Dawn of Souls was the first main series FF game I bought. After having garnered an interested from FF Crystal Chronicles (the reason this isn't on the list is that I have yet to beat it and it was very tedious, though it might've bumped II out if I had), Tactics Advanced, and Kingdom Hearts, I'd started realizing that I really wanted to play a few JRPG's, but where to start. Well, given the ones I'd been playing, I realized that the choice was obvious. Final Fantasy.
Not realizing that the series never actually carried on in the main series until a little later, I wanted to start with the original FF. It's good, and I'll get to it later, but this reviews about FF II.
The story for this game is very grandiose in comparison to it's predecessor. Where the first centered around the main villain's, Garland, quest for immortality and the adversities he caused, the sequel focused on a small rebel alliance, the Wild Rose, under the leadership of Princess Hilda.
If you started to hear the Darth Vader Theme/Imperial March or possibly the opening fanfare...you're not alone. This is where Star Wars and Final Fantasy had their first major similarities with II often being compared to A New Hope. Why is this? Well, it's simple. Youth joins a small rebellion after his home and family destroyed by the empire. Someone with a connection to the youth joins the Empire, becoming the Emperor's Dark Knight, in control of the destructive silver dreadnought. Mentor's die, and places are burned to ruin. The youth becomes a warrior, and stands out as one of the best knights in the rebellion.
Anyways, where XII's story would encompass draw similarities to the entire original trilogy, II's was simply Episode IV. This might've worked in its favor, if they'd ever returned to it like they did XII's Ivalice, X's Spira, IV's Earth, or VII's Midgar, however, they never returned to Palamecia, leaving the story kind of unfulfilled.
I love the Dawn of Souls artwork for FFII. Aren't they awesome?
The main cast (featured above), are four orphans from the town of Salamand. Firion (2nd from the right) is the protagonist and the warrior of the troupe. Along with his adopted siblings, the dark knight, Leon (on his right), and the mage, Maria (on his left), and his best friend, the druidic monk, Guy, the four of these characters sit at the middle of the strife going on in the world, long before they even know it.
As with most cases, the anti-hero is my favorite, and thus, Leon, or Leonheart, garners that position in this game. He's dark, and in the end, rather ambiguous as to why he helped the team, with the most likely reason being he wanted to create a power vacuum so that he could become the next emperor. It makes him a rather unique character overall.
Finally, the version I played, Dawn of Souls included an epilogue about some of the fallen characters. As I've never actually played it through, it would be hard to include elements from it in my review, though, it really doesn't tie up the loose ends from what I saw as it deals with the afterlife of the fallen rebels.
FFII plays very similar to the rest of the series, at first glance. It's a turn based JRPG in which you can use magics and combat to deal major attacks to your enemy. However, it differs in its skill leveling. Rather than have experience based levels, this game tried something new in that you leveled your characters stats up not by winning fights, but using abilities. This allowed you to level up very quickly, and actually allowed you to cheat such in earlier versions through a glitch in the command programming.
While this is a little tedious, and requires more planning in character development, it allows you to make the characters anything you want really. Where as the characters were meant to be a Warrior/Paladin, Black Mage/Archer, Monk/White Mage, and a Dark Knight, you can make them anything you want. For me, I ended up with four red mages capable of any spell and having some major stats in attack, defense, and HP. However, I made sure they were capable of such early on.
Other characters come in built up already to some extent, Minwu as a White Mage, Josef as an engineer/Monk, Gordon a warrior, Leila the Thief/Pirate, Scott the Red Mage, and Ricard the Dragoon. These characters come and go in your party until Leon rejoins you in the latter half of the game and you can build their stats, though, save for Minwu allowing you to boost Firion, Marie, and Guy's stats early on, it's not really that important to do so.
The game also allowed the player to be immersed more in that talking to certain people with the right learned phrase allowed you to learn more from them, or change their reaction to you, be it they realizing you're a rebel and either aiding or attacking you, or allowing you to figure out where you need to go next in the story. Some of these are required in game, and they are the most frustrating, as you can have a stack of learned phrases, but unless you know the right one, you can't progress the story.
Graphically, the game looks decent. It's a 2D top down RPG in adventure mode, and in battle, much like other FF games. There isn't much to say about its in game graphics. However, in the FF Origins Anthology for the PS1, the game got a fairly pretty CG movie.
If only the rest of the game was this pretty, right? This wasn't included in the version I played, but it was in the PSP and iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app version from what I understand. It looks very pretty to me, though I kind of like Dawn of Souls' chibi characters as well.
The music playing throughout the video is the Rebel Army Marching theme, which can be heard here.
Uematsu's craft shines through here better than any other piece in the game...besides one magnificently glorious piece, that got its start here.
Don't you just love the Chocobo theme?
This piece brings us to the final point of interest for FFII, the legacy of it. See, Final Fantasy is special in that each new title brings something new to the title Other long running series, mainly Zelda and Mario, will get to feature this too when I get to them (the Halo series also went over these, though not as well). As such, I'm going to go over them.
The legacy of FFII was that it brought two mainstays of the series, one I just hinted at, was the Chocobos. The yellow feathered mounts first appeared in FFII as modes of transport, and personally, I'm glad they did.
The other equally as important mainstay, was Cid.
Cid in this game is a former white knight and member of the Fynn Army (the army that became the Wild Rose rebellion). This was where he first took to the skies bring you and your companions along. It would have been nice to take up arms with him at your side, but that would have to wait for a few more games.
The final thing this game brought to the Final Fantasy series was the overabundance of Star Wars tributes, references, and out and out plot stealing. Whether it was intentional or not, it gave us Biggs and Wedge in later FF's and was pretty much the cause of XII, and for that, I'm grateful.
So, that's Final Fantasy II. Have you played it yet? What did you think of the leveling system? How are the remakes? Do you prefer the older one that allowed you to cheat the leveling system? Aren't the chibi's awesome??? Burning questions all, so let me know, and stay tuned for more Final Fantasy greatness to come in the rest of this (at least) sixteen part crossover series.
-Sara
p.s. In case you missed it, the series started yesterday with Sara's Top Ten Games with Final Fantasy in the Title. Check it out if you want to learn more about the series.
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