#even if you can put tons of equipment in your deck that doesn't mean you should

[dravidious]

Actually hang on I just saw this card and it made me so angry that I needed to make a version that isn't completely terrible

This version is still terrible, to be clear. For context on just how terrible it is, here are two cards that always destroy the creature AND have an extra bonus

You're more amazing than Branches

Quick card design in text form

Parry

UR

Instant

Gain control of target spell that targets you or a permanent you control. You may choose new targets for it.

[pocketbelt]

Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster (PC/Steam Deck)

This is the real one for testing how good the Pixel Remasters are, as FF2 is the series' black sheep (some might say first black sheep, the next one being either VIII or XIII depending on you ask; the former less so these days due to rehabilitation and the existence of the latter). The original was a nightmare game of arcane mechanics and baffling decisions that made playing it a pain in the ass, and all subsequent releases tinker with it in slightly different ways. The Pixel Remaster is a composite of the PS1, GBA and PSP versions and their tweaks and fixes, and the field for "definitive version" is rather tougher here than for FF1.

For my part, I don't consider the PSP's bonus dungeon a worthwhile addition, and the GBA's post-game is conceptually rad ("Soul of Rebirth", a post-game scenario about characters who died in the story continuing the fight in the afterlife) but a bit of a git as you have to actively plan for it during the main game. The Pixel Remaster has neither of these and I don't think it's worse for it, and it has a number of new cutscene depictions for various events in place of the PS1 3D FMVs (also used in the PSP version), which work fine for the aesthetic level it's going for, but I don't think the FMVs necessarily jar with the pure 2D sprite aesthetic. The sprites and animations are, like the PR for I, vastly superior to the other versions, though. There is some background balance tweaking of enemies and certain aspects, but it's similar enough to the other post-NES versions to not matter too much.

I think the Pixel Remaster does pip the "definitive edition" post, but only by a bit; the presentation and performance are the key factors, but as they play close enough to each other, I would recommend the GBA version as well if you're interested in its Soul of Rebirth post-game mode. Some of the "balance" tweaks in PR also don't favour the player - Teleport's accuracy has been nerfed so you can't wield it as an indiscriminate deathspell as effectively - but most do.

On its own merits, FFII is a game with weird mechanics mostly fixed by removing the deranged "skill/stat decay" mechanic from the original: increasing some skills or stats made others decay accordingly, making narrow specialisation something to strictly enforce and also a bastard to actually maintain. All later versions remove that, and without it FF2 is interesting but still stumbles because of secret mechanics and hidden stats it doesn't tell you about (like, for example, how equipping staves - even ones named things like "Wizard's Staff" - puts a heavy debuff on your magic damage output). There's some flexibility for tweaking characters and making monsters here; HP and defence stats are increased by getting hit in battle, so there's nothing stopping you from strapping armour to your chosen spellcaster, putting them on the frontline and letting them build tank-like defences as they do their usual work. I find that quite appealing, and I think with further refinements you could make a quite engrossing system out of this.

And indeed, they arguably did; in FFII's weird skill system, you can easily see the roots of later entries' mechanics and style. FFIII's job system is basically a merging of this and FFI's character system, which FFV would then improve upon. FFII's story-telling improvements lay the foundations for FFIV making the series come into its own, and its focus on customising characters to suit your own wants or needs is basically the basis for FFVI's magicite/Esper system (which, in turn, gave rise to FFVII's materia, which fed into VIII's Draw, and you can draw a line from them to FFX's Sphere Grid which leads to XII, etc etc). It is as important an entry as any other of the "early" (i.e. pre-VII) Final Fantasies, and debatably moreso than some others.

But, even in the PR, building skill levels in weapons and spells (individually!) requires spamming their use a ton per fight, meaning the best way to build skill levels efficiently is often to let one party member blast or carve up whole fights by themselves, and having to do that across a lot of fights. It's still short by modern RPG standards, being a NES RPG in the end, but your runtime can easily reach 20 hours because making some things effective just actually requires grinding them out mindlessly. The PR wins out here by having a really effective auto-battle mechanic, if nothing else, and while I can't say definitively, I'm pretty sure it is balanced a bit easier on the whole than other versions, which does help with the required grinding.

Like FFI, FFII is well worth a look for "academic" reasons, but where FFI's purity and simplicity make it easy to just zone out with if you want something to just tap through, FFII is a bit harder to recommend in that way. I don't think it has enough character/aesthetic zest to motivate grinding, nor enough mechanical depth to motivate it, but it almost does. It's an easy enough ride if nothing else, and you could do a lot worse. Its reputation is worse than it deserves, but it does deserve some of that rep.

I have more waffle about FFII broadly and also some of the mechanics shit under the jump as this is getting long, but yeah, it's okay, not critical.

FFII is very interesting in the series as it makes a number of marked additions and step-ups from I; a more involved attempt at a story, with (even on the NES) scripted fights, cutscenes and the debuts of even more of the series' recurring images and concepts (Chocobos, Dragoons, Ultima and various other spells like Drain and Osmose, more unique status effects like Mini and Toad, the Front & Back Row mechanic, spell multi-targeting in exchange for reduced damage per target, Leviathan, the designs of various monsters locking-in or taking shape like Iron Giant gaining his single red eye). There's a sizeable cast, your fourth party member rotates regularly through a list of NPCs whose spread of skills helps inform their character and history, there's even tricks like forced-loss fights to sell story moments even at this early stage. These are super noticeable when you play it back-to-back with FFI, which makes FFI feel even more ancient.

I do need to do that post or essay or whatever I've thought about of drawing a line through the main FF series and tying together where they obviously draw from each other, and where they seem to draw from each other. It's often said "Final Fantasy is a series where every entry is completely different" and the validity of that isn't as clear-cut as it seems (like, yeah, it's a different cast and world and story every time but also the series is very clearly a lot more mechanically iterative than it lets on). I got into it above already but FFII is clearly the origin point for a lot of what III, IV, V and VI got up to. It's fun to see the roots so clearly.

So I had played II before this, I made an attempt at the NES original via emulator and of course that went nowhere, and made an attempt at the PS1 version via emulator and that also didn't get far because of frequent load times. I did eventually own the Dawn Of Souls GBA remake two-pack of I and II, and that was where I first played it properly. It wasn't until this playthrough, of the Pixel Remaster, that I actually made an effort to look into how II's skill mechanics work, and how they're still just a bit too fucking stupid for their own good.

So, magic. Odds are high if you play FFII that you'll find White Magic (healing, buffs, etc) supremely useful and Black Magic (damage and killing) extremely situational. Black Magic will be super useful when hitting a weakness (using fire on undead, thunder on aquatic enemies, blizzard on lizards and amphibians, etc) and against enemies with no weaknesses (most humanoids) it'll not be worth the cast versus just hitting them physically. Even if you commit and equip staves (which bear names like Mage's Staff, Wizard's Staff and so on), spell damage will never get terribly high.

Because there's a secret stat on all equipment that determines how much it nerfs magic when you equip it. I only learned that this run.

All equipment has a secret number that weighs down the output of the magic damage formula, and that includes all staff weapons, even ones explicitly named and described as magical. All armour pieces also have this number, and only a very scant few have extremely low (-1) or no debuff effect. All headpieces except for Golden Hairpin and Ribbon have a significant nerf value, all hand gear except Power Armlet (-2) and Protect Ring (-0; you only start seeing these at the end of the game) have significant nerf values, and all body armours except for Plate/Cuirass type armours (-1) or the Black/White Garb (-1) and Robe (-0) armours have massive nerf values. Staves have the least nerf value among weapons (-5) as do all knives (-5). Shields are right out (-70), and dual-wielding just adds the debuffs together; only the Masamune sword has a -0 among weapons, and it's an endgame sword found in a very subtly hidden secret room in the final dungeon.

The only other option is to go bare-handed, which has no debuff, of course. And there is not a single piece of gear that provides a buff/+ effect, no.

What makes this aggravating is FFII, even in Pixel Remaster form, has no indication that this is a mechanic or how things work anywhere. II goes to great lengths to make sure you always know where to go next and what to do, and some versions (including the PR version) add wizards to the first room who provide basic tutorials, and no version thinks to explain this shit in any way. Once you kit your dedicated spellcaster(s) out with no weapons, no gloves, hairpin or nothing and only Cuirass (in PR, plate in older versions) or Robe armours, their spell damage spikes, magic becomes completely and perfectly viable to use instead of weapons and even multi-targeting becomes worthwhile for some encounters. It becomes so good you can rend all the endgame bosses asunder in 2-3 shots, and the final boss in only slightly more.

It's clearly a hold-over from the deranged original NES version, one of the bizarre mechanics designed for "balance" that just make it a worse experience. I'm actually sad the Pixel Remaster doesn't scrap it or at least blunt it considerably; FFII is a game in need a remake or a good rebalancing/rework mod/ROM hack (that probably already exists but I haven't checked) to sort out these background numbers.

In similar fashion the game would be vastly improved by reducing the amount of "skill EXP" that weapons and spells need to rank up. Unless you consciously stop to grind for it, the only thing that'll reach the maximum rank of XVI is Cure, because it's so much more convenient and better than potions and can be used from the overworld/dungeon menu, which still grants usage EXP. You should realistically be able to get one of the core Black Mage spells (Fire/Thunder/Blizzard) to XVI, if not all three, and only need some special effort to make late-game spells like Flare get there for immense reward.

To that end, Ultima is infamously useless in FFII and still is in the Pixel Remaster. It has a special damage formula dependent on you having maxed out weapon ranks and maxed spells, which means it takes an unfathomable amount of grinding to make this hyped plot-important spell worth a shit, never mind immensely powerful. The solution to that is obvious, but they left it in-tact for the PR for some reason.

Also, if you play FFII you'll likely find that your physical attackers will stop gaining usage EXP at some point, even as stronger and stronger enemies come in. Usually you'll be stuck at around Rank 11 for their main weapons, unless you stopped to grind above that. This is because enemies have a secret number (referred to as "monster rank" or similar) that determines whether or not they'll pay out usage EXP, and if your weapon's 'rank' is too much higher than it (or just higher, one of the two) they won't give shit. Also, you need to use the Attack command quite a few times to actually qualify for usage EXP even for monsters you can get it from, so if your stats are too high you'll kill things too fast to get EXP. This also means having to let one person kill everything as the others defend, the same grind method for grinding spell ranks.

Again, that should've been blunted or just stripped out entirely by the Pixel Remaster, never mind other versions. I don't think the "pure" FFII experience is better for it, even if there is a nobility in preserving that as best as possible. But as FFII is fairly well ported (Wonderswan, PS1, GBA, PSP, horribly ugly iOS & Android which also got ported to PC before being taken down and replaced by Pixel Remaster), I think that "intended experience" is fairly well preserved as is anyway.

I still reason that the Pixel Remaster is the "definitive version", but most of the FFII versions after NES are fairly similar so it isn't too meaningful a prize here.

[dravidious]

You uuuuuhhhhhh are cool

So there's a relic on Path of Champions called Voidborne Carapace that give the equipped champion "Whenever any unit dies, grant me its positive keywords" and Evolve (Once you've had 6+ different positive keywords in play, grant me +2/+2). I always wondered what to use it for; Evolve is much harder to trigger when you can't choose what cards to put in your deck, and getting keywords from dying units doesn't seem that good. However, I've since realized the synergy it has with 2 champion's star powers:

Bard is a champion based a round buffing allies in your hand, and has the power Caretaker's Blessing: "Whenever you summon a unit with buffed stats, grant it a random keyword." This makes evolving super easy, and can let Bard collect up all the random keywords that your allies have, making him a monstrosity with high stats and a ton of keywords.

The other, much more interesting option, is Elise. Elise's 3-star power is Spider Queen 2: "When allies attack, grant allies Spiderlings everywhere +1/+0 and the positive keyword of allied champions." For context, spiderlings are 1/1s that Elise is really good at summoning lots of, and "everywhere" means permanently, for the rest of the game, even on spiderlings that are summoned later. Elise's deck only has reliable access to 2 keywords, so evolving is fairly difficult, but oh my the rewards...

First of all, copying the keywords of dying enemies (and any other keyworded units you pick up) allows you to permanently transfer those keywords to your spiderlings. That could be pretty nice, granting stuff like quick attack, overwhelm, brash, challenger, spellshield, etc., but it's unreliable. You also transfer evolve to your spiderlings. And while turning on evolve is difficult, if you ever manage it, then all your spiderlings get +2/+2 for the rest of the game, making you basically unstoppable with your army of itsy-bitsy spiders.

The only problem is that I don't have Voidborne Carapace nor Elise's 3-star power.