Final Fantasy II

"Not good enough"

Some may wonder why Square made a sequel to something named FINAL fantasy. The reason is that
the first game was supposed to be the director's final game before he left. But when it became
a big success he got his inspiration back and decided to make a sequel.

The story in this game circles around four rebels. After a fight in a battle the heroes awake in a
castle, all except one. The heroes starts to fight the evil and at the same time find their lost
friend. The story in this game surpasses the first one by far, but it's still far from flawless.

There's a new strange level up system, if you can call it that. By doing things in battle, your
stats goes up. If you have a low HP at the end of the fight, you gain Max HP, if you use a lot
of magic you magic goes up, and so on. At first it's confusing, then it's addictive, then boring,
then frustrating. The fights works like before (select a command for all of you characters each
turn) but because of all the things you need to do, they are sometimes extremely long.
There are other problems too. You rarely know where to go. There's some places where this really
can cause problems. First of all, in the beginning, you are supposed to go to a town, at one place
there's a way to the left and one to the north. The north one leads to the town and the left one
to Mysidia. If you try to go to Mysidia you'll meet lots of strong enemies, but I didn't know
that the first time I played this so I went west and saved.. I was then stuck and had to restart
and gain HP (I did that for like an hour). And there's another place where you can choose between
like, five towns, all with different armor and things like that. That is frustrating.
The battles are easier in this game to.

The graphics is better in this game, not much, but small things like that you and your enemies
are in the same window during the fights. This is good but not good enough.

I really liked the music in Final Fantasy. But in FFII, it's not that great. The only masterpieces
are those that were in the first game to. I think that the quality of the sound increased, but
you'll probably not notice. I really think that whathisname that made the music should've worked
more on it. There are still very few sound effects so there's no need for me to write about them.

There's not much of a replay value here either. It's too much work, gaining status.

As you can see, I don't like this game too much. Still, Final Fantasy II is a good game.
All long series has it's flaws, this is Final Fantasy's.

Story: Better then the first one - 9
Gameplay: Either you'll love it or you'll hate it - 6
Graphics: Small improvements - 4
Music/Sound: It could've been a lot better - 7
Replay value: You wont have the time - 3
Overall - 7

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/05/01, Updated 05/05/01