Airships and Crystals and Spoony Bards…Oh My

There are moments when you play video games where you get a glimpse of something you hadn’t yet encountered before. As a seasoned gamer, I’ve had many of those kinds of experiences.

And one of the first of them was when I first became acquainted with a little game called Final Fantasy II. Forgive me if I get some of of the details wrong, as I haven’t played this game in almost two decades, but even given that amount of time, I likely remember its plot and characters better than a lot of the movies I saw about the same time.

Now what was released in North America as Final Fantasy II was in actuality Final Fantasy IV, and it has been released numerous times on many platforms since those old Super Nintendo days, most recently on the Wii’s Virtual Console, but to me, it will always be the ever wondrous Final Fantasy II of my youth, no matter what they do to polish it, enhance or recreate it.

I played a lot of games as a kid, including a few role playing games, but in most cases, their plots were merely a series of fetch quests that revolved around a character or characters that you had named, but whom had no real character traits. This included the first Final Fantasy, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t have a huge emotional attachment to that game. After that kind of gaming experience, playing Final Fantasy II was a revelation, and back in 1992, it was a monumental moment in my development as a gamer.

It was the first time I played a game where I actually cared about what was happening to the characters. I was fascinated by how the plot unfolded, and I needed to know what was going to happen next not because the game wouldn’t move forward if I didn’t, but I wanted to see how things would work out for these characters I was spending time with. Admittedly, there may have been earlier games, like Golgo 13: Top Secret Agent that I was interested in from a plot perspective, but they could have stuck any character into that and I would have followed the story.

But with Final Fantasy II, even from the very beginning, there seemed to be an inner life to many of the characters, especially the main character Cecil, who as you can see from the opening, had some inner conflict going on.

And it was the kind of game where characters made choices which were true to themselves but which, as the player, I wouldn’t have made.

I still remember the brave sacrifices of many of the characters, from the twin child wizards Palom and Porom turning themselves to stone to prevent their new friends from being crushed in a wall trap to the elderly sage Tellah’s using his last ounce of strength on an ill-fated act of retribution against the antagonist of the game, Golbez, which led to his own death.

In terms of unexpected heroic sacrifices and deaths, it rivals 24 in terms of anyone being forced into that situation at any time. I will admit that looking up some of the videos for the post, I started getting teary-eyed as I remembered the context of those actions.

Of course, with all this character-related stuff, there is an impressive plot to hold it all together involving crystals, dwarves, aliens, a giant robot and a spoony bard, mythical creatures, ninjas and glorious airships… and no one gets into a fridge to avoid a nuclear bomb, so everything I mentioned is free from that kind of taint. And it is a game from that wonderful time in Square’s history when they didn’t embrace total androgyny with their male characters.

Not the mention the righteous and sometimes quirky soundtrack.

And to this day, I still compare a lot of game endings to the one that Final Fantasy II had, as it was the equivalent of the ending of The Return of the King… it gave some form of closure to almost every major character in the game and it felt definitive. The world was a fundamentally different place than when you started, and that is a good thing. And for a relatively short RPG (at between 20-30 hours), that ending was very substantial. A 20 minute ending for a game is mammoth compared to the single screen endings I was accustomed to.

I think in the end, you always remember the first time that something or someone broke your heart. I guess that is why a lot of players have attached themselves so strongly to Final Fantasy VII, as that may have been the first game they played that truly emotionally affected them.

I may not be into role playing games like I was as a child/adolescent (mainly because narrative gaming has come a long way since then), but I still look back on those days fondly. If it wasn’t for Final Fantasy II, I likely wouldn’t have played such classics as Chrono Trigger, Ogre Battle or even more recently, Persona 3: FES.

It was a game that asked me to expect more from my gaming experiences, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.