II Down, IV to Go

 Well, that's another Final Fantasy game beaten.

While I have a vague, if underdeveloped, interest in maybe revisiting the original Final Fantasy to try out the Thief and Red Mage classes, this is a game that, to be honest, I'm glad to see in the rear view mirror.

And the reason for that is almost purely mechanical: it all came to a head in the final boss fight.

When I reached the Emperor in the depths of hell (yeah, there wasn't a lot of particularly ambitious worldbuilding in the early days, though I will say II has more of a coherent story than the original) I discovered too late that because my Berserk spell and my Basuna spell and my Haste spell were not high enough, I could basically only do damage with Firion wielding Masamune and Maria pelting him with Ultimas - each of these landing for pitiful damage, but at least some at all. Thus, Guy and Leon were basically useless. And then, the Emperor cast Slow on Firion, meaning that he was now doing precisely zero damage.

I still won - I didn't have any total wipes the whole time I played. But that final boss felt like trying to knock down a brick wall with a pool noodle.

Plot-wise, though, II introduces some elements to the series that will become staples: we have an evil empire, and even a subversion in that a new villain rises up to replace the emperor (only for that to be doubly subverted when the emperor returns from death to become the main villain once again).

Over the course of the game, the fourth character slot becomes a home for a rotating cast of characters, most of whom meet grim fates. There are recurring villains - not that they have a ton of personality, but when you find the zombified version of an arrogant airship captain in Pandemonium Palace, it feels pretty satisfying to take him down.

But overall, the progression system really holds this one back. Likewise, even if the series eventually moves on from classes (or "jobs") I actually could have used a clear pointer of what each character was meant to be best at - I found myself giving Maria all the magic stuff, so she wound up having to carry the party. Guy I made a dual-wielding heavy-hitter, kind of a Barbarian, which was great in 99% of situations until I hit that final boss and he couldn't deal nearly any damage.

Anyway.

The game is certainly a step up in difficulty, though I think that is, again, kind of the fault of the progression system. Combat, like in the first game, is turn-based and has you enter all of your party's commands at the top of a round, then executing those commands in a randomized order (there are stats like Agility that don't seem to have any explanation). Once again, the damage of an attack is strongly tied to the number of hits that you make, and I think this is directly tied to your skill in that kind of weapon - for example, if you have a skill of five in swords, by default when you attack with a sword you'll do 5 attacks (these are all compounded into a single damage number, like they were in the first game). You can also equip a weapon in each hand, which causes your character to attack with each of them on their turn (I don't know exactly how or even if there's much of a damage penalty to doing this). Damage, I feel, is a lot swingier in this game than in the previous one.

Spells are all leveled up individually, but unlike in I, you just get a single spell of each element: your Fire spell will upgrade gradually as you cast it. And there's no distinction between single-target and multi-target spells (which I think continue on into later games,) so you can simply select to the far left to target every monster, or far right to target the whole party. The damage then gets split between the targets.

I suspect that the defense system is subtractive, as, unless the monster has a serious vulnerability to a type of damage, you'll often see pretty pitiful damage when you spread it across the battlefield as opposed to hitting a single target - like, less damage than you'd get if you divided the damage of a single-target spell. This, of course, makes the necessity of hitting as hard as possible really important (and why the final boss was such a slog for me).

I got through the game with little grinding - other than a period in which I had a petrified Guy and would draw out fights to cast Esuna on him over and over.

Oh, also, the distinction between Esuna and Basuna was a pain - Esuna only clears status ailments that persist beyond combat, an Basuna only clears those that end at the end of combat. Why these need to be separate spells? I guess I should get in a time machine and complain.

I'm eager to try the third game, which I understand to be the one to introduce "Jobs," Final Fantasy's more easily-swappable version of character classes. I think I'm going to read up on how to prepare for that game because I think my party wasn't really put together well in II (if I had to do it again, and I probably won't, I'd dedicate one of the core 3 to being a Black Mage, one to being a White Mage, and the third to being pure physical damage dealing. And I'd be casting Berserk every freaking combat.)