Casual_Chemist
New Member
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2017
- Messages
- 24
- Points
- 3
- Age
- 28
Back again, this time after completing the divisive Final Fantasy II. I'll try to break down this postmortem into a few main sections.
Story and Characters
This was what I was most excited about moving from Final Fantasy I to II. But unfortunately the story star wa... I mean Final Fantasy II leaves plenty to be desired. While the premise of joining a rebel army as orphans is cool, you never feel as though Firion is much of a character along with Maria and Guy (who is a little simple, I think?). They were plenty of cool set pieces such as the disguised princess seducing you as well as the destruction of the Dread Star. But it never felt as though it amounted to any strong emotions. I did really enjoy how crazy the emperor going to Hell, killing the devil and becoming the new lord of the underworld was and I hope more Final Fantasy villains will reach this level of feats!
The party characters were a bit on the weak side (and not just in gameplay). Outside of Ricard the rest of our temporary compatriots felt like they were just joining us for a few battles to immediately die/ get lost (RIP Josef). Although our party members sometimes felt as though they were in a revolving door to death, it did it's job at capturing the loss one can experience during war time.
However, I am aware this story criticism is through a modern lens. If I had no outside knowledge and was coming just from FFI I think this would've had a much stronger impact.
Game play
This is where I am very conflicted. The idea of having characters that are blank slates is neat, but the execution is pretty lousy. I was lucky enough to have enough background knowledge on the game to know that shields gave you agility growth and wearing heavy armor reduced spell effectiveness. But I imagine not knowing that would be a serious detriment to your enjoyment of the game.
Because of how grind dependent the stat system is I just ended up throwing each character in a very specific niche and never branching out of that. I think what I am seeing here is a proto-job system, where your character can change what they wanna do but is done VERY slowly.
Overall, the game play was serviceable but I hope I do not encounter this style of leveling in future entries.
Last Bits
I think this game is an important step for the franchise. You can see the experimentation with multiple party members, a WORLD that tells a story, and a "unique" leveling system. Again, I'm excited to see how these games develop and look forward to tackling FFIII shortly!
Thanks for entertaining my rambling thoughts, and be sure to share what you are think about FFII! (If you are interested in watching these games live, shoot me a message and I'll share the twitch channel)
Story and Characters
This was what I was most excited about moving from Final Fantasy I to II. But unfortunately the story star wa... I mean Final Fantasy II leaves plenty to be desired. While the premise of joining a rebel army as orphans is cool, you never feel as though Firion is much of a character along with Maria and Guy (who is a little simple, I think?). They were plenty of cool set pieces such as the disguised princess seducing you as well as the destruction of the Dread Star. But it never felt as though it amounted to any strong emotions. I did really enjoy how crazy the emperor going to Hell, killing the devil and becoming the new lord of the underworld was and I hope more Final Fantasy villains will reach this level of feats!
The party characters were a bit on the weak side (and not just in gameplay). Outside of Ricard the rest of our temporary compatriots felt like they were just joining us for a few battles to immediately die/ get lost (RIP Josef). Although our party members sometimes felt as though they were in a revolving door to death, it did it's job at capturing the loss one can experience during war time.
However, I am aware this story criticism is through a modern lens. If I had no outside knowledge and was coming just from FFI I think this would've had a much stronger impact.
Game play
This is where I am very conflicted. The idea of having characters that are blank slates is neat, but the execution is pretty lousy. I was lucky enough to have enough background knowledge on the game to know that shields gave you agility growth and wearing heavy armor reduced spell effectiveness. But I imagine not knowing that would be a serious detriment to your enjoyment of the game.
Because of how grind dependent the stat system is I just ended up throwing each character in a very specific niche and never branching out of that. I think what I am seeing here is a proto-job system, where your character can change what they wanna do but is done VERY slowly.
Overall, the game play was serviceable but I hope I do not encounter this style of leveling in future entries.
Last Bits
I think this game is an important step for the franchise. You can see the experimentation with multiple party members, a WORLD that tells a story, and a "unique" leveling system. Again, I'm excited to see how these games develop and look forward to tackling FFIII shortly!
Thanks for entertaining my rambling thoughts, and be sure to share what you are think about FFII! (If you are interested in watching these games live, shoot me a message and I'll share the twitch channel)
