The Battle System: Insufficiencies and Irritations

I began FF2 with a lot of optimisim for the proposed battle system. Rather than the rigid class structure of FF1 we're given a "mold your own characters" system that allows any character to  use any weapon, piece of armor, or spell that you want them to, and rewards your battle strategies with stat gain that reflect your play style. How far from the truth these claims turned out to be.

To begin with, while you can most certainly equip any character with any combination of weapons, armor, etc., certain characters seem predisposed to gaining certain stats with greater ease. I set out early to turn Maria into a beefy warrior (just to play with the gender conventions a little) and found that, in spite of my efforts, Gus' strength, endurance, and hit points continued to rise faster and more easily than Maria's, making it quickly impossible for her to keep up with him in damage. Yes, this could probably be fixed with eteremely focused training, but the time that would take simply isn't worth it to me. If Maria naturally likes being a white magic user so be it.

Secondly, the "stat gains" that you theoretically get for performining different actions in combat are extremely arbitrary, and often have hidden requirements. For istance, according to the manual your characters gain HP by taking damage in battle. What the manual doesn't tell you is that in order to recieve an HP increase the character in question must take damage greater than or equal to half of his max HP. Obviously this happens less frequently as the game progresses. More HP and better defence naturally equal a lower probability of taking enough damage to gain HP. How do you solve this? Since your characters often deal far more damage than any enemy, you usually end up having to hit yourself in the face in order to do enough damage to cause an increase. The same concept applies to MP increase, which also require you to expend half of your max to get a boost. The end result is that you'll spend a good deal of time grinding stats in battle, pureposfully encountering lower level enemies and then ignoring them while you attack yourself and waste your MP casting spells that don't serve any purpose. Its tedious and boring.

What about spells and weapons, you say. Yes, spells and weapons gain experience through use and need to be used in order to become more powerful. Guess what. You'll get to grind for these too. A glitch in the game mechanics allows you to select an action (attack, for example) and confirm a target, and then cancel the action and still recieve points towards that weapon (or spell). So you'll find yourself going into battle, queueing up attacks, canceling, repeating, repeating, repeating, until your head explodes. You can also only do this with three out of your four characters (confirming a target with your fourth character intiates the attack round, with no chance to canel) leading to a constant strength imbalance between your three primary characters and whoever is currently filling your fourth spot. (If there's a way to reorder the characters I haven't found it yet.)

No, ladies and gentleman, the battle system here is a well conceived but terribly executed plan that breaks down at fundamental levels and leaves you with no option but to waste time grinding if you ever want to get anywhere. Trying to level your stats, weapons, and spells the natural way would take centuries. Use the cheats, grind until you can't stand it anymore, and then focus on beating the game. Bah humbug.