The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 6
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I realize that I’ve been pretty hard on Final Fantasy II up to this point, generally for good reason. The game has a lot of ambition, but ambition is only commendable insofar as it leads you to reach upward, and this is a game that continually falls short of where it wants to be. What was innovative more than twenty years ago is less so today, and even then I imagine these holes and weaknesses were visible to players; breaking the game’s mechanics is hardly a new thing, for instance.
That having been said, the Mysidian Tower is kind of thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a dungeon where all of those well-designed dungeon elements that the game has sported can really get up and do a dance, and the enemies have tricks that feel like they’re at least meant to be interesting rather than annoying. I couldn’t autopilot through these fights, but neither did I find myself painfully bored as I made my trek.
Zones of death!
“Oh, let’s build a little cottage up there!”
– No one, ever, in the history of the world
Do you know what the top of Mt. Everest is called? The Death Zone. Well, all right, to be really technical the Death Zone is any region in climbing which involves going so high that human beings can’t get enough oxygen to live. It’s a region wherein every moment you stand there brings you closer to death, because you cannot get enough precious, life-giving oxygen.
Why in the world are you going to the Death Zone? Do you want to die? This isn’t the Maybe Sort Of Possible Death Zone If You Know What I Mean, Wink Wink. It is the Death Zone!
Not that this makes the average climber any dumber than the average video game character, or for that matter, the average gamer. We get a lot of laughs out of watching characters do stupid things that we like to say we’re smart enough to avoid, but the fact of the matter is that we’re in the same boat as the horror movie fans who go wandering around int he dark without a flashlight without thinking about it.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 5
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite the fact that Firion and the Attractions failed to pick up any allies, the rebel army presses forward with an assault on Fynn. This is… well… it’s the end of the war, right? Our goal here isn’t to now conquer the nation that invaded us as a result of some retaliatory principle, right?
Oh, who am I kidding. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil men is for good men to do nothing, so we’d better keep running this resistance force like an army until we’ve wiped everyone out. I guess.
Anyhow, Hilda and Gordon have come up with a cunning plan to retake the castle. First, the troops will distract the Empire’s troops, because a disciplined military unit is going to be adequately distracted by an ill-equipped resistance band. Then, Firion and the E Street Band will go into the castle and kill the person in charge of the castle. This will result in victory, because it’s not like the numerically superior force will stick around when the commander is gone.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
At roughly the halfway point of the game, Final Fantasy II has kind of worn out its welcome. This would not be as big of a deal if there was less game left to go.
Part of the problem here is that it doesn’t take many cues from Final Fantasy where perhaps it should. There are parts of the original that I accused of being a slog, and they certainly were, but at least every part of the game made a genuine effort to reward you in some way. Yes, the dungeons could turn into slogs, but at least the enemies rewarded you with experience instead of tedium.
The encounter rate is absurdly high, but the ambush rate is also absurd, leading to a multitude of turns spent watching enemies act and then act again. This includes several enemies with annoying but not actively dangerous special abilities that bog combat down even further, making themselves priority targets just so I won’t have to wait through their animations again. It’s the worst kind of battle where it would take a seriously bad day for you to lose, but you still have to wait to win, like playing against someone in Magic: the Gathering who keeps adding more life without any way to hurt you. Sure, it takes you longer to eat through the wall of health, but who cares?
But I think there’s an even more important element here, and that’s the simple fact that my tactical options are pretty much zero.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 3
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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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 