A painting of me

Final Fantasy II

   30 November 2006, early morning

I finished Final Fantasy II for the Gameboy Advance late last night. Shima was over using my computer, so I had some time to sit down and plow through the last dungeon. FF2 is a strange game. It starts off quite difficult, and as the game progresses gets fairly easy. In the beginning of the game, you’ll wander off the beaten path and the monsters you encounter will kill your ass so fast. However, I finished the last dungeon in one go. Killing the last boss was easy as pie (thanks to the Blood Sword). Usually Final Fantasy games have final bosses which are orders of magnitude more difficult than everything else you’ve been fighting up to that point. If they had kept the difficulty of the original NES game it might have been more of a challenge, but less accessible to people who don’t play Final Fantasy much. (Final Fantasy I, which is also on the same cart, was also crippled in this way.) The story is pretty lacking — I’m not even sure it’s a step up from Final Fantasy I. You play a group of three friends who are helping the resistance fight the emperor; you do all this without it feeling epic or exciting. Since I just finished playing FF4, this lack of story was all the more glaring. FF2 is a very old game, so Square probably hadn’t reached their stride just yet. The game clearly shows its age. Still, FF2 is a lot of fun. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy playing it on the bus.

 

Comments

  1. Did you talk about FF3 for DS, or finished it already?

    I’ve been playing for a few hours now, let me know if you have a mogmail address.

  2. Krishna bought the game. He’s playing it right now. We decided I’d get the GBA games and he’d get that one, then we’d switch at some point.

  3. Yes we will. We can switch very soon, I am in the last dungeon. I really like ff3. Its not as epic as 4 but still quite impressive considering it was on nes.

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