Final Fantasy II

"The Game that proves that getting beaten to a pulp is good for you!"

The sequel to Final Fantasy does a lot of things well. It has a better plot, better graphics, better characters than its predecessor. And yet, I hate this game, and wish it had never been made.

The designers of this game decided that ''levels'' were too restrictive. Why not simply reward the player based on how they are playing? If they fight a lot, give them strength, if they cast spells a lot, give them magic. If they get beaten to a bloody pulp, well everyone knows that you get stronger by getting beaten within an inch of your life, so you get more Hit Points. Makes perfect sense. So you are then forced to fight numerous battles like this: Hit an enemy with one character, Cure the enemy with another, and let the enemy beat you down as low as it can. Just fighting one battle seems to take forever. I can just see what they might say when returning to town after several such battles: ''Yes, I'm just hanging on to life here, and I can barely walk, but I'll be able to be beaten twice as long after I've been healed!'' Oh joy!

In Final Fantasy II there are two types of battles, the easy battles where you spend your time doing the process described above, and the hard battles, where you get beaten, but not in the good way. There simply is no middle ground here. You go from kicking butt, to getting yours kicked. This can happen even right next to where you were just fighting easy battles, suddenly you're attacked by things you have no hope of defeating.

The graphics were improved ever so slightly, and the music is... well, at least it's a little different, if not any better. There is an actual plot to this game, although it's not executed any better than in FF1, with townspeople still only saying one line.

Some people could get past these flaws and found a decent game beneath, obviously I could not.

This game gets a 3 because I didn't like it. At all.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/06/00, Updated 04/06/00