This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 2]

(Continued from Part 1)

Having spent last time setting up my backstory and prior battles with this game, we now have found ourselves in early January 2024. I've got the Famicom original set up on my Raspberry Pi, and for now I am just stepping into it out of curiosity and wonder. Will the damn thing actually be hard for once? The answer is yes. What follows is my trip report, putting on the record the dark and terrible things this game did to me and how I enjoyed every one of them. I confess. I confess, friends and lovers, to a litany of debaucherous sins and vices I did indulge in over the course of this journey. It changed me, darkened me, and by God I liked it. Before I truly launch into what happened to me, I want more on the record. On the off chance you do not know the idiosyncratic nature of the infamous Final Fantasy II, I want to explain just how its systems work on paper.

Final Fantasy II eschews the usual experience point-based character progression system for something I've been calling the Stat Experience System. Basically, it's not your character who levels up, but their skills at various things based on their actions in battle. Attack with your sword 100 times? You get better at using swords. Cast a magic spell 100 times? It hits a new level. It sounds simple at first, but some of the progression is esoteric and stuff that I don't really understand. Worse yet, due to various oversights, the system is exploitable. The game doesn't care that you performed an action, only that you selected it. You could fight 100 battles and swing your sword one time each fight, sure. Alternatively, you could select attack, cancel your attack, and then re-input it. Every one of these menu selections is a point of stat experience, so you can in theory cancel your attack 100 times in a row for a "quick" boost. I use "quick" very loosely because this takes its time and is also monotonous as shit. You can do the same for your magic spells as well, and that's even more time consuming because you have extra button presses to select those, and adding 300 extra button presses adds up.

The other exploit, and the infamous one everyone likes to trot out as to why this game is a stinker, has to deal with raising HP. If you get hit in battle, such that you end the fight with a fraction of your max HP, there is a chance that your max HP total will raise. The key here is that the game doesn't care who dealt that damage, just that you were damaged. As such, if you deliberately enter an easy battle and beat up your own characters, at the end of the battle they have lower HP than their max and earn an HP up. This clearly must be the only way to do well at the game, what a silly thing! You hit yourself in the head for optimal HP gains, who would make something so braindead? Except... You don't have to. That was the point of the video essay I watched which started this journey, and I can confirm it. I have played through and beaten Final Fantasy II on the Famicom, and I only did that little chestnut once. I might have gotten away with not doing it at all if I let myself level up by fighting some weaker enemies, but it's not like I supercharged myself to game-ending stats: I just gave myself a little buffer to survive the hard game.

Because Final Fantasy II is a hard fucking game, let me stress. With all that accessibility and lessening of the game's challenge removed, this was a harrowing fucking battle of life and death between me and the game. Let me give you a comparison, as we launch into the trip report proper. When I entered Semitt Falls, the first dungeon, in the Pixel Remaster? I had loads of HP and I was actually so strong just from fighting everything on the way through the game that my weapon levels actually stagnated. That is to say, the dungeon enemies were now so weak as to give me no stat experience for my attacking. (Indeed, if I were to want to get mad, I could note that just giving out stat and weapon level ups every few battles out of generosity somewhat hammers the structure of the level up system into a shape resembling a traditional experience point system, but I don't have time to get mad about square peg round holing of black sheep sequels right now.) For comparison, when I went into Semitt Falls on the Famicom? My weapon levels were only at 2, nobody's HP was past 100, my main guy hadn't even gotten an HP gain yet, and I felt underpowered for the crawl ahead which I would have to make multiple attempts at, clawing a little more progress each time.

This was what I wanted, everyone. There is a unique friction present, not just in Final Fantasy II but in its other siblings on the Famicom. Later Final Fantasy games would become cinematic set pieces in their own rights, awash with intricate and exploitable character progression systems as well as engaging stories and melodramas. The Famicom trilogy has a different flavor. These are dungeon crawlers, albeit dungeon crawlers which justify the in-universe versions for their crawls with more context and plot with each subsequent game. This game in particular is a series of hellish dungeons you are expected to run through, carefully using your resources and praying that some bullshit doesn't end your trek. Your reward for doing so is some new equipment and a plot beat justification for you to plunge yourself into an even deeper and darker dungeon to do it all over again. This friction, this difficulty, it is not a weakness. It is a strength, and because of the Stat Experience System every single moment of adversity is making you stronger.

The adversity at play here led to an interesting revelation, and an intriguing set of feelings building up within me. As I played Final Fantasy II, Kawazu and I (and please forgive my use of auteur theory here) were locked in a tantalizing tango together. His game, a mean little piece of friction that grinds against you as you try to survive the devilish design. Every bit of it made me stronger in the game, but the fucked up thing is I was getting enjoyment out of it. I have a reputation as a Hard Game Beater, yes, but never before had I felt such a dark thrill out of a hard game hurting me like this. Being hurt, being hit hard or uncovering a new trap to keep note of, was giving me the same dopamine as levelling up in a traditional RPG system would. The lurid truth of it was that I was locking myself into an electronic cycle of consensual sadomasochism, and loving it. There was a deep and fundamental intimacy to the way this game delivered pain, and it was giving me pleasure. That's my thousand words-long confession, everyone. Final Fantasy II made me hurt, and I not only consented to this but I liked it.

Let me illustrate just one of the ways this game delivered that sharp sting to me, with one of its more insidious moments. It first cropped up when dungeon crawling a snowy cave. It was, in fact, the same cave I was travelling to in my first memory of Final Fantasy II from 2004. I got so deep into the cave and was low on health, so I decided to use my Teleport spell to get out of there. When I did, I was met with this message.

You see, this cave has you travel with a temporary party member named Josef. Not to spoil too much of the video game, but on the way out of this dungeon Josef is crushed by a boulder and killed. He is, in fact, the first party character in a Final Fantasy game to die. If you were able to warp out of the cave after getting the key item at the bottom, Josef would not be killed and the careful plotting of the game would be ruined. Therefore, Kawazu has decreed that any dungeon involving some sort of story progress in the act of clearing it (which we will hereafter call a "plot dungeon") will have warping disabled. If I were to want to leave, I would have to walk all the way back out. I attempted this. I died, and lost all my progress and had to go back in but more cautious this time. That sudden sharp sting tingling across your psyche, which lights up pain receptors but also gives a sudden rush? That is Final Fantasy II. 

Let me tell you of a similar scenario. I was in another dungeon, searching for a key item at the end. Unlike the previous example, this was not a plot dungeon and I could freely warp out of it. Unfortunately, in a difficult battle some floors deep down I miscalculated my MP costs. I was 1 MP off from being able to cast Teleport and get out of there. I had to try and walk out once again, and this time one of my guys got poisoned with no way to cure it. What followed was an absolutely desperate and tense crawl back out, constantly at the brink of death, every step a potential encounter that could be my last and wipe out all of that progress. I made it out, just barely, but I held on to that feeling. That desperate tension and worry over this monster infested space, where each step was a possible run-ender? I felt alive. It was what I came to the Famicom for, and I never would have felt it in one of the subsequent ports. I'd have just walked through the maze with no friction, wiping out all the enemies in one turn by mashing A and would never have gotten close to that desperate situation. I can say that for sure because I did this dungeon on the Pixel Remaster and that's exactly what happened.

The next dungeon, the Imperial warship known as the Dreadnought, is where things officially got too hard for me. I was caught in this insidious loop where every encounter could be my last and I was being hit hard, but not hard enough that I could get HP gains out of it to slowly build strength and make it more survivable. I think there was also a mechanic at play where I was healing in battle to survive the fights, which is a no no because you have to end the fight at low HP to get a gain. Worse yet, you have to save some comrades from a prison cell in this ship, and if you do that you can't leave the dungeon: you have to do the whole thing in one shot, and it's a plot dungeon again so no warping for you. This, by the way, is the point where I took advantage of hitting myself for HP gains. That made the dungeon survivable, but it wasn't a cakewalk just yet.

(A brief aside to mention this: many people talking about Final Fantasy II and its plotline will compare it to the original 1977 Star Wars. Both feature a rebellion against an empire, a rebel princess who is captured by said empire, and a massive imperial weapon which must have its main engine blown up by subterfuge in order to give the rebellion any hope. People like to compare the two works, but the similarities between Final Fantasy II and Star Wars end once the Dreadnought is blown up. In a shocker of shockers, not everything is about the space movie.)

Nemesis.

At this point in the story, another story in miniature begins to play out. I would like to introduce you to the first part of what I am calling the Hill Gigas Ordeal. The Hill Gigas is a deadly giant enemy, and it guards one of the treasure chests deep in the Dreadnought. One of my attempts at surviving the dungeon ended right here, as the Hill Gigas was way too fucking strong for me. Nevertheless, I was resolute and tried again immediately. With a careful use of healing, magic, and just plain luck I managed to defeat the Hill Gigas and get the shield it was guarding. I then walked back out of the Dreadnought, healed up, and walked right back in for the third time that morning to rescue the princess, crawl down to the engine room, and blow this accursed dungeon to smithereens. It should be noted that, while Final Fantasy II is a bold step forward for RPG storytelling circa 1988, it's still very early days. It's not until Final Fantasy IV or so that your reward for making it through a dungeon is another page unfolding in a gripping story with plot twists and deep character-based introspection. Your reward for beating the Dreadnought is whatever you managed to loot out of it, a story-based pat on the back, and your rebel leader pointing in the direction of the next monster-infested labyrinth that needs to be crawled through.

It's here that Final Fantasy II hits a somewhat contradictory set of twin beats. It is simultaneously very friendly in its design here, and very unfriendly at the same time. Remember the Hill Gigas, the basically boss of the Dreadnought which I barely survived? It's a regular encounter in the next dungeon. And there can be two of them in one encounter. And you can't run from them. Now how in the hell am I going to manage this? The game gave me exactly the tool I needed to deal with it, in the castle just south of the dungeon. You're given many fun treasures, but the key here is a magic spell called Curse. Curse is a debuff spell, and using it halves an enemy's attack and defense. A Hill Gigas goes from hitting like a truck to hitting like a baseball bat. It still hurts, but it's not going to knock you on your ass and break every bone in your body. Halving defense means you actually have a good shot at doing decent damage to one as well. I really want to sit and praise this design choice. You are given this spell just before delving into the dungeon where it can be used to great effect, and that's not the only thing you're given. The end of the dungeon is a boss fight against some chimeras, and one of the castle treasures is a sword that does extra damage against winged beasts such as chimeras. This is genuinely very nice, and makes you feel cool and good for using the tools you're given to cut through the difficulty and make real progress.

Unfortunately, the hidden intricacies of the number crunching at play behind the code are where the unfriendliness enters the scene. I had my fancy new Curse spell, and I was even levelling it up with every cast... but I could never actually get the thing to land, even on the most basic of enemies. Surely the spell could not be so useless as to not work on a fucking goblin at level 3? Why wasn't this working? It all has to do with character choice. I was playing the game with some basic roles in mind, but I had my main character decked out with armor and a sword while also using black magic. I gave him the Curse spell, and he was failing to use it well. I had to resort to the Internet to figure out why, and it's insidious. The best way I can describe it is as such: Wielding any weapon that isn't a staff or knife, or wearing any heavy armor, incurs a magic effectiveness penalty. Unless some NPC somewhere mentions it, this is never clearly communicated in the game. As such, I had to strip my boy of his armor and slap him with something lighter, and then Curse had a reasonable success rate. There was, of course, the wrinkle of him being a swordfighter. There was a way around that, however. If I wanted to cast Curse in a fight, I could unequip him of his sword and shield in battle, cast the spell until it hit, then reequip his weaponry so he could strike. It's an absolutely silly exploit, and the thought of Firion dropping his sword so he could cast his magic spell amused me. Still, though, Curse was working. I could beat those Hill Gigases with a little work now. I was beginning to get better at taking the game's mix of pleasure and pain.

What happens, then, when I go too far and break the game?

(Continued in Part 3)