Final Fantasy Legend II (Game Boy) review "This would be the only Final Fantasy Legend game I have not lost of the three made, and I am happy to say that I still have it and still play it. This is an excellent game for the classic gameboy, and it is better than most Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color games. The storyline, intertwined with entralling gameplay, and an overall experience that you will want to try over and over again. While it is likely the hardest game created with Final Fantasy in its name (at least in my mind) you will spe..."

This would be the only Final Fantasy Legend game I have not lost of the three made, and I am happy to say that I still have it and still play it. This is an excellent game for the classic gameboy, and it is better than most Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color games. The storyline, intertwined with entralling gameplay, and an overall experience that you will want to try over and over again. While it is likely the hardest game created with Final Fantasy in its name (at least in my mind) you will spend months working your way towards that final goal, and that final battle against the gods. Final Fantasy Legend II is an instant classic, and one that you would not want to miss.

STORY (20/20): There are 77 magi created in the world. When all 77 are gathered togather a godess will come to grant your wishes. However, as always, there are gods who also desire all the magi for themselves. There is the god Apollo who is nice, the God Ashura (who uses force, the God Venus who uses her beauty, the Japanese war god, and of course the friendly viking god Odin who just desires one battle with you. Each land has it's own storyline, and some will intertwine (specially with that Apollo character). There is a huge twist at the end, and a few surprises along the way. A good story that lives up to a Final Fantasy games expectations.

Besides the gods, you need a cast of characters that will be memorable. While your four main characters are unimportant, that is typical of the Final Fantasy Legend series. Instead these characters will come across dozens of important subcharacters, some who will even join and fight with you. These characters will all revolve aroudn those four subcharacters, especially the main characters father, who will greatly affect the whole story.

GRAPHICS (12/15): Nothing dazzling, but nothing horrible either. The gods however look excellent, for they are huge and very detailed, and they do belittle your poor warrior (like it should be). There really is no motion in the game, for like most RPG's it is turned based, and that leads to no action packed scenes, but the characters are well detailed and the backgrounds are stable, and show what they are supposed to show.

SOUND (8/10): The music is perfect. Each song fits it's part clearly, and you may find yourself almost crying with the fitting sad music when someone important dies (I will not tell you who). There is action packed music, and they have a jukebox where you can listen to all this music at the bar. The sound effects are not great, but you can't have to high expectation for a game using the early gameboy soundchip.

GAMEPLAY (38/40): It is turn base battle, and the gameplay is very similiar to the Final Fantasy Legend game before it. You have a certain amount of hits you can use per weapon before you have to buy another one. Like the first one, this means you will have to keep yourself stocked up on certain weapons if you expect to fully conquer this game, because it would be very futile to be fighting an important battle, and to find that your out of longswords or hammers. As long as you keep the right equipment handy, and ration the weapons of greatest quality for the final three boss battles, you should be able to do alright.

Unlike the first one however, people will join you along the way and will stand by you and fight. Some of these are very important, and probably the reason you win a battle (I think they made the Mask a little too powerful though, and the girl way too weak). When these characters join, however, the ability to run will greatly decrease, but you should not be running anyway. These character greatly affect the storyline, while helping your crew out significantly.

For your immediate crew you can choose from monsters, robots, mutants, or humans. The biggest problem with this game is that they make monsters way to weak. They evolve by eating meat, but if you become a powerful monster and eat the wrong meat, you could become a wyrm again. The robots however are useful cause they get stronger by what weapons you give them and they can then reuse those weapons over and over, just be revisiting inns, so you do not have to rebuying them longswords or whatnot. Human/mutants just level up (statistically), instead of the typical 1-99 system, they will randomly gain either HP, agility, strength, or sometimes nothing at all. This means, you will have to keep training these guys to get to their highest capabilities. The difference is humans can fight with swords much stronger, will mutants can use magic, which is very useful. This system works pretty well, but I would highly reccomend two humans, a mutant, and a robot. Otherwise you will find yourself in trouble down the stretch.

Final Fantasy Legend II gives you a nice combination of puzzles, leveling up (maybe a bit too much) and storyline twists. This gives a nice feeling to the game, one that is not truly ever hindered until the very end. You will find yourself perplexed sometimes about what you should do next, until you can gain your next stash of Magi.

REPLAYABILITY (8/10): This game is long, and you will have to level yourself as much possible to win. That is why the replay value is kinda low, cause the story is great and really fun to play over and over, but it is just so hard to spend around 10 hours leveling up at least before you take on the final masters. But you will at least play this game one more time through for old times sake.

DIFFICULTY (3/5): In the beggining it is not too hard, as long as you don't run from battles. Make yourself strong in the beggining and you will cruise through for a while. But later on in the game the masters become near on impossible, and you will have to level yourselves up past the max and buy the best weapons in this game. Down the stretch their really is no point for originally, and you just have to hope for luck, and constant leveling up.

OVERALL (90/100): The difficulty is really the only weakness in the game. If they made the final masters easier this would have been the best gameboy game ever, instead of the second best to Final Fantasy Adventure. But this game is definitely extremely fun, and is definitely worth any money you will spend to buy it. If I could I would force you to buy this game for your own good!

Community review by ratking (Date unavailable) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.