to see the evolution of the series from game to game.
First off, Final Fantasy II is a much better game than Final Fantasy I. Final Fantasy II’s story—which holds up fairly well when compared to modern games—is light years beyond that of Final Fantasy I, which is basically a “go collect the crystals” game. This element of Final Fantasy II surprised me the most, and kept me interested in the game. It’s an amazing accomplishment that the story of Final Fantasy II is as complex as it is, considering that the game was released 19 years ago.
Combat in Final Fantasy II is better as well. The combat in the GBA version of Final Fantasy I is insanely easy compared to that of Final Fantasy II. Final Fantasy II actually had a number of spots that were challenging and rewarding, although to be fair, the difficulty may have been more due to my incompetence rather than any difficulty inherent in the game. The Jade/Pandemonium combination dungeon was a particularly satisfying final dungeon.
For the most part, I found the combat/skill/leveling system a lot of fun to play in Final Fantasy II. I enjoy RPGs like Morrowind and Oblivion that have a direct correlation between skill use and skill advancement, and Final Fantasy II does a great job in this regard. The luster started to wear off, though, in the back half of the game. The Drain and Aspiru spells were so powerful that they allowed my party to live off the energy of my enemies, and they reduced much of the complexity of combat to a narrow range of simple attacks and strategies. It would have been nice to have a greater need for a variety of tactics in order to be successful.
I have a couple of other quibbles as well. Unless I missed it, there is no way to skip over combat animations (watch, someone will post a comment that tells me the super secret button-press I never knew), and by the back half of the game combat was getting tedious because it took so long for all the animations to play out. For the most part, the animations are ok, but once you’ve seen them a hundred times, any animation gets pretty stale. And some of the animations are quite long, as well! The worst offender in this regard was the Ultima spell, which in the middle levels (5-10) felt like it took about 20 minutes to run through its dazzling effects. I swear I could have finished the game in half the time if that one spell had a reasonably short animation.
I suppose I should mention Soul of Rebirth as well, but I’m not sure what to make of that add-on game. It was kind of neat to get some extra content, it was fun to play with the dead characters from the main game, and the new range of monsters was semi-interesting. However, outside of a beginning and an end, there is zero story in Soul of Rebirth. Also, the combat is identical to the main game. If you like grinding, it’s kind of fun, but for me, I was just going through the motions with this add-on.
On the whole though, the gaming experience in Final Fantasy II was very satisfying. I don’t think I’d want to play it again, but I’m glad I played it through to the end. Overall, I’ll give the game an 82% rating.
Japanese culture loves numbers in games, and one of the neat things about the first two Final Fantasy games is that they come complete with monster almanacs, which record not only what type of monsters you’ve killed, but also how many of each type.