Let’s Play Final Fantasy II (Part One)

This was my very first exposure to what would eventually become my very favorite RPG.

I was in fifth grade. I didn’t know what an RPG was. My friends and I were old hats at the original Final Fantasy, of course, and we’d long since bombed our way to the heart of pseudo-RPGs like Crystalis and The Legend of Zelda. I’d dabbled a bit in Ultima: Exodus and Wizardry, but I never really got the hang of them. No, for the most part our NES hours were filled with Mario, Mega Man and whatever looked interesting on the shelves at the local pawn shop.

We didn’t have an SNES. Nobody at school did. They were magical machines from the future which, if you were lucky and your parents were rich, might appear underneath the Christmas tree. But that was months away. One of our adult cousins had purchased the system, so every weekend we’d beg to spend the night over at his house so we could play the games in his meager collection: Lemmings, Super Castlevania IV and Darius Twin. We spent three days of our summer vacation just watching him play Act Raiser to completion.

In the meantime, we had this issue of Nintendo Power, which explained this new, awesome-looking Final Fantasy game in great detail. I’ve never had a subscription to Nintendo Power, but my best friend did, and after reading through this particular issue at school I made sure to beg my mom to buy me a copy of my own, just so I can sit at home and read it again and again. I think I may have promised to wash her car or something in return. I wonder if I ever did.

I had a lot of questions. What kind of character classes were “Sage” and “Bard”, anyway? Did jumping on monsters do damage, or just squash them like in Mario? Why wasn’t the black mage wearing a pointy hat? How on earth could you call monsters to fight for your side? Why were the orbs now called crystals? Why did the guys stand in a zig-zag pattern, and how come there were five of them?

Just the fact that the game could handle names as long as “Edward” was enough to blow my young, feeble mind.

We finally received that magical phone call late one Friday afternoon. School was out for the weekend, pizza was on the way, and my brother and I had just started a new game of FF1. The party was FI/BB/RM/BM. Their names were JO, TINY, ZACH and ONYX. We had just killed the PIRATEs when we received a magical phone call.

It was our cousin. He said, “Hey guys, I just got Final Fantasy for Super Nintendo. Wanna come over and watch me play it?”

To this day that is still the greatest question I’ve ever been asked in my life.

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So, what is Final Fantasy II?

I’m sure I don’t have to clarify this for anyone here, but Final Fantasy II is the fourth game in the Final Fantasy series. They switched the name from Final Fantasy IV on account of the two previous FF games never making the trek to North America. And honestly? Maybe it’s for the best they didn’t. Those games were hard and mean, and not very much like the first game at all when you get right down to it. My taste in games was still in its infancy, after all. If I’d been forced to choke down Firion and his gang back in the short pants days, I might have never developed a lingering taste for the series.

But FF2 was quite a bit like FF1. It had relatively simple game systems that were easy to wrap your head around. It had a single, linear experience system exactly like the one I was already used to. The plot graph was easy to follow, and the game world was difficult to get lost in. I approached the game with the mindset that it was just a newer, prettier FF1 with maybe two or three new things in it. The game was happy to oblige me.

There turned out to be more than “two or three” new things, of course, and I was eventually forced to learn some tough lessons as the game went on. The biggest change over the original game, though, was the colorful cast and the complex narrative. This game had a real story, and not just an excuse to do things. In FF1 your dudes went into the cave to get the thing to give to the guy to wake the prince, but they did all this because that’s how you get the TNT. The characters in FF2 had far deeper motivations for their actions; you don’t wake Rosa up from desert fever because she’s the only person who can open some locked treasure room. You do it because the main character loves her.

Nowadays we take these kinds of stories for granted. We even rail against them when the text drags on too long or the cutscenes can’t be skipped. But back in the day games did not work this way. FF2 was the first. It was like nothing that existed on the NES, where even the best examples of story games were full of holes and contrivances. In FF2, one plot event leads into the next, which leads into the next, which leads into the next. The game world opens and closes doors as you advance in a very natural and logical way. Seeing what happened next in the story became its own reward.

Mechanically speaking, FF2 had a lot of stuff that took some getting used to. In Japan, its predecessors had already shown how in-depth character-building systems could get in RPGs. It’s easy to picture a Japanese player, who had watched the progression from “build a party” to “use a sword to level your sword skill” to “dozens of unique jobs”, turning up his nose at the back-to-basics systems of this new sequel.

(Can you imagine it? All those “it’s prettier but it’s dumber” arguments we hear nowadays about FF13, being made in 1991? I bet there were players like that!)

The place where FF2 decided to innovate was in the core battle system, which it called Active Time Battle (ATB). No longer did the player and his enemies take turns hitting each other. No more queueing up a round full of commands, then spending forty seconds watching the game play itself. In FF2, each combatant worked on a timer. When their timer was full, they got to act. This meant the bad guys could sit there beating on you while you were trying to figure out what to do. It also meant the player was always engaged in the battle, because he was entering commands constantly, rather than the old system of “act, wait, act, wait”.

ATB became one of the cornerstones of the Final Fantasy series. It was over a decade before the series attempted to innovate again, and the most modern systems are still heavily influenced by it. I think it’s fair to say ATB was absolutely revolutionary.

I’ll go into more detail about ATB and how it impacts the game as the LP goes on, as I explain the characters and their actions.

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Are you going to start the LP anytime soon?

Oh, I suppose. Our story opens with a fleet of airships returning home from a particularly lucrative voyage…

Next: The crystal or your life!