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PSP | RPG | Final Fantasy II

Boxart for Final Fantasy II
Final Fantasy II 29 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 4.75
  • SOUND: 4.00
  • CONTROL: 4.50
  • FUN FACTOR 4.00
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.3
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 3.5

Review: Final Fantasy II

Review by Andy Burt | 07/25/2007 | 13:35:10 PM PST

Rounding out Square's lineup of Anniversary edition re-releases, Final Fantasy II gets a nice generational upgrade to save it from the 8-bit cemetery.

While it isn't not quite as amazing as the FFI Anniversary Edition, it's still a fun title that is definitely worth checking out, especially if you missed the boat the first time around.

The First of Many Sequels

The fairly simple premise of orphaned children fighting against an evil empire paved the way for a lot of the Final Fantasy titles that came after, and even though it has a decidedly old school flavor, it still manages to hold up by offering fun, imaginative characters who develop nicely over the course of the game. The beautiful visual style also helps push the game out of the realm of RPG dinosaurs, and it's nice to see your character's emote during conversations.

While the game in many ways looks similar to the FFI Anniversary (beautiful character and enemy models, tons of little touches throughout towns and dungeons), the game plays quite differently. It takes much longer to grind through stat levels and attributes in FFII, for example, thanks to the stat system which requires you to make some tough choices on how you level up your characters. This can get a bit tricky at times and a little frustrating. For instance, if you want a character who excels at casting magic, you'll have to consistently cast spells. But you'll also want them to have a decent attack level to balance things out; unfortunately, you can't achieve that unless the character actually attacks something. The system takes a little time to adjust to and will definitely try your patience.

Speaking of frustrating, why did Square leave out the "save anywhere" feature from many of the dungeons? During early parts of the game when I was still getting my bearings, I would find myself making my way confidently through a dungeon I was exploring, leveling up my characters and getting items, only to somehow come across an extremely powerful enemy who would lay waste to my adventurers without breaking a sweat. And just like that, all my effort was gone down the drain.

These complaints aside, Final Fantasy II is yet another great addition to the PSP's slowly improving library and really shows off the care and attention that Square Enix puts into its remakes. Now, bring on the remake of Final Fantasy VII already!

Pros: Nice upgrades in almost every department: visuals, sound, control, gameplay.
Cons: Leveling system is a bit confounding. Inability to save anywhere in dungeons sucks.


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