Back for the second part of my Final Fantasy Legend II analysis! As I
hinted in my first post’s title, a good 50% of the philosophy at work behind FFL2’s finely tuned assemblage of pixels
could be summed up in one word : COMPLEXITY, ladies and gentlemen. Not only is FFL2 an incredibly complex game by 1990’s
standards, but some of the innovations it introduced managed to remain fresh
and relevant even by today’s standards.
To fully appreciate how forward-thinking FFL2 was at the time of its release, you
have to remember the context. In 1990, the Game Boy had been in operation for
roughly one year and a half and yet had to produce its biggest masterpieces,
especially regarding the Holy Realm of RPG: Link’s
Awakening was still three years away,
and let’s not even talk about the Pokemon
series, which was still deep in the recesses of Satoshi Tajiri’s brain at that
time. We may have forgotten it nowadays, in a gaming era where every new
generation of consoles brings little more than a few hardly noticeable graphic
enhancements, but back then, in the late 8-bit era, every single year saw
quantum leaps in terms of graphical quality and gameplay. FFL2 is the epitome of that relentless pursuit of innovation and betterment, and one just needs to compare it to Game Boy
best-sellers of 1989 like Super Mario
Land and Ducktales to realise
that. Not only is FFL2 more complex
than any other Game Boy game of that time, but it also affords the supreme
luxury to be more complex than most home console RPGs of that time, including
its big brother Final Fantasy.
One can indeed sense that something is
brewing upon the first minutes of playing the game, when one is kindly required
to compose their own four-member party from scratch and presented with eight models of main
character and six models of teammates to choose from. Talk about customization,
especially in 1990! As one may rightfully expect, all these characters have
wildly different abilities with various degrees of efficiency: this brings a
tremendous amount of variety to the fold and gives you an enormous number of
combinations to choose from, from the sleekest to the lousiest. This allows you
to tailor-make your party according to your level of mastery and/or the level
of challenge you desire, with a precision rarely equalled—even in modern games.
To add an extra layer of complexity, weapons have radically different effects and
proprieties depending on the character using them, which forces the player to
tinker and experiment quite a lot in order to learn how to operate them. Here’s
one revelatory example: Guns, like all weapons, can be equipped by several
characters and have a limited number of uses. If you give a Gun to a Human or a
Mutant, the said Gun will run its course and you’ll have to buy a new one; but
give the Gun to a Robot and it can be used endlessly, providing that you sleep
in some inn to replenish the use counter, and it will boost the Robot’s defence
stats to boot! Well, good luck trying to figure that on your own when you’re playing for the first time. Let’s face
it: FFL2 is one of these games that
absolutely require the reading of its instruction manual if one doesn’t want to
end up horribly lost. I didn’t bother to do so at first, so sure was I that I
would breeze through what I thought was an innocuous early-stages Game Boy
game; but after a fairly long bit of uncomfortable guessing, trial-and-errors
and grasping at straws, I admitted my failure at understanding fully the rules
of FFL2 and decided to download the
instruction manual—which, en passant, is a mammoth of an essay with its 80
pages bristling with information—and to my great delight, things suddenly
became much clearer. That’s not to say that the game suddenly became a walk in
the park, for there were other obstacles to overcome; but more on that in my
next post.
To further enhance the general complexity
at work, non-linearity is a constant in FFL2,
from the way the game world is structured to the way the player is bound to
discover and explore it. Instead of roaming a single Earth-like world with
continents separated by oceans like in virtually every other RPG under the
gaming sun, FFL2 sets you out to
explore parallel worlds set on a vertical axis, one upon another, and connected
by a tree-like structure called the “Pillar of Sky”. You get access to that
Pillar and then to other worlds, progressing upwards until you reach the top
and save the world—business as usual, shall we say. This concept, obviously
borrowed from Norse mythology, is highly uncommon and a fertile ground for
interesting developments involving more complexity. It allows the introduction
of vastly different worlds of various sizes, from a one-cavern world to a
shogun-era pastiche, without forgetting a glorious, shiny megalopolis; the
coexistence of such different places, which would have seemed jarring in a
single unified world, is perfectly palatable in FFL2’s universe of parallel dimensions—more than that, one gets
actually eager to see what kind of surprise the next world has in store. Your
primary purpose for roaming these worlds is to recover a mass of McGuffins, and
one could legitimately have feared that FFL2
would play like a giant fetch quest; but thanks to the huge variety of the
parallel worlds, the player is instead treated to a fascinating, thrilling
adventure that packs loads of surprises and unexpected twists and turns.
Instead of following the good ol’ ‘Village-Dungeon-Boss-rinse and repeat’
template, the game constantly breaks the rhythm and gives you very different
tasks to fulfil in each world. You explore pleasantly various places, more
often than not devoid of any resident boss to beat to a pulp, and get the opportunity
to interact and bond with NPCs in each world, all things that give a strangely
gentle and relaxed vibe to a game that nonetheless leans rather on the tough
and unforgiving side of RPG. You’re also free to travel between worlds at
leisure, which is quite convenient for reasons that I will detail in my third
post; it’s thus not uncommon to find yourself travelling several worlds
backwards over the course of a playthrough, sometimes all the way back to the
first world, which is incidentally your home world. This is of course possible
in most RPGs, but one hardly ever has reasons to do so apart from the
occasional force-fed, story-induced backtracking, and doing so on one’s own
free will in order to take a nostalgic peek at the place where it all started usually
only yields feelings of emptiness and disappointment. Not so in that game,
where you always have excellent reasons to come back to your world while at the
same time being cleverly forbidden to set foot in your home village, making you
effectively a roaming outcast until your task is complete. Talk about teasing!
As a whole, it’s fair to say that non-linearity reigns supreme in FFL2, making the game an intricate and
layered offering well above most console RPGs of that time, both on home
consoles and handhelds—including, as a matter of fact, Final Fantasy.
Just like a zealous ice cream parlour clerk
generously showering your ice cream box with a flurry of toppings, FFL2 adds a great many intriguing
details to this complex mix, making it in effect even more layered and
enticing. Here are some of the yummy toppings:
—Extra characters routinely join your party, making it a five-member gang, and fight by your side for a given amount of time before
taking their leave and following their own road. On top of providing some interesting
distraction, this rather unique configuration allows you to deepen your
strategies by using the extra character’s abilities to your advantage.
—The Inn system is radically different from
anything I’ve seen before: instead of paying a fixed yet ever-rising price to
rest your party, you pay a pro rata amount depending on how many HP your party
needs to replenish fully. For instance, if each of your party members lost 50 HP,
your night of well-deserved rest at the local Inn will cost you 200 GP. The
rate remains constant throughout the game, with one HP costing one GP. But—and
that’s where things become interesting—should your team’s HP meters be full, you
can still sleep at the inn free of charge to replenish the use counters of your
spells and weapons! That’s a very neat and fair system that lets you pay only
for the damage you’ve been dealt, and one that I would like to encounter more
often in the Realm of RPG.
—In a light-hearted and cheeky move, the game
allows you to change the Overworld music. Getting bored of the ubiquitous
“Legacy” theme? That’s not an issue: take a stroll to the nearest bar, check
the jukebox, and for a modest amount of money, you can select your favourite
tune for the overworld. It’s not mandatory, but it’s certainly a nice touch.
—The storyline is captivating and
intricate, without being overly convoluted. I usually don’t care that much
about the narrative in RPGs, especially in older ones, but this story left a
pleasant impression on me. It joyously blends Norse and Greek mythologies in
typical J-RPG fashion and sprinkles it with a healthy dose of modern
references, from Indiana Jones to 80’s Super Sentais. It also packs a decent
amount of twists and turns, including the startling innuendo that (SPOILER)
your beloved father, who you pursue through the whole game, may very well live
a double life and have sired a daughter in one of the parallel worlds you’re
visiting. Talk about shock value! (END OF SPOILER) At any rate, the story is
more than satisfying and perfectly falls into the whole picture of complexity
drawn by FFL2’s rudimentary yet
potent assemblage of pixels.
—The game takes place in a highly unusual
type of world for an RPG, in which all races coexist peacefully. This point is
never addressed or justified in any way by the storyline and is pretty much
taken for granted: as a result, your village and every other town bristle with
all types of creatures, from robots to slime-like monsters. No racial wars and
no Monsters-against-Humans trope in the world of FFL2: that’s unusual, very forward-thinking for 1990, and
pleasantly refreshing. Even weirder, if you choose a non-human as your main
character at the beginning of the game, your parents will still be regular
humans! It feels like the game is gently making fun of the ever-present racial
tropes in RPGs by throwing that racial potpourri at the player’s face and
acting like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. And while this has no influence
on the gameplay, it certainly adds some originality to the game and sets it
apart from regular RPGs—all the more so in 1990.
So, here we are. Half of the Final Fantasy Legend II equation lies in
its ground-breaking complexity, the level of which was unseen on consoles at
the time, especially handhelds. But this game is not only complex: it is also
nerve-rackingly hard, and I’ll cover that second half of the equation in my
next post. As for now, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!
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