Uh....FF2 is sorta....good?

[Bebpo]

I started playing FF2 for the first time and for the first hour when you have like 30hp and 5mp and it seems to take forever for stats to up and when you get to the first boss and you do 0 damage...kawazu seems like the crazy loon we all know him for.

But then a few hours in when everyone has decent HP/MP, the game sort of ...works?  It's fun always gaining stats and getting stronger. leveling your magic, etc...It's cool how when you actually have a TOUGH fight and beat it scathed you get a shitload of stat upgrades in return.  Whereas when you fight a peon you get nothing usually.  It's a nice rewarding system for surviving the tough.

Also I like that it has a plot.  Coming off FF1 where the plot was lolz, this seems too work a little better.  I like how you get different guest party members.

The game reminds me of FFXII.  All my party members in FF2 are awesome at magic and physical attacks and def and m-def.  Everyone is basically can basically be the same and it's up to you to branch them in different ways.  I think that's pretty cool.  It's nice to get to a boss that is weak against ice and then have EVERYONE launch blizzard attacks and kill it in 2 turns.

I think I'm about 30-40% in?  I just beat the Red Soul and got the flame to go take down the only airship in the world that is murdering everyone.  It's become very difficult to put down.  I'm like "I'll stop at the next town; after this dungeon; when I get to the next dungeon; ..."

There's still some wacky crazy shit that makes you remember Kawazu is nuts like how Red Soul absorbs all magic and takes ~0 damage from physical attacks and the only way to hurt him is to curse him with a physical attack which only 1 sword in the game can do so you better have found it in a previous dungeon and have it equipped for the fight....lol, but when Kawazu is not being crazy his gameplay is actually pretty fun and addicting and makes sense sorta?

Next thing you know it I'll be saying Saga games are fun ^^;

[demi]

Fuck Kawazu, you're mental. It's one of the things I hate about TLR

[Lucretius]

I liked FFII as well!
It's the most western in its gameplay of all the FF games in that you become better at things you do frequently.  I think the gameplay and character leveling system gets pissed on as being broken (mostly by people who have not played through the whole game).  I think it's a fine game that suffers from being so different from all the other FF games and from being so rarely played by those who most frequently shit on it.

[TakingBackSunday]

The game reminds me of FFXII.

 

[tiesto]

Up until FFX-2, this was my least favorite of all the FF's... it felt extremely broken, although I liked that it had a plot, probably pretty revolutionary for an RPG back in 1988.

[Himu]

it's better than ff12

[Third]

It's the only FF I haven't finished.

Didn't like the weapon upgrade system. Stopped playing after I left the castle.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

[demi]

co-sign

[y2kev]

patel

[Fragamemnon]

patel's response is amazing. another victory for my photobucket account.

[T234]

I like the GBA version.

PATEL, Wrong on Internet Protocols, Wrong on FF2

[recursivelyenumerable]

FF2 was actually designed by the same team as FF1 though.  anyway you should try SaGa2/FFL2 on Gameboy, it's probably my fave RPG of all time.  though Shiren DS might have it beat now

[T234]

Recursive, have you ever played Rengoku II? How is Shiren compared to it terms of difficulty?

[Bocsius]

FF2 is so exploitable. At least when I played the PS1 version.

Need to gain health points? Attack yourself. Need to gain magic points? Use tons of magic for no reason. And when you gain the Osmose spell, cast it on the undead. Max out that MP! (Just be sure to cast osmose on the living to refill your meter afterwards).

That said, I still enjoyed it a lot. One note of warning, though. During the game you'll come across a blood sword or two. Weak weapon, you'll want to get rid of it because of the inventory system. Except if you do get rid of it,

spoiler (click to show/hide)

the final boss is basically invincible. At least, I couldn't find another way beat him or her or it or whatever. Keep that daggum sword at all costs. I ended up replaying the last 10-15 hours of the game from an earlier save because of my mistake.

[close]

[Jabberwocky]

Patel took my words and my breath away.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

FF2 was actually designed by the same team as FF1 though.  anyway you should try SaGa2/FFL2 on Gameboy, it's probably my fave RPG of all time.  though Shiren DS might have it beat now

I wouldn't say Saga 2 is my favorite RPG of all time, but it's probably my most warm-hearted love love RPG of all time. I feel about that game the way ninthings must feel about Chrono Trigger.

[Crushed]

i found a review for this game

Final Fantasy II (Moon Date 1988/ USA 2003)
Imagine, if you will, that upon finishing a game, Square liked to have a good old-fashioned dog fucking party. Now imagine that after finishing Final Fantasy I, Square threw the biggest dog-fucking party Japan had ever seen. Champagne being poured, red carpets being rolled out, dogs being fucked up and down those red carpets; an amazing feat, as only one dog is allowed to occupy Japan at a time thanks to the postwar Constitution we kindly wrote for them as a favor. Now, I'm not sure if dog-fucking is a part of Japanese culture, but it's the only logical way the conclusion of this story can be true. So let's say a severely distinguished mentally-challenged homeless man sneaks into this dog-fucking party and secretly takes pictures of each and every Square employee in the act of dog-fucking. Surely if these pictures were leaked, the company would be destroyed! This is why Akitoshi Kawazu has been directing games at Square for nearly 20 years instead of sucking the nutrients out of curb asphalt to survive.

The second you start playing Final Fantasy II, your party of four is mercilessly slaughtered by a battle you can't escape from. This is Kawazu's way of telling you, "Welcome, and please get used to my unique interpretation of role playing games!" And get used to it you will, as you find moving in one arbitrary direction will bring you from the land of level 1 crippled moths straight into the mouth of level 99 behemoth diablos that will make you sorry you decided to not remain completely motionless. This "punishment through exploration" method was also used in Kawazu-directed games like SaGa Frontier, mistakenly bought by many gamers who thought they deserved a life without torture. Final Fantasy II's shame-based gaming can also be found in its character level system, which doesn't exist. Instead, to gain stats, it's more productive to use your own characters to beat the shit out of one another; a fine analogy for playing Final Fantasy II.

[recursivelyenumerable]

 

[Himu]

FF2 was actually designed by the same team as FF1 though.  anyway you should try SaGa2/FFL2 on Gameboy, it's probably my fave RPG of all time.  though Shiren DS might have it beat now

I wouldn't say Saga 2 is my favorite RPG of all time, but it's probably my most warm-hearted love love RPG of all time. I feel about that game the way ninthings must feel about Chrono Trigger.

what if you aren't a ninthing but heart chrono trigger

[Bebpo]

I would like to note that 3/4th through the game now I have yet to beat up my own cast. I'm playing the gba version and it seems not very broken.

[Himu]

the gba version is nerfed

[Bebpo]

the gba version is nerfed

by nerfed you mean balanced and fun, right?

[disgruntled_jojo]

I played all the way through the fixed PSP version where they had resolved a lot of the distinguished mentally-challenged leveling issues.  I would agree that it is 'sorta good'.

[Positive Touch]

I would like to note that 3/4th through the game now I have yet to beat up my own cast. I'm playing the gba version and it seems not very broken.

good god the original is so much more broken.  the bosses with crazy high DEF were bad enough, but then i got to the airship level and all the enemies were able to kill me in one hit.  it's like they didn't even try to balance the game difficulty.  and the gba/psp versions' more balanced difficulty just leaves you with a boring-ass rpg with the worst level designs in the history of gaming.  FF2 is fucking garbage.

[Bebpo]

I finished FF2 tonight and I can see where the complaints come from.  The battle system is quite broken.  In the end my party's physical attacks did 0 damage on bosses until I berserked them and then they did 3,000 damage killing them in 1 hit (or the final boss in 3 turns).  My magic never did any good damage and the damage I took was totally random.  Most enemies were hitting for like 1-3k physical damage in the final dungeon while the final boss was castling Flare16 for 700 damage on ONE of my 4k characters.

I like the idea of individual stat growth based on what you do and I like that you could make characters whatever you wanted.  OTOH there wasn't checks to balance it.  Like I made every character besides my berserk casting female a two handed weapon user with both hands just being their 1 preferred weapon type.  No reason not to really, you get 1.5x damage and it's not like shields matter much.

The only system I really disliked was spell leveling.  It worked at the start when you were leveling the early spells along with your characters, but then 3/4th into the game you get ULTIMA....1, which does 59.....damage, while your good old fire/thunder/blizzard spells are doing 700.  To get ULTIMA to the point where it would actually do more damage than just a physical attack you'd probably have to cast it 10,000 times over 20 hours of grinding.  So basically all spells obtained after the first town or two were pointless because they had to be leveled.

I liked the story!  It was cheezy, but it was as legit as the 16-bit ones with tons of party member death (DUDE THEY EVEN KILLED CID WTF!?!?), a real enemy, mini-stories along the way, towns, abandoned castles, Gears of War 2 maps, at almost 20 hours long it's pretty damn close to being on par with FF4's adventure and for a NES game that's impressive.

Also there was some great music in there.  The main rebel HQ theme is AWESOME and I hope that is the song they remix for the FF2 stage in Dissidia.

I liked it more than FF1, but less than the other FFs.  Now I just need to play FF3 and I'm all good.

[recursivelyenumerable]

Ultima's damage is supposedly based on the sum of all your weapon and magic levels.