During the early years of videos games sequels were different than they are today. I remember John Romero (of Doom fame) explaining that there was a hesitation that fans might not want something too much like the game they already played and would be looking for something new. I think this was true for a lot of NES games which usually had a first sequel that was a bit odd and different than the original. This gave us Mario 2 (technically the Lost Levels but the Doki Doki Panic port likely followed this same idea), Castlevania 2, Zelda 2 etc. Final Fantasy 2 interestingly but I guess unsurprisingly follows this pattern.
Going in I knew the least about this particular entry and I don't think it has much of a following. The most striking difference is the departure from the level system of the first (which would become ubiquitous in the series). Instead each stat is governed by usage. That is, taking damage increases HP, draining MP increases it, using magic and weapons increases their level and just having high evade increases agility. At first the rudimentary explanations are difficult to follow but after a while you kind of understand what it expects of you. In this way it's possible to build custom classes. Have a hard hitter who gets hit hard will make them better at doing that, having a character that casts spells will make them better at that. It's surprisingly rich for an NES game and it has a nice bonus that even cannon fodder battles can give you small improvements at a regular cadence that feels good.
The problem mostly boils down to it being hard to gauge where you are at. At least with a level system you kinda get a sense of where everyone is but when all the stats are all over the place you're mostly gauging on the feel in battles. The other part is it can be hard to figure out what you should be doing. Magic interference, a very opaque stat never made sense to me but I kept my magician as a hand-to-hand combat specialist because it was lower. I also made a few mistakes. One was going too role based. I basically laid out a warrior and black magic but it turned out that I should have really invested more in magic for everyone a bit sooner because at least in this version there is no penalty for doing so (The Famicom original might be different). You need the MP and ability to use spells later in the game. I also underinvested in certain magic. The biggest was Berserk which I erroneously understood to be the status effect of other Final Fantasy games that makes you only attack but with higher damage when in fact in this game it's just a spell to increase physical damage. This is necessary for physical characters to do damage to certain boss enemies, particularly the final boss which took a few tries. It also stacks a bit, so you need to cast it more than once to get the full effect. The other is Osmose. This steals MP from enemies but it is incredibly overpowered. Even at low level it can steal 100+MP in a single turn, enough to easily give you unlimited MP which in turn means unlimited healing (at least outside battle). So I really didn't completely get the hang of the systems until the end.
Otherwise progression isn't hard. It's similar to Final Fantasy in the you go through floors of dungeons fighting random battles and can only save on the outside. Though now dungeons are littered with doors to nowhere to waste your steps, a very strange design. The enemy leveling is less flat, you definitely fight harder and harder enemies over time and the dungeons come in a linear order. But I did find that it jumps occasionally. You might have cruised through the previous dungeon mashing the attack button but the next will have much stronger enemies that cause you to rapidly level up (weapon levels are based on how strong the enemy is). The game also seems to have more of them so much of it is exploring these labyrinths and engaging in a lot of random battles. Outside of dungeons there is more of a plot, the characters even have names! But it's still simple by today's standards, almost silly at times with the whiplash of the plot twists. Still there's probably less figuring out what to do than with the first game. What they added to create depth was the keyword system. Sometimes talking to NPCs (mostly just Hilda) you get a word in red which you can learn with a command. Then once learned you can ask certain NPCs about it to open up new paths and advance the plot. Unfortunately, much like the level up system it's just overly complicated and functions the same as talking to NPCs to unlock things but with an irritating extra step.
You also only have 3 main characters. The 4th slot gets occupied randomly by others characters which is kinda cool because they are already setup as certain classes. The problem here is that you never know when they will swap out so the effort you put in might not be worthwhile later. Also while early characters are usually a bit stronger than the rest of your party, later ones are much weaker, requiring additional grinding to get up-to-speed. And there are a lot of character deaths, Final Fantasy 7 was shocking, but turns out was new at all.
Compared to Final Fantasy, I found this game to be grindier. It took me about 6 more hours to complete and I don't think the content was all that better. They tried some interesting things but I'm not surprised they never stuck for later entries as they just weren't all the good. I also liked seeing the start of some new long term themes like the Ultima magic, Molboro enemies, Behemoths, an actual MP system, a more intuitive and configurable front/back row system etc. I can see why it was perhaps less popular overall. The music is still good though, especially the new orchestrated + choir rendition of Pandemonium. The extra grind pushed me into more of the pixel remaster features like auto battling. This works by taking the last action of each character and replaying it but it's at the party level, so if even one character has the change actions you need to input them all again. Also when auto battling you get 2x speed. I don't know why they didn't just lift the already working systems from Bravely Default which let you control game speed independently and let you use last action per character. I also wound up turning off battles for certain traversal parts because the battles were not dangerous at all, just super tedious. So this playthrough was a little less pure. Still enjoyable though.
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