I am an enjoyer of video games, and from a young age I have liked them, especially the genre called role-playing games. Final Fantasy in the West was the most popular series of this genre for quite some time, and it may still be. There are 16 main games, and two of them are what are called massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)- 11 and 14. I would like to have one day played and beaten all of the ones that are not massively multiplayer or online, but single player experiences. Before this afternoon, I had yet to finished II, III and XIII. This afternoon, I have finished II. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter, but I am happy to have a check beside the game.
There are a few thoughts I have that are perhaps not 100% about the game, but thoughts that came to me while playing the game. I will write them below.
The first starts with Bad Religion, or Thomas Kuhn. It’s probably only with Thomas Kuhn. As you may know, Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am not sure how popular or influential the book is, but I believe it is the book that popularized the phrase and idea “paradigm shift”. I haven’t properly read the book all the way through in the last two decades, but you shouldn’t be here if you would like a proper analysis of the book, so that should probably be fine.
The book, as I remember, is about how science doesn’t go in a straight line. Progress is not in a straight line. It is only after progress has happened that we look back, and draw said line to connect the dots to where we have gotten. However, we do not connect all the dots, only the relevant dots, and which dots are relevant are only possible to decipher with the power of hindsight. In the midst of the progression, it is not clear which of an infinite number of possibilities will be the straight line that is constructed after the fact. The idea has always stuck with me, especially when we are in the midst of geopolitical events. The first three days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine come to mind. September 12, 2001 American analysis of world events also comes to mind. Not analysis on these time periods, but what were people saying on TV, or writing in papers at the time.
To take this back to something a little more inconsequential, Final Fantasy II in many ways feels like a dot that didn’t get connected with the rest. It is not an original thought to point out that there were other sequels to popular games on the Nintendo Entertainment System (or Family Computer in Japan) that took what would be considered today a sharp left turn. Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link, and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest come to mind. (I have never played Castlevania II, and I never will. It goes outside my scope of interest.) It is fun to look at these games that we feel were not connected in the progression, and either view them as the individual pieces of art that they are, or transport yourself back to that time when there were only two games in the series, and connect those dots as if it were then, and think about history. It can also be fun to change how the progression is perceived by forcing a connection.
I think this all has its head way too much in the clouds, so it is probably best to talk about the game at this time. The thing everyone who talks about is how the game increases your stats. In most RPGs, it is a given that you battle enemies, which give you “experience points”, and if you gather enough experience points, you “level up”, which means that some of your stats increase: attack, defense, speed, health, magic power, etc. Final Fantasy II didn’t do this, and instead your actions in each and every battle influenced how your stats grew. For example, using spells would increase that spell’s power and increase your MP. With Final Fantasy III, they stopped using this system.
Another idea is the system of remembering key words, and with key non-playable characters, being able to ask them about key words. Ultimately, there were less than 10 key non-playable characters in the world, but it was fun to ask them about things. I’m not sure if it was only in the remaster of the game I played or the original, but it highlighted the words in red for which you would get a response. This is called a “quality of life improvement” in video game speak, but I wonder about what we lost with it.
There are also ideas in the game that are less talked about. The world map for example. Most RPGs try to mimic having some continents on the world, usually three. Final Fantasy II’s world is connected from north to south and east to west with various land bridges. In most video games they have it so when you go all the way west, you end up on the east side of the map, but also if you go all the way north you end up in the south side of the map. As you likely know, this is unlike our Earth. They can cover this with the continents so it doesn’t seem that weird, but a piece of land in Final Fantasy II goes through the corners of the map, like nothing is happening. This never happened again as far as I know.
There is also the game’s poor dungeon design. I am curious how Final Fantasy III handles dungeon design, because Final Fantasy IV’s had no issues in my opinion. With the game’s unique battle system, in order to properly increase the stats that you have, you need to fight a lot of battles. In RPGs of this era, the battles are “random”, which means as you walk on the screen, seemingly randomly the screen changes to a battle screen every now and then. This happened a lot in Final Fantasy II, and the way the dungeons were designed was to maximize the amount of time traversal takes, using every part of the rectangular map, even if it breaks immersion. Furthermore, there are many many rooms in the dungeons that are just empty rooms with nothing in them, and when you enter these rooms, you don’t start at the entrance of the room, but in the middle. It’s strange, and I don’t think it happens again.
There are also things that connect it to the rest of the series. It is the first of the series where there are Chocobos, a kind of rideable flightless (for the most part) bird that has become a sort of mascot for the series. It is the first game to feature Leviathan, a mythical sea beast. It is the first game to have a Dark Knight class. There is also the spell Ultima. There are many thematic things that have stayed in future stories, while the mechanics of the game have largely been ignored in future games.
There is a rebuttal to what I am saying though. What about something like Final Fantasy VIII? Don’t all Final Fantasy games have something that make them unique? No other game ever used the Junction System again. I think this is different though. VIII had a lot in common with Final Fantasy VII and before, and by this time, what defined the game was not its mechanics but its story and presentation, and the game very much followed in the path of VI and VII here, as did the “throwback” of IX, and the “redefining” games of X onwards. II wasn’t there yet, and mechanics and story/presentation were still intertwined in a way they for the most part stopped being.
I ended up not bringing up Bad Religion, but it is about their second album Into the Unknown and their follow up EP, Back to the Known. Into the Unknown doesn’t sound like a punk record at all, with synthesizers and whatever else. However, in an interview out there a member of the band said they thought at the time that the most punk thing to do was to subvert expectations and not get stuck in a mold (or something like that). Their fans hated it. In hindsight, punk was also about fast simple rock music.
It’s fun to be in these moments when things aren’t defined and there are infinite possibilities ahead of us. It is also fun to remember this when looking into the past.
Klingsor's First Winter 