Any amount of playtesting would have revealed that the core RPG systems of Final Fantasy 2 would not produce the intended results. In practice, players of the original version of Final Fantasy 2 are faced all but forced to spend at least as much time as they'd spend on the game's main content on grinding, independent of that content.
Actual progression in strength in Final Fantasy 2 comes only in extremely specific circumstances that are totally at odds with normal play. If one hopes to avoid getting one-shot by every enemy they encounter, they're going to have to go significantly out of their way to engineer situations where they can safely and repeatedly end encounters with far less health than when they started them. Considering that everything else about the game requires that the player lose as little health as possible, this becomes an activity that has to be done on its own and directly outside of an inn.
This is not the only one of FF2's counter-intuitive player traps, but it is the lethal one. In subsequent releases, Max HP is raised in a way that is far more amenable to normal play and all stat leveling is mercifully expedited. This bumps FF2 up from a miserable experience to a decent one, but certain issues remain.
The keyword system, like many things in FF2, is innovative but poorly executed. There are a deeply distressing number of times in Final Fantasy 2 where a player might hike to the opposite side of the world map only to find that they hadn't actually learned the keyword that they need to progress, and so they will have to traverse that distance another two times. Dungeons employ maddening dead-end traps which lock players into encounters that do not benefit them, serving only to waste their time, patience, and dungeon crawling resources for having the audacity to choose incorrectly.
The encounters themselves are startlingly frequent and horrifically annoying. Running, at least in the original version, is almost never an option. Battles are slow due to the frequent use of multi-target attacks in a battle system that is poorly optimized for them, and unbalanced by a morbid fascination with party-wide status affliction that persists not only after battle, but through death. Antidotes, Eye Drops, and their like do NOT stack in the player's inventory. Enemy defense stats and resistances lead somewhat frequently to situations where enemies like the Gigas just be damaged at all without blasting through a character's whole MP pool. Did I mention, by the way, that the oft maligned lack of re-targeting from Final Fantasy 1 is still here? And the swarms of up to eight enemies per encounter? And you can only hit the front block of them even if there's only one in that quad, so three of your characters turns will be wasted while the back four enemies are safe? Did I mention that as your spells level up they cost more MP and you LOSE ACCESS to the cheaper ones? And that in the original you will LOSE your magic stat if you use the normal attack command to much? And that all of your spells level separately and so slowly that it only makes sense to try leveling two or three of them?
The story is ambitious, the game is pretty as always and sounds wonderful, but the original release of Final Fantasy 2 has so very much wrong with it that not even the drastically improved rereleases can repair it all. They do however, make a hell of a difference. Nevertheless, even taking the average of all versions of FF2, (and just to be clear, if I were only talking about the original release, it'd be at least a whole star lower) it still lands near the bottom of the pile.
Actual progression in strength in Final Fantasy 2 comes only in extremely specific circumstances that are totally at odds with normal play. If one hopes to avoid getting one-shot by every enemy they encounter, they're going to have to go significantly out of their way to engineer situations where they can safely and repeatedly end encounters with far less health than when they started them. Considering that everything else about the game requires that the player lose as little health as possible, this becomes an activity that has to be done on its own and directly outside of an inn.
This is not the only one of FF2's counter-intuitive player traps, but it is the lethal one. In subsequent releases, Max HP is raised in a way that is far more amenable to normal play and all stat leveling is mercifully expedited. This bumps FF2 up from a miserable experience to a decent one, but certain issues remain.
The keyword system, like many things in FF2, is innovative but poorly executed. There are a deeply distressing number of times in Final Fantasy 2 where a player might hike to the opposite side of the world map only to find that they hadn't actually learned the keyword that they need to progress, and so they will have to traverse that distance another two times. Dungeons employ maddening dead-end traps which lock players into encounters that do not benefit them, serving only to waste their time, patience, and dungeon crawling resources for having the audacity to choose incorrectly.
The encounters themselves are startlingly frequent and horrifically annoying. Running, at least in the original version, is almost never an option. Battles are slow due to the frequent use of multi-target attacks in a battle system that is poorly optimized for them, and unbalanced by a morbid fascination with party-wide status affliction that persists not only after battle, but through death. Antidotes, Eye Drops, and their like do NOT stack in the player's inventory. Enemy defense stats and resistances lead somewhat frequently to situations where enemies like the Gigas just be damaged at all without blasting through a character's whole MP pool. Did I mention, by the way, that the oft maligned lack of re-targeting from Final Fantasy 1 is still here? And the swarms of up to eight enemies per encounter? And you can only hit the front block of them even if there's only one in that quad, so three of your characters turns will be wasted while the back four enemies are safe? Did I mention that as your spells level up they cost more MP and you LOSE ACCESS to the cheaper ones? And that in the original you will LOSE your magic stat if you use the normal attack command to much? And that all of your spells level separately and so slowly that it only makes sense to try leveling two or three of them?
The story is ambitious, the game is pretty as always and sounds wonderful, but the original release of Final Fantasy 2 has so very much wrong with it that not even the drastically improved rereleases can repair it all. They do however, make a hell of a difference. Nevertheless, even taking the average of all versions of FF2, (and just to be clear, if I were only talking about the original release, it'd be at least a whole star lower) it still lands near the bottom of the pile.