FINAL FANTASY DIMENSIONS II

FFD2 does a lot of things right - and a few things wrong. The bad: The title - FF Dimensions 2 - is misleading to those of us who played the first game. No random encounters. No towns or dungeons to explore. No overwork map to blaze across. Meanwhile, FFD 1 had all of those elements. I personally feel that the game should have been called something else - many folks were disappointed enough by these changes that they never have the game a chance - which is too bad, because for what it is, and what it’s trying to be, FFD2 is quite good. The game starts slow - it take some time before your characters start getting new abilities to make the fights more interesting. I almost quit at one point - but I’m glad that I didn’t. The good: Everything else. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and experimenting w different party combinations. Battles are fun and fast, and the game is absolutely loaded with countless FF franchise references and details, making the game extra fun for those of us who have played many of the earlier FF games (e.g. The Tower of Babil music is a great remix of FF4’s original ToB music). Overall, the playable characters are enjoyable and have personality - maybe not as deep or as great as some past characters from previous FF games (Edge, Locke, Barret, Celes, etc.), but still enjoyable nonetheless. Put in over 50 hours, was well worth the sale price of 7$. Got my money’s worth.

The storyline is a semi-decent amalgamation of the original Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. It's moderately entertaining with a decent play time (I obtained and maxed out every ability in the game and hit level 99, clocking in about 65 hours). However, most of that time is really letting the game play itself with autobattle. It's really only a handful of fights where you need to intervene directly. The game was originally designed as a freemium mobile game and it's painfully obvious how the focus used to be on the business (enticing people to spend money on the microtransactions) rather than making a game that's genuinely well-crafted. It's been redesigned to eliminate the microtransactions. but with the deterministic drops of the signets, it feels a bit broken, since some abilities are clearly junk that are not worth upgrading, and yet, it just becomes the norm to do so because everything is handed to you as the result of story progression. It's OK as a pay-once game that it currently is but definitely isn't the best that SE has to offer. 4 stars just because I somehow managed to max everything out without uninstalling.

For the Final Fantasy (FF) fan who thinks every FF title needs to be an exact carbon copy of every other FF title: if that is your expectation then you might be disappointed. My first impressions of the game are very positive overall. I feel like things are streamlined in such a way to keep the player steadily advancing while constantly adding in new elements of play. It also appears that Square Enix (SE) has taken heed of what's currently popular in the mobile RPG market and incorporated it into their new title. Of course, it still has many of the common FF mainstays found in any other FF title, such as moogles, chocobos, turn-based combat, towns, shops, world maps, etc. The common core elements that identify a FF title are all there. It seems apparent to this long time, old school FF fan that this is a solid effort by SE to keep providing fans with more FF content that's relevant and high quality. However, I've not finished the game yet and although I highly doubt it, I could be wrong. I'll write the conclusion for this review upon finishing the game. For now, though, I'm quite satisfied.