"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

In my experience Genesis games' battery saves were a lot more prone to erasing themselves. I can't remember losing a save on SNES even once. Clearly this is why the Super Famicom/SNES was a superior RPG machine.

FFV could've been made on the same engine as FFIV, if such things existed at the time. So no, it wasn't exactly a graphically impressive game.

What no.

I remember hearing the "SNES is made for RPGs" line back during the 16-bit wars, but I don't know if that's strictly true or just something that was thrown around. I do think the sound chip makes a huge difference, not to mention MODE-7!

The Shining Force games looked rather good, without transparency or mode-7. And since RPGs just rely on menus for most things, the fewer buttons wasn't much of a weakness. The limited sound chip was very apparent, though.

Dammit, people, stop making me see things that I cannot un-see.

Anyway, yeah. Brickroad FF II Let's Play. I am so hot for this.

My obligatory FF II story: I played it long after I'd played FF III. So I regarded it as primitive, but still really liked it. I still do, I guess: I keep playing the stupid game.

My first play-through happened after I'd had major surgery and couldn't do much. My sleep schedule was wonky, too, so I'd be up at two in the morning, playing FF II and eating cheesecake (mushy foods only) and wondering what the hell was up with the Moon music. Shit still freaks me out. In fact, (FF IV After Years Spoiler): After Years did a lot of things wrong, but the eerie stillness of the final moon overworld and then encountering the Moon music inside the Core creeps me out hardcore.

In Japan (and all versions of FFIX), they're called Dragon Knights, which sounds more impressive as well as actually being accurate.

Forgot to mention this earlier, but one of my first "all-nighter" times was playing this game at a friend's house. We drank hot tea and ate chocolate-covered espresso beans. Probably not the best thing for a couple of 14-year-olds to do.

Every time someone says this I can't help but feel a little sorry for them. Because you all missed out on having your minds blown. It completely redefined what it meant for a game to have a story.

Also, all this talk about Kain's NP picture and nobody's mentioned those ridiculous socks?

How about when someone says they played II and III concurrently, and finished both on the same night?

I ... can't even begin to understand this. Was this actually enjoyable?

You can! Just let me explain.

This story took place in the Dark Ages, when video game rentals were limited to two days (sometimes effectively a night and a day). The hero was a poor kid who had to pay for any luxuries he wished to enjoy, so renting was often his only option. He rented Final Fantasy III one weekend, but couldn't finish it before he had to return it. The next weekend, someone else beat him to it, so he rented Final Fantasy II instead. Eventually, he managed to approach the end points of both games (despite other renters sometimes overwriting his save files) one weekend. The next weekend, he rented both again and beat them within a few hours of each other. Victory never tasted so sweet.

Epilogue: Our hero was later given a Final Fantasy cartridge, one with no number to denote its order in that fabled lineage. It was a more difficult game, but he was able to play it at his leisure, and nobody overwrote his save file. He enjoyed that game, too, despite its crudeness and occasional cruelty.

The end.

See? It's not that complicated.

You still get pitied. Unless the Narshe March blew your mind like the FFIV prologue blew mine.

I guess what I'm getting at is, there was this window from maybe 1991-1993 where FFIV completely blew away everything that had come before, especially if you were just upgrading from the NES to SNES. If you played a lot of SNES games already, especially ones that came out after FFIV, you missed out on that magic (though I will grudgingly concede that you may have experienced it from another game, if you're a philistine). You can see this in a lot of the reactions from people on this forum; those who played it within that window have this incredible nostalgia and adoration for it, while a lot of the comments from those who played it later aren't nearly as exuberant.


As for myself, the game is one of the defining experiences of my childhood, and if the game ever fails to make me feel like I'm 8 years old again, then I will have become the world's most cynical man.

It was pretty mind-blowing at the time - still impressive, in certain ways, just a couple of months ago. Even so, they're very different beginnings for very different games. Everything about FFIV's beginning was still exciting - some things even more so because of my limited experience with its successor.

The Prelude and sword-T at the title screen...

A whole fleet of military-grade airships...

The prophecy and castle, with two moons visible in the sky...

The castle and town as adjacent but separate locations...

Fat Chocobo?!..

Starting as an invincible level 10 Complete Badass...

A ridiculous number of treasures, hidden in a ridiculous number of ways...

And, of course, playing the role of an evil knight who slays an innocent dragon.

No, sir; I have no need for anyone's pity.

Not for me; I was a PC gamer. All the good games had stories.

Hear hear! Around the time FF2 was blowing the minds of 16-bit gamers away, we PC gamers were seeing the likes of Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, King's Quest V, King's Quest VI, and Legend of Kyrandia. And that was just in the adventure game genre!

This "my first game was better than your first game" thing is exactly where I was hoping the LP discussion would go!

Trust me, it was better this way. I hated the original FF, so I was immediately suspicious of II. Once I finished III, I had a much better understanding of how RPGs are supposed to work. And anyway, I had my mind blown by FF III's story, because it was the first time I'd really thrown myself into an RPG aside from Dragon Warrior.

It seems as though your insidious "If you wait long enough to update your LP, amazing things will happen!" philosophy has blown up in your face.

Please do not kill this thread, I am looking forward to seeing you gush about this game.

Well, for me? It was the original Phastasy Star. A game that even to this day holds a special place in my heart, even though it's actually kind of bad. I knowingly admit that my feelings for Phantasy Star 1 is 100% nostalgia.

I'm still upset that Sega Ages Phantasy Star never made it over here. I was looking forward to that one from the day I heard about it.

Man now Brickroad's making me feel bad.

But I hope nobody thinks that's what I said. What I was trying to get at is that FFIV was revolutionary.

And now that I've gotten that out of the way, FFIV was way better than your first game. Also, PCs games don't count and PC gamers are fictional, just like unicorns and dolphins.

But seriously guys. Kain is wearing green and orange(/brown?) socks! What is up with those socks?

You should be fully aware by this point that we can and will change subjects of conversation at least a half a dozen times between updates.

Vertically striped socks make your legs look longer and slimmer, because they lead the eye. Kain is being very fashion-conscious, despite his profound colourblindness.

I remember when everyone thought that Mass Effect 2 importing your Mass Effect 1 character was revolutionary instead of an expected feature for an RPG sequel. It made it really easy to tell who was ign--

--so those socks, aren't they crazy.

I'm gonna have to call bullshit on those socks. There aren't any socks in the game itself.

They were cut from the US version, even though Kain's art had already been finished.

My FFII/FFIII story is that they were both the most expensive games I'd bought thus far, but liked them so much that I was almost proud of the cost. I got FFII from a Toys R Us for $70 and FFIII from an Electronics Boutique for $80. For FFII I had to leave a Nintendo-brand SNES cleaning kit on the shelf because I was expecting the game to be $60, although the SNES turned out to be much more reliable than the NES so I never needed it. For FFIII I had to sell Stunt Race FX and Breath of Fire for a big chunk of the money. If everybody in America in the early 90s had been Hironobu Sakaguchi, I'd have been the biggest tipper around. In contrast, I'm now a jaded old man who has to cover his own expenses and balks at paying half as much for a game, even in today's gimpy dollars.

After thinking about FF4 again, it dawned on me that this may be the only game in the series with the combination of brevity and cinematic feeling to survive a one-and-done Hollywood adaptation in good shape. Plausible?

I don't know, I think you'd lose the audience about three plot twists in. Maybe a mini-series.

I dunno. You have to establish Cecil's struggle between loyalty and doing what is right, the love triangle between Kain and Rosa, Mist Village and Rydia's situation, Tellah's drive for revenge, which is directly linked with Edward, Cecil's redemption, which you need Palom and Porom for, Cid for the Airshippy thing...

Yeah, that's a lot of stuff, and only, like, the first quarter of the game. Maybe a trilogy of movies, or we end up with what happened with the Rankin and Bass 'Return of the King' which attempted to compress the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in to a single movie. With musical numbers. BAD musical numbers.

An adaptation would omit nearly all of the random encounters and menu shuffling. What's left wouldn't be all that long.

Drastic shrinking from the book can be done well or poorly. LA Confidential and Scott Pilgrim were two movies that did it well. For one small example, a FF4 movie could merge Kain and Golbez into one character.