When I was playing this game, one of my friends put it best. FFII is a game of “in theory...”. The devs of FFII swung hard and built a system based around levelling up your stats and skills based on what you do and use in battles. In one sentence, that doesn’t sound terrible, but in practice it’s a bit all over the place. Your characters level fast, becoming quickly powerful with high stats, as your fourth party member rotates in and out and nearly always plays a very distant fourth fiddle to your three main party members. The later characters you get join with okay stats in theory, but their weak HP, MP, and spell lists mean they have a hell of a lot of catching up to do to the point where it’s not really practical to consider them. All spells you get also start at level 1, so spells you get later in the game take effort to bring up to speed.

And that’s fine, I don’t mind an easy game, but it’s just a bit too overtuned. The encounter rate is cranked up very high and the dungeon design is rough, with many maze-like designs and dead-end rooms in practically every dungeon designed only to waste your time. The enemy encounters and bestiary are also quite odd, with tons of repeated monsters everywhere with lots of midgame enemies far overstaying their welcome. I do quite like the Key Terms system, at the very least.

Overall, it’s fine. I didn’t really hate it, but I found it very grindy (which I suppose is kind of the point) and was far too easy to really have great payoff for what I had to put into it.