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A long, long time ago, a young boy got a GameBoy for Christmas. With it
came a coupon book, courtesy of his grandmother, which held vouchers for
fifty half-price rentals from the local Phar-Mor. The boy hadn't had a lot
of experience with non-computer video games, except for a short rental of a
Super Nintendo once or twice on the holidays, but he knew what he liked --
Final Fantasy. So he went over to Phar-Mor, and lo and behold, there were
two titles with Final Fantasy in them available in the GameBoy
section.
And that's how I first found The Final Fantasy Adventure and
Final Fantasy Legend II, aka SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu. It's the
second one we're talking about today. As there wasn't a lot of variety at
the Phar-Mor, I played those two games quite a bit. FFA, I beat and enjoyed.
FFL2, well.. that took me a lot longer to appreciate. It was hard, it
was confusing, and I didn't like how my monster characters kept turning into
Fly things when I fed them the wrong kind of meat. I didn't have too much
patience with that when I was twelve, especially since I had already played
Final Fantasy II on the SNES.
The next year, Final Fantasy Legend III appeared on the shelves,
and I got hooked on that one for a while. I liked how it was so much more
like the "real" Final Fantasy games, with official characters with official
names, an actual plot, and a level system that actually had experience
points involved. I played all the way through that game, then played it
through again. But then, while I was preparing for my third time at the
final boss, it hit me.
This time around was exactly like the last time. And the time before
that. I was using the same characters in exactly the same roles -- because
forget about the monster/beast/robot forms in FFL3, they were more limited
than useful. I had played through the entire game the same way as
before, and was now doing the exact same thing to prepare for the end,
namely trawling for the one specific enemy encounter that got me the most XP
in one go.
And it was boring.
Seriously, I had four characters, two human and two mutant/magic user
types. I could change them into monsters, beasts, androids, and robots --
but only a handful for any given level range, and they changed on me if they
gained a level. There was the potential for a lot of variety here, but in
the end? I kept them as humans and mutants, because those were the types
that got the best use out of the spells and weapons specifically designed to
take down the final boss. I could gave them any spell that I liked, and
found no real difference in ability. They each had their own names, but
otherwise had no real character to them. The major events that did happen in
the storyline often occurred with key bits of information lacking, so that I
had trouble understanding why Character X had just tried to attack
his sometime comrades, and then blamed it all on the power of the mystic
swords, or how in the span of 10 years the world went from medieval to sci-
fi. That sort of thing I let by the first time 'round, but by the third, it
was kind of getting to me.
Then I went back to FFL2, and fell in love again. Variety, wonderful
variety to be had! And the variety actually mattered! You could choose to
make all your characters into monsters, and it could work! It would be hard
as hell, but it could work! The game's system of increasing stats as your
character exercised it made much more sense than just racking up experience
points. The story was ridiculously minimal, but at least it did the job of
showing me the varied worlds of the game, and could do so without the need
for established party members.
It had taken me a while, but I finally realized. FFL3 was a generic
little game with a cool airship and a shell of a story. FFL2 was an
adventure that I had to play through, almost like a D&D campaign, and the
NPCs had little stories of their own that I just happened to catch glimpses
of in passing. The second and third FFL games may have had about the same
amount of story to them, but FFL2's "passing through" approach worked far
better than FFL3's attempt to center the story on the main characters.
Of the two, can you all guess which one I currently own in two languages,
and am planning to buy again once the remake comes out? It sure isn't
number 3 in the series. That one, I can leave behind me. It's just not
interesting anymore.
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