Final Fantasy Legend II (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
309A playthrough of Square Soft's 1991 role-playing game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Final Fantasy Legend II.
Final Fantasy Legend II, like The Final Fantasy Legend (https://youtu.be/rM7omzH0LbQ), is not a true Final Fantasy game. It is actually the second game of the SaGa series, but Square renamed it for better brand recognition - and thus, better sales - in North America. On the surface, especially to American gamers in the early 90s, it was easy to accept without questioning it. It was still a turn-based JRPG that emphasized story over grinding, but as anyone who has ever taken the plunge with a SaGa game can tell you, beneath that familiar surface lies a wholly different animal.
The opening shows your father waking you up in the middle of the night to hand you a magi shard for safe keeping, and after saying a few cryptic things, he escapes through a window. Several years later, he has still not returned, so you decide to gather up some of your friends to go search for him.
Following the trail, you eventually find yourself at the Pillar of Sky, a tower that holds gateways to different worlds. These worlds are all led by tyrants that use the magi fragments for less-than-altruistic reasons, and if those pieces are ever brought together and Isis's statue is rebuilt... well, let's just say the world will be in a pretty sorry state.
So, as the party of adventurers discover, following dad's footsteps also puts them on a direct path to saving the day, so you must travel to all of these worlds in search of the 77 magi shards.
FFL2's story is a welcome improvement over the first game's bare bones plot. It's not overly original, but the game does some really neat things with it. It's a bit cheesy, but it works well as a pretext to offer up an excellent bit of variety. Instead of merely wandering from town to dungeon and back again, this time you'll end visiting some pretty imaginative locales - I loved that one dungeon took place inside of someone's body, a fact that was nicely reflected in its overall structure.
Like the first game, starting out can be pretty intimidating. Since your initial party choices dictate how you play and many of the possible transformations can make or break the experience, your first few attempts at getting through it (without a guide, at least) will likely be full of experimentation with party formations, and that will assuredly prompt many restarts as you realize how badly you've gimped yourself for the end game.
The pain of this experimentation has been lessened considerably for the sequel, though. You can now avoid having your best abilities taken from you as your character grows by changing the slots your skills occupy, and the game is not quite as grindy, nor as it as fond of random and unexpected insta-kills as FFL1 was. It's still a punishing game for sure, but I always found it much easier to finish than the first, and the staggering breadth of party customization options gives the game a ton of replayability.
The story has a lot more character to it, and I think that plot and the settings make FFL2 quite a bit more palatable and engaging than the original, as do the improved graphics and sound. The music, a collorative effort between Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito, is awesome. I'd argue that it's even more effective and memorable than the music in FF1 on NES was. The graphics are also great - the tilesets regularly change between worlds, and the monster battle graphics, though still static, look much nicer and are better varied than in FFL1.
The SaGa games have always purposely been of a more niche, more hardcore flavor of JRPG than the comparatively "friendly" Final Fantasy games have been - a fact that's readily apparent if you've spent any real time with them. But for as much as they demand of you, SaGa games provide that rare sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when you finally see the credits finally roll. If you like a game that expects you to think and to take big risks, FFL2 arguably does the job better than any other game on the OG Game Boy. Just be warned that if you prefer games that hold your hand, you're barking up the wrong tree here.
Since the "Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend" comes out next month for the Switch, I thought it about time to finally post this one!
*Recorded using the DMG shader in Retroarch to mimic the look of the original hardware.*
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!