Final Fantasy II
Yeah, so, I did the grinding thing where you equip two shields on the person in the front and whatever on the people in the back, and when I finished (with liberal use of fast forward) everyone had max evasion and practically max strength.
Then I walked through the game…in retrospect nice to be OP, but I ended up fast forwarding through basically all the random encounters afterwards. Indeed, as someone stated on a forum, if you grind the rest of the game will be boring, and the stat growth is well-balanced enough that you can just play the game and the difficulty will scale with you. Besides that, my main pet peeve was the limited inventory space. I’m the kind of person who hoards everything, and at the end of the game I ended up throwing out all non-recovery consumables. How come the FF1 remake had unlimited inventory??? Also, the amount of casts required to level up spells – getting Basuna and Esuna to level 6 so I could heal ailments was……a time.
But the good stuff!
rotating cast of characters! Even if the people in your party die after like 30 min! Except Leila and Gordon, who left the party before they could die!
the dungeons look really good IMO. Jade Passage was amazing. Also, they were very nice about dead ends – those wouldn’t transport you all the way back to the beginning or something as annoying.
I think the pacing was very fair, and I never felt stuck – the game made it clear that I could talk to Hilda, Gordon, and that one old dude who tells you how to get to places by being like “I bet you can’t get to Paloom because you need a canoe!!!” to figure out what to do next. I actually wish I had to do more talking, though that probably would have made the game more confusing.
The game was clearly meant to be played several times – for example, by not telling you which magic is black and which is white, it’s probably better if you take notes and then do a second playthrough. Turns out Ultima is a white spell but I gave it to my black mage (Maria), so she didn’t make full use of it.