FIX FINAL FANTASY FUDGING 2 FFFF2

Why can't he be a bad-ass young man who likes flowers and revolution? Ain't nothing wrong with guys liking flowers. Guy needs a hobby so why not flowers?

I like stabbing my friends to level up faster. It's a unique mechanic that, sure, wouldn't do for the newer games, but is a staple of that one. I don't see why we can't have that one game in the series where stabbing people makes them better. Go play another FF if you want non-stabbing of friends. It wouldn't be FF2 if it didn't have you killing yourself and your allies to get stronk.

Amano's sketch has him light brown skin but he could easily be seen as white with a tan (though it's likely he was meant to be at least Middle Eastern). They've mainly kept him lighter skinned in all the sprite iterations of him even when there are darker characters in a game - so it's likely he was always intended to be fair-ish skinned, else they'd have changed him up already. To be honest, I've never really cared for Amano's art so I'd rather they based the characters off what looks good in the game than his stuff. Besides, his art never looks like the characters properly anyway, so what's the point?

Do not give us Gilgamesh. He has his own games to be in.



Honestly, I liked FF2 a lot better than some of the others (3, 1 and 4), so I don't see the need to change it up much. I will agree that a more characterised version would be nice, but I always thought that though the characterisation was a bit light on the ground for the game, it was decently handled for what it was, especially in comparison to some of the titles of the time. I liked the interesting levelling mechanics, appreciated the keyword system and how characters came and left the party. It was a fun game despite its faults and I'd rather any remakes actually keep true to the spirit of the game.

The thing to understand that this game was designed by Akitoshi Kawazu who is a mad scientist and the sole reason why this game is different from all the other FFs surrounding it. All of his games have some sort of weird meta board-game aspect that requires replaying and looking up guides to fully understand. It is completely a knowledge based endeavor and the "fun" I assume is to just bump into all of the possibilities and figure out how to break the game from there. FF2 is nothing more than a prototype for Kawazu's ideas. Like Liberty said, most of these suggestions sound like just making it another FF with a standard RPG system which is the most obvious approach you can do.

I think a harder design assignment is figuring out how to retool the game so that it hits the intention behind its mechanics better. Though I've never really fully enjoyed a game with Kawazu's stamp on it (except FF Chronicles, but the cryptic side quests are the worst part of it and i know its his idea) so I couldn't tell you. If I had an interest to try and get into the SaGa series again maybe I'd come up with something. I just appreciate that he was the source of a lot of the minor innovations within the FF series.

author=unity
Though really, I think it would be even more interesting if someone took all the cool ideas from FF2 and made a brand new game.

Don't forget this is FF2: Hitting yourself for stacks of HP and relying on it only worked for the first three quarters of the game. Once the HP draining enemies became common you'd find out how you fucked yourself over: HP draining enemies dealt damage proportional to your maximum HP and could hit multiple times, basically eating your HP like a kid with cookies. If you haven't trained up your evasion by rotating a frontliner with two shields to get dodge procs and ergo evasion stat improvements you could build yourself into a corner! And don't forget heavy armor was a trap since it crashed your dodge rate making it basically impossible to get those precious evasion gains!


I think one problem was how they did "do a thing and get better at it" by making what you improved way too narrow. A character should improve their ability at doing a role in general, not just get Swords+1. Stat gains to strength kinda counts towards this but it won't make up the difference when your axe stat is 1. Thankfully these kinds of games were usually safe investing in swords, iirc fists worked well too in FF2. The whole thing conceptually might work but it should be revised so characters improve in roles organically and have less slow grinding abilities up to make them useful. Casting any of Cure, Esuna, Raise, etc. would build healer role exp making them all more effective so when you do need to cast Raise all those times you cast the other spells mean that Raise isn't just a lv1 cast.


The plot is a mixed bag for me. I like some of the impact you had to the game. Mythril gear for example isn't unlocked by going to the next story town but it's an actual plot point. There is the classic farting around doing jack shit part basically involving the whole of Ultima that gave a wet fart of a spell. I do like the reasoning that Ultima is a super old spell and not necessarily better than modern high power spells. There's the last of real characterization, the war and empire are really underdeveloped, the world outside the early parts of the game feels really empty, and no character arcs or anything that really brings everything together. I'll blame NES era games.


The keyword system is something that could be expanded on easily, integrating it more into the game than a handful of plot triggers and a bit of token text. Ultima 4 & 5 were like this, although the game didn't remember them for you. You had a few basic key words you could ask people: NAME / JOB / HEALTH / BYE, and then anything that might catch your eye in the conversation and they might have hints to ask other people. Not all key words advanced the game but some people reacted differently to the same key words. Laser Lords is another general step forward (then a step back with word capacity and forgetting key words, LL has a lot of words): Remember key words NPCs said and say them to others and get different reactions.


I feel like FF2 has some of the same problems of FF3 in that other games have done everything FF2 tried to do better or completely discarded the worst aspects like the monster closets. What's left really isn't fun, while FF1 manages to rely on a more solid foundation that doesn't overstay it's welcome like 2 and 3 do.


oh yeah and magic dodge is hard as shit to get up too