Final Fantasy II, To begin again

The journey continues...

Background: The second installment of the Final Fantasy series was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and Akitoshi Kawazu of Square in 1988 and released on the Famicom system (what they called the NES in Japan). The game was produced in a beta version for North American release and publicized but long delays, the release of newer Japanese Final Fantasy games and the soon to be released Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) all eventually led to the shelving of Final Fantasy II for the U.S. It wasn't until 2003 that the U.S. recieved an english version of the game as Final Fantasy Origins. They couldn't release it as Final Fantasy II because Square USA release Final Fantasy IV as Final Fantasy II in North America to avoid confusion among the fan base and to avoid questions like, "Where's II and III, why do we only get IV?" I will be playing the version packaged with Final Fantasy I on the game cartridge Dawn of Souls for the GBA.

Loading up the game I created my characters, except this time there were no classes to choose from, instead I just picked four names. To keep things going from my first trek in the series I named my characters Ikorid, Yorik, Lokeir, and Nicole and started my adventure; albiet a little confused. Things start off with a nice evil empire killing everyone off, and a rebel alliance of sorts, well... rebelling. Our four young heros' town was destroyed so they join up. Sounds good so far, but umm, where's my levels???

I ventured out into the world to do some fighting and find that there are none, you just sorta get stats as you do stuff. This is a cool idea, and I praise Square for their innovative ideas of 1988 but it can be kind of frustrating trying to get the game to level your guy up the way you want him to be. I had to go research why Nicole NEVER got more HP. Well it was because I had her in the back row, where my mage (what I want her to become) should be to be protected, and well... she wasn't losing HP ever, so she doesn't gain HP. Okay... so I have to put her in the front row, and equip her like a fighter so she doesn't get one shotted. So I gave her a shield and a spear too. Then, I have like 10 MP, and normally I reserve MP in case I run into a bad boss or something that only dies to magic. I had to figure out why none of my guys ever got more MP... Well, because they never used MP. ><

Took me a while to get a handle on things, but now that I see how the game is going to run, I can deal with it. But I do definitely prefer the class system. This was my main beef with FFXII, everyone could do everything. Not a fan of that idea, I like people to have specific roles. But I'll roll with it, everyone will have cure, life, blink, protect, fire, thunder, blizzard, and I guess I'll just specialize the super black magic on Nicole and super white magic on Ikorid. Yorik is going fists, Nicole is going Spear/Shield, and Ikorid is going Axe/Shield. But wait a minute! What about Lokeir, and why is Ikorid going white magic??? Well that's because three hours into the game, I have no Lokeir and have no clue when I'm ever going to get my fourth character so I have to adapt for now.

The game has the fourth character slot changing, first I had a super powerful White Mage Minwu (I call him White Mage cuz he already had every white spell in the game), then I had a Monk type guy Josef, and then a weak sauce soldier type guy Gordon. Right now though I'm rolling around with just three people in my party.

The story and gameplay is cool, graphics got a little better, mobs got more interesting. I saw my first Bomb type mob and got to ride around on a Snowmobile and ... ready....? wait for it... wait for it........ a CHOCOBO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Alright! Go, go first chocobo appearance!

It's kinda hard to relate how far along I am since there are no levels, nor any set plot line of like 4 elements to acquire like FFI had, so if you've ever played the game, the Dreadnought has arisen and taken over Cid's airship (yep finally got to see Cid). Tonight I'm going to try to find a harder mob area around a town and just level up some spells, try to get some more MP before continuing.