Greetings, Young Padawan...

So you want to learn how to maneuver your way through Final Fantasy II, huh? Well, the first thing to do is to throw out everything you have ever known about Final Fantasy combat, old and new. We're gonna start entirely from scratch.

Those are some mighty colorful pirates.

At first glance, the system looks like your traditional Final Fantasy. Sure you've got the good guys on the right of the screen vs. the bottom like the SNES games but you've got your MP, your HP in the hundreds, looks like you've got two rows for your characters to be in. It's the same, yeah?

No. The things I just described are basically where the similarities end. The first thing is notice the damage done: 0. You'll be seeing that number a lot, especially in the early game. If you aren't prepared for a dungeon (read: over-prepared), you'll get to the boss to find that all of your party members do 0 damage to them. This isn't a glitch, this isn't a trick to try and get you to find out their strategy, you just aren't strong enough. Even if you can butcher every other monster without taking a hit, you still may not be strong enough to do melee damage to the bosses

You notice I said melee damage. Yeah, usually on these bosses you can do some magic damage, but there's a catch. Magic has to be bought from shops, leveled up individually and then you have to have the MP to actually use it. If you run out of MP, tough. You're dead. Like the first Final Fantasy, there are no saves in dungeon so get ready to play that sucker over again.

Level ups also work completely differently, as I mentioned in previous posts. Instead of leveling up your characters like pretty much every RPG ever has done, you increase your stats individually based on their use. That means the more damage your guy takes, the more health he'll/she'll get. Use up your MP in battle and you'll be seeing an increase at the end of it. This sounds cool in theory but it gets brutal pretty quickly if you aren't careful.

Betcha can't guess which character gets attacked the most.

First of all, throw out any notions of playing this game legit. It just isn't going to happen unless you spend unbearable hours playing and hoping for the stars to align so that you actually get the stat increases you want. Every stat has it's exceptions for when it levels up. For HP, you have to lose at least half of your health in battle. MP works the same way. Note that I said, "in battle". That means using your spells outside of battle to heal and such will not help. While that will help to level up your spell, it won't increase your magic. Now, for every stat, if your character dies OR if you get inflicted with any status ailments, you can kiss your stat increases good-bye. That's not too bad when you're rocking 1100 health like my third character up there but when you've got a maximum of 30 hp? You have to carefully tread that line to increase your stats. Even when you've got a large amount of health, that means a careful assessment after every battle. Do you heal your characters and lose the chance for a maximum HP upgrade or do you risk that character dying? Then with MP, that question becomes, "do I heal them now and be safe or do I wait for a battle to start and try healing them all in battle to increase my max MP?"

I'm gonna answer those questions right now, DON'T RISK IT. EVER. The dungeons aren't as long as some Final Fantasy games but they are no less brutal than the first game. One party of monsters can come along, paralyze your whole team and leave you open to endless slaughter. If you're riding half health for your party members, you can just reload that save right now.

HP and MP aren't the only stats you get increased. You also need to increase your base PWR and M. PWR (power and magic power respectively). Even if you have a great weapon, if you're PWR sucks, you won't be doing that much damage. Same with M. PWR. Within M. PWR, you also have stats for INT and Soul for Black Magic and White Magic. The catch with leveling these up is that they often lower one of the other stats. Not all the time, but enough so that you can't exactly make a bunch of jack-of-all-trades characters. To add insult to injury there, the low MP often requires you to have your designated mage character use physical attacks, leveling up their PWR and decreasing their magical ability.

Recognize those enemies? I'll give you a hint, they blow up in your face.

Finally, you've got your weapon skills. Your agility increases too but that's pretty self-explanatory and just seems to level up as you go. Basically with the weapons, give Firion the sword, Maria the bow, Guy the axe and your fourth characters just can use whatever. Never switch these for any reason. Canes suck, knives are swords but worse, Javelins have good range but are worse than the strong bows and fists could never hit enough times to justify their weak attacks. The problem with leveling these skills up is that each monster has it's designated maximum skill level. If you have a higher level than the monster's skill, that means you won't get any points towards leveling that weapon. These numbers prevent you from getting too over-leveled but they are all over the place. Sometimes, just to level up your weapon skill, you have to fight monsters waaaaaaay too strong for you.

Now, you've mastered the art of exploiting your level ups by controlling these damages yourself. But wait, have you been paying attention to those screenshots? Notice how the fourth player keeps changing. Yeah, there's the rub. You get the top three players for the whole game but the fourth one keeps changing. There are a few characters that cycle in and out as you progress through the game. Sometimes characters stay for a dungeon, sometimes longer, sometimes they leave and then come back later like the pansy, Gordon, up there. Sometimes they... don't come back... *early spoiler alert*

Tonight, Josef vs. the Giant Rock! Live on pay-per-view!

*end early spoiler*

Leveling up these characters is not only tough, it's basically pointless. Because they keep switching in and out, you may finally get one fourth up to the same level as the rest of your guys, just to have them leave a few minutes later, replaced by another weakling. In fact, when the couple fourths come back, they have the same stats as when they left you the first time, even if that was 10 hours earlier in the game! Make no mistake, these guys are meat shields, nothing more. Level up your main three and use your fourths as fodder... particularly Gordon up there.

So we've gone over leveling but how does the fighting actually work? Well, this is pre-Active Time Battle system but the turn order is no longer random like Final Fantasy. Your turn order is dictated by your agility stats. There does seem to be some random chance thrown in there but it's minimal. This means you can actually strategize your character's moves! Yay! The downside is you still don't know where an enemy is going to end up in that order unless you've memorized monster specs which would be scar- I mean awesome!

Obviously, attacking is attacking. That's not really changing any time soon. Magic is the interesting beast. Basically, you buy your spells and they all start at level 1 which means they cost 1 MP to use. As you use the spells, they increase in level. Use Cure 1 fifty times and it becomes Cure 2, so it now doubles it's effect and costs 2 MP to use. Do you see the problem in this yet? Cure 3 then costs 3 MP, Cure 6 then costs 6 MP... all the while, you're never actually increasing the potency of the spell, you're just getting the ability (requirement) to cast it in bulk. Yes, you can increase your character's magic power and their intelligence/soul stats but the difference isn't all that substantial. My trained mage uses Fire 4 and does about 250 damage whereas my melee character who uses magic in a pinch uses Fire 4 for about 230. What all of this means is that your mage will quickly become your dedicated healer who can't waste any MP attacking because getting down to level 4 of a dungeon and running out of cure's won't end well. Not to mention you better save some MP to cast Exit because otherwise, you get to the bottom and then you have to hike all the way back through the dungeon to get out. Bad plan if you're out of magic. So now that you're saving MP for cures, what is that character doing in battle? Yep, they're physically attacking. Which means what? Their power is going up and their intelligence/soul is going down, making them weaker at what you want them to be doing. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Don't even think about replacing your healer with items. Apparently, the team decided for Final Fantasy II that items played too big a role in the other game so they decided to give you super-limited inventory space and items can't stack. So if you have a backpack with, say, 30 spaces, you can have a maximum of 30 health potions which cure about 40 health per use. Not only would that not get you far but that also leaves you no space for your key items that you need for your quest, your weapons and armor you find in chests, your status curing potions, your battle items (which suck, by the way. Just sell them.). It's nearly impossible to keep any potions at all in your inventory, let alone enough to get you through a dungeon. As if that all weren't enough, you can't actually use these in battle. No, you have to equip items to your characters in advance if you want to use them in a fight. Each character can equip two items and can only use them on themselves. So if you think you're going to get poisoned in a battle, unless you know exactly which character's getting poisoned, you have to equip an Antidote to each one of them. That's assuming that you know you're getting poisoned. How often do the monsters announce, in advance, they will be paralyzing your characters now? This is why magic is so necessary despite being so under-powered.

All in all, the battle system, like the whole game, is a time of extreme experimentation for Final Fantasy. Some of the advances were great, like the MP system versus a fixed usage, agility stat versus random turn order, significantly fewer insta-death monsters. But a lot of the attempts were epic failures like the stat-based level ups, completely unbalanced magic, and the needlessly difficult and restrictive item system. I'll write my full review of the game *hopefully* later today but possibly stretching into Friday or Saturday depending on how much more of the game there is.

Game on!