Final Fantasy 2

A few days ago I managed to beat Final Fantasy 2 on stream, so with that now off the list I think it's time I talked about it.

Final Fantasy 2 is a piece of shit, I really don't like it, but I can sort of forgive it for being so crap because you really have to take into consideration when it was made and you kind of have to give Square credit for at least trying to do something different.

The problem with Final Fantasy 2 is that it's broken and unless you exploit the ever living hell out of that broken system then the game is unreasonably hard.  The system with FF2 is that your stats go up based on your actions in battle rather than having an overall level.  So attacking will raise strength, getting hit will raise HP and using spells will increase spell mastery and MP etc.

On paper it sounds like a really cool system and I've played games with similar sorts of systems that have been a ton of fun, but here it falls a bit short.  The problem is that playing the game normally is absolutely not enough to prepare you for the fights that you have to overcome.  2 members of my 4 character party had less than 1000 HP by the time I got to the final dungeon and I had been playing normally without running from many battles.

To be effective in Final Fantasy 2 you either have to grind for hours or exploit the ever loving shit out of the broken progression system, but the problem with doing that is that it makes the game WAY to easy and ultimately unfun.

Still, if you're willing to put up with all that shit, then everything else about FF2 isn't so bad.  It has an interesting world to explore and the plot is OK considering that it's an NES game from 1988.  Also the PS1 origins version has a couple of cool looking cut scenes at major turning points in the game that make things a bit more interesting if your the kind of person who played it a bunch when it was 8-Bit.

I'd suggest that everyone play Final Fantasy 2 just to see how Square were at one point willing to do new and interesting things with the series rather than just fall back on stupid anime cliches and awfully written plot lines.  No matter how much I complain about Final Fantasy 2, it's STILL better than 13 by a long shot.

Also as a little update, a couple more donations came in after the stream had finished and over £200 was raised for the Alzheimers Society! Thanks again to everyone who donated during the marathon, the highlights from the stream will be uploaded soon!