Tag: Final Fantasy II

#oneaday Day 493: The breakneck pace of Final Fantasy IV

As one of several games I have on the go right now — for a bit of variety, like — I decided to start up Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster. I've played Final Fantasy IV I think twice before — and one of those was on PlayStation, so your sympathies are gratefully received, though that version at least isn't quite as bad as PS1 Final Fantasy VI — and remembered it being quite short, though I had forgotten quite how fast it moves.

I'm two hours in and already — apologies in advance if any of this is a spoiler, but the game came out in 1991 — the main character has committed a war crime, adopted an orphan child that he was directly responsible for orphaning, become separated from his best friend (who inevitably turns traitor), rescued his loved one from a deadly bout of Desert Fever by retrieving a valuable gem from a slobbering Antlion, rescued a prince from the ruins of his devastated castle and his broken heart, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to fend off an assault on another kingdom.

It moves so fast. I had forgotten how fast. I have played so many modern (relatively speaking) games that feature epic-length story sequences between the core "gameplay" sections that it almost feels rushed. I mean, hell, after two hours in a Persona game from 3 onwards, you're barely through the initial character introductions and you almost certainly haven't set foot in a dungeon yet.

This is both a strength and a weakness of Final Fantasy IV, looking at it with a 2025 pair of eyes. It's a strength because it means that there's never particularly long to wait before you're doing stuff again — exploring the world, clearing dungeons, fighting monsters, levelling up, buying new equipment — and that is quite a refreshing change from today's narrative-centric games that, while undoubtedly considerably more ambitious in their storytelling, sometimes do feel like they're getting a little bogged down. Not only that, but Final Fantasy IV is done and dusted in less than 20 hours, which makes it a veritable light novel by RPG standards.

However, it's also a weakness, because there are some sequences that were clearly intended to be quite significant narrative moments, but the way the game just whizzes through them makes them feel almost laughable.

I'll give you an example. Rydia, the girl that the protagonist, Cecil, rescues from a war crime he inadvertently committed at the behest of his king, is a Summoner in Final Fantasy Job terms. This means that not only can she summon big things to deal heavy damage, but she can also cast both white and black magic spells. When you first get her, she's an inexperienced kid at level 1, so she barely knows any spells, but a bit of levelling in the field will net her a few initial, useful spells. Except you'll notice one black magic spell is prominently missing: Fire.

Think about it for a moment and it's obvious why: because she lost her entire village, including her mother, in a fiery explosion, she is, of course, going to be hesitant to call upon the power of fire. This little bit of characterisation is initially delivered without the game drawing any attention to it whatsoever, but you can notice it early from a simple browse of the menu. Very cool. Ambitious for the time, even!

What is less cool is when the party finds their path up a mountain blocked by a big chunk of ice, and the other members, eventually getting Rydia to admit that she "hates fire", pretty much tell her to stop snivelling and get over it because they jolly well have a quest to accomplish. It's almost certainly not intended to come across that way — the other members are all "yay, you did it, I always believed in you" after she does successfully cast her first Fire spell, presumably with tears streaming down her face and the knowledge that this is probably going to need years of therapy to truly deal with — but with at least a couple of decades' worth of games that handle sensitive topics rather more delicately behind us, it does feel rather… blunt.

But, again, you have to remember that this was 1991, just a year after the SNES had come on the market, and Final Fantasy IV was on a cartridge that contained less than a megabyte of data in total. In fact, during development, the script had to be cut considerably to fit on its cartridge; lengthy exposition was something that developers simply couldn't afford to do back in these days, because every byte mattered, and text can potentially take up a lot of space if there's enough of it. As such, it's not altogether surprising that some sequences feel like they move a tad fast by modern standards — short of shipping on a larger capacity cartridge, which was presumably a decision that needed to be made relatively early in development, there were very real constraints on what Final Fantasy IV would be able to do.

Of course, Final Fantasy IV has been expanded on quite a bit in later remakes such as the polygonal 3DS version, the Game Boy Advance version and the PSP version; each of these had their own additions to the basic Final Fantasy IV formula.

But the Pixel Remaster; that's based on Final Fantasy IV as it originally existed, graphics and music aside, and thus you have the plot that speeds off over the horizon as you just think you're getting caught up on proceedings.

All this is no shade on Final Fantasy IV, of course; it's a game I like very much (though it's far from my favourite Final Fantasy) — I just found it interesting to revisit this after so many years and be reminded that at one time, RPGs moved a lot more quickly than they do now!

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1831: Second Fantasy

When I've had a free moment to sit down with the Vita, I've been continuing my Final Fantasy marathon with the second game, the imaginatively titled Final Fantasy II.

Final Fantasy II came to Western shores considerably after its original release; it wasn't until the PlayStation release of Final Fantasy Origins that we'd get to play it in English for the first time, but, like its predecessor, it's subsequently been enhanced and ported to a variety of different platforms. I've been playing the PSP version via the Vita, which, again like its predecessor, incorporates a bunch of extra content, though I'm yet to encounter any of it aside from the entrance to an ominous-sounding (and huge-looking) optional dungeon.

Final Fantasy II is thought of in somewhat mixed terms by many people, to put it politely. It's absolutely hated by others, and those who like it are in something of a minority. I'm one of them, though; it's an interesting game, and while its mechanics don't quite work as well as they could, it was a bold experiment whose systems we can still see at work today in games like The Elder Scrolls and its ilk.

Final Fantasy II's unique selling point was that it had no experience points and no levels. Instead, you levelled up individual skills and stats by making use of them. Want to get stronger? Hit things. Want to get better at casting spells? Cast more spells. Want to be able to take more damage? Take some damage. It's quite logical when you think about it, though it does tend to encourage a certain degree of gaming the system, and there's a number of glaring flaws in it, too, such as the fact that characters in the back row of your party (which one of them is in by default at the start of the game) will never take any damage except from things that affect the whole party, and thus their HP counts will be left trailing considerably behind the rest of the group. The game is also somewhat notorious for seemingly encouraging players to attack their own party members in the name of boosting their HP quickly.

The PSP version maintains this peculiar levelling system, but so far I haven't really encountered a major issue with it, and like the PSP version of Final Fantasy I, the pacing feels like it may have been tweaked slightly, though this is only my gut feeling rather than being based on any research. But it certainly feels like the game's been made to push you onwards rather than force you to grind; fight a number of battles, and your characters' HP totals will increase naturally, for example, even if they haven't taken any damage recently. You still need to make use of appropriate actions to build up your stats, but there's a certain degree of natural progression that comes from just playing the game.

The interesting thing about Final Fantasy II's system is that it essentially allows you to build your own characters — something that wasn't really possible in its predecessor aside from choosing which three of the four available spells for each magic level your White and Black Mages got to choose from — by naturally moulding them to fit your play style. Because of the flexibility of the system, this also means that you can create unstoppable, multi-talented characters who are strong, tough and capable of flinging devastating magic spells around when required. (In fact, the game's ultimate magic requires that your character has advanced in as many different areas as possible in order to power itself up.) In practice, though, you'll probably tend to find that the characters naturally evolve according to how you use them.

In my party, for example, I have protagonist Firion as a fighter/white mage type character, or probably a Paladin in Final Fantasy terms. He is good at fighting with swords and using shields, but is also able to cast White Magic spells such as Cure, Life and Protect. Several of these spells start off being next to useless — Protect often "misses", for example — so you need to get him to "practice" them in the field to make them worthwhile additions to your arsenal. Taking the time to do that is eminently worth it, however.

The other interesting thing about Final Fantasy II that is unrelated to its unusual progression system is the fact that it's so story-heavy compared to its predecessor. Final Fantasy I was essentially a case of "Bad shit is happening in the world! Go explore and stop it!" and little else; Final Fantasy II, meanwhile, has named characters, events, cutscenes and a genuinely interesting ongoing plot. It's not what you might expect from your typical NES-era game, in other words; and with its new coat of paint in its more recent PlayStation and PSP incarnations, it actually stands up pretty well as a modern RPG.

I'm enjoying it, in other words, but I still have a long way to go yet!