This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 1]

(Thanks to Sean, Alina, and John for letting me vent about this experience as I endured it.)

Art by @bykillt on Twitter

Friends, pals, loves, readers, I must confess. I am not the same person I was when this year began. Something has happened to me, a chance encounter that has changed me in ways that will take me thousands of words to describe. I'm doing my best to describe it now. The simple truth of the matter is this. I have played and beaten Final Fantasy II on the Famicom, and the deadly dance I am the game engaged in has done terrible and wonderful things to me. This has happened to me but once before in my life. It was in the year 2012, when on a whim I played Battletoads and managed to beat the legendary Turbo Tunnel of my own power. I wondered how far I could get through the game past that, and what followed was a week long journey into the darkest parts of the human video game playing soul. That is what Final Fantasy II on the Famicom did to me, only it had me in that waltz of war for two weeks. I want you to understand what I went through, and in order to get you to understand I must describe my enemy to you. I must regale you of the antagonistic relationship I have had with this video game for the past 20 years, and how I came to this waltz. Let me take you back in time to the skirmishes we have had, and the buildup to this final battle which haunted my sanity and harrowed my soul.

Somewhat surprisingly, even for me, my first outstanding of Final Fantasy II is a warm and fuzzy one. It is the year 2004, and I am in my college dorm's computer room. I have learned enough about how Linux works to get NES and SNES emulation working on the machines, and I can play a translated ROM of Final Fantasy II. I am gliding across a snowy tundra on a sled while fighting monsters, and thinking of someone I am quite fond of. There is a song I associate with this moment, a song I am certain the person I am fond of turned me on to, and I must have it on while playing the game. It's a nice memory. I have no further memory of playing the game at this time, but it's a year later when I technically end up owning a copy. In 2005 I purchase a copy of Final Fantasy Origins for the PS1 from a local game store with my birthday money. The friend who will later become my roommate a year later advises me against getting it, actually. He says it's overpriced at 30 dollars and not worth it. He's usually right, but in this case I ignored his advice and got the game.

Funny enough, it's not Final Fantasy II which I associate with this time, but the first game. 2005, if you remember some of the blog posts from a year ago (may I point you to this one, for instance?), is a time that I felt the literal definition of nostalgia for, wistfully wishing it was not eroded into dust. Among those many memories, on the disc that contained Final Fantasy II, I played the original game after class while waiting for my then girlfriend to call me for my birthday. There I sat, in my tiny little dorm room, idling on the world map while talking to a person I loved once upon a time. That relationship, too, has eroded away into the mists of time. I hold no ill will to the girl, and I hope that wherever she is now she is happy. She, like so many other friends and places and things from that time, are long gone to me. Please permit me that one final bit of eulogy for my youth from half a lifetime ago, and let us continue onward through the hazy memory. 

That's what it feels like.

It was in the year 2007 where the battle began, and where I played and finished Final Fantasy II on the PS1. I hated it. I endured every moment of it and loathed my time with it. It was difficult, monotonous, grating, grinding, and way too fucking hard for the me of the time. Due to the obscure idiosyncrasies of its Stat Experience System (more of which when we talk about my 2024 playthrough, I have to save some gas in the tank after all), I lacked the knowledge to create much beyond a party of four glass cannons who dual-wielded death but couldn't take a fucking hit to save their lives. That system had an infamous exploit, but it was simultaneously easy to use and utterly tedious to perform. I was, in fact, so utterly done with the game and so impatient to get the thing over with and move on that I used another exploit. I used the PS1's memory save option in the final dungeon as the world's most slowest save states, making my way through this hell maze with as little friction as possible. I beat the game, saw the credits, and shelved the disc with the promise to never play this fucking thing again after what it did to me.

Obviously, given that I am writing these words, I went back on that... but it did not take me 17 years to go back on my word. No, despite my dislike of the PS1 experience, in the intervening years I dabbled with the other versions and re-releases of this game that came out. A version of Final Fantasy Origins for the Game Boy Advance came out in 2005, and much like the PS1 game I mainly remember playing the original Final Fantasy on it. There was subsequent dabbling, not only with the PSP version of Final Fantasy II (Which I actually bought for a friend as a birthday gift from a used game store, aren't I a real pal?) but just a scant few years back with a ROM hack of the GBA game called Mod of Balance. I have beaten it again at least once since 2007, maybe twice. Again, those hazy mists of memory are fogging it up. The main point is, did I enjoy myself? I did not, sorry to say, but I failed to connect with these versions of the game for an interesting reason.

Oh, let's just come out and say it. They were too easy. They bored me. I want to stress that the fact that accessible re-releases and remasters of this game that are not nightmare monsters from the bowels of hell are a good thing. People who don't want to willingly fling themselves into a hellscape should have a nicer and friendlier version of this story that they have the option of playing. It is a net positive in the word of video game accessibility that these versions exist, and they as valid a way of playing the game as any other version. Everything I am about to say applies only to myself and my own internal landscape, and is just me sharing how I feel. Are we all on the same page here? Good, great. Let me tear into this shit then.

The subsequent versions swung the pendulum way too much in the other direction. I mentioned mainly playing the original Final Fantasy on GBA, and even that version of the game is severely lacking in bite or challenge. You just walk around and mulch anything in your way by pressing A. Final Fantasy II was the same way, and I will admit some culpability on my part for this. I was so scared of the challenge that I again exploited the system a bit. Doing that for a game with the pendulum swung towards easy turns the difficult slog into an easy slog. You just walk through mazes and hold A to kill things. Again, part of this is my fault. I actually, honest to God, stuck a clothespin on my Game Boy to hold down the A button so that I could automate the tedious grinding exploit of the Stat Experience System. I still felt that fear, that terror that the game would crush me, and so I made it an easy slog on myself. I still was having a miserable time, just from the other way. Was this my fate? Locked into dull boring dungeon crawls every half a decade with this game for the rest of my life? Something had to change. Something did.

In late 2023, I came across this very long video retrospective of the Final Fantasy series. I've spent longer times watching worse retrospectives, not naming names, so I fired this up to hear some of the insights on the games. I know the run time is daunting, but I would recommend giving a watch to the section on Final Fantasy II. It's very insightful and fair towards the game, but there's one critique I wish to focus on. The infamous Stat Experience System is discussed in this section, and all the usual old chestnuts about how best to exploit it and how tedious said exploitation is, before this video essayist drops a super secret tip for how best to use the Stat Experience System.

Just play the game normally.

Dear reader, hearing that was an eye-opener, an idea simultaneously so simple but so galaxy brained as to seem like sage wisdom. Don't sit around tediously grinding your stats, playing as little game as possible with a reward of just walking through the fucking game that you've made into a boring slog. Just take a zen approach and actually play the video game. When you hit stronger enemies, your stats will increase accordingly. That idea stuck with me, a seed sprouting into a temptation, and I finally caved to it. I would wait for the New Year to come, and then I would do it. I would go back one more time, and I would try this new approach just to see if it could finally make this game click with me. Here we were, then. January 2024. New year, new game, new approach. I even had a new version of Final Fantasy II to try this experiment with, the Pixel Remaster on Steam gifted to me with all the others some time ago. Here I was, then, on my couch with my laptop plugged into the TV and wireless controller in my hand. Here I was, refusing to grind my shit and just playing through Final Fantasy II. Here I was, dear reader, being honest and not exploiting the game, looking for just a little of that friction. 

And it was STILL too fucking EASY FOR ME.

This was all wrong. Even without grinding, with just fighting whatever random encounters got in my way, my stats were skyrocketing. The growth rates had been increased from the long ago versions, and there was even more generosity in regards to the game just handing out stat increases for being a good gamer and fighting some battles. It got to the point where I was not gaining any weapon experience from fights in dungeons, because my weapon level was higher than the rank of the enemies in the dungeon. This version had even more accessibility, constantly sticking a dungeon floor map complete with treasure chests marked, like slapping a GameFAQs walkthrough right on the screen. I tried to make my own challenge, never following the map and just exploring, but it wasn't working. I gave it until the Dreadnought, the dungeon which I remembered the PS1 version starting to kick my ass on. It was when I walked through it with absolutely no friction and beat it in one go that I saved my game and shut that shit off.

I tried, damn it! I tried not to make myself overpowered, but it happened again! It wasn't my fault this time! The game was made into candy coated simplicity, and once again I was faced with the prospect of slogging my way through a far too easy version of it. No. No! Not again! Not again, damn you! I refuse! Again, it's good and excellent that such a well-produced and accessible version of the game exists, but I could not do this again. Now, in hindsight and talking to people after the fact, the console ports of the Pixel Remaster offer difficulty sliders and selections that could, in theory, give this version some teeth. I did not know that in early January, and I'm not about to return to the world of Final Fantasy II any time soon because of what I did next. What I did in my desperation.

Alright, fine. The writing's on the wall. Every version of Final Fantasy II after the PS1 version is toned down considerably, defanged and cuddly, a sweet and soft experience for all. I didn't want that. I needed a challenge. I needed bite. I needed hell and fury and war. I needed what this game gave me in 2007. I was a different person now than I was back then. I was a Hard Game Beater, a seasoned veteran, and I knew a lot more about the game now. I was also frustrated and pissed off that this kept fucking happening to me. Eventually, an idea born of desperation came to me, and on one terrible cold January day I got the spoons to put it to fruition. I obtained a file, slapped it onto a USB stick, slapped that into the cozy little Raspberry Pi nestled in the corner of my entertainment center, and turned it on. 

So it was, then, that three weeks ago I plunged back into December 1988, into the world of a new Famicom RPG. In all my fury and rage and need for a challenge, I flung myself into the original Final Fantasy II, with the exact same ethos that the video essay gave me. I would come to it with zenlike dignity and grace, and play the game normally, letting it guide me instead of trying to break it over my knee. The sickly digit of the monkey's severed paw curled in on itself. For the next two weeks, I got what I fucking wanted. God help me, did I get what I fucking wanted. This is the story of the deadly dance which followed, and how it changed me. This is how I won the war, not just against the game but against myself.

This is how I came to love Final Fantasy II.

(Continued in Part 2)