I love Final Fantasy. I've loved it for my entire life to this point, or at least ever since buying FINAL FANTASY during elementary school and pretending to be sick the next day so I could play it (a RUSE that my mother didn't fall for -- she hid the NES controllers before she went to work). When I say I love Final Fantasy I mean that I even enjoy the "bad" entries in the series, the games that stray away from the formula and maybe don't live up to the heights of the best Final Fantasies. Because of the way I'm wired, always wanting to find the good in a game, sometimes the flaws in these games make me work even harder to find and appreciate what they do right: the universe-expanding nature of some of the mainline sequels in particular raise them pretty high in my estimation, and I'm never not going to extoll the virtues of FF10-2 and FF13-2. I think there's even a great game in Lightning Returns, although I haven't quite managed a serious revisit of it yet.
I've now played through the six Pixel Remasters that came out last year, and enjoyed them all to various degrees. I was probably most familiar with FF1 and FF4 before the PRs, although I had played other versions of all six at various points. I think it's safe to say that The Internet As A Whole was most excited for a few of these games (English release of a 2d version of FF3! A new fiesta-ready version of FF5! What are they going to do to FF6's Opera Scene?) But then there's FF2, a game so divisive that friends of mine sometimes replace it with Crono Trigger when discussing the series -- something I used to do with FF12 and Lost Odyssey before I came to love that particular return to Ivalice.
Final Fantasy II is a hard game to like. The idea that you raise your attributes, weapon proficiencies, and spell proficiencies by using them seems like a good idea on the surface, and has worked in other games, but the way it works here just isn't as impactful as the gameplay systems of other games in the series. Taking damage raises your HP after battle, using swords makes you better at using swords, and casting Fire eventually makes you better at casting Fire. But it all feels very out of your control: if you're dominating weaker enemies, your gains slow to a crawl/stop happening. You might encounter an enemy group that you simply can't handle, or you might plow through meaningless enemy groups and gain no additional stat progress, with little rhyme or reason.
In college I played through the original Famicom release with a translation guide, and most of that playthrough was carried along by the novelty of seeing a game that looked so similar to my beloved Final Fantasy, but played so differently -- these days the idea of finding a long lost entry in your favorite series seems more and more unlikely, but in 1997 that was still a possibility. Each subsequent release of FF2 tweaked things to make it more accessible, but it still had that fundamental issue: I just wish it played like the other games. I can put up with the gameplay system... but I just wish I didn't really have to.
When the Pixel Remasters released, I played through FF2 the way I normally do -- mostly playing it straight, telling myself I won't attack my own party to raise their HP, telling myself I'll actually use magic this time, and it was an okay, if slow, experience. The Emperor didn't seem to have received as much of a buff as Chaos did in the first game, although I did rely on Blood Swords like I always do.
But I missed a Steam achievement, and after wrapping up the other Pixel Remasters, I decided to play through FF2 again with an eye to finishing the Bestiary. "But what if this time I do that thing I've seen people recommend, where you grind up your stats on the guards early on in Fynn?" This mostly involved choosing a weapon for everyone to specialize in (I chose Swords for Firion, Staves/Bows for Maria, and Axes for Gus), and then grinding until one character at a time has a high enough Evasion using a Shield to survive the encounter (until either the guard runs away or dies). This raised everybody's stats very high, maxing out their shield skill and the skill of their chosen weapon, giving them very high HP and near to max Evasion. I tried raising some of their spell proficiencies by doing this, but it just felt so tedious and so unhelpful that, like always, I gave it up. Even knowing about the armor penalties for spellcasting, I've just never found a real use for magic in this game.
So here's the thing. After grinding on the guards at Fynn, my stats and skills were so high that I could basically Autobattle my way through the rest of the game. It made the monster closets and the mazes less frustrating... but it was also a cake walk, and not really an especially interesting experience. It also meant that every new character that joins you is just fodder: they'll spend so much time being dead that when each of them dies for story-related reasons it just seems reasonable, like they had it coming. Look how weak they were, after all!
In the old days, maybe I wouldn't have minded, but now there's a timer that tells you how long you've been playing, so unlike back in the day when grinding was just a thing you did, now you know precisely how long it's taken you.
I fought those guards at Fynn for about 12 hours, and I completed the game 10 hours later. Firion and co. escaped from Fynn at the beginning of the game, turned around before even getting the Canoe from Minwu, and then beat up on the guards there for longer than the rest of their adventure would take. Feels kinds bad.
At least this time I found the Iron Giant in Pandaemonium, though. 100% Steam Achievements acquired! But next time I don't think I'll do the Fynn grinding. The story is pretty good for so early in the series, the music is of course fantastic, and I've always liked the Memory/Keyword system. If someone modded in even a basic gameplay system like FF1, I think I'd even enjoy playing it!
