In a far off land...
A long peace has ended.
The Paramekian Empire
has summoned Hellspawn in
hopes to rule the world...

The people of Phin fought
bravely for their kingdom...
And lost.

Now four of Phin's youth
must flee to Altea,
with the enemy just behind...

After the successful debut of Final Fantasy in 1987, it took only a year before Square released the sequel, Final Fantasy 2. Whit much better plotline and more interesting characters this game was much better than the original. Square had a translation of it, which was meant to be released as FF2 in the usa, but they got some problems with "The big N", so it never made it over to usa. Now, however, Neo Demiforce has done a translation of it and I suggest you to download it and try it out. For those of you who want info about the American FF2, go to the FF4-section, since the game is the original FF4 in Japan.

Story

The game begins with Guy and three others fighting horse riding soldiers. These soldiers are much stronger then the Guy's party, so they win. After that, in a mystical way, Guy wakes up in the castle of Altea. After a while he realises that the Empire has captured one of his friends, which was fighting with him. The other two, Maria and Frioniel, that was fighting with him, however, are with him. After they have chatted a while, they go to the queen of Altea and talk with her. Together they decide to go to Phin and find t lost friend. And so the adventure begins... Later on you will meet both Cid and the yellow bird that we all love, the Chocobo. I won't say anything more, in the case I spoil the game for you.

Music

Well, it's kinda hard to describe the music of a Nes-game as you maybe understand, since the quality isn't the best. The music in FF2 is maybe better than the original FF, but it isn't good. If you listen carefully to the crystal tune at the title screen you will probably hear that the music has better quality then FF1. But still it is the same phone signals as in all the other Nes-games.

Graphics

As I have said earlier this is a Nes-game. The graphics just can't be any good when you only can have 16 colours at the screen at the same time, or 4 bits. However Square has developed it a little since the first part of the series, with water that moves and the character faces in the status menu. But, a lot of the other graphics was reused from the first FF.

Battles, menus, & gameplay

The menu (When you push the start button) in FF2 looks different from the other FF-games. Here you'll find the commands at the bottom of the screen, and not at the right side. Except that it works like the menus in the other FF-games, with blue colour and everything. Of course everything is much simpler, but is better than the first FF. You will also be able to see the character faces, which is always nice. The battles look as they do nowadays and are much better than the ones in FF1 that have all these terrible windows everywhere. However you still have to point at the enemies exactly or the chances are big that your hit will be ineffective. The conversations with people are way more complicated than nowadays. I won't go into that now, because it's easier to just see the screenshots-page.