FINAL FANTASY II

tres bon jeu !!

The story is good, although the stat scaling is completely absurd.

Besides a strange leveling system, it's an improvement over the first game in every way.

최고예요

[h1 ]Bad Trip Balancing II: Esuna XVI Boogaloo [/h1] I owe an apology to FF I Pixel Remaster. While FF I even at 0.5x gains was at least an okay challenge for 1/3rd of it, with it becoming a boring auto-attack slog by the halfway mark coupled with shockingly atrocious difficulty spikes in the form of its very few bosses, FF II just doesn't give a damn almost all the way through. According to a random online source (for lack of better ones): 0.5x modifiers are the closest to the original game (despite being actually lower than that, but the next one is flat 0x, no 0.25x choice here). I stuck to those nearly up until the moment I'm writing this. I am just about 3/4ths of the way through, but I think if I wasn't that invested in finishing it for culture sake, I probably would've given up 5h in for how much I've been on auto-pilot. The entire levelling system is really interesting for its time. However, it's also the game's biggest downfall. There is zero design intention in the difficulty curve of the game, I've either been too weak or overpowered to hell (the latter has been the case since around hour 2), and many design decisions concerning weapons and spells are absolutely mystifying. Fighting with bare fists is absolutely broken, while you dodge less, you deal obnoxiously high damage. None of the bosses so far have even lasted more than 3 turns and I only have ONE who fights with his fists, I can only imagine a whole party with fists, given you also get the least penalties in casting magic built that way. My lone fist fighter has consistently been dealing either as much or more damage by attacking normally than my 3 other party members combined through their weapons, and that's without taking buffing spells like Berserk or Haste into account. Spells each level up for their use, which is fine in theory. However, that means many spells are completely worthless at low level for their low accuracy or potency. The worst cases I've seen are the Esuna & Basuna spells; beyond the baffling decision of splitting the purpose of a "cure ailments" spell into two different ones, they are borderline useless at low levels, only able to cure one specific Poison status each + Blindness at level 1. So what happens? You have to cast a lot, and I mean A LOT of pretty much every non-attacking spells in the void, to zero effect, in order to level them up. Esuna in particular can only cure Petrification at level 6, same for Basuna at levels 5 & 6 with Paralysis & Confusion, meaning there will be HOURS worth of grinding just to overcome the enemies capable of those status ailments. (besides killing them fast enough to bypass the entire process, but you're never safe from ambush attacks) In the process, it will also raise your stats passively, so we're back to the same issue of being even more on auto-pilot when it comes to fighting more regular enemies. So, kick up the modifiers to raise the spells faster? Yeah, well, if the rest of the game is a cakewalk when played normally even at 0.5x (I can't even imagine at x1), maybe the difficulty spike shouldn't rely on raising spells that have had little to no use prior? Also it will level up the other spells even faster, making the rest of the game even more of an auto-pilot. I hate how I cannot just like this game as much as I'm fascinated with it, since everything else (except maybe the world map) is sound. I'm into the story and the more dire tones, the soundtrack's great, the dungeons don't even bother me... just a shame the gameplay is not holding together at all. There's a good idea in there. Sadly, it's probably close to the worst possible execution of it.

Music is too good already

The game looks HORRIBLE. I'm a long time fan of the final fantasy franchise and this "remaster" is a disgrace to the original game. Everything there looks like its been drawn by different teams who clearly didn't interact with each other during the process - as a result, the game looks like a mess of different pixel art styles. If possible and if its legal in your jurisdiction - please, do yourself a favor and play the original game via an emulator