For the truest possible experience of the game without learning Japanese, I have used the original Nintendo ROM patched with NeoDemiforce's translation of the game. Note that this post contains spoilers, which are in black text. Highlight to read them if you have already beaten the game, or if you dare to spoil the game for yourself.

GAME INFORMATION

Released: 1988 (JAPAN)

Nintendo Family Computer

REGULAR FEATURES INTRODUCED TO THE SERIES

Not all of these features would appear in every subsequent game in the series, but they all appeared first in Final Fantasy II and would become important parts of most of the games to come.

• A larger inventory of items for use in field and/or in battle
  
• The ability to save anywhere on the world map at any time
  
• Face graphics in the menu screen
  
• You now can walk around in buildings in towns
  
• Your characters can talk, and dialogue makes its debut
  
• Your characters have names (you name them) and personalities.
  
• Front and back battle rows were defined
  
• Items for recovering MP (Ethers and Elixirs) and for different levels of HP recovery (XPotion, Elixir), as well as an item to restore life (FenixDn)
  
• Expendable items whose sole purpose is to damage enemies in battle
• Chocobos
  
  
• A guy named Cid
  
• The ability to target enemies or allies in battle
  
• Magic can target a single enemy or ally or the entire group.
  
• Status effect animations
  
• Enemies drop items after battle
  
• Boss battle music
  
• Ultima, the ultimate magic
  
• Behemoth and Leviathan
  
• Dragoons
  

UNIQUE FEATURES

Final Fantasy II may have introduced a lot of timeless features to the series, but a lot of its innovations were dropped for subsequent releases. The following are the most notable unique features of the game.

• Character growth is dependent on events that happen during battle. Taking damage will increase defense; losing a lot of HP will increase maximum HP; using magic will increase magic potency and MP; etc.
  
• Any character can equip any weapon or armour, and all characters are able to use all magic spells.
  
• Each character has a skill level for each type of weapon that increases with use.
  
• Magic is not separated into concrete levels, but each spell's level increases with use, and each spell costs a number of MP equal to its level. Magic is bought as items, and these items are used on the character you want to learn the spell. Therefore, magic can now be found or sold, rather than just bought at a magic shop.
  
• All characters can equip two weapons or a weapon and a shield (also in III and XII)
  
• Items must be "equipped" in the menu screen (two slots are available per character) in order to be available in battle.
  
• You can learn key words from non-playable characters and repeat them to other characters to learn valuable information or to progress in the game's story.
  
• Through most of the game, different guest characters join you in battle in the fourth position.
  

CATEGORICAL RATINGS

GAMEPLAY

Almost all aspects of character growth, magic, and battle were improved over Final Fantasy, but they're also all subject to opinion. The loss of the class system hurt a bit for such a primitive game; that area needed more structure. Having every character be able to equip any weapon or armour is supposed to allow for more customization, but always ends up being a bit bland. Getting special weapons and armour isn't quite as exciting when anyone can equip it, though I'm not exactly sure why. Overall, gameplay wasn't vastly improved. The item system is horribly flawed, as your inventory will be largely filled up by the end of the game with all the old scenario items that you cannot get rid of. In order to procure treasures from chests, you'll have to throw out something valuable without even knowing that what you're getting isn't complete junk. The system of magic requiring more and more MP as it leveled up is neat, but it unfortunately requires you to level up your MP in battle (very tediously). You'll end up needing to do long battles trying to deplete enough MP to level it up, which will take a long time without an MP-drain spell; those come in handy. The character development system is clever and more involved, but is still quite flawed. The more patience you have, the more likely you are to appreciate it. I think that it is a good system that needed refinement that it would never receive in this series, as it, along with most other new gameplay features, was dropped for Final Fantasy III. All in all, the game plays a lot more like a modern RPG than Final Fantasy does. The ideas are progressive, but that doesn't necessarily make this particular game more enjoyable.

BATTLE

Battle has improved, but it is still very slow. The system is much the same, but there are some notable changes. First of all, your characters can now be in either the "front" or "back" row. From the front row you can attack enemies with weapons, and they can also attack you; from the back, only magical attacks are effective. Long distance weapons (a bow) can do damage from the back row. The row system is pretty important to the Final Fantasy battle system, even if its importance is less in later games. In my latest play-through, I relied on weapons far more than I would like to in a game. That's only a bad thing because variety in battles was sorely lacking. Attack magic seemed a bit useless overall, except for those certain enemies who were physically invulnerable. The amount of time it takes to level up magic enough for it to be effective just doesn't seem worth it when weapons work so well. The ability to focus magic on multiple targets is a great innovation, though most spells were, for me, too weak to spread across many targets. Ally-targeting is important to character development, because you can be in control of your own HP damage in order to increase attributes like HP and Vitality (defense). On the surface it's not terribly different, but Final Fantasy II improved just a little bit on just about every aspect of the battle system of the original.

ENVIRONMENTS

Since this game uses the same basic tileset as Final Fantasy, most of the basic environments have remained unchanged. There may not necessarily be more variety, but locations such as the Warship and [Leviathan's innards] were innovative for RPGs at the time. The last region of the game is one of the most epic the series had seen up to that point. Basically, though, there are just a lot of castles and a lot of caves in this game.

MUSIC

The prelude and the victory fanfare are back, hardly changed, for their second tour of duty. Interestingly, though, this means that of all the games in the series, Final Fantasy II actually features the fewest songs returning from previous games. Anyway, the sound synthesis has improved since the first game; the notes flow better and are more emotive and less harsh. A lot of the compositions are more extended and complicated than in Final Fantasy, even though their strength is sometimes compromised. Story-relevant pieces appear for the first time, as do thematic ones such as the beautiful "The Rebel Army" and "The Empire Army," which was the best suspenseful piece in the series yet. The standard was set here for battle music, as a new boss-battle theme, the best battle music to that point, was introduced. As the chocobo debuted, so did its theme music, a classic that would reappear throughout the series. Finally, the ending theme of the game is magnificent, and again set the standard for future games. Final Fantasy Symphonic Suite is a seven-track CD concert of orchestral arrangements of select pieces from Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II, and the group does a wonderful job turning these simplistic compositions for such a primitive sound system into breathtaking, soaring pieces that actually sound like real music. There is a wider variety of music in this game than in Final Fantasy, and more standout pieces, but just as many weak ones. Notably absent is what would later become known as the "Theme of Final Fantasy."

CHARACTERS

At last our characters have voices and feelings and friends and motives. There was still a lot of work to be done, but Final Fantasy II took that all-important first step in the right direction with its set of more-human playable characters, and a rather broad collection of guests and other auxiliary friends. Characters are capable of trust, mistrust, betrayal, sacrifice, and emotions, in their basic forms. They don't so much have opinions or personalities just yet (the non-playable characters are certainly more fleshed-out), but by the characters at least seeming like real people, a lot of interest is added to the game and you can't help but become at least somewhat interested in the plot as if it actually matters, and not just as a goal to reach in the end.

VILLAINS

The villainy is still underwhelming, though there is a consistent, singular bad guy this time. The Empire is hated because they ruin people's lives and have no regard for the people whatsoever. It goes a bit too far though. As for the Emperor, he does bad things, but I sort of felt like I only disliked him because I knew I was supposed to. He also doesn't have a large enough role in the game, though he is much more prominent than any villain in Final Fantasy. It's a step in the right direction, anyway.

DIALOGUE

Here it is. In this game, you can not only discover things about the world or the game by talking to people, but you can also learn about them, about their struggles or emotions (this is especially true in Square Enix's new translation of the game). It's not Shakespeare, but it gets the job done. The story isn't deep enough for the story-relevant dialogue (is there any other kind?) to be amazing, but it certainly doesn't bog the game down. An important tool in dialogue, the key words idea, is a good innovation that has people talkin'. This way you can get people to say different things based on what you say to them, so a given person isn't always repeating the same lines of text no matter what—but it's probably not as advanced as it sounds. Oh yeah, and this game supports multiple sequential text windows, so characters can speak more than a sentence or two in total at one time. What a concept.

STORY

It's one we've all heard before: the undermanned, underpowered rebel army decides to take on the all-powerful empire with its warships and armies and mythril equipment and evil dictator. It's effective, and it progresses along with the game, unlike the story of Final Fantasy. It's a bit too unoriginal and bland to score serious points, but it isn't weak, and it provides a solid foundation and reasonable motivation for the action of the game. It also isn't needlessly complicated, and it just does what it needs to. Though the story from the first game may have had more intriguing potential, this story actually has substance, and would pave the way for much more complicated and higher-quality stories to follow in the series.

THEMES

More political than good-vs.-evil. Allies are important to the game. Knowing you have an army supporting you is essential, as is knowing who you can trust and who you can't. The themes are more personal here than in Final Fantasy; even if the empire's tyranny is global, it is a personal battle when compared to the first game in the series. The issues you need to deal with involve human nature as portrayed by individuals rather than just trying to save the world from evil and destruction. That's not to say there is a lot of grey area, although [the betrayal of Leon, the missing fourth character] provides some depth and some complication to the otherwise clear-cut notions of good and evil. It won't be long before this theme reappears in the series in a very familiar way.

INTEREST

Going on to the next mission in the game oddly seems like more of a chore in this game. Carrying out these missions is no more fun, either. Since I didn't use magic much, the battles weren't very involved, and that's very important to an interest level. The prospect of making the battles more varied didn’t interest me much either, because it would take so much time leveling up magic to make it worthwhile.

FLOW

It's still fairly slow (though a bit faster), but there may be even more interruptions in order to increase your characters' stats, depending on your style of play. The plot flows logically from one point to the next, as long as you can figure out what you're supposed to do next. The key word system helps with that, but you still may be left a bit confused at times. The occasional very large cave doesn't help the flow, though it may increase the challenge.

CHALLENGE

Much of the challenge for me came from not having strong enough magic (for those few times that I needed to use it), and not having enough MP to adequately provide healing throughout a long journey. The solution to this is simple, as it is in most RPGs (unfortunately), and that is to get stronger. Too bad that can get very tedious in this game. Interesting, but tedious. Using a predominantly weapons-based attack, I defeated most bosses with ease, and faced the greatest challenges during battle after battle with large groups of enemies. I was probably a bit underleveled, but the challenge through most of the game ranged from reasonable to considerable. It definitely had its annoying times, when enemies did too much damage, Potions and Cure didn't restore enough HP, and the dungeons and caves were too expansive. Note: a harder game does not necessarily get a higher "Challenge" rating; the fun factor of a challenge is the most important thing. Better to be too hard than too easy, though.

EXTRAS

There are optional bosses on your way to the final battle, and an ultimate weapon to be found (just like any other game), but that's about it. The chocobo added little to the overall product in its first appearance, but it was nice to get a break from battles, even if just for a few minutes. The map is more open-ended to start the game than in Final Fantasy, but you’d be instantly killed for straying from the regular progress of the game, anyway.

REPLAY

Your characters are considerably customizable, but there's not really much different about the different weapon types. Trying to make a team of powerful mages could be interesting. The game is slow but isn't too long to make replay that unappealing. Something to do with magic is definitely the only thing I can think of that would make my next experience in the game interesting, because that's the one thing I didn't use much. Outside of character development, there isn't much else to do differently.

WEIGHTED RATING: 50%

Though Final Fantasy II may be the odd one out of the triad of games for the NES, it contributed much during a time when the foundations of a series were being laid. Character development aside, this second installment improved upon what the first had laid down in almost every way. Even so, it is not hard to understand why it isn't as timeless as the first even if it is the better game. Final Fantasy's job system is simpler and was executed better, its themes are universal, the game is more epic, and its replay value is far superior. However, Final Fantasy II provided a refined battle system, real characters, a developing plot with action and suspense, more complicated themes, a soundtrack that was at least as good, and an enjoyable gameplay experience. Count me in with the group that thinks Final Fantasy II is the better game, but still can't decide which they would rather have if they had to choose.