...and it's a JRPG. A Final Fantasy game. By Square. From 1988. What?!
I'm not the biggest JRPG fan of all time, though I've had several love affairs with them, and there are quite a few I adore. Lately I've actually been pretty nuts about them. Dragon Quest IX was a blast, I'm a huge fan of Radiant Historia, and a few months ago I decided to finally give the Final Fantasy series a good honest try, since the only two games in the series I'd ever really played were X, which I hated, and XII, which I loved, though I finished neither.
I figured that the best way to play them would be in order, though to save myself some headache, I decided against playing the original version of each. I recently finished the GBA Dawn of Souls version of Final Fantasy 1, which I found really enjoyable for a classic and standard-as-it-gets JRPG, and now I'm on the DoS version of 2. And man it... it kinda kicks ass.
Don't get me wrong, I know alot of people have issues with the same things I'm about to talk about loving, but considering that the game came out in 88, I think it's rad. Most of the ideas it had were so fresh and it makes me genuinely sad that JRPGs have largely gone down a far less interesting route.
Leveling in Final Fantasy 2 does away with experience entirely, and instead you gain proficiency in skills as you use them. Sort of like how it works in Elder Scrolls games, only you're managing four different party members at a time (the character in the fourth slot changes throughout the game). Want to get better at beating on dudes with swords? Equip a sword and start beating on dudes with it. Want to get better at healing magic? Start casting cure like a motherfucker. But here's where it gets super interesting- you can use any ability or spell on anybody in the battle arena, and not only that, any spell can be split up into an multi-target attack. Gone are the days of FF1's single-target damaging spells and higher end multi-target spells. In FF2 you just have, say, fire. You can cast it on one dude for a ton of damage or on several dudes for less damage, but across multiple targets. RPGs today are still using unique spells for each type of attack, and it's such an interesting idea to see it done FF2's way.
So yes, you can totally beat up your own party members, or cast healing spells and buffs on enemies. Why would you ever do any of that? Well, for the most part, you wouldn't. Unless you wanted to train those specific skills, in which case, it becomes super effective. Too effective, in fact, because there are several methods of abusing the system to train the fuck out of your guys into ultra-badasses relatively easily, and just sweep the rest of the game. I've opted to not take this route, because I find the system interesting and fun to use, and don't want to just steamroll everything like I did in FF1 after grinding for a bit.
Also, each of your party members is right or left handed, and you can equip weapons in either hand. If they're right handed, their left handed attack will be weaker, but you can still equip one in order to give them a second swing on each attack command. If you've got the guy trained up in strength and that weapon, it's a good amount of extra damage your allowing your guy to deal. Such a cool little thing. The three core party members are all right handed, or at least they are in my game (perhaps it's randomized?), and I've yet to run into a left handed party member, but I really like the idea that I have to make sure to equip a weapon in the correct hand in order to make sure they're most effective with it. I'm not sure if it's really all that effective, but I've got my caster holding shields in each hand to boost her defense.
Finally, the game's got a primitive dialogue system that I kind of dig. How many JRPGs out there have dialogue systems? Probably more than I realize, but still, it's not common. In FF2, when talking to important NPCs, you can either ask them something, learn something from them, or show them an item. The item thing is just there to let you "use" story items on the NPCs in order to progress the story, so that's no big deal, but the other two are pretty cool. When talking to NPCs, they'll sometimes say specific terms you can then learn from them, which adds the term to a bank of words you can then ask other NPCs about in order to complete quests and do other shit. It's actually not been put to too much great use, but I still love it.
It's all very primitive and idealistic, and in the case of the leveling is outright broken in several ways. None of it gets to put to as great a use as it could have been, but then, I just love that the game tried such radical and new things.
I'm not the biggest JRPG fan of all time, though I've had several love affairs with them, and there are quite a few I adore. Lately I've actually been pretty nuts about them. Dragon Quest IX was a blast, I'm a huge fan of Radiant Historia, and a few months ago I decided to finally give the Final Fantasy series a good honest try, since the only two games in the series I'd ever really played were X, which I hated, and XII, which I loved, though I finished neither.
I figured that the best way to play them would be in order, though to save myself some headache, I decided against playing the original version of each. I recently finished the GBA Dawn of Souls version of Final Fantasy 1, which I found really enjoyable for a classic and standard-as-it-gets JRPG, and now I'm on the DoS version of 2. And man it... it kinda kicks ass.
Don't get me wrong, I know alot of people have issues with the same things I'm about to talk about loving, but considering that the game came out in 88, I think it's rad. Most of the ideas it had were so fresh and it makes me genuinely sad that JRPGs have largely gone down a far less interesting route.
Leveling in Final Fantasy 2 does away with experience entirely, and instead you gain proficiency in skills as you use them. Sort of like how it works in Elder Scrolls games, only you're managing four different party members at a time (the character in the fourth slot changes throughout the game). Want to get better at beating on dudes with swords? Equip a sword and start beating on dudes with it. Want to get better at healing magic? Start casting cure like a motherfucker. But here's where it gets super interesting- you can use any ability or spell on anybody in the battle arena, and not only that, any spell can be split up into an multi-target attack. Gone are the days of FF1's single-target damaging spells and higher end multi-target spells. In FF2 you just have, say, fire. You can cast it on one dude for a ton of damage or on several dudes for less damage, but across multiple targets. RPGs today are still using unique spells for each type of attack, and it's such an interesting idea to see it done FF2's way.
So yes, you can totally beat up your own party members, or cast healing spells and buffs on enemies. Why would you ever do any of that? Well, for the most part, you wouldn't. Unless you wanted to train those specific skills, in which case, it becomes super effective. Too effective, in fact, because there are several methods of abusing the system to train the fuck out of your guys into ultra-badasses relatively easily, and just sweep the rest of the game. I've opted to not take this route, because I find the system interesting and fun to use, and don't want to just steamroll everything like I did in FF1 after grinding for a bit.
Also, each of your party members is right or left handed, and you can equip weapons in either hand. If they're right handed, their left handed attack will be weaker, but you can still equip one in order to give them a second swing on each attack command. If you've got the guy trained up in strength and that weapon, it's a good amount of extra damage your allowing your guy to deal. Such a cool little thing. The three core party members are all right handed, or at least they are in my game (perhaps it's randomized?), and I've yet to run into a left handed party member, but I really like the idea that I have to make sure to equip a weapon in the correct hand in order to make sure they're most effective with it. I'm not sure if it's really all that effective, but I've got my caster holding shields in each hand to boost her defense.
Finally, the game's got a primitive dialogue system that I kind of dig. How many JRPGs out there have dialogue systems? Probably more than I realize, but still, it's not common. In FF2, when talking to important NPCs, you can either ask them something, learn something from them, or show them an item. The item thing is just there to let you "use" story items on the NPCs in order to progress the story, so that's no big deal, but the other two are pretty cool. When talking to NPCs, they'll sometimes say specific terms you can then learn from them, which adds the term to a bank of words you can then ask other NPCs about in order to complete quests and do other shit. It's actually not been put to too much great use, but I still love it.
It's all very primitive and idealistic, and in the case of the leveling is outright broken in several ways. None of it gets to put to as great a use as it could have been, but then, I just love that the game tried such radical and new things.
