playoldgames

First Released: 1988

First Played: 2005

Recently Played: 2025

Going to be honest going into this one, this is probably my least favorite Final Fantasy, and it’s hard to tell if I’m being fair in that. I first played this game on the Game Boy Advance in the Dawn of Souls collection, as a 10 year old, this game was incredibly confusing, and I hadn’t hit the point where I knew how to look up solutions yet. I remember starting this game countless times, telling myself I would finish it, and it just never happened, until recently!

This game came out in 1988, hot off the heels of FF1. Coming off of this, they got a slightly better team, and had a slightly more ambitious idea this time, and the bros wanted to cook a little bit. One of the more ambitous systems in the game is the way you gain levels. The combat director for the game, Kawazu (who went on to make the SaGa games), didn’t like the EXP system from the first game, and wanted to try a new system where things were “unpredictable”. I don’t think this system is that bad, it seems more like it just wasn’t thought out all the way. This is a feeling you get kind of used to when you play older games!

While the combat in this game isn’t my favorite, I appreciate that they tried it. It was so early into gaming, that you just kind of had to try things. One of the things I really appreciate about early games is the set of restrictions that they have to work with, and the creativity that was required to make them. This game accepts that challenge. Final Fantasy 2 takes a much larger scope in the story, starting with having characters that aren’t made by you, and even incorporating a pretty interesting “keyword” system, where you need to learn phrases and terms from people. Much like the combat system, it’s interesting, but either needed a little more time in the oven or was restricted by the hardware.

This game struggles in the aging department, even when you play a modern release of it. It feels like there are a lot of systems that if you gave them modern technology, they would have felt a lot better. That’s normally the only time I say something hasn’t aged the best. It’s still worth playing if you are doing a deep dive on the series, but if you are only hitting the highlights, this is the most skipable before Final Fantasy X.