The battle against dignity continues in Final Fantasy II!
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The first tabletop RPGs had lots of (often clunky) rules because they were trying to simulate the behaviour of an imaginary world, and it's no surprise that a lot of their mechanics carried over to their electronic incarnations. What is surprising - at least, surprising in comparison to every other genre - is that they continue to draw attention to themselves as rules, constantly reminding the player that THIS IS NOT REALLY HAPPENING by representing everything in abstract numbers. This is why I've always found the 'parody' games that come out of the RPG Maker community so pointless, since this is a genre that doesn't even have the pretense of a fourth wall. The more you think about it - and you don't need to think that much - it seems downright bizarre, since we're effectively playing an electronic simulation of a physical simulation which primarily existed because there weren't any electronic simulations available; the console's processor should be the one worried about the math involved, not us.
It's ironic that they're called Role Playing Games, since we're supposed to play them in abstract, from an omniscient perspective where we're made acutely aware that everything in the world is made of numbers. More than in any genre, we aren't playing the role of the characters as much as we're manipulating them. Playing, say, Super Mario Brothers, we are Mario, reacting through instinct and intuition to the world around us, and what his precise top speed or jump height is isn't something we have to think about consciously, because it's based entirely on our prior experience with this world and how it works: The pit is pretty wide, but if you start a run-up from about there, you should probably be able to clear it because jumping after running makes you go about yay far. In, say, Final Fantasy IV, though, we don't think "That monster looks means and I'm hurt - better heal", we think "Cecil's maximum HP is now 300/1850, the enemy attack does 250 HP damage per turn, therefore I will be dead in two turns unless I heal now or the next turn, and since the enemy might cast Flare, it's better to be safe than sorry". The size and number of enemies - something which is incredibly important in most action games - matters little in RPGs, since an early boss who takes up the entire screen will probably have less HP than the standard enemies we encounter in a few hours, and a horde of goblins can easily be fireballed to death, but a single goblin with a different palette and name who appears later could potentially decimate the party in two turns. Likewise, the idea that FF6's "Diamond Vest" offers less defense than the "Snow Muffler" is so absurd that I'm surprised my computer can display it without exploding, but the proof is right there in its statistics, so nobody has any qualms about forcing their front-line fighter to wear one. The numbers, and how we manipulate those numbers, are more important than anything.
No, not the Final Fantasy II that was actually fun.
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Which brings us to Final Fantasy II (and the SaGa series, since they were made by the same guy, natch). Final Fantasy II is an RPG that tries to break away from the standardised rules as we know them and become something more organic that could only be done on a console capable of storing, retrieving and manipulating thousands and thousands of numbers at once. Characters don't have levels or classes; their abilities increase and decrease proportional to how they act during combat - a character who primarily performs physical attacks with an axe will eventually evolve into a fighter who's good with axes, for instance. Instead of having a set list of spells arranged on tiers according to power, they all begin weak and can only be mastered through repeated casting. This is much closer to the idea of "Role Playing" than any other game in the series, since, if we want to be a fighter, we have to damn well get out there and fight stuff, not collect a piece of crystal and then select "Fighter" from the Job menu. When we later encounter enemies who are weak against ice, we don't just give somebody an ice spell or the Shiva summon that we've got lying around, we've got to put in the hard yards and learn to cast ice with enough power to do damage, assuming we weren't smart enough to diversify our line-up early. The characters have statistics, and numbers still pop up above people's heads when rocks fall on them, but the way they all relate is something the feels natural and alive, not the end result of collecting an arbitrary number of experience points. This is all well and good in theory.
In practice, it's another kettle of seafood soup. We might not level up, but there's still indicators on the menu that show how good each character is in each area, and the temptation to make those numbers get higher by being sneaky is very, very hard to resist, especially when it becomes apparent how easy it is. Maximum HP, for instance, increases proportional to how much damage that character suffers, which makes sense early on when monsters can kill you pretty damn easily and you need to toughen up... except, later on, there's nothing stopping you finding an area where the monsters are now too weak to harm you (literally; they'll do 0 damage) and start getting your characters to attack themselves. When everybody's on low HP, heal them and do it again. By the time you run out of MP, just kill off the pathetic monsters and find, to your delight, that your party's maximum HP (along with strength, defense and weapon proficiency) is now three times what it was beforehand. This takes maybe five minutes. Don't pretend that you wouldn't.
Except... this isn't really sneaky, it's necessary if you want to survive. As in the ice example from earlier, you will run into situations constantly where a certain spell or weapon type is clearly the way to go, only to discover that nobody is capable of using it properly because you've relied on axes and fireballs all game. It might seem like its our fault for being over-specialised, but if we had split weapon / spell usage evenly, none of them would be powerful enough to take down a regular enemy, much less a boss. This reaches new heights of stupidity when the party climb a ridiculously difficult tower in order to attain Ultima, ostensibly the most powerful spell in the world... except, when we get it, it's on level 1 and barely scratches a goblin. Fuck Aeris; this is the sort of stuff that makes me break down in tears.
The people who made this game knew about these problems. Instead of, say, trying to work around them, they added a feature to cover the holes in the gameplay: The "Swap" spell, which exchanges your HP and MP with the target. This sounds like one of those obscure Blue Magic spells that only completists bother getting, but... cast it on a Goblin with 6 HP and 0 MP, finish the battle, and, lo and behold, your stats are through the roof, because the game thinks you were reduced to 6 HP and 0 MP by the astonishingly difficult battle you just survived by the skin of your teeth. The only reason this spell exists is so you can cheat with it, because the people who made this game realised their system was totally unbalanced, but couldn't think of a way to correct the damn thing. This is so monumentally inane that it beggars belief.
This is still a game about the player relating to and manipulating abstract numbers, it's just that it's more frustrating and less satisfying. The characters don't really evolve organically, because not only can we plainly see how the stats are doled out, but the game expects us to notice and actually helps us exploit its loopholes. If the rest of the game were properly balanced, if the dungeon designs were clever rather than annoying, if anything here didn't feel so half-finished, then this might seem like one of the first post-modern video game moments, but, honestly... it's just really, really stupid. It's not that it's "weird" or "experimental", it's that it starts by taking control over the all-important numbers away from the player, then realises it doesn't know what to do with it and gives it back, but by then it's too late. If you want something "experimental", play Final Fantasy VIII; at least the numbers make sense.
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Whilst performing my morning routine of checking a list of popular RPG bulletin boards in alphabetical order, I once came upon an especially ignorant message which claimed that Final Fantasy V was "a lost gem that not enough have experienced". After chuckling derisively to myself, I formulated one of my trademark incisive and intellectual responses. "It's hardly the fault of true RPG gamers such as myself that the world is populated by contemptuous philistines", I wrote, "and furthermore we should not have to suffer having our vibrant and stimulating online communities sullied by your misinformed opinions! Final Fantasy II is an infinitely rarer gem, and one of startling psychological and emotional complexity compared to the childish farce that was Final Fantasy V." "Have you played it? What's it like?" he responded in an attempt to confuse me. Having never played the game before, I set about collecting production and sales data that could be used to prove my point (which did not require proving to anyone with an open mind!). Unfortunately, this was such an involving task that I missed the schoolbus and could not give my equally well-researched oral presentation on the thematic links between Final Fantasy VII and Heart of Darkness, resulting in an unsatisfactory grade. C'est la vie.