A look back at: Final Fantasy Legend II

If you can't tell, I really want to get to SaGa Frontier already, which is why I had been churning through the rest of the SaGa series (the Final Fantasy Legends and Romancing SaGas, of which I am currently on Romancing SaGa 3 right now as of this writing). A look back at the second game reveals I actually hated it.

But why though? Why don't I like it? Well, I have to admit, this is the entry in the series that has an actually annoying random encounter rate, and sometimes you will be fighting up to about 16 enemies in a group, maybe more. It's utterly crazy, and half the time, I wonder if the encounter rate is in some sort of fixed pattern, because I do remember half the time where I would be going a long ways without an encounter, then two steps before an encounter, then one step. It makes no sense to me. The game does have its interesting locales, as well as guest characters which very often tag along as fifth playable characters for your party to use.

Alright, so we got a new class to use besides the humans, mutants, and monsters, which is the robot. This thing doesn't really gain anything unless you actually equip it with weapons and armor. So basically it's sort of like the monster class except you actually need to buy stuff instead of killing stuff to enhance their abilities. I personally stuck to the same group I used last time, two humans and two mutants. Also the humans do join the mutants in that they do get stat gains from battles this time around, but not necessarily special abilities. Again, this becomes a staple for Romancing SaGa games.

The whole plot of this game isn't that good. It starts with the father giving a magi to whatever you main character is* and then making his exit by jumping out of a window? What? So we got all these unique worlds to go around in too. That's pretty much the staple of the Final Fantasy Legend games, with subplots in each one, but the main focus is having to find your father throughout the whole game. At first, this Mask guy shows up who resembles your father, but he's not the real deal, he's just another one of those "fifth companions" that feels compelled to help. You do find your father though, and he helps out until his apparent heroic sacrifice, which, well, he survives, but eh. And the ending of the game is your character's entire family going on another adventure, which honestly the sequel to this game doesn't really touch on. I liked the premise of the first Final Fantasy Legend a whole lot better than this one.

*And considering that your player character can be any class, including a robot or a monster, you wonder how did both your human parents conceive your character if you choose such classes. The robot I can probably understand as it would probably be a creation, but then again...