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The successor to the legendary origin of the Final Fantasy saga took a whole new direction, and changed basically everything. Some of those changes made a lot of sense, while others felt like a backstep.
Most notably, classes were completely removed from the game, and every character was completely free to develop into every direction, to equip every armor and weapon, and to learn every spell in the game.
It also allowed the player to increase attributes and stats by doing certain actions, which was a very welcome change to the random leveling in Final Fantasy I.
Also different than before, Final Fantasy II followed a real story, in which the characters had some weight, instead of being just nameless heroes.
Another honorable mention are dialogues, which let you learn certain keywords, which enable new conversations with NPC's, and sometimes opened new parts of the story.
The Pixel remaster also does a fantastic job in polishing outdated mechanics:
There is a lot more information, dungeons are completely mapped, movement is faster, battles can be automated, the graphics are improved, and there is a very handy ingame-worldmap.
Starting with 01/2024, there also are options to disable or speed up all parts of the development, up to 4x, and to disable random encounters, which is a huge relief! Especially, since Final Fantasy II isnt as straighforward as before, and requires you to find out by yourself, how to proceed, pretty often.
It still is annoying, but not nearly as bad as before.
And yet, the flow is not really there. Spending lots of time travelling from location to location, and speaking with all NPC's in the game after certain breakthroughs, becomes really annoying.
To make things worse, characters level every (!) weapon type or spell individually. That means, changing the primary equipment or spell leaves you with a terrible performance, and Lv1 in that skill.
Speaking for myself, i had developed my three characters into mages with heavy armor. Which worked wonderfully - until i discovered opponents that are immune to magic. Which forced me to level the weapon levels of all characters, just to be able to proceed. I dont like that...
Concluding, Final Fantasy II PR is immensely innovative and highly polished, and is absolutely worth to be discovered at least once. In its core, it remains a very old game, though, and in some regards it really shows.
Personally, i have played through it once, and altogether enjoyed my experience. As with the first game though, i dont think, that i will ever replay it...
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