Final Fantasy II, released as Final Fantasy IV on the Super Famicon in Japan, is a turn based strategy RPG where the player takes control of Cecil, captain of the Red Wings and leader of the Kingdom of Baron’s military. When questioning his King’s justification for a recent mission to steal a neighboring kingdom’s crystal, Cecil is stripped of his rank and sent to deliver a mysterious packaged to the Village of the Mist. As the player you’ll explore the world of ‘Blue Planet’ with a dynamic cast of characters fighting random battles as you try to thwart evil’s plan. Widely considered a massive leap forward in the franchise from previous entries, Final Fantasy II is one of the Super Nintendo’s most recognized and beloved titles, representing for many their first introduction to both the Fantasy and RPG genres.

Audio (18/20)

If FF2 were to be so well remembered by fans of the series it would undoubtedly be due to its music and sound design. With the musical score having been composed by Nobuo Uematsu, the game's rich and varied soundtrack carries the player through both the story and action. Whether it’s a tragic song like “Sorrow and Loss”, an exhilarating battle theme like… well “Battle Theme”, or a downright haunting track like “Dancing Calbrena”, wherever our adventure took us we found the music and sound design to be perfect in driving home the emotions of the event or scene being portrayed.

And while the music is the definitely the highlight, don’t let that fool you into thinking the rest of the audio is any slouch as almost every ability in the game comes with its own crisp sound effect. From the satisfying ‘flee battle’ sound bite that plays when you successfully escape an encounter, to the crackly roar of a fire spell, the sound effects of the game deliver the exact amount of punch required to make you feel like a real battle is going on without ever feeling over the top, repetitive, or annoying.

In our recent play through of the game we found the sound design was far and above our favorite aspect, creating a true sense of timelessness especially when compared with other games in the SNES library. It’s our humble opinion that the music of Final Fantasy II is what ultimately carries the weight of its story, and felt this clearly demonstrated by the fact that when we first picked the game up we didn’t remember much beyond the first few plot beats, but could hum along to almost every one of its songs throughout.

Visuals (15/20)

While overall the art direction is solid, Final Fantasy II was released very early in the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle and unfortunately does show its age in a few ways. Before we get into that though, we should talk about what the game gets right, because there’s still plenty to love!

Most obvious is probably the high quality sprite work, and in particular the enemies and bosses who are large, interesting, and well detailed. We also appreciated that it wasn’t afraid to mix in some silly enemies alongside the creepier ones, making us laugh out loud at some parts and physically recoil at others. We feel it speaks volumes to the art direction when a game evokes this level of emotion, and we could tell there was a level of care that was put into this component of the game.

A second area worth mentioning is the character portraits in the main menu. For us these portraits really helped transform the characters from cartoon caricatures into actual people saving the world, something we felt was desperately needed as the only other representations of your rag-tag group are the cutesy battle and overworld sprites. Add in some decent battle backdrops and you can start to see how the visual design really does work hard to make the player feel immersed in the fantasy world.

Unfortunately, as we’ve already mentioned it isn’t all good. The overworld, especially from the airship perspective leaves something to be desired in the modern age. And while we’ve mentioned this exact component before in other reviews, in FF2’s case we feel it more generally represents what we think the modern player might find disappointing about the game, which is to say the environments often feel a bit… empty.

Sure it sounds nitpicky but picking this up today the most noticeable change really is how barren some areas feel. Dungeons, towns, castles, and the overworld just don’t feel as dense, detailed, or varied as modern games and we found that a bit jarring.

For us this issue really came to a head in our time spent in the generic “futuristic” dungeon settings of Golbez’s Tower. Maybe it was our dislike of the unpleasant colour palette, or maybe it was that we couldn’t use Warp to skip to the exit once we’d accomplished our objective, but regardless of the why - it was at this point that our interest in seeing what the game had up next started to wane.

Unfortunately these feelings weren’t limited to just the environments. Animations are in a similar boat where what the game does do is fantastic (ex. the Call abilities), but on a whole it feels like there just isn’t enough of them. The easiest example of this would be the complete absence of a ‘failure animation’ when one of our spells didn’t work on an enemy. Something we found particularly annoying not just because it struck us as a missed opportunity to show a fun “fizzle” animation like the mage falling on their face, but also because it would have greatly improved the gameplay by communicating important feedback to the player that what had been cast was ineffective.

Overall, it’s not that Final Fantasy II does anything wrong visually. It’s colourful, thematic, and what is there is great. Unfortunately it’s just not enough by today’s player’s standards, and because of this we believe the visuals may turn some people away.

Gameplay and Controls (15/20)

We think at this point most people understand what they’re getting into gameplay wise when they pick up an RPG from the 90’s, but in case you’re new, the core gameplay of Final Fantasy II boils down to navigating an overworld while getting routinely tossed into monster encounters where you’ll fight your way to victory in order to return to the overworld and continue your adventure.

In battles, gameplay is also a bit of a mixed bag although the game definitely has some novel spells. Our favorite of these being “Wall”, which reflects targeted magic onto the opposing party and which can be cast by some enemies as well as your own white magic users. And while Wall might not sound interesting at first, add in the nuance that a spell will only ‘bounce’ once and you start to see some interesting situations. One of which being that when an enemy casted Wall on itself, we needed to cast Wall on one of our own characters in order to bounce our damage spells onto that enemy… pretty neat! And this is only one of many little gameplay interactions, from casting berserk on our melee character equipped with a lifesteal weapon to avoid having to heal them, to finding enemies our black magic casters could use Psyche on to drain MP between save points, FF2 does a decent job of keeping battle gameplay interesting.

Unfortunately it’s not all good when it comes to spells. For example, even 20 hours in we still hadn’t found an opportunity where we tried “Toad”, “Piggy”, or “Mute” and the spell didn’t (silently) fail, at which point we just gave up on these spells entirely. In a modern game we imagine that this would likely be changed to having the spell work for significantly less time on stronger enemies, causing it to still be useless on bosses but improving the player experience.

We also felt that “Peep”, a mechanic which tells you information about your enemy, is terribly implemented as it works on regular enemies where you rarely need it but fails on bosses where it would actually be useful. More engaging gameplay might have been to add something where you had to cast it multiple times to reveal additional information each time, or forcing the player to cast it multiple times in order to build up to a threshold at which point the details of the enemy were revealed. This feels like a big miss because either improvement would have not only created an interesting risk reward mechanic, but also added a whole new battle dynamic to bosses who grow in power the longer the fight goes on.

While navigating the overworld the gameplay boils down to three key mechanics: not wasting steps so as to minimize the number of random encounters you’re forced into; searching for secret paths, chests, and items; and solving the occasional puzzle or ‘what to do/who to talk to next’ problem. And while the latter two mechanics definitely did not age well, we have to admit that replaying the game some 30 years after it’s release we were weirdly engaged by the first item, minimizing our steps.

On the bright side, controls wise we’re happy to report everything is simple but solid. Overworld movement uses the d-pad and battles rely on it for basic menu navigation with the added ability to hold L+R to run away from a fight. We were also happy to find there was essentially no grinding required at any point in the game which shows respect for the player’s time. If we had to sum it up though, while FF2’s gameplay does have some things going for it, for every hit that it delivers, there seems to be a number of misses that come with it.

Story and Presentation (10/20)

We’re just going to say it, the story in Final Fantasy II isn’t great. While it starts out strong with a classic hero’s arc it fails to ever really finds it’s footing before proceeding to lose its direction entirely about two thirds of the way through, from which it never really recovers.

First up we need to talk about the plot, which begins with our down-on-his-luck hero gathering a scrappy crew to topple the bad guys which is great! And while we felt that characters are introduced and disappear far too quickly in the first half of the game, we were understanding of the need for a regular turnover of party members in order to switch up the gameplay. But then about two thirds in it happens, the game decides to take a left turn off the fantasy highway and drive the plot straight off the cliffs of bad sci-fi into the oblivion of player indifference. From this point forward the cheap gimmicks come hard and fast until we were facing off against a final boss with zero story tension or investment in the resolution.

The second thing we need to talk about is the dialogue. If we were to sum up FF2’s dialogue it would quite literally be… ellipses. Combining sparse and abrupt character lines with some uncomfortable gender stereotyping and you just have to accept that on some level Final Fantasy II didn’t age well. With the main character Cecil feeling more mopey lump than stoic badass, and his underdeveloped counterpart Kain not much different, the dialogue is only saved from being completely unbearable thanks to supporting cast members and comic relief like the hilarious duo of Palom and Porom.

In sharp contrast, presentation wise the game does a great job managing to carry key story moments with very limited assets. From the creepy crawling hand sequence to the laughable Cid and Edge airship repair scene, the game manages to use its limited toolset to really add life to the world. This is especially noticeable at the conclusion of the game where the presentation ramps up with moving backgrounds on the final boss fight, numerous ending cutscenes, and a fair share of Mode 7 effects.

As for the interfaces, couple the above with a robust menu color selector, convenient text speed options, a gameplay timer, a nice save/load game selection screen, editable spell menus, and a convient “sort” (which is actually an “auto-stack” function), and we were left with a very positive impression.

Overall it feels a bit strange that when viewed through a modern lens the story of a retro game would be the aspect which has aged the worst… but in the case of Final Fantasy II that seems to be exactly the case. And while the quality presentation does help to improve the experience, ultimately it can’t make up for the lack of meaningful character development, strange plot, and low quality dialogue.

Systems and Design (13/20)

At the time of release, the systems in Final Fantasy II were a large step forward in game design. However, playing it today after decades of refinement within the genre it’s difficult to not to be frustrated by some of its design choices.

One stand-out problem amongst these systems is the meaninglessness of gold and the economy. Gold, rewarded from battles and used to purchase party equipment, feels entirely inconsequential. We neither cared how much a fight rewarded us with nor how much it cost us to flee, and we rarely knew how much gold we had until we were standing at the shop buying something… or more frequently, buying everything. This limits the satisfaction from new gear significantly and inadvertently turned shopping in the game from ‘exciting reward' into a boring chore.

Similarly, equipment decisions fail to engage the player in any way. Items throughout the game tend to be either strictly better or worse than each other, and so the game presents essentially no decision making or trade-off considerations in this aspect. Add in that armor doesn’t affect character appearance and we found no reason we shouldn’t just equip whatever we came across most recently as it almost always had the best stats.

And this was the theme for many of the other systems - like the front and back row system for party members, our character’s ability to parry, and the need to float or unequip anything metal in certain dungeons. While these systems exist, they never really created a need for us to make a hard decision or choice.

Which brings us to the most obvious system that we believe will turn off modern players, the random battles. It’s been discussed a million times so we won’t rehash the details here but at a high level these are bad game design because they erode the player’s sense of control, don’t respect the player’s time, and don’t create meaningful choices.

In contrast, one system we did enjoy which wasn’t in previous titles is the Active Time Battle system. A system where each participant in the battle has a (hidden) gauge that slowly fills up, which when full allows the character to act. This is a nice change from a strictly turn based structure and adds a real urgency to the fights as the speed of issuing commands to characters directly impacts battle outcomes. Notably, this also converts the “Battle Speed” setting in the “Custom” menu from simple preference to an indirect difficulty setting. One small disappointment we found with this system was that once you move beyond the basic menu, the Active Time Battle gauges are paused in the background reducing the systems impact on gameplay significantly.

Broadly speaking the systems of Final Fantasy II while not inherently broken suffer from not creating meaningful choices for the player and that’s a real problem. Today’s player is likely to be frustrated at some of the design choices that were made and the squandered opportunities they represent.

Summary (71/100)

Final Fantasy II gets a lot of things right. It has fantastic music, interesting visuals, decent presentation, and some fun characters. Unfortunately there’s also a lot about the game which hasn’t aged well at all, and it feels like FF2 sacrifices depth for breadth in more than few ways. Upon completion we were left wishing the game had trimmed the last third of its story and content in favor of refining other aspects such as the economy, equipment systems, environments, animations, and just generally building more emotion with a smaller cast of characters. With a love and understanding of how FF2 fits into the evolution of the series and the RPG genre more generally, we can appreciate it for the leap forward it represented; However, if you don’t share that appreciation or have any nostalgia for the game, it would be difficult to recommend it to the modern day player as ultimately it’s serves more as a showcases for just how far the RPG genre has come.

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