FF2j, WTF?

I have had the ROM for this game on my computer for a few years now however I've never got past the first half hour until recently, when I finally decided i want to finish the only one I haven't beaten yet. The gameplay is, to say the least, atrocious.

1) By the end of the game my caster Maria with max soul and int inflicted a mighty 600dmg max with ultima16, compared to the constant 1000-3000dmg by each of my melee chars.

2) Not only are the spells broken themselves, the system used to advance them is as well. Take Esuna for example, which only cures poison and dark at level 1, I don't know about you but I rarely get poisoned in any game more than 80-100 times total which would place it at level 2, maybe 3 with dark and the lvl 2 inflictions included. Elemental spells are useless as well except against key enemies which take roughly equal damage from their appropriate weakness than from a melee attack. Perhaps this was a coding mistake, I don't know, it still makes the entire magic system reprehensible.

3) The fact that heavy armors impede casters is not displayed in the game itself and is seemingly arbitrary from the perspective of the player. How is one to know that a certain armor is worse than another?

4) The difficulty/easyness of the game is entirely decided on whether you wish to spend time whacking your own characters and canceling your actions. Without using these features, which they most certainly are considering that Square in all its wisdom left them in the game for the remakes, you can spend Dragon Warrioresqe amounts of time leveling against stupid mobs, which leads me to my next point.

5) Where are the goblins and floating eyes and other cool mobs? Am I supposed to believe that the mighty foes invading the realm are bloody hornets and vines with faces? I DONT THINK SO. These monsters were noob and had very little imagination put into them.

Positive Aspects:

1) Boss music was awesome

2) The leveling system was conceptually hopeful yet was implemented with far too many bugs to make it seem reasonable. As much as it might balance an imagined and arbitrary mechanic that working out makes you dumber and studying makes you less buff, it does not accurately mirror reality. You cannot lose intelligence from anything short of raw brain damage or slowly with aging and strength comes from using those muscles often, which can be for something as simple as lifting heavy books at the library.

1) Really? By the end of my game Leon with un-maxed soul and int did about 600 damage with Ultima10, but it didn't really matter 'cause no one in the game has a real ton of HP anyway.

2) I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. You start off talking about the system to level up magic (casting it) and end up talking about how little damage magic does. I'm confused. Should I respond to both?

3) Mages don't wear heavy armor, and you can see the effect the armor has if you look at your stats. Besides, there's armors that have descriptions that tell you that they increase soul and int.

4) The difficulty/easyness goes up and down quickly. You'll find yourself having a harder time making it to the boss than you'll have defeating the boss. It's funny, I know, but that's how this game works. Generally you'll have a hard dungeon, then a few easy dungeons, then another hard dungeon. However, the nice thing about hard dungeons is that they're good for levelling up in. Yup, level up, cast warp, use a tent, save, go back in. Kinda fun and fairly easy.

5) Goblins are one of the first enemies you encounter along with hornets and leg eaters. If you haven't encountered them yet, I don't know why. But to address your other point, how are we supposed to believe that a FLOATING EYE could take over the world? This is why the genre is called "fantasy" and not "realistic". If it was realistic, we wouldn't be able to cast spells. Also, the monsters were "noob"? It's funny, just one point ago you were saying the monsters were too hard. Now they're "noob"? I mean really, of all the insults to dish out, "noob" is the lamest one of all. Was that your intention? If so, okay, but all the same, it's not a word that makes you sound intelligent.

i hope DJzen that my ffII gripes did not come across as bias and incoherent as above? :eek: :eep:

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Originally Posted by aeris2001x2

i hope DJzen that my ffII gripes did not come across as bias and incoherent as above? :eek: :eep:

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What was that? Oh, you meant to type a message in English, perhaps you meant " I hope, DJzen, that my FFII gripes did not come across as biased and incoherant as the message above". It's OK, not everyone can master the elusive and very difficult "English language" in their first try.

Take a chill pill you two, be nice.

I agree FF2 wasn't put together as well as alot of other FFs and could have been done better.

Isn't it a good thing that they noticed what NOT to do in later FFs once they noticed how crummy alot of the stuff in ff2 was?

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Corps

What was that? Oh, you meant to type a message in English, perhaps you meant " I hope, DJzen, that my FFII gripes did not come across as biased and incoherant as the message above". It's OK, not everyone can master the elusive and very difficult "English language" in their first try.

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that,s grammetically wrong, not incoherent. there is a big difference. and considering its a message board, its coherence and understanding that matter. I never claimed to be the greatest at all the grammer and spelling nonsense, but at least ppl can understand my posts on first read.

anyway i was not flaming u i was asking DJzen a question. but if u want to start a fight, look elsewhere. take your tough guy army attitude somewhere else please. not to mention i have an A-level in English and am studying it at University. so such a low blow flame, used as a last resort when no other retorts are avaliable, is quite sad.


i agree with TasteyPies 100%.

....And made an entire game franchise out of it that's been fairly succesful? :D

:eek: HEYO!!!!

ffII=Very important experiment into finding whats good and whats not. In that capacity it was a success. for it led to the wonderous ffIV and genius was born...

Sorry, that was a response to tasty pies. I have this bad habit of not reading everything. To answer what you asked me, no, you seem coherent, but yes, you seem very very biased. I like FFII a lot, and you don't. That's okay. When people state things as fact I tend to respond. That's just how I have fun. I also have fun by stat tweaking. That's why I like FFII. It gives you more control over your stats than any other FF game except for FFVIII, which I also like a lot. I also like the story. Maybe it's simple in comparison to other FF games but I like it. Then again, we've been spoiled by Xenogears. That game makes me quote Neo and say "whoah...."

lol, yeah the game is hyper customisable. its even more impressive considering its 1988. Can u max every stat (to 255 or whatever it is) in ffII?

I think it's 99, but I don't know if it's possible to max out all the stats on one character. I think the engine prevents it.

This game is horrible, it does not provide any measureable challenge because most of your stats are so arbitrary except hp, mp, wep, CURE which are somewhat necessary to finishing the game.

This incarnation of the FF series gets a 2/10 because it fails to satisfy on ALL levels, unlike the 1 or 2 which are present in the later ff7+ games

i thought it was decent on a few levels. Music, story, monster design u cant fault.

The story and chacters were cool, the music was good, but the rest really wasn't. It was worth playing once but that's about it. Leveling was tedious and not fun. Two stars **

my biggest annoyance with ffII will always be the poorly developed characters. but at least they saw what was wrong and ensured ffIV had divine characters.

I also didn't like the leveling system, because like Del said it's tedious. The thing I did like about it, was that square made an attempt at a more realistic character building system. Because getting better at something from practicing it, is more realistic than say, gaining exp and having all your stats jump at once. Same goes for getting stronger from taking hits. Too bad they didn't realize that that makes a boring game.

i LOVE the idea but HATE its implementation. maybe in a future FF game they could create a decent systerm using such principles. that would seriously rock :cool:

Isn't getting to level 99 in any FF game tedious? Isn't chocobo breeding tedious? Isn't drawing 99 spells tedious? Isn't ANY RPG tedious? Isn't the game that DEFINED console RPGs also the most tedious game ever made?

if you're talking about FF1, no it is not tedious. Your advancement is clearly indicated and at no point in time will the game arbitrarily make you weaker.

(Btw DJzen is your title S.I.D.S knight a reference to the french way to say AIDS?)

Sudden
Infantile
Death
Syndrome


Dragon Warrior. In Dragon Warrior, you spent about 5 hours levelling before going on a 2 minute dungeon crawl, but it became a total NES classic since there was no other console RPG before it.

Edit: FFII never makes you weaker arbitrarily, it's a very carefully calculated system that steers your characters towards one archetype or another. If you're trying to make your characters awesome at everything like you can in FFVII or FFVIII, then yes, you're going to be spending a LOT of time getting them to a point where they can handle the monsters.

Yes the system is balanced, but against what? Itself? I say arbitrary because you cannot simply lose ability whether physical or mental in an instant just because you got better at something else.

And I personally loved the dragon warrior series, in DW1 you had clear-cut levels of power, indicated by your level. In FF2 you could have the magic of a level 99 character and the hp of a level 1 character.

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Originally Posted by DJzen

Isn't getting to level 99 in any FF game tedious? Isn't chocobo breeding tedious? Isn't drawing 99 spells tedious? Isn't ANY RPG tedious? Isn't the game that DEFINED console RPGs also the most tedious game ever made?

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Rpgs are 4 me the least tedious games. but thats just me.

ffI never got boring 4 me but it was very short.

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Originally Posted by Phoenix Corps

Yes the system is balanced, but against what? Itself? I say arbitrary because you cannot simply lose ability whether physical or mental in an instant just because you got better at something else.

And I personally loved the dragon warrior series, in DW1 you had clear-cut levels of power, indicated by your level. In FF2 you could have the magic of a level 99 character and the hp of a level 1 character.

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Like I said, it's done like that to steer your characters in the direction of one of the FF class archetypes. Mages always have low vitality, and fighters are always terrible at casting spells. Heck, even materia has this effect to some extent.

My reference to DW was to its tedium. If anything, FFII makes you think more because just blindly fighting limits your options in combat. In DW you just kill 50 billion someodd slimes and ghosts just so you can make it to the nearest town, nevermind that you need to be level 10 to even attempt the first dungeon.

Oh and BTW, I like DW too :)