YMMV / Final Fantasy II

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Here.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Borghen, the foul arch-traitor who assisted the Empire in taking the heroes' hometown and thereby resulting in the deaths of their parents, turns out to be the weakest boss in the game by a mile. In fact, the boss monster the party just fought, the Adamantoise, was far more dangerous. Moreover, after his death he sets off a trap that causes the death of Josef, meaning that this wimp also gets the honor of being the first Final Fantasy bad guy to kill off a playable character. Zig-zagged by the zombified version of Borghen you can encounter in the final dungeon, who is one of the few bosses in the game who can't be nuked instantly with a Matter spell or the Blood Sword (the former of which aren't worth using due to a quirk of his defence stats, and the latter of which will actually heal him), but otherwise is very easy for an endgame boss.
  • The Emperor also fits this trope when you fight him in the Cyclone, where he's a pushover, being a relatively weak opponent who's faced after two waves of enemies and alongside a handful of other minions. As the Final Boss, he's significantly harder, but since the Blood Sword is a Percent Damage Attack, it only takes about 16 hits to kill him, which may translate into only a few attacks.
• Awesome Music: The ending theme, "Finale," is one of the most tender and moving for any Final Fantasy title. It was also released as a vocal version titled "Love Will Grow."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The giant beavers at the bottom of the Ice Cavern. Aside from giving a chance to helpfully inform us that "Guy speak beaver," they have absolutely no relevance to the plot or to anything else in the game, but nevertheless you must talk to them to proceed. They were meant to have been the series' first appearance of Moogles, one of several races encountered in the world, but were ultimately Dummied Out.
• Broken Base:
  • The character progression system is what either makes or breaks the game for most people. For patient gamers who enjoy number-crunching, the fact that you have near-absolute freedom to build each and every party member however you want down to the individual points of each stat adds a lot of replayability and general creative freedom to approach the game however you like. For people who prefer a standard level system, don't appreciate the system's general opacity and many perverse incentives (there's simply nothing more efficient for powering up than beating yourself up), or simply want to plow through the story, they'll probably quit at around Kashuan Keep. The version ported to the 25th Anniversary box set had to ramp down the difficulty because so few fans were willing to sit through it.
  • Whether heavy equipment hindering magic and stat atrophy were good or bad mechanics. Supporters believed they allowed for solidified combat roles amongst characters rather than the inevitable party full of Magic Knights that the Dawn of Souls based versions produced, who only differ in whether they use White or Black magic. Detractors believe that such penalties slowed down the game and added unnecessary difficulty in an already punishingly hard game with a grindy and divisive progression system, feeling the removal of both mechanics made the Dawn of Souls based versions more enjoyable.
• Complete Monster: Emperor Mateus, the primary villain, is the ruler of Palamecia. A tyrant defined by his arrogance and greed, Mateus unleashes the Legions of Hell to attack the innocent peoples of the world and aid him in his quest of total global domination, seeking to destroy all those who won't submit themselves to his iron-fisted rule. In order to remove the threat of the island of Deist and their Wyvern-riding warriors, the Dragoons, Mateus poisoned the Wyverns' water supply, wiped out the creatures, then exterminated the weakened Dragoons. He also enslaved the peoples of Salamand and Bafsk, the latter of which he forced to construct the Dreadnought, an air warship which he uses to rain death upon cities that oppose him. Following the Dreadnought's destruction, Mateus instead uses a massive Cyclone to completely obliterate the towns of Paloom, Altair, Gatrea and Poft, killing all within. Dying in the attempt to wipe out Fynn as well, Mateus's soul was split into a dark half and a light half. The dark half conquered hell, returned to the world of the living, murdered the last Dragoon, Ricard, and revealed his new intention to destroy the world with his newfound power. Meanwhile, Mateus's light half seized the throne of heaven, and, after briefly pretending to be a pure being to tempt the souls of four heroes who had died in the war against him, vows to grant them eternal suffering once they realize the light half of Mateus's soul is just as evil as his dark half.
• Contested Sequel: Among fans, the quality of Final Fantasy II as both a game and a Final Fantasy I sequel is a matter of heated debate on account of its unusual take on stat progression systems, in which you can only upgrade stats by undertaking specific actions (which can lead to Violation of Common Sense strategies like attacking yourself to increase multiple stats at once). While its plot is generally considered a huge improvement over the "Dungeons & Dragons with the Serial Numbers Filed Off" approach of I, audiences are at far less of a consensus on the actual gameplay.
• Critical Dissonance: Reviews for the game are largely mixed-to-average, while fan reception is mostly mixed-to-negative.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • A few creatures fit this description, but Chaos Riders from Soul of Rebirth are the worst example. Insanely high defence and magic defence (you'll be lucky to inflict any damage at all); maxed out spells like Confuse, Slow and, worst of all, Osmose^note Unlike the other spells, Osmose never misses and it always drains 120-150 MP, no matter how much Level Grinding you've done; a tendency to attack in groups and a powerful draining physical attack if it were to run out of MP.
  • Anything that can inflict Confusion. They usually target everyone, cast it almost every round, and unlike in later games, your characters don't snap out of it upon being hit. Your confused characters will never target the enemies and take quite a few rounds to return to normal, and late in the game you're often doing so much damage that your characters can kill themselves in a matter of seconds, meaning that navigating certain dungeons is a matter of whether or not you get ambushed by these things. (The Mysidian Tower is the worst, having three enemies that can do this- Imp, Devil's Bloom, and Vampirette/Vampire Girl.)
  • Cockatrices make their glorious return from the original Final Fantasy. They still inflict petrification, which is still an effective instant-kill. This is a property of their standard physical attacks. And they come in flocks of up to six. Your party size is only four.
  • Sorcerers and Wizards that first appear in the Coliseum halfway through the game. You have a 3/64 chance of running into them (along with Captains and Sergeants, which are hard on their own), and they love party-wide status and damage spells, such as Curse, Toad, Stop, Confuse, Break, Warp, Death, Osmose, Drain, and Flare (most of which they drop as tomes upon defeat). Sorcerers can also cast Haste on the Captains and Sergeants to kill you, and Wizards have high HP and defense. If you didn't get the Ribbon from the Lamia Queen, you're as good as dead.
  • The Hill Gigases in the Deist Cavern hit as hard as the Captains from earlier, if not harder, and have tons of HP compared to other enemies in the dungeon. If that's not frightening enough, there's a distinct possibility of running into two at a time. If you can't run or stick a status ailment like Curse, Blind, or Paralysis on them, they can easily crush your entire party.
  • Mythril Golems in Pandaemonium have absurdly strong physical attacks and defense, along with high HP, which means they can easily kill off your party members one by one if the battle goes too long. A decently-leveled Thunder or non-elemental attacking spell (Holy, Flare, Ultima) is strongly recommended if you want to take them out in any reasonable number of turns. Alternatively, a Blood Sword on a character with a decent Sword proficiency rank will work the same wonders it does against bosses.
  • Most enemies whose physical attacks absorb HP, like Death Riders and Ghosts (special mention to Vampire Girl/Vampirette and Vampire Lady/Succubus for being able to both absorb HP with physical attack and inflict Confusion). Not only does it obviously heal them to attack you, but damage from enemies' physical absorption attacks is calculated the same way as the damage your own party members deal wielding a Blood Sword: It deals as many sixteenths of the target's max HP as there were hits that landed. So, such an enemy scoring even four hits with their physical attack will slam the target for one quarter of their max HP in damage, and that hit count is on the low end for a lot of enemies with this ability. Factor in that you can encounter up to around four such enemies at once, often with other lackeys to worry about on the side, and the danger level starts to snowball fast. Many such enemies are undead, however, which, while sadly immunizing them against doses of their own medicine, does mean spells like Fire, Cure, and Life are effective ways of cutting them down to size.
  • Coeurl can casts Blaster X which paralyzes its victims, and its physical attack can inflict KO status. Coeurl itself is not as dangerous as dragons or golems when your party has been decently levelled up before reaching Pandaemonium, but fighting more than five Coeurls during one random encounters, especially when they are helped by monsters that can use magic (even more so if the monsters get the first strike) can be fatal. It is suggested that the player keeps Backstabber (an item that casts Confuse) they got from Tropical Island and uses it just in case they get overwhelmed by multiple Coeurls.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The game is infamous for its bizarre design choices and grindiness that results in being either outright broken, or almost unplayable if you make a mistake, but the story is noted for being surprisingly complex by NES standards. While the main trio is fairly lackluster, the supporting cast provide solid plotlines, many of whom would become the basis for other characters down the line, and the Emperor is considered the best villain in the NES trilogy, with the game as a whole standing out from its predecessor being a Dungeons and Dragons clone and its successor opting for a more Monster of the Week focused plot and having a somewhat sympathetic Big Bad overshadowed by a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere taking his place as the Final Boss.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Minwu. The developers took notice and turned him into a Breakout Character in the remakes, making him the focus on a secondary storyline unlocked after the game that takes place in the afterlife. Tetsuya Nomura even wanted to include him in Dissidia Final Fantasy (2015). Being an obscenely overleveled character capable of carrying the party to Mysidia to get endgame spells at the start of the game by himself and the singular fourth party member who averts Can't Catch Up both times he joins does that.
  • Ricard Highwind, the last of the Dragoons, has also garnered quite the following. Like Minwu, he is predominantly featured in the secondary storyline in the afterlife, and was the inspiration for Final Fantasy IV Memetic Badass Kain Highwind.
  • Leila is also popular with fans, being a badass pirate and one of the earliest action girls in gaming. Also helps that she's the predecessor of another fellow fan favorite female Pirate Captain.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending, while "bittersweet" with emphasis on "bitter" warmly states that the wounds of the war would heal "in time." Given that about half the world's population centers have been totally wiped out, it's probably going to be a real long time.
• Evil Is Cool: The No-Nonsense Nemesis, afterlife-conquering Emperor inevitably gained a sizable fanbase. Many fans consider him to be one of the franchises most underappreciated baddies as well.
• Fan Nickname: Emperor Bowie for The Emperor.
• Fanon: Firion gets very few lines in the game overall, but usually speaks up during particularly plot-important moments and when dealing with the latest entrant into the fourth character slot. However, it's Maria who asks Gordon to join them in Kashuan, while Firion doesn't say a word. Some fans interpret his silence as disgust, if not outright hatred.
• Franchise Original Sin: Later games in the series got knocked for confusing, unintuitive, or easily broken mechanics, as well as the party members feeling incredibly similar due to an overdose of customization. All that started in II—it's just that II was generally seen as an Oddball in the Series rather than the start of a trend.
• Game-Breaker: Here.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the original and PS1 versions, if one selects a move and then cancels it, the game treated it as if you had performed the move, for the purposes of raising stats. Thus it is possible to get astronomically high strength and magic skills almost as soon as you start the game, if your fingers can take it.
  • When facing single foes if you set a damage spell to multi target you do 1.5 times as much damage (The formula for the damage is the normal damage plus 50% divided by the number of foes).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Given that Leila is effectively the Han Solo to Firion's Luke, that she is the only party member who suffers a Disney Death is now quite ironic.
  • The subtle Gameplay and Story Integration of Ricard's initial specialization in swords (at least in the NES version) casts an extra layer of melancholy over the fact that you can only obtain Excalibur, the legendary ancestral sword of the Dragoons, by bringing news of Ricard's passing to Elina in Deist. Ricard will never be able to take up his knightly order's treasured weapon, despite having the makings of a great wielder for it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Firion and the others are tasked to destroy the Dreadnought, Gordon laments his weakness compared to the heroes and wonders what a pathetic coward like him can do. Guess who accompanies the party when they finally blow up the Dreadnought?
  • The plot's rather infamous Whole-Plot Reference to the original Star Wars Trilogy became a lot more accurate with both Emperor Palpatine's resurrection in The Rise of Skywalker necessitating a final confrontation in his hellish throne room, just like Mateus in Pandaemonium
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Firion has a share of fanworks that pairs him with Maria, Hilda, Minwu, and The Emperor. And that's just outside of the ships from Dissidia.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Emperor's weird death cry in the Japanese version: "UBOAR!" (And to a lesser extent, the English version "UNGAAHH!") Tidus lampshades it in Dissidia Final Fantasy, as seen here.
  • Firion's scene with Hilda (well, actually a Lamia Queen) is popular in Japan as well. His reaction to Hilda's seduction ('Gulp...') has led to him being called 'doutei' or 'virgin' (which rhymes with the Emperor's title, 'koutei').
  • Guy speak beaver.
• Never Live It Down:
  • While the unorthodox level system has been refined by remakes, to this day this is the Final Fantasy game known for being the one where you level up by having your party members attack themselves. In this game a character's aptitude with weapons and spells increase as they use them in battle, and their stats level up when they get used (tanking hits boosts HP and Stamina, using spells boosts MP and Magic, etc.). In the early parts of the game when enemies die in one hit, your party members are much more durable than them and so attacking themselves draws out battles and gives them more stat boosts, and in the lategame the best way to level grind is to fight some early game trash mobs and spam attacks on yourself again since the enemies you're fighting don't matter. However, it's possible to play through the game without having to do this unless you're purposefully trying to power level, and you'll be fine.
  • Firion being seduced by the Lamia Queen disguised as Princess Hilda led to the Japanese fanbase calling him "doutei"/"virgin" and Dissidia Final Fantasy making the inability to talk to women a part of his personality. (The fact that Firion actually gets very little dialogue compared to other characters undoubtedly helps this moment to stand out.)
• Newer Than They Think: This game was the origin of a lot of Final Fantasy standbys. Elements like Cid^note The "Cid of the Lufaine" from FFI is a Posthumous Character added in re-releases, chocobos, etc., which weren't in Final Fantasy I—this comes as a surprise to a lot of people.
• Nightmare Fuel: All things considered, this is the game that is held as one of the darkest entries in the mainline series. The Emperor's cruelty and wanton genocides, the sheer number of characters that die over the course of the story, the melancholy tone of the world map theme, and the hell that is the tumultuous dungeons that do their best to wear you down lead to one heck of an oppressive game. It's not helped that the Emperor straight up made a Deal with the Devil, with demon forces and everything at his beck and call, and takes over Hell itself to depose Satan, just to kill even more.
• Nintendo Hard: The original Famicom version and PS1 port's Normal Mode are quite brutal, which adds in the bleakness of the game. The PS1 port's easy mode and the later remakes have eased up the difficulty of the main game. Soul of Rebirth is arguably even harder, especially when going in blind.
• Older Than They Think: Many of the plot elements—the Evil Empire, Bishounen villain who's seeking godhood, essentially, party members being Killed Off for Real, and even the presence of any plot at all—which many people seem to think only started in the SNES and PS1 era.
• Once Original, Now Common: It really cannot be overstated how ahead of the curve this game was in terms of story. A large cast of characters, an epic plot, and a charismatic and intelligent villain all in a NES-era RPG. You might also recognize these tropes from damn near every JRPG released since then. Unfortunately, anyone to have played nearly any other JRPG since then will probably not be impressed, and nowadays the lack of characterization in the game (especially among the main cast, who are all very flat) is one of the biggest complaints about it.
• Player Punch: The towns you visit visibly go through the wringer over the course of the game, thanks to imperial troops and bombarding airships. After the Cyclone, however, they are gone: just a patch of ruins on the overworld that you can't enter. After being able to visit these places and see their trials for the whole game to that point, knowing that they've been wiped off the map with no survivors... ouch.
• Polished Port: The many remakes and ports of the game do add some content and reduce the annoyances. That said, they don't make enough alterations to keep the game from being contested even among classic fans.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Here.
• Scrappy Weapon: Bows are considered the worst weapon type for various reasons. The first is they are the game's only two-handed weapon, meaning that you can't equip shields, a piece of equipment that is valuable to raising agility due to increasing your evasion in a game where a character increases agility by dodging attacks. Second is that they are catered for characters who stay in the back row, a row which is a bad idea to put characters in as not taking as much damage prevents them from gaining a higher amount of hit points, which means a low max HP and as such any attack that can hit the back row will shave off most if not all of a character's HP. And third if you're playing the original and Pixel Remaster versions, bows give a massive penalty to magic (bigger than any other weapon type), making them a poor fit for magic-focused characters who'd be the best fit to put in the back row to begin with!
• Self-Fanservice: Fanartists seem to have reached the consensus that beneath the robes, Minwu is absolutely shredded.
• Sophomore Slump: Final Fantasy I is a revolutionary, if flawed, game that helped popularize the RPG genre on home consoles. Final Fantasy II is considered by many fans to be one of the lesser games in the franchise due to a variety of issues with its gameplay. Later games from the classic era wouldn't make the same mistakes and are all generally well-received.
• Special Effect Failure: The One-Winged Angel form of the Emperor is supposed to be intimidating, being a large foe that blends in with the black background of the NES version of the game. With the move to actual battle background graphics in later versions, his sprite repeatedly changed to accommodate for this. So when Pixel Remaster decided to reuse his Final Fantasy All the Bravest sprite recolored, which in and of itself was a redone take on the original sprite, he was inexplicably put on the newer backgrounds (and a generic Pandemonium one at that rather than his proper final encounter graphics), resulting in a disproportionate and awkward-looking floating torso that doesn't even remotely look intimidating or all that interesting.
• Spiritual Sequel: The game is something of a Spiritual Prequel to the SaGa series. The gameplay is the same, they share the same "go anywhere" philosophy usually utilized in WRPGs, and Everybody's Dead, Dave tends to be a driving force in both games' themes, especially in the Romancing sequels.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Rebel Army theme is a soundalike of "Throne Room" from Star Wars: A New Hope.
• That One Boss: Beef Gate encourages the player to develop their party and not bite more than they can chew. Yet, one boss character named Lamia Queen stands out. She is the only boss that was fought inside the rebel's hideout that caught many players off guard in the past because they forgot to recover their HP and MP after finishing a long quest in Deist, and did not think that they would fight another strong foe so soon, especially not in their own turf. Other than her high magic capabilities and strong physical attack which can inflict Sleep status on her targets, she has tendency to cast Blink XVI on herself and Charm IX to confuse her targets with high success rate. If Lamia Queen gets the first strike and she casts Blink XVI on herself, unless the player have one party member with high levelled Dispel to negate Lamia Queen's Blink or other magic that inflict negative status ailment, just consider the fight over and restart the game from the last Load.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Pixel Remaster of FFII has brought a strange variation of "They Changed It Back, Now It Sucks!". The return of the divisive magic penalty system for weapons, shields and armor (not helped by the remaster not informing players in-game of this) along with the removal of the Soul of Rebirth mode added in the Dawn of Souls remake and the Arcane Labyrinth Bonus Dungeon of the 20th Anniversary remake has led some to see the Pixel Remaster version as a downgrade. The fact that the iOS and Android releases based on the 20th Anniversary version were removed from stores when the Pixel Remaster version released only increased the enmity.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Between the Anyone Can Die story, the quirky game design and the unreasonably cruel difficulty, the overall feel is of wandering through a dying world. NPCs continually insult your party and tell you that you're all useless teenagers (though they warm up quickly), and some, counting the numbers, have pointed out that over half of the world's population is killed over the course of the game. While the heroes save what's left of the world, Leon still believes that he and his four friends can't go back to the way they were before, although Firion holds out hope that Leon will return. The crushing despair of this game may have been why Final Fantasy III went for a Lighter and Softer approach like the first game.
  Duothimir: FF2 in a nutshell: Everyone dies, the heroes are left with crippling depression and PTSD, the end.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Despite explicitly being called a man in his introduction, Minwu is often mistaken for a woman. It may have something to do with his looks, wearing a top that exposes his navel and a long white skirt, and being the only male White Mage in the franchise.

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