Well D&D and Dragon Quest were the inspiration, so I feel the stories of FFI and III are more about the world than the player because the player characters are meant to be filled in by the player itself. I use to write little extensions to the plots of these types of game with my personally crated characters, like imagining what they talk about and do while fighting monsters on their way to the next dungeon. Is Black Mage really an evil Cultist trying to steal the crystals for himself? Is Onion Knight 3 and 4 secretly brother and sister? Silly things like that. The advent of more detailed movie style story, cutscenes, and voice acting have kind of killed any player involvement from the latest installments, I think it;s why games like Demon's Souls/Dark Souls and Etrian Odyssey are still doing so well, not to mention the Persona series that gives the player more control over the MC as an avatar.

Still, FFII had a pretty cool story going for it, with lots of betrayals, noble sacrifices (including our main White Mage Minwu of this thread) and one of the more badass villains in the series.