01/08/2014

Final Fantasy Legend II (2): Playing hard to get



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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