Eyes on Final Fantasy Forums > Final Fantasy: Nerds in Paradise > Final Fantasy II > FFII's role in the growing of the franchise.

[Rase]

Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno ^

Its too hard to say what would happen, I would think that JRPGs would probably be snuffed out and instead we would only have boring "infinite hours of stat tweaking for no smurfing point" western RPGs. I know FFIV would be a very different game cause FFII seems to be its heaviest influence.

I doubt JRPG's would have disappeared, or even completely banished from the States. Whenever there is an absence of a viable product for a market there is money to be made. Square, Enix, Sega, or some other company would have found success in the US likely.

Also, there are plenty of times I prefer "infinite hours of stat tweaking for no smurfing point" western RPG's to "infinite hours of leveling to be the stupidly hard super secret boss" eastern RPG's.

[Bolivar]

If it flopped, it might not have been the end of Final Fantasy, Square might have just tried harder on a kind of "comeback" game for FFIII. But then again, FFIII itself did kinda go back to the style of I, in many different ways, and shed off a lot of the changes that were made in FFII. It makes sense when you figure Akitoshi Kawazu was the director, and took the levelling system in FFII into the SaGa series.

If FF DID end, it would've changed the direction of Japanese RPG's. There might have been another series to innovate and set the style for other JRPG's (other than Dragon Quest that is). Or they would've all been more like Dragon Quest...

In the end, this is all speculation, but I do feel FFII is the best Final Fantasy on the NES, its Gameboy Advance port is one of my favorite games in the series.

[Wolf Kanno]

Originally Posted by Rase ^

Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno ^

Its too hard to say what would happen, I would think that JRPGs would probably be snuffed out and instead we would only have boring "infinite hours of stat tweaking for no smurfing point" western RPGs. I know FFIV would be a very different game cause FFII seems to be its heaviest influence.

I doubt JRPG's would have disappeared, or even completely banished from the States. Whenever there is an absence of a viable product for a market there is money to be made. Square, Enix, Sega, or some other company would have found success in the US likely.

Also, there are plenty of times I prefer "infinite hours of stat tweaking for no smurfing point" western RPG's to "infinite hours of leveling to be the stupidly hard super secret boss" eastern RPG's.

I may have been hasty when saying "snuffed out" but it depends on who had the strongest influence when it came to creating "story driven" games. Phantasy Star pioneered it but I feel DQ is what made it dominant and I feel DQ only started to move that route due to its rivalry with FF.

I just wonder if FF would have tried another story based game had II flopped? The original NES FFIV may have come to pass and we may have never seen the FFIV we know. They may have stuck to something closer to early DQ instead of gravitating towards Phantasy Star. Had that been the case, who knows how many series would have gone down the same route. FF may not have started the idea but I feel they pushed the boundaries of JRPG's in the SNES era and its possible it could have been a more muted experience had they not gone down the path of story telling. JRPGs may still exist but they would be very different from what we know. Course this is all speculation.

[redneckpride4ever]

Originally Posted by KoShiatar ^

Final Fantasy's success in 1987 was unexpected, so if FF II had flopped, it would probably have been recorded as the so-and-so sequel of a good game. But we wouldn't be here discussing it, so we wouldn't miss the series because there would be nothing to miss.
Incidentally, there's a chance that the Dragon Quest series would have been hyped a lot more in the States, and now we would all be DQ fanboys in a DQ forum.

I've been a fanboy on a DQ forum for quite awhile.