This Is The Path To Hell (The Final Fantasy II Trip Report) [Part 3]

(Continued from Part 2) 

A Discord pal linked this in response to the posts
going live, and goddamn if this isn't the FFII vibe.

So here I am, pushing beyond the boundaries of where I got in the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy II, finding interesting new challenges and a masochistic streak awakening in me as I plunge into the depraved depths of the abyss that is this Famicom game. The game has been kicking my ass, giving me friction and the sharp stings of adversity and I have been liking it. In the name of God and man, I have been liking Final Fantasy II. A very curious thing happens to me at this point of the game, and to tell you about it I have to tell you about the open nature of this game's world.

At this point of the game, I had a ship and could sail basically anywhere with only minor hassle. There aren't actually that many places to sequence break to for any benefit, given that most of the towns are on the northern side of the map and are ones you explore during the first few quest loops. The exception, then, is the magical town of Mysidia. I was not meant to go here yet, and the encounters around it were still lethal to me. As you can save on the world map, however, I could just save every few steps and make my way there without dying. There were some helpful magic spells, but what really appealed to me was a powerful new axe for my main heavy hitter. It was so strong, in fact, that in one of the next dungeons I could get an axe that was one level below this one. The boy was a physical powerhouse, and anything he hit with that thing at this point of the game melted.

This small sequence break, coupled with the steady progress I had been making, led to a bit of a lull in the game's difficulty. It actually became kind of easy, and the friction lessened as I walked through the intricate mazes to get to my goals in each dungeon. You would think this would horrify me, given everything I said at the top about my frustration with this game's easier ports. Oddly enough, I was not as bummed out as I expected to be. The power level I had reached, and the ease I was going through the game, felt earned. In a port, I would have gotten this strong just by existing and winning some easy fights. There was none of that compensatory stat progression at play. I had to struggle tooth and nail to get those increases, and struggle I did. Hell beasts clawed at my flesh, magic spells scorched me to a crisp, and the keen blades of the fascist tyrants of the Palamecian Empire skewered me within an inch of my life. I endured this pain and grew stronger for it, and I felt satisfaction from doing that.

That is not to say I entirely welcomed this shift in difficulty. There are things it did to maintain that friction which I will praise in a moment, but the actual life or death struggle was muted and I missed it. Here I am in confessional again. The game kicked my ass, consensually, and when it stopped kicking my ass I missed it doing that. What abyss was I tumbling down into? What Long Dark Night Of The Soul was my 2024 becoming? In the name of God, what was this fucking game doing to me? Even when it was easy, I did enjoy the intricacies of its dungeon crawl. Take the Fynn Castle basement, a five floor dungeon where every floor had different enemies and a good variety. One floor was all undead. One had enemies that liked to swap around their HP with yours. One had very hard-hitting praying mantis enemies. I enjoyed the variety at play in that dungeon.

Furthermore, just because the encounters were easy at this stretch didn't mean that the dungeons were. These are still crawls, increasing in their complexity and friction. I have yet to mention the infamous "doors to nowhere" mechanic, where every floor is peppered with a door that could be the way to treasure or another floor but is more than likely an empty monster closet with an increased encounter rate. In an easier version of the game where you're just walking through mazes, these are a mild inconvenience and easily criticized. In a version that's about walking through the mazes and the friction of any encounter being your last, they take on a whole new level of stress and risk and add some more tension. It's unfriendly design, but unfriendly design that seasons the general bleak vibes of the game. The complexity of the dungeons only increased, and it was at a tropical island cave with multiple stairwells leading down to multiple sectioned-off portions of the next floor that I crossed a line and had to do this.

It's a crude doodle, and one that really only made sense to me while I had the game up on the screen and the crawl fresh in mind, but it was a tactile strike against the game's oppressive atmosphere. That tactile satisfaction is not to be underestimated, either: if you've ever played Etrian Odyssey, mapping out the deadly dungeon crawl of that game yourself gives a dopamine that's hard to explain or replicate. It was an effective weapon against the friction of the game, and Final Fantasy II was not about to stay a cakewalk for long. Deep into another cave I was ambushed and petrified by some monsters, and wiped out. Some judicious levelling cheese with the Esuna spell was required for that, and there's my one issue with the otherwise zen approach of just playing the game. Magic takes just a bit too long to keep up with to be reliable, especially status spells like Esuna. At 50 in-battle casts a level, and needing to get it to level 5 to cure petrification, I would have had to be casting it every battle for a few dungeons. This would naturally waste valuable action economy towards the actual threats of the dungeon, not to mention losing out on stat experience from my weapon and other spells. It's one area where I wished for a bit of lenience and an increased growth rate for spell usage. 

Catharsis.

Curiously, and as I mentioned in Part 1 of this odyssey, between the time I finished this game and me getting these words on the page, a patch was released for the Pixel Remasters on Steam which added in difficulty sliders from their console ports. Potentially, one could lower the growth rates to put things a little more in line with the Famicom original. One could also increase the magic growth rate slightly more, in theory. I've not actually patched and fired up that version again to verify, because after beating Final Fantasy II on the Famicom you will forgive me for putting some distance between me and the game. Still, things were going easier on the Famicom and I was making good progress. In a wonderful cathartic end to a long-running saga, on the way back to town after that last dungeon crawl I ran into my old friend the Hill Gigas. My physical attacker with his super axe killed it in one swing. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and stronger I would get. The grace period of this axe and my stats carrying me was over. Final Fantasy II was about to get hard again, and I couldn't be happier.

Mysidia Tower was the longest dungeon yet, at a staggering nine floors. It's packed with lots of treasure, several winding paths, damage tiles, difficult enemies, and at least four boss-class enemies. Any worry about this game going easy on me melted away pretty damn quickly. It wasn't a plot dungeon and so warping was fine, but that didn't mean it was easy. I had a near-death experience involving being ambushed by a bunch of imps who confused half my party, and by the time I sorted that shit out and survived the battle my healer was down. With no other way to revive folks, I had to retreat and re-hike up the tower to that point. God, what a beautiful friction. Despite that, there were moments of catharsis. Three of those four bosses, for instance, were enhanced elemental versions of the Hill Gigas. Landing Curse still made them easy enough, so I still had that sense of accomplishment over having bested my nemesis. 

Any catharsis is quickly undercut, however, by what happens after you clear the dungeon. You get Ultima, the ultimate magic spell and supposed strongest thing in the game. That's very good. While you were climbing the tower, the Emperor of Palamecia used a deadly tornado to destroy nearly every town from the start of the game. Oh, but you have the Ultima spell, right? The ultimate magic? Yeah, it's actually bugged and doesn't increase in strength any as you level it up. Oops! It has been said before by others, but the oppressive nature of playing Final Fantasy II and enduring its particular masochism tango is mirrored by its plot, in which you resist an all-powerful fascist empire and take one step forward for every two steps back. This may seem like a minor detail, but it's one that we really need to focus on for a moment here. During my endless odyssey with this game, I was discussing it with my pal John, someone with whom I could vent about the latest nonsense the game put me through to darken my soul. John shared some tweets from another person's playthrough, a deep dark odyssey of the soul which mirrored my own in many ways. It was when I got to one particular exchange from this Twitter user that I perked up, however.

You see, dear reader, this resonated greatly with me. I cannot fully explain why. Not yet. Talking of tandems, in tandem with my playthrough of Final Fantasy II I was watching a television show. It has become a part of my internal landscape, and sometime in March or April you will see a lengthy blog post or two about this show. It took reading these tweets, of seeing the rebellious struggle of Final Fantasy II as "long, exhausting dungeons rewarded with setbacks, insufficient victories, and large-scale tragedies, to which the answer is always to throw yourself back into the grinder" to make me realize. I was just playing out a version of what this particular show was showing me. The synchronicities and mirroring was running deep, my friends. The show and Final Fantasy II mirror that desperate struggle of tragedy and setback and repeatedly trying again to make the world a better place. Final Fantasy II and the first comic of my Comics Challenge, Of Thunder And Lightning, mirror the masochistic desire to fight in deadly combat to feel alive again, which I was turning into the deeper I went into the game. This bleakness, this teetering on the edge of the abyss... This has been my 2024 media journey so far. I want to stress that I feel fine, emotionally, and I'm not diving into nothing but downers as a coping strategy. It's just how things ended up. In 2023, the lynchpin of this blog's journey was a fuzzy old VHS tape that brought about nostalgia. 2024's lynchpin, it seems, is the misery of fighting a desperate struggle. We will soon see how that struggle goes on television, but back to the world of the game...

(Continued in Part 4)