Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano

As we last left our heroes or whatever, it was time for another trip across half of the map to talk with someone.  Or, as it turned out, to ask someone for the right to pay our way onto yet another airship ride.  (I will give the designers credit here and note that all of these locations can technically be reached on foot, but the march is kind of insane.  In fact, the map never really points you to these things; you’re just told to go take another ride.)  One brief ride later, the party was plopped down in front of Kashuan, the castle where the royal family kept something or other that does mean things to the engine of an airship and… yeah, I don’t know, exactly.

Look, let’s just assume that we’re getting the missiles to shoot at the Death Star vent, all right?  That’s familiar.

The bright side is that Kashuan doesn’t make you do a whole lot of searching to find the Sunfire, since it’s right there in the courtyard.  Unfortunately that doesn’t mean you actually have anywhere to keep it, because that’s the most difficult part of this equation.  And as you probably expected, doing this with a series of torches isn’t an option, which means a search through the entire castle to find a torch that can hold the flame.

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Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano

One of the biggest things I noted about Final Fantasy is that its open world is really an illusion.  You’re carefully sectioned off into very limited exploration, with the game always forcing you into the right parts simply through a dearth of alternatives.  You can see this as a failing, but you can also see it as a notable advantage.  It’s possible to be a bit unsure of where to go next, but you can always fall back on exploring for a while with the knowledge that you’ll stumble on your objective eventually, simply because there’s nowhere else new to go.

Final Fantasy II is a bit worse about that.  The world is more open, and you have more chances to go off the rails.  Which means that you get more opportunities to exercise your freedom, but it also means that you find yourself more likely to be unsure of where to go next in a game that doesn’t even provide you with helpful pointers like levels.  And the second major quest in the game kind of leads in that direction, because your destination is sort of hidden way the heck and gone.

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Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano

Final Fantasy II is not nearly as well-known as its predecessor. Which is not surprising, considering that it took fifteen years to reach US shores and is also horribly broken. We’re talking about a table that comes with a leg on fire levels of broken here.  It’s the origin of large parts of the franchise, but it wound up being kind of forgettable in the overall progression.

But you can’t blame all of that on the game itself. The lack of a US localization is mostly Square’s fault as a company, since the folks in charger were certain that the first game in the series wouldn’t sell and didn’t bother to localize Final Fantasy I until three years after it was released in Japan. It did sell quite well, naturally, at which point a hasty localization project began for FFII… which fell apart when someone had the bright idea of just translating the then-contemporary Final Fantasy IV. And quite frankly, translating all of the text in the game was a pretty big chore anyway.

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Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano

You know, I’ve tried really hard to keep this project free of personal quirks.  Not in the sense of making this less of a personal experience, but insofar as I recognize that some things I think are cool are just strange on an objective level. Having said that, I still think the ending of Final Fantasy is really neat on a conceptual level.

If you’ve been paying crazy careful attention to the map, you realized that all four Fiends were located at points equidistant from the Temple of Fiends. You don’t even think about how weird it is that the first dungeon in the game is the Temple of Fiends until you’ve been through most of the game. And yet there it is, staring you in the face – the bats surrounding Garland, the black orb right behind him, the nature of its location. It all comes around to the same circle. Garland is the root of everything.  Your first boss is your last boss.

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