In my hubristic quest to play through the first six (at least) Final Fantasy games, I've now begun Final Fantasy II. From the get-go, we've got more of a plot, and an element that is going to be a mainstay of the series: the evil empire. Our heroes, now given names and a hint of personality and backstory, are young orphans trying to aid the resistance against the empire, aiding the exiled princess and dying king of their homeland.
Mechanically, there's a big change: characters don't have classes nor even levels - instead, each time you use something, be it a spell or a weapon or even just "getting hit" you gradually build up a meter that will level it up.
This means that, technically, your characters can play any role, though their starting stats might push you in one direction or another. Indeed, now that I think about this, I feel a little bad for going with the gender conventions and making the female character the spellcaster.
This type of leveling is...
Ok, to be frank, I don't love it.
It's very similar to the Elder Scrolls series, where you totally "level by doing." The problem is that every single spell works this way - if you want your Esuna to get better (though I don't even really know what it means to "be better" other than potentially being less likely to fail?) you need to cast it over and over. This will likely mean doing so a lot out of combat (I hope that it even works that way) on perfectly healthy characters (I hope that it even works that way). Spells get more expensive as you level them - one MP per spell level - but you also gain more MP by spending MP.
I think this works in a game like Elder Scrolls because there are so many ways to play a game like that (I had a friend who didn't do any quests - he just hunted animals to make better and better hide and leather armor). But here it feels a little like I need to be careful not to let any of my skills fall behind. This also means casting a lot more spells, which meant when I got to the first boss I had barely any MP left - ironically I had to make my melee characters do most of the spellcasting.
Another change, and one that is probably welcome but also comes with consequences, is that the same spell can target a single target or multiple, but it appears to be divided between the targets or at least take a penalty. I don't think I'm going to get a "Fira" because I think Fire will just level up to Fire 2 and Fire 3, etc., and you can just select all the enemies to cast it as an AOE.
Another oddity is that, while there's more plot and dialogue, I also think the game does a worse job of giving you a sense of where to go. In the first game, it's actually pretty hard to blunder into areas that are too high-level for you because of the way that it restricts movement (and by the time you have the airship, the overworld is basically all of an appropriate level for you). Here, though, I went a little too far west and had Guy get one-shot by an Adamantoise, and later got both him and Firion killed by a group of ghosts (luckily, this go around resurrections are free at the temples).
It also appears that the fourth character slot is more or less for temporary party members. Firion, Maria, and Guy so far seem to be permanent, but I've had a couple people pop in and out in that fourth slot.
As will tend to be the case going forward, the characters have unique sprites, rather than the basic ones provided by their classes (I know the iconic Black Mage with the shadowed face will show up again - at least in the Pixel Remaster, they're still the spell vendors - gone are separate stores for white and black magic).
Anyway, I'm only a couple hours in, and now seem to be working on destroying the Dreadnought - the Empire's airship that has bombarded all the friendly cities and left big craters in them.
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