The Rebel Army (Day 203)

Final Fantasy II is really an oddball in the series. Both the first and third games had gameplay centered around giving your generic characters different jobs or classes and otherwise had pretty traditional experience and leveling systems. Just about every Final Fantasy game regardless of the mechanics continues to adhere to the standard leveling and experience system, but Final Fantasy II was different. Experience points no longer exist. Instead, attributes increase after certain conditions are met. If you lose a lot of HP in combat, chances are you're going to gain some HP after the battle. If you attack physically a lot, you're going to gain strength and proficiency with that weapon type. It bears more similarities to the Elder Scrolls series than it does to Final Fantasy.

One standard that FFII did introduce was the concept of magic points. I won't pretend it was the first game to pioneer the mechanic--I honestly don't know one way or the other--but this trend continued in Final Fantasy IV and most games in the series that followed. That stat upgrade system was however never repeated. I'm not sure if Squaresoft received a lot of negative feedback on it or not--but I can't say I mind it, in theory. The only real problem I have with the system is that it's highly abusable. To increase the HP of your characters, you need only lose HP in combat. You can do this by attacking your own characters. Wearing no armor makes you take more damage so you gain more HP. It's a very counterintuitive system that encourages you do things you wouldn't normally do.

In the original Final Fantasy, spells are organized into tiers. There are several different tiers of fire magic, thunder magic, etc. In Final Fantasy II, you'll learn a base Fire spell that will continue to grow in power as you use it. This is a good system, but it's tuned in such a way that it takes absolutely forever to level this magic. You'll have to cast the spell in question hundreds and hundreds of times before you have it adequately leveled. This is likely highly unnecessary, but it does hurt my compulsive tendencies to max out certain things by the time endgame rolls around.

Another strange aspect of Final Fantasy II is in the keyword system. It's actually pretty interesting but to my knowledge was never repeated. As you talk to certain NPCs, you'll memorize keywords and be able to ask other NPCs about these keywords. This is required to advance through the plot which is admittedly barebones. Still, FFII was the first in the series to feature named playable characters, a trend that resumed in FFIV and continued for all future titles. It was an important game for the series, but I also feel like it was a failed experiment in some ways. I'm enjoying it so far, but it is certainly not without its frustrations. If I end up having to level my magic up to level 16 to progress in the game, that will be extremely frustrating.