Final Fantasy II - A Full and Unbiased Review
The purpose of Final Fantasy II for the iPhone isn't meant to constitute a game: its meant to be a distraction to keep me from noticing the couple groping and kissing each other ("Oh... Don't do that here") who are pressed against my side while I'm on the tram trying to get to school. With my headphones blaring the succulent sounds of barely re-imagined midi/chip synth music into my ears while the young lovers are joining me at the hip into their love affair, Final Fantasy II succeeds in its purpose to allow me to either pretend that I'm in a fantasy world of poorly created pseudo 3D perspective, or phase out while the little swords go "rip rip rip" and I one handily smite the Green Skinned Ogre.
But immersion is one thing (and trying to pretend that in search of his girlfriends behind, her significant others hand didn't just flutter across my arse falls within this category) but how does the game work? Lets throw up a tag line called....
INTERFACE
Flack wrote:Conventional d-pads just don't translate well to touch screen controls.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:It's just that sometimes you're playing a game that really doesn't work with a touch screen environment, because it was developed in the 80s, like Final Fantasy II.
A four pointed star sits as an outline in the bottom left of the screen: with large, pointed shards that indicate the four cardinal directions, the buttons can be easily depressed to ease up on movement speed with a slight hovering of the thumb or switched to another movement without delay or guess work. While obvious, this allows the character to be moved with little difficulty and shows an oft forgotten awareness on the park of the designers on how and in what situations human beings are playing their game. Such as how doom for the iPhone was forced to hamstring a sort of odd accommodation to create buttons where no button press can be felt, Final Fantasy II solves the movement issue without any fuss or difficulty.
Battles are a little less conductive though straightforward: actions scroll from top to bottom characters without any issues but what can become aggravating, is that each action must be selected and the target then touched. Across the bottom layer of icons, it was a simple matter to become used to this interface but at the same time, my eye always scrolls across the icons to look for an auto battle function. Obviously this is Final Fantasy and that couldn't be allowed ("old school final fantasy" as opposed to the newer where its OKAY to automate the larger portion of the game into a predefined "Create your own AI" fun fest, but where putting in an auto battle option to make the painful ten or fifteen clicks and swipes to get through a single battle less tedious is anathema) and with the complaints already understood, it takes a (little) disagreeable amount of masochistic feeling to level up.
But this game, and Square(Soft)Enix as a whole show an awareness of the platform that is forgotten by other developers: a simulated game pad in Shining Force (and Streets of Rage) proved to be an inaccurate and cumbersome way to replicate the Genesis layout. Playability isn't an issue with this FF game however and it is mildly interesting to touch a screen and remember that someone had to "Think This Shit Through."
The Game
Revisions from the NES? Does one even have to care? No? Okay then... The story is the forward progression of a character's location that has been tried and tested in this genre: go to city, talk to character/grab item, go to next area, etc, etc. But the story has a feeling of revision instead of a straight text translation: as compared to the original Final Fantasy I, there is a coherent backdrop and relevant dialogue that feels prototypical for the Final Fantasy series. The gist of this, is that the character is important in a storyline and relevant to events but the fact that this narrative is even in place hints that some wider points of the game must have been changed in conversion to English and to the iphone.
Now.... There are one or two elements that are remnants of an earlier age of game design: the main point is the virtual fence, or artificially difficult monsters that will kill an entire party if encountered. These monstrosities (which made me cringe when I later encountered them in non-buffed form) are encountered if the little array of pixels that is the main character, walk off the intended course the designers had for the player. Its punishing if the game hadn't been saved for a while and even worse because its difficult to gauge exactly where to go in three or four points of the game. Its a different mode of thinking, a different way of design and progression, and its interesting to see it survive in this revision.
But the game itself, without being pointlessly broken into components and taken in some random fashion is enjoyable: leveling gives that addictive edge it always has, the story is constructed well enough to push the player onto the next point, and the level of craftsmanship and attention that has gone into the larger details of the game are felt... For me personally, its one of the few experiences where I've been able to see the testing that went on behind the scenes and understand the direction and the elements the designers had to work with.
As a product, as a journey, its a rewarding one to take but GOD DAMN IT WHY ISN'T THERE AN AUTOBATTLE FUNCTION?
---Three and a half out of Five Stars---
Sidenote: Being the first 2D Final Fantasy that I've played outside of an emulator in... Several years, the lack of a speedup/frameskip/fast forward function to level at insanely fast rates was keenly felt though this was put aside for the review.