This is a review for the PS1 version of the game:
I'll just come right out at the beginning of this and say I do not like Final Fantasy 2. I did not enjoy my time with this game. I will not go back and play the game ever again. But I am glad I finally got around to playing it.
I'll also go ahead and list everything I liked about this game before I rip into it further down in this post. One thing I will praise it for is that this game isn't afraid to get dark. Characters will die. The story gets dark and they try to make you feel hopeless. The fact that it tries to have a story is great. A real step up from the basic adventure of the first game. It would have been nicer if it did this well, but for its time this was a breath of fresh air. I actually do like the idea of the leveling system. They were bold to try something like this, but sadly this game doesn't do a good job with it. The game would have been better with just a classic system like the first game. But good on them to try to innovate something. I do have to applaud this game for introducing a lot of the series staples FF has become known for. A lot of the well known things originated in this game.
Okay with that out of the way it's time to move onto the mountain of complaints I have with this game. I could do without the keyword system. They never really did anything cool or unique with it. You just end up going through every word with every character you can ask question to until someone has something new to say. It feels like busy work and could have just been replaced with more natural dialogue with the characters. Most of the time for every word they just hit you with the dreaded ?, meaning they know nothing about that word. Unlike FF1 the main characters in this game have names, personalities, backstories, and relationships. A departure from FF1 where the main party are just blank slates you can name and roleplay a story for them. That being said this game does such a poor job of telling/showing their personalities and relationships that I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of them. The character development of the main trio is also laughable. The best I could tell you is that two of them are related. I couldn't tell you how they changed/evolved throughout the game either. Well, except for Gus/Guy. He's the big strong, slow character. But at a certain point it's revealed that he can speak beaver, so that's nice. That's honestly one of the high points of the game.
The PS1 version of this game has insane balancing issues. Monsters in the beginning of the game give you next to no gold and all the attack spells cost 400 gil. That's over double the cost in other newer games. Also forget about getting a Phoenix Down early in this version. It cost 5,000 gil to buy one of them while it only costs 500 gil in the GBA version. The prices on just about everything is wack and makes grinding for cash in the beginning almost a necessity, just to get some of those spells. But grinding for a couple of those spells was a waste of time because I ended up not using any magic other than cure at a certain point in the game. I didn't know that leveling up the magic would take so long, at least in the PS1 version. In the PS1 version of the game the magic takes so long to level up it's not worth it. I compared my progress to someone playing the GBA version and by the time I got one of them to level 2 they already had the spell to level 4. So after a couple of hours I abandoned the notion of using magic during battle. I ended up only attacking and did nothing else. I did use magic to heal, that's it. Though even with only using magic to heal, my Cure spell was only level 5 by the end of the game. That's a laughable level for end game spell level.
Speaking of grinding, there's no way to know if you're overpowered for the area you're in or if you're underpowered. You don't gain levels or exp for battles. Only your stats and proficiencies gain exp. So you never know if where your stats are at is good or bad until you start fighting. There's no sense of progression. The numbers all feel arbitrary. It almost feels random when your actual stats go up. If you want to power level the best way isn't fighting the monsters in the world.... Oh no, it's fighting yourself. Just start wildly attacking yourself during battle then finish off the enemy. You'll gain more exp for your stats and proficiencies this way than you would ever get from fighting the actual enemies in the game. It's a joke and I wish they would have removed it from later ports or just not coded it like that. On the topic of battles, the random encounter rate is way too high in this game. This has to be one of the highest rates I've seen in RPGs period. There's way too many fights and boring fights at that. At one point I got an encounter 5 steps in a row. These were never challenging, unless they got the jump on me. Then depending on what assortment on monsters you were fighting they could just one shot you before you could blink. They should have dialed the battles back by half. The reason it's so high is because of how leveling works. You need those fights or else your stats and proficiencies will never go up. It's also a waste of time trying to escape from battle. 9/10 it never works and you just ended up letting the enemies get free damage on you. Running away is tied to one of your stats but I had equipment equipped that rose that stat and had over 80 in that stat and I still couldn't run from most battles.
The world is so small so they make you do a lot of backtracking in the game. Backtracking in games isn't inherently bad, but it all depends on the situation. This game doesn't handle that well at all. At one point I got so aggravated at one section of the game. You are trying to find a pendant, on one of the floors there's 3 set of stairs you can pick from. Two lead deeper into the dungeon and one of them takes you straight to the pendant. Unless you got lucky and picked the one that led you straight to the keyitem you need you end up exploring the whole dungeon, which doesn't sound that bad. You want to explore the dungeon for items and exp but now is not the time, which you don't know. But anyways after you inevitably take the wrong set of stairs and explore everything you will find yourself picking up the keyitem after you went through everything. So you finally go back to the place that gave you this quest and talk to a NPC there thinking this quest is over. But, oh no, they give you an item and tell you to go back to the place you just spend a lot of time exploring in and go to the very bottom floor to drop off the new item you just got. So after you fight your way back through there again you drop the item off and that's it. You have to wait until the final 1/3 of the game for that to have any payoff. This feels like a filler arc in an anime. It would have been smoother to take the item in there with you to begin with. You'd have to rewrite that section a little bit but that's super easy to do.
The dungeon design in this game is some of the worst I've even seen in a RPG let alone a FF game. It almost feel like an AI who's never played a game before made them. There's a bunch of paths that lead nowhere and a lot of stairs that take you up or down levels that lead to dead ends. It's not clever design it's tedious. Every dungeon also has a ton of empty rooms called "Trap Rooms" there's nothing inside of them. Except for random encounters that you'd rather not do. There's so many of them that at a certain point you almost just want to skip out on every room you see, it's that annoying. But if you do that you'll miss out on a lot of the best items in the game. So you inevitable have to play the lottery and see if there's an item or a fight inside. Also basically at the end of almost every dungeon they throw 3-6 doors at you. Only one of them is the correct way to go to reach the boss fight or the way out of the dungeon. Every other door is a trap. Only put there to waste your time. The enemy placement in these dungeons also feels random. At about 1/3 or 1/2 way into the game a dungeon throws very tough enemies at you. If you get an encounter with two of this enemy 9/10 you'll end up wiping. But after that dungeon the next handful of dungeons throw weak enemies at you. There's no rhythm or reason for this. Even the final dungeon still throws some weak enemies at you. Another thing that really pushed me over the edge was the loot in the dungeons. Even as far as the last dungeon some of the treasure chests were giving you equipment you started the game with. There's no reason to give you basic starting equipment in the final dungeon unless the developers were trying to troll you. There's no reason these dungeons should be like this at all.
I praised FF1 for making you think during battles and engaging you in combat. You had to pay attention and use your attacks and spells wisely or else you'd die. In this one however all I did after the first 2 or 3 hours was smash X to win, which is something I hate in RPGs. I would only stop smashing X when I need to emergency heal or use a life spell to bring a dead party member back to life. Which honestly wasn't too often because I'd usually just do that outside of combat. Why waste time healing when I can just go unga bunga caveman on the enemies to end the fights faster. I couldn't be bothered to engage with the magic system because like I said earlier it took too long to level up anything in the PS1 version and I wasn't going to spend hours grinding them up. When I tried to use them even around a 1/3 of the way through the game they were such low level I would only do double digit damage even using the weakness of the enemy. A single physical attack would do triple or quad damage depending how far I was in the game. I didn't do any grinding for stats or manipulation to cheat the game. If you know what you're doing you can break this game over you knee. But because of how I ended up equipping some of my members and how the leveling system works in this game 2 of my characters had 99% evasion with a buttload of attack power. So I would hit real hard and be hard to hit.
I also praised the multiple hits system of the first game but this game had to go and ruin that too. In the first game every time you got an addition hit you could feel yourself getting more powerful. If was a nice sense of progression. In this game within the first hour you're already doing like 3 hits, so the multiple hits become meaningless. By the end you are doing more than 10. It doesn't feel rewarding or anything. It just feels random and you don't get excited to see it. You don't even pay attention to how many hits you are doing. Using armor and weapons during battle also made a return from the first game. But unlike the first game I never interacted with it. Why would I waste my time doing that when I could end the battle faster by mashing X? There was no point in it. The only time I used any of these items was during the final boss fight. I used the weapon that hasted the whole party. I had to do it this way because I wasn't going to waste my time leveling up the haste spell to a high level to make it better and more likely to succeed. Poison is also a useless mechanic in this game. Never try to poison the enemy, it's not worth it. I would inadvertently poison enemies with my venom axes and the poison would do like 4 damage. It's so minuscule that's it's laughable.
Finally Final Fantasy is a series known for their superb soundtracks. But this game has one of the weakest OSTs I've heard in a FF game. It does have some quality tracks, don't get me wrong. But a lot of the them are very repetitive and boring. Some of them are straight up bad and I dreaded every time they would reuse them.
I'll just come right out at the beginning of this and say I do not like Final Fantasy 2. I did not enjoy my time with this game. I will not go back and play the game ever again. But I am glad I finally got around to playing it.
I'll also go ahead and list everything I liked about this game before I rip into it further down in this post. One thing I will praise it for is that this game isn't afraid to get dark. Characters will die. The story gets dark and they try to make you feel hopeless. The fact that it tries to have a story is great. A real step up from the basic adventure of the first game. It would have been nicer if it did this well, but for its time this was a breath of fresh air. I actually do like the idea of the leveling system. They were bold to try something like this, but sadly this game doesn't do a good job with it. The game would have been better with just a classic system like the first game. But good on them to try to innovate something. I do have to applaud this game for introducing a lot of the series staples FF has become known for. A lot of the well known things originated in this game.
Okay with that out of the way it's time to move onto the mountain of complaints I have with this game. I could do without the keyword system. They never really did anything cool or unique with it. You just end up going through every word with every character you can ask question to until someone has something new to say. It feels like busy work and could have just been replaced with more natural dialogue with the characters. Most of the time for every word they just hit you with the dreaded ?, meaning they know nothing about that word. Unlike FF1 the main characters in this game have names, personalities, backstories, and relationships. A departure from FF1 where the main party are just blank slates you can name and roleplay a story for them. That being said this game does such a poor job of telling/showing their personalities and relationships that I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of them. The character development of the main trio is also laughable. The best I could tell you is that two of them are related. I couldn't tell you how they changed/evolved throughout the game either. Well, except for Gus/Guy. He's the big strong, slow character. But at a certain point it's revealed that he can speak beaver, so that's nice. That's honestly one of the high points of the game.
The PS1 version of this game has insane balancing issues. Monsters in the beginning of the game give you next to no gold and all the attack spells cost 400 gil. That's over double the cost in other newer games. Also forget about getting a Phoenix Down early in this version. It cost 5,000 gil to buy one of them while it only costs 500 gil in the GBA version. The prices on just about everything is wack and makes grinding for cash in the beginning almost a necessity, just to get some of those spells. But grinding for a couple of those spells was a waste of time because I ended up not using any magic other than cure at a certain point in the game. I didn't know that leveling up the magic would take so long, at least in the PS1 version. In the PS1 version of the game the magic takes so long to level up it's not worth it. I compared my progress to someone playing the GBA version and by the time I got one of them to level 2 they already had the spell to level 4. So after a couple of hours I abandoned the notion of using magic during battle. I ended up only attacking and did nothing else. I did use magic to heal, that's it. Though even with only using magic to heal, my Cure spell was only level 5 by the end of the game. That's a laughable level for end game spell level.
Speaking of grinding, there's no way to know if you're overpowered for the area you're in or if you're underpowered. You don't gain levels or exp for battles. Only your stats and proficiencies gain exp. So you never know if where your stats are at is good or bad until you start fighting. There's no sense of progression. The numbers all feel arbitrary. It almost feels random when your actual stats go up. If you want to power level the best way isn't fighting the monsters in the world.... Oh no, it's fighting yourself. Just start wildly attacking yourself during battle then finish off the enemy. You'll gain more exp for your stats and proficiencies this way than you would ever get from fighting the actual enemies in the game. It's a joke and I wish they would have removed it from later ports or just not coded it like that. On the topic of battles, the random encounter rate is way too high in this game. This has to be one of the highest rates I've seen in RPGs period. There's way too many fights and boring fights at that. At one point I got an encounter 5 steps in a row. These were never challenging, unless they got the jump on me. Then depending on what assortment on monsters you were fighting they could just one shot you before you could blink. They should have dialed the battles back by half. The reason it's so high is because of how leveling works. You need those fights or else your stats and proficiencies will never go up. It's also a waste of time trying to escape from battle. 9/10 it never works and you just ended up letting the enemies get free damage on you. Running away is tied to one of your stats but I had equipment equipped that rose that stat and had over 80 in that stat and I still couldn't run from most battles.
The world is so small so they make you do a lot of backtracking in the game. Backtracking in games isn't inherently bad, but it all depends on the situation. This game doesn't handle that well at all. At one point I got so aggravated at one section of the game. You are trying to find a pendant, on one of the floors there's 3 set of stairs you can pick from. Two lead deeper into the dungeon and one of them takes you straight to the pendant. Unless you got lucky and picked the one that led you straight to the keyitem you need you end up exploring the whole dungeon, which doesn't sound that bad. You want to explore the dungeon for items and exp but now is not the time, which you don't know. But anyways after you inevitably take the wrong set of stairs and explore everything you will find yourself picking up the keyitem after you went through everything. So you finally go back to the place that gave you this quest and talk to a NPC there thinking this quest is over. But, oh no, they give you an item and tell you to go back to the place you just spend a lot of time exploring in and go to the very bottom floor to drop off the new item you just got. So after you fight your way back through there again you drop the item off and that's it. You have to wait until the final 1/3 of the game for that to have any payoff. This feels like a filler arc in an anime. It would have been smoother to take the item in there with you to begin with. You'd have to rewrite that section a little bit but that's super easy to do.
The dungeon design in this game is some of the worst I've even seen in a RPG let alone a FF game. It almost feel like an AI who's never played a game before made them. There's a bunch of paths that lead nowhere and a lot of stairs that take you up or down levels that lead to dead ends. It's not clever design it's tedious. Every dungeon also has a ton of empty rooms called "Trap Rooms" there's nothing inside of them. Except for random encounters that you'd rather not do. There's so many of them that at a certain point you almost just want to skip out on every room you see, it's that annoying. But if you do that you'll miss out on a lot of the best items in the game. So you inevitable have to play the lottery and see if there's an item or a fight inside. Also basically at the end of almost every dungeon they throw 3-6 doors at you. Only one of them is the correct way to go to reach the boss fight or the way out of the dungeon. Every other door is a trap. Only put there to waste your time. The enemy placement in these dungeons also feels random. At about 1/3 or 1/2 way into the game a dungeon throws very tough enemies at you. If you get an encounter with two of this enemy 9/10 you'll end up wiping. But after that dungeon the next handful of dungeons throw weak enemies at you. There's no rhythm or reason for this. Even the final dungeon still throws some weak enemies at you. Another thing that really pushed me over the edge was the loot in the dungeons. Even as far as the last dungeon some of the treasure chests were giving you equipment you started the game with. There's no reason to give you basic starting equipment in the final dungeon unless the developers were trying to troll you. There's no reason these dungeons should be like this at all.
I praised FF1 for making you think during battles and engaging you in combat. You had to pay attention and use your attacks and spells wisely or else you'd die. In this one however all I did after the first 2 or 3 hours was smash X to win, which is something I hate in RPGs. I would only stop smashing X when I need to emergency heal or use a life spell to bring a dead party member back to life. Which honestly wasn't too often because I'd usually just do that outside of combat. Why waste time healing when I can just go unga bunga caveman on the enemies to end the fights faster. I couldn't be bothered to engage with the magic system because like I said earlier it took too long to level up anything in the PS1 version and I wasn't going to spend hours grinding them up. When I tried to use them even around a 1/3 of the way through the game they were such low level I would only do double digit damage even using the weakness of the enemy. A single physical attack would do triple or quad damage depending how far I was in the game. I didn't do any grinding for stats or manipulation to cheat the game. If you know what you're doing you can break this game over you knee. But because of how I ended up equipping some of my members and how the leveling system works in this game 2 of my characters had 99% evasion with a buttload of attack power. So I would hit real hard and be hard to hit.
I also praised the multiple hits system of the first game but this game had to go and ruin that too. In the first game every time you got an addition hit you could feel yourself getting more powerful. If was a nice sense of progression. In this game within the first hour you're already doing like 3 hits, so the multiple hits become meaningless. By the end you are doing more than 10. It doesn't feel rewarding or anything. It just feels random and you don't get excited to see it. You don't even pay attention to how many hits you are doing. Using armor and weapons during battle also made a return from the first game. But unlike the first game I never interacted with it. Why would I waste my time doing that when I could end the battle faster by mashing X? There was no point in it. The only time I used any of these items was during the final boss fight. I used the weapon that hasted the whole party. I had to do it this way because I wasn't going to waste my time leveling up the haste spell to a high level to make it better and more likely to succeed. Poison is also a useless mechanic in this game. Never try to poison the enemy, it's not worth it. I would inadvertently poison enemies with my venom axes and the poison would do like 4 damage. It's so minuscule that's it's laughable.
Finally Final Fantasy is a series known for their superb soundtracks. But this game has one of the weakest OSTs I've heard in a FF game. It does have some quality tracks, don't get me wrong. But a lot of the them are very repetitive and boring. Some of them are straight up bad and I dreaded every time they would reuse them.