It’s Monday, the 22nd of April, and time once again for a round of 3FP updates! As I told a few of you, I spent most of this weekend powerleveling my end-game party. Way more time than was necessary, too! In the wake of last night and then today’s playtimes I’ve completed both the main story and the Soul of Rebirth, so as I type this up I’m watching the opening movie of Final Fantasy III. I’ve included my opinion of Final Fantasy II at the bottom in a rather lengthy couple of paragraphs which I apologize for.

Progress

~Friday, April 19th -Evening (From 3:00PM PDT)

• Entered the Cyclone and defeated the Emperor
• Learned of the new Emperor, and obtained the Airship
• Traveled to Palamecia and witnessed the Emperor’s rebirth

~Saturday, April 20th

• Set out for the Jade Passage
• Improved the finalized party’s skills

~Sunday, April 21st

• Improved the finalized party’s skills
• Entered Pandaemonium and defeated the Emperor
• Began Soul of Rebirth Mode

~Monday, April 22nd

• Fought through Raqia (the Heavenly Passage) and reached Machonon
• Improved the party’s skills and caught Scott up to everyone else
• Climbed through Arubboth (the Celestial Palace) and defeated the ‘Light’ Emperor

…And that’s where I am! As I said above, I’ve just started Final Fantasy III. I am only playing until I can save, and probably won’t start the actual playthrough until tomorrow sometime.

Final Fantasy II ~ Parting Thoughts

Ever since I first played Final Fantasy II in the PS1 ‘Origins’ collection, I have had a love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand I enjoyed the unique system of improving stats as they were used in combat, and the map in this game was one of the very few Final Fantasy worlds that has ever really felt open to me. On the other, the narrative feels weak and the constant changing of party members who will almost certainly die (or leave your party permanently) makes me feel like my leveling efforts aren’t worth the energy I spend. (Although admittedly, Soul of Rebirth relieved this greatly) The PSP iteration is, to me, markedly better about a few of these things. It has at least a touched up translation if not fully updated, and the inclusion of several dungeons that use the passwords (a cool but largely unused feature) made this game a lot more enjoyable. I still feel like too much of the story was left unexplained or handwaved away, but I can honestly say I had a more wholesome experience this time around.

In the future, I would enjoy seeing this game remade with a more filled-out story. I personally prefer the higher level of graphics found in recent games, but would be perfectly okay with models in the style of the remade III and IV. A remake would also need to have sidequests, as this game is very light on content outside the main narrative. I found most of my time was spent walking around the world because the boat happened to be in another port, and things like that. It was also a heavy negative when most of the towns were destroyed halfway through the game, as you didn’t even get to enter these places anymore. This doesn’t bother me, except that I’d actually enjoy some quests for helping out survivors of the damage! It would also be nice to see a revamped version of this stat system, maybe with a few new weapon types thrown in. I really like the idea of skills improving when you use them, and this game had one of my favorite stat progression systems of any Final Fantasy.

Overall, I feel Final Fantasy II was very much a decent-but-transitional game, one where new things were tried (most of which didn’t stick) and some progress was made. While I still enjoyed myself playing it, this game sits as one of my least favorite Final Fantasies.