NINTENDO LAND - REVIEW: Final Fantasy 2, NES

Okay, if anyone decides that FF2 should never ever be realeased here because it's too hard, hit them please. Now, this isn't as easy as FF6 or FF7, but it's still easy. Why? You will find out in this review by the crackhead himself Squire Nomad (nah, he's not one of those people that treat people badly, people, like females, just treat him badly).

The idea of creating RPGs with a real good plotline came from this 2 MBit video game. The evil empire or Paramekia is ruling and ruling at it's best. One day, four orphans run into some evil knights travelling. You can't actually win this battle, you'll either miss or get zero, but they can't hit you on average of 8x hits, and do some bad damage, but they've had their fun. Once you are near dead, you are taken to some church, where you see a magician and another healer with you. They are surprised that you wake up, and take you to meet someone. On the way, the two orphans, Maria and Guy ask you where the other orphan Lionheart is. All of you suspect he is dead, and you enter the throne room. The person sitting on the throne asks you to go to one of the places that the empire has conquered to get a ring (they haven't conquerered Althea, the resistance base), and bring it back to Althea. Here, you will learn a keyword. It is now the time to get weapons, spells, fight, or whatever before your trip.

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Finally, the magician joins your party, for a while. This guy has level 7 white magic, and it's in the beginning. It'll be hard to let him leave you.

I like to bring in a little realism to the reviews. However, leaving my hellspawn life alone, we reach the battle system of FF2. This game should not have any codes whatsoever. Why? Well, there is no levels to gain in Final Fantasy II. When you lose a significant amount of HP, it goes up. But wait wait, that's not it. If you do a trick where you hit yourself to get to that level, you can gain defense points, attack points, strength points, the works. For those of you that are FF1 whizzes, you might ask, "how can they generate more hits?" Well, let's see...

Since there are no levels, there's no EXP. So, how can you get 8x hits? Simple. You attack 100 times and you can get two hits, and one as done in FF1. The highest levels, however, are 16. 1600 battles? No, try 16 battles. Simple: you get into a battle, press "A", and choose your enemy. Then, the next person will come up, do the same. Now, the third person will come up, do the same. Now, you will usually have no need for the fourth guy until the end of the game, so press "B" until you get back to the first guy, and do this 100 times each battle. With that, the weapon you currently are using will level up, and if you have a shield, that will too. In this game, you have two weapons, but you have lower attack. Do the same with your magic, and you can be strong, but remember you have to use lots of magic, and waste a lot of HP to get those up too. As you do that, you can get lots of GP up too. So, is that different?

Yes, it is. The higher your HP is, the more you can expect to get from gold. So, what about that magic? There is no "-ra" or "-ga" type spells in this game. You buy magic books, like Faia no Hon (Book of Fire), and you have the spell "Fire". You level this up, and it will be L? Fire, not "Fi-ra" or "Fi-ga" or "Fire 2" or whatever, that's not here.	You'd better get those top three people close or in the thousand with HP, and good magic and MP. This guy is really stupid.
So to a different topic: music. If you can enjoy the percussion-less weirdness of FF2, then it's okay. The boss music is okay, and the last boss has it's theme, which by far is an improvement in music from FF1. There, however, is a dungeon theme, that will make you say "Owzer's House". Yep, that song originated from one of the dungeon themes in this game.

In my opinion, FF2 is worth much more than FF3, but that doesn't mean it needs to cost more than an N64 game. FF2 will always impress me, and if I ever find it again, I won't lose it. You can get Dragon Quests easily in Japan, since they sold so many copies, but since FF2 was the last FF to sell lower than a million copies, it's rare to find cheap.

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Even with characters, it didn't matter how much HP your main three guys had, the fourth guys will have whatever is pleased. The fourth guy shown here started with 64 HP. Many guys in FF2 will have low HP when you get them, so save before you get the new character, find their HP, and if lower, get higher than that.

FF2 will remain the most different of the NES games, and tie with FF4 as the most different. Don't be picky when you find this. As with FF4, there is more than one type of FF2. There's a multi-cart, which Square called "Final Fantasy I.II", as done with Dragon Quests I and II (Super Famicom), before FF1,2 was released on the Famicom, again. This multi-cart is perfectly legal, but even harder to find than FF2 itself. If the price is over $60 complete, don't buy it there. If it is over $40 with cart only, don't get it. Only good Japanese stores will sell it like it's crap. Like in Final Fantasy IV (which is US FF2, if you don't know), this isn't a game that will stay cheap, so get it!