How long do you usually play a game before you come to a conclusion if it’s a good game or not? How long do you think you should play a game to do a review? Honestly, I don’t often finish any games… not even the ones I review here most of the time. Pokemon Sword was the last one that I think I beat, but I usually put a lot of time into them before that. It’s not so much that I don’t want to beat a game, it’s that I get distracted, either with something in the game or by something else.

But sometimes… sometimes a game just hits every wrong thing in what you’re looking for. We’ve all got the games we love, and the games we don’t. I don’t especially care for games that feel the need to be punishingly difficult (so I don’t care for the Souls games), I’m not huge into Rogue-likes (though Hades is fantastic and fun, I just suck at it), and I’ve never liked Minecraft for some weird reason.

I should have listened to her and just quit at this point… gone on to play a farming sim or something like that.

I’m more a first person shooter, RPG, platformer type… oh, and games that let you build. I like the old-school turn-based RPGs… I clearly liked the first Final Fantasy game, flaws and all, and I rank Final Fantasy VI as one of my all-time favorite games. That being said… I really, really, did not like Final Fantasy II. I put maybe five or six hours into it, and just went nope… not going to keep going. I know, I wanted to do playthroughs of all the games, but sometimes, you just have to know when you’re not going to have fun.

I know I’ve played this game before, back when I had it for the GameBoy Advance, but didn’t remember it all that much. After trying to play it again… I think I may have just blotted it out of my mind. There are a lot of old school games that never hit me quite like this one did. I can get over some bad elements in a game, but not when the very fundamentals of the game are just so… grindy.

I don’t mind grind some of the time, so long as the grind either is tied to something fun, or it has some variety to it. Peeking ahead to a future title… I never minded grinding in Final Fantasy VI because there were a lot of activities I could go and do to level up. I could run on the Veldt, find things to steal from, etc. I had espers that could modify my stats as I leveled up, and it gave me a whole ton of variety to it.

I hope you like the look of this town… you’re going to spend several hours attacking yourself in front of goblins here

To call Final Fantasy II a grind is a huge understatement. This is a game where the most efficient way to level your character, in a way that won’t take the rest of your lifetime, is to attack your own guys. To improve your spells, you’re best off finding little creatures and fighting them hundreds and hundreds of times, then going and spending some time to rest, rinse and repeat.

You start the game underpowered, which is fine in these sorts of games. In fact, you being underpowered is a plot point, because the game opens up by you getting your ass kicked by the Imperial soldiers. This encounter is by design, to tell you how terribly unprepared you are and show the Imperial force that’s taking over everything as an unstoppable juggernaut. You know, that particular plot thread is probably the main story in like 2/3rds of Final Fantasy games, come to think of it. Damn Empire!

I mean, sure, he’ll live, but don’t like put him in a bed or anything. That’s too much.

The problem is, though, that you are actually woefully underpowered, so there’s so little for you to do. You have a quest to sneak into an imperial-controlled town and look around trying to find your friend (the elusive 4th member off the party that will really be a revolving door for guest characters). Don’t get caught by any of the guards, though, because they will stomp you again.

That’s the problem with the early game, though… you have two general types of enemies you can fight: comically easy or deadly. Nothing in between. Maybe eventually gets better, I don’t know, but the fact that it’s so out of whack makes this a very unfun game to play. Case in point… when going to that city to the north, there’s a point where you need to go up or down. Maybe there was some NPC dialog that warned you off, but if you’re like me, you’re about exploring in games like this and looking to thing.

Down was a very bad choice

Up led you to more goblins and wasps, stuff you’d been fighting all along. Down which was just a little grassland, led you to your death. In gross and rapid fashion, with stuff that was seemingly dozens of levels higher than your characters. I’m not talking “these are kind of hard,” more like “come back in twenty hours.” You couldn’t hit them, you couldn’t run away… it was just dumb luck to survive.

Worse, when you died and tried to continue, the game put you into a spot where any step you took meant a fight with those same powerful monsters again. It didn’t save you at the last moment where you were, it had predefined zones, and would put you back in that spot. That means, if you wandered when exploring, like I did, and didn’t have a recent save… you were screwed.

How do I know? Because this was the spot, right here, where it would load you in. Left, right, or up would cause an encounter every time.

Eventually, after by my count 47 tries, I was able to get a combination of a Preemptive Strike and a Run Away to actually work… in the second round, after two of my people had been killed. I ran back to the closest city, brought them back, and tried to continue on with the game. I avoided that area, and got to the next spot…

… but at that point, I was just done. I’m more than willing to looking to past janky controls, a buggy game, or weird systems when the story is great and they’re not too overwhelming and have a great story to bring you along. After all, I’ve played the first Mass Effect a few dozen times (seriously, I love that game but the controls in it are not good).

Here, there’s not enough of the story at the start to get over the insurmountable mountain that is all the terrible parts of the game. It’s bad systems, with a big grind, and next to no guidance on what to do. If this was the old punishing NES game, which had all sorts of design issues, I’d get it. But this is the remake, and did nothing to improve the flaws in the game design.

I wanted to play through all the games, but I knew there would be some that I just couldn’t enjoy. I mean, I assumed it’d be Final Fantasy XIII, or maybe V, but this one did me in early. Luckily, it’s the last one that has only one real option to play… since it was bundled with the first game, it was available on the same platforms, along with iOS. I’ve played a lot of Final Fantasy games over the years, and while not the worst experience I remember, it’s certainly close. I’m giving this one a one out of five, and I’m moving on.

4 COMMENTS

  1. I get that you may have wanted to speed through the less interesting entries in the series to get to the heavy hitters sooner, but this was still a pretty disappointing review. Your principal complaints seem to be largely self-inflicted since any good RPG player will pay attention to NPC dialogue and make a habit of saving often, and absolutely nothing about the game forces you to sit around hitting your own party members for any extended amount of time. In fact, stat growth is partially influenced by the rank of the enemies you face in battle, so if anything, the game actually encourages you to seek out more powerful monsters sooner rather than later.

    Hitting your own party members is also far less productive than most reviewers would lead you to believe. One person actually did a few direct comparisons and found that hitting yourself resulted in higher HP and Stamina overall than conventional gameplay did, but not much else:

    youtube.com/watch?v=320ElVeZSTU&t=736s

    Higher HP is actually a bad thing early on in the game because inn prices are tied to how much you have to recover, meaning that all this really does is require you to farm more gold. Not fun. And if you did want more HP, all you would have had to do is play a little longer until Minwu joins your party and spam Swap to get the same results without having to constantly resurrect party members.

    It’s a shame that you never got to the more interesting parts of the game, like the instant death spells that actually end up being far more lethal than they are in any other Final Fantasy game because of how quickly you can level them up, or the fact that every character can multiclass and excel at it because stats don’t go down in Dawn of Souls like they did in previous versions. Even mentioning the monster closets or the impractically tiny inventory would have made for a better assessment than “I followed bad advice and had a miserable time”.

    • I mean, I’m not past saying that I may have been following the wrong path… it’s just the one that nearly every guide and walkthrough online talks about. And the only reason that I was following one of them is because the game was very bad at directing and sign-posting where to go. That aside, though… just playing through normally, which I did end up doing, is how I got into a place where I was being killed with every step I took. That, where I was trying to explore the land to find some more powerful things to kill, is what wrecked any fun of the game for me. I did save before I went there, but the saves are not precise, and it just put me back to that spot even if I saved well away from it to start (I’d actually saved up closer to the town).

      More than that, I just sort of reject the idea that we need to save often to get the most out of the games. If this was the NES version, limited in tech and software, I’d buy that… but in something that’s been remade and reinvented, it just comes across as bad (re)design. Especially since similar annoyances were fixed in the first game.

      As to why I wrote this review… it wasn’t anything to do with timelines or wanting to move on to the heavier hitters. While I’m going to likely write a novel talking about my love of Final Fantasy IV and VI… the reason I moved on is because the game just wasn’t fun to play. I got to a spot where a glitch/bug/design flaw made it so I had the choice of “start over” or resetting the game dozens and dozens of times to try and get away just so I could crawl back and figure something out. I tried to go back once I escaped, and played up to the part where I got the first companion… but at that point, it just wasn’t fun. The reason it wasn’t fun is because the game punished me, hard, for doing something fundamental in an RPG and exploring a bit.

      Could I have forced through and maybe gone on to put a lot more time into it? Probably. But I wasn’t enjoying it, so I stopped.

      • (Commenting as a new user since the site won’t let me post a comment as ‘Fallenangel’)

        As someone that has put 5-6 hours into the original NES version of FFII and played the Origins remake through to completion, I can promise you that nothing of the sort happens in either of those versions. Both predate any mobile release by at least eight years. In fact, I tried the game again in puNES just the other day, and every time I save and reload, my character is right where I left him on the overworld. It’s true that Final Fantasy II does many strange things, but magically moving the location of your character after a save is not one of them. If this wasn’t just a bizarre bug unique to your copy of the game, it was a design choice implemented long after the fact, so there’s no need to act like this was something they failed to address in the remake, especially when you failed to mention any of the numerous things they DID fix. Periodic increases to the health stat. Increased inventory size. Stat gains that don’t cause decreases in other stats. Dual-wielding that isn’t bugged. Stats that can’t roll over.

        As for sign-posting, it sounds like you were able to figure out enough of the keyword system (another interesting feature that wasn’t mentioned at all in the review, despite it being wholly unique to this installment) to learn that you had to head north to Gatrea, then further north to Castle Fynn. After talking to Scott, if you had returned to the rebel base to report back to the Queen, you would have been told to head east to Paloom. Yes, you have the entire overworld to explore in the meantime, but if you run into something you can’t face, all you have to do is remember not to go there next time (though it’s worth noting that if you’re patient enough to grind until you can reliably take down the Captains around Castle Fynn, it’s completely possible to fight your way through the area you couldn’t escape from even before recruiting Minwu – see “How OVERPOWERED Can You Get BEFORE Scott’s Ring” by Primalliquid).

        Obviously I can’t force you to rewrite your review or revisit FFII, but I have to admit that it just doesn’t seem fair to judge the entire game by the fact that it wouldn’t let you go down instead of up in the first 15 minutes, especially since the game does tell you to go up. Imagine if I failed to get past the segment with Locke and the Moogles in FFVI (something that actually did happen the first time I tried to play the game) and proceeded to pan it for trapping you in unfavorable situations. That’s kind of how this looks to someone that has actually played the game.

      • As someone that has put 5-6 hours into the original NES version of FFII and played the Origins remake through to completion, I can promise you that nothing of the sort happens in either of those versions. Both predate any mobile release by at least eight years. In fact, I tried the game again in puNES just the other day, and every time I save and reload, my character is right where I left him on the overworld. It’s true that Final Fantasy II does many strange things, but magically moving the location of your character after a save is not one of them. If this wasn’t just a bizarre bug unique to your copy of the game, it was a design choice implemented long after the fact, so there’s no need to act like this was something they failed to address in the remake, especially when you failed to mention any of the numerous things they DID fix. Periodic increases to the health stat. Increased inventory size. Stat gains that don’t cause decreases in other stats. Dual-wielding that isn’t bugged. Stats that can’t roll over.

        As for sign-posting, it sounds like you were able to figure out enough of the keyword system (another interesting feature that wasn’t mentioned at all in the review, despite it being wholly unique to this installment) to learn that you had to head north to Gatrea, then further north to Castle Fynn. After talking to Scott, if you had returned to the rebel base to report back to the Queen, you would have been told to head east to Paloom. Yes, you have the entire overworld to explore in the meantime, but if you run into something you can’t face, all you have to do is remember not to go there next time (though it’s worth noting that if you’re patient enough to grind until you can reliably take down the Captains around Castle Fynn, it’s completely possible to fight your way through the area you couldn’t escape from even before recruiting Minwu – see “How OVERPOWERED Can You Get BEFORE Scott’s Ring” by Primalliquid).

        Obviously I can’t force you to rewrite your review or revisit FFII, but I have to admit that it just doesn’t seem fair to judge the entire game by the fact that it wouldn’t let you go down instead of up in the first 15 minutes, especially since the game does tell you to go up. Imagine if I failed to get past the segment with Locke and the Moogles in FFVI (something that actually did happen the first time I tried to play the game) and proceeded to pan it for trapping you in unfavorable situations. That’s kind of how this looks to someone that has actually played the game.

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