success stories in the early days of gaming. But you can’t really get into such floral

verbiage about Final Fantasy II. And, just so that we’re on the same page, I’m talking

about the real II. Not the II you might know, on the SNES, which was actually IV. We gave

up that pretense back in ‘97. Get with the times, folks. This is Final Fantasy II, released

just 365 days after the original Final Fantasy, and initializing the complaints of “If it’s

Final, why are there two of ‘em?” Did you honestly think Square was going to let

this now-very-recognizable name go to waste? Of course not.

II represents the series’ movement from a D&D-style party, where you begin the game

by tailoring the classes of your team, to a new, strange, classless system where proficiency

is determined by repetition. Use an axe, and you’ll improve your axe attacks. Take damage,

and you’ll get more HP. Cast magic, and the magic and your MP will improve. On the

one hand, it’s a clever system, and allows for the most fluid character development this

side of Final Fantasy XI. On the other hand, like XI, it often demands grinding and grinding

and grinding, and woe betide ye if you want to switch weapon focus halfway through the

game.

The plot concerns a rebel faction fighting off the incursions of an evil empire, and

if that sounds a whole lot like Star Wars... well, it kinda is. Perhaps this very parallel

is what lead to Enix’s Star Ocean franchise taking its inspiration from Star Trek, thus

creating an apt rivalry... only to be quelled by the merger of the two companies. In a unique

innovation for the series, and one which I believe should’ve been carried into further

installments, some keywords in your conversations with NPCs will be highlighted. These terms

can be learned, and then suggested to other NPCs elsewhere in the game to change dialog

paths, utter passwords, or ask for additional information relevant to a particular subject.

It’s a slick system... shame we haven’t seen it again.

Much like its predecessor and companion in this Final Fantasy Origins version, II comes

equipped with a dynamically-updating bestiary, a spiffy new CGI intro trailer, and a bevy

of Yoshitaka Amano concept art. This augments redesigned sprites and artwork, richer backgrounds,

and a remastered soundtrack that’s par for the course in the FFO package. At the time

of its PS1 release, this was the only way to get your hands on Final Fantasy II in English.

Granted, since that time, we’ve seen remakes on the GBA, PSP, and iOS devices, making it

no longer the rarity it once was.

But let’s not look past II’s most significant contributions to the series: Chocobos and

Cid. Yes, those big, hulking, often-flightless overgrown canaries got their start right here,

though their role in the game is primarily as a convenient means of escape. Cid, on the

other hand, is exactly the airshipmeister you’d expect him to be, bouncing your protagonists

all over the world (for a fee, of course). I mentioned recently that no one ever really

references FFII, and while that’s most often the case (except for outliers like IX and

XIII-2), perhaps the reason is because these classic Final Fantasy elements, by nature

of their very existence, are a permanent callback to one of those games that kinda just fell

by the wayside.