Subnautica

Subnautica is a survival game that puts you in the place of a stranded space traveler on an ocean planet. Survival is a somewhat controversial genre that a whole lot of people despise or just don't give a damn about, so you may have just knee jerked into closing this review. I'd love to tell you: "Hey wait a minute and listen to me, Subnautica is barely the kind of survival game you're thinking of!". I desperately want to tell you: "What if you had Metroid's level of atmosphere, but underwater?". I would actually say it's almost closer to a walking (swimming?) simulator with survival chores tacked onto it more than anything (which is not an insult, walking simulators are really cool). It certainly wants to be that kind of minimal survival game. But I'd be a damned liar if I said that.

The Game

 The survival elements are rather light on the surface, and it features minimal combat (beautifully excused by your corporate overlords disabling weapon production on all 3d printers after a massacre in a similar survival situation). Gaining resources is primarily a matter of picking things up (as opposed to more elaborate mining systems or combat challenges the genre trends towards), getting new technology is a matter of finding or scanning things you find in the environment. A few other survival elements also exist (needing to eat/drink, repairing equipment after use with batteries, powering your base to operate equipment, etc) but most of them quickly fade away into minor chores after upgrades. 

 The real core loop of Subnautica is just about going to new places, finding upgrades in them, creating those upgrades with gathering you did along the way, and then using those upgrades to go to even more new places (your traversal mechanics getting shook up slightly along the way). The only real omnipresent survival element is that the places you explore will almost always be on a time limit of your oxygen supply, but it's really more of a flavor timer than anything since resupplying at a safe point is rather trivial.

 The terrible, terrible problem of Subnautica is just that it didn't cut down the survival genre enough. In particular, the dreaded scourge of the genre is in full force: inventory management. If you're unfamiliar with it, Minecraft basically established that inventories have to be terrible chores where you have to move items into chests between runs. Lots and lots of chests. It's a genre staple that has stuck around for good reason because it gives purpose to player's bases (if you can carry everything then why have a base, other than for crafting stations). Even more importantly, the need to organize things (ie, put the gold and silver in their own chest) is a facsimile of how people organize their actual homes in real life, creating a sense of place. While annoying, plenty of games have done a good job minimizing the annoyance while maximizing the flavor it creates.

 Subnautica does the opposite and maximizes the annoyance instead. Specifically, it defies genre standards by not letting you stack items of any kind. While it's very generous with the number of slots in your inventory and chests to compensate for it, it makes transferring items between chests an enormous chore. The first problem this creates is just that the game will ask you to transfer your main storage multiple times: first because you built your base in a really stupid shallow spot where your vehicles can't easily get into. Then because you only start out with being able to build small tubes, so when you finally find the recipe to make a big room you end up with a big chore of hauling things around. Then the game will do this again when it introduces a mobile base where you can store everything if you choose to do so (of course said mobile base has a number of limitations where you will occasionally still need a normal base to do certain things anyway). I didn't actually exercise most these options, opting to store my crap in the tiny annoying tube base rather than moving it over and over again (and using the mobile base as a secondary base instead of a primary). So that's a real hassle.

The second problem not having stacking creates is just that it makes it hard to stockpile things (until very late in the game where you get said mobile base, then it just becomes a nightmare to transfer your stockpile without taking multiple trips). Unless you go back to base every single time you hit your inventory limit, you will constantly be leaving resources behind. Sometimes I left things behind just because my chest for that thing was full and I didn't have a great place to put another chest of those things in my tiny tube base. This limitation was almost certainly a design choice, because the result is that you will constantly be be running out of things and going "ugh I'm out of this, time to go back to that biome that has them". And sometimes this design choice worked out really well with me discovering something I missed the last time, or a new area along the way. But mostly it created a certain chafing annoyance every time I thought about starting the game up again. The apex of this is the final thing you have to build in the game: it only tells you the resources you need for each stage of building it, so it's impossible to create a shopping list ahead of time. The end result is that I had to go back and forth (a several minute trip of just heading forward) to the endgame area like 5 or 6 times to build the final thing since I would inevitably have not brought enough for the next stage of building. While some of this can be mitigated with smart base positioning (or just obsessive gathering even if you don't think you'll need something again), it's easy to screw it up without foreknowledge.

And let me be clear here. I think Wind Waker's sailing (the thing everyone complains about as being too slow) has the best sense of adventure a game has ever accomplished. I thought the treasure map quest in Wind Waker was a good time and I hated that subsequent re-releases cut it down (I almost tried playing the Japanese version to see the longer version of it!). I think Death Stranding, a game about walking back and forth to places delivering packages, was the best game released in 2019. So when I say that Subnautica is filled with way too much tedious back and forth travel caused by a crummy inventory system, I really mean it. 

The World

The actual appeal of the game is the world. Underwater settings are woefully underrepresented (likely due to early 3d attempts at swimming controls ending in tragedy), but Subnautica completely nails the feeling of exploring an alien ocean in isolation. It's not even that the art design dazzles you with exotic glowing plants and alien one-eyed fish, contrasted by the player's sleek futuristic vessels. It's that in the same way that Red Dead Redemption had exactly the right "wood creaking under cowboy boots" sounds that movies have trained us to expect, Subnautica has all the right creaks and groans of an underwater base, and the creepy moans of giant things we definitely don't want to encounter. The deeply atmospheric soundtrack that kicks in sparingly takes you the rest of the way to traveling to this alien planet.

The story has a pretty minimal approach, primarily driven by distress signals you get on your radio, and cliche voice logs of the other survivors you find scattered about. What makes it work is that it twists and goes past your expectations just enough to excite your imagination. Looking back on it after finishing it, it isn't that impressive from a distance, but in the moment it's exciting. Scanning the fauna and learning about the planet's ecosystem is also delightful, though I wish the game paused your oxygen counter while reading.

Topping it off is the game's brilliant way of handling exploration. Rather than uncovering a map, you get beacons you can place that the game will point you towards at all times. This is a perfect balance of letting you find your way back to important places while still making it easy to get lost in the world. It's also sized tastefully enough that every point of interest in the game is generally at least a little unique, and traversing the entire map isn't too exhausting. The only real mark against it is that the game uses distress signals too heavily, directing you to most of the important locations in the game ahead of time, which can rob you of a sense of discovery. It's also a minor technical mess with tons of world pop-in, fish flying into rocks and clipping through things, getting warped into a rock by an attacker, etc. These things are understandable given the scope of the game relative to the team's size, but it does hurt the game's strongest assets.

As much as I spent most of this review complaining about the survival mechanics, they also add a certain something to the pacing of discovering the world. A certain something to the sense of danger to the world. Excitement when you finally find what you need to go deeper, but also irritation when you feel like you're looking for a needle in a haystack. So would I recommend that you play Subnautica? Yes, especially if you're into atmospheric games about exploring things. But with a very heavy caveat that you need a stomach for terrible inventory systems and other such nuisances. I generally like survival games and backtracking, but this game was too much for me several times (so much so that I quit playing it the first time and only came back to it later. And frankly, I'm not sure it was worth going back to finish it.). It's a world worth exploring, even if you don't see all of it.

Final Fantasy II

There's one phenomenon of the NES era that I find most interesting: the black sheep sequel. For whatever reason the second game in a lot of series tended to be radically different. Castlevania II turned a straightforward action platformer into an open world adventure (albeit inspired by Castlevania's parallel MSX version- so II might have been seen as letting the NES "catch up" in complexity), Zelda 2 turned an overhead action adventure into a side scrolling action adventure with an RPG overworld, etc. Upon release, the drastic genre shifts generally weren't received well by their fans and the next sequel tended to be a return to form (though opinions have shifted over the years).

Final Fantasy II, at least from a western perspective, falls firmly into this category even though it didn't change genres. Going into it for the first time (ignoring previous 5 minute dismissals), all I really knew was "it's that game where you hit your own party members to increase their HP instead of getting experience to level up". Which is true, but what I didn't expect was a shocking emphasis on story for the time (most discussions I've read about the game usually write it off as, "I guess it establishes taking down evil empires in Final Fantasy"). I would probably go so far as to say that if Dragon Quest is the grandmother of Japanese RPGs, then Final Fantasy II is the mother- and it honestly establishes more of the formula as we think of it today than Dragon Quest does.

This guy is my favorite NPC in the game. He blames you for every bad event in the game.

The Story

It starts you off as a group of now-orphaned teens trying to run away as the Empire conquers their home town. The escape fails, but they end up rescued by the rebellion. After proving themselves capable, they end up recruited by them and the rest of the plot revolves entirely around overthrowing the empire. While the means of taking the Empire down technically boils down to fetch quests, the first half actually does a very good job of feeling like you're taking part in a conflict. Finding the mythril for new weapons actually spawns new NPCs that sell those weapons to you, you have to go back to the central castle to receive new orders each step of the way, and plans often go awry resulting in towns getting partially destroyed in the crossfire (albeit in very limited fashion of just having some NPCs disappear). There's even a part late in the game where liberating your conquered home town actually turns a dungeon into a new town (plausibly the inspiration for Suikoden). It's all incredibly cool for 1988 on a Famicom, and I really didn't expect to see this kind of stuff until Dragon Quest IV in the 90's.

 

A lot of people die in this game. It's pretty rad.

 

Unfortunately for as directed as the plot is for the first half, the second half turns into more of a literal fetch quest for a spell to defeat the Empire with. The plot loses all of its momentum for the sake of turning into a more typical free roam RPG, where you basically just have to conquer several dungeons in a row. This section probably wouldn't stick out as much if the game part of the game were actually good, but we'll get to that later. On the plus side, the plot focus of the first half of the game does eventually make its return, and it features some of the best moments as well which makes the slog to get to it somewhat worthwhile.

The sex scene was probably too hot for the game to come to America.

 

What makes the plot stand out for the time isn't just that the world changes in response to it (or that it exists at all), but its execution is surprisingly good. Partially because the game actually features cutscenes of NPCs moving around, heroically sacrificing themselves on boulders for you- even going so far as to have a sad piece of music for the numerous deaths in the game (maybe the first usage of matching music to emotional tone?). But more importantly, it's relatively intricate: At the start of the game you'll meet an optional NPC in town, a cowardly prince who refuses to take the throne to wage war against the Empire, leaving his sister to do it in his stead. You'll meet his brother on his death bed, but he still he won't fight. Several hours later he'll end up joining your party for a time. Even later on, he ends up leaving your party, finally inspired by the protagonists to fight. From then on he becomes a major player in the story, even though he started out as an NPC you could easily walk past. The same structure applies throughout the game: NPCs you rescue at the start of the game later become guiding party members or daring rescuers near the end of the game. It's all really cool, even if not everything works (a late game character reveal doesn't have the emotional weight nor the surprise to work, the late game plot dissolves into just killing the bad guy, the protagonists themselves have virtually no characterization, and completely sidelining the princess who does all the actual work in running the rebellion is pretty lame).

Even the world map features cutscenes, like this airship chase.

The Manual

Try as I might, I cannot actually find an English translation of the original Final Fantasy II manual (remakes that received translations aren't really substitutes since they generally omit detail that has been added to the game itself). This makes evaluating the game somewhat difficult. There's a good chance things like arcane progression systems, or different armors having different spell casting penalties may have been cleanly stated instead of aggravatingly obscure. There's just as good of a chance that the manual didn't explain anything. For my own play through, I ended up referring to an online database that included a lot of opinions about spell/item utility and warnings about numerous bugged elements (the manual definitely wouldn't have included bugs). It made for a much smoother play than I would have had totally blind, but just how different from the intended experience is impossible to say (I suspect the manual would include spell penalties at least). Just something to keep in mind, a lot of complaints against the game could either be very minor if the manual explained them or game destroying flaws if it didn't and I have no idea which it is- I only have my own distorted experience.

Not every world transforming event is handled very well, probably due to cart limitations.

The Game

Let's get the easy part out of the way first: Final Fantasy I had pretty great dungeons. Most of them had distinct themes (sometimes with the layout, sometimes with the battles themselves having a theme, sometimes with minor puzzles or damage tiles, etc), and they were tightly sized so their pacing generally wasn't too exhausting. Combined with a  more-full-of-stuff battle system (featuring elemental damage, tons of spells to buy, and unique equipment to find), Final Fantasy I was basically a really good dungeon crawler to Dragon Quest I practically being an adventure game with its reliance on dialog clues (something Final Fantasy merely dabbled with for variety). Dragon Quest II had more stuff, but was still ultimately outclassed as a dungeon crawler. Which then makes it utterly baffling that Final Fantasy II pretty much jettisons everything its predecessor did with dungeons.

Get used to seeing this room.

Almost every dungeon in Final Fantasy II has only one main gimmick: doors that mostly lead to the same empty room, so you have to figure out which one is the way forward. Things like fake walls you can walk through and damage tiles technically exist, but are used sparingly, and are largely irrelevant or impossible to find. Even though the new spell system lets the game reward the player with new spells now, treasure chests are heavily slanted towards only giving you garbage (yet still contain unique items just often enough that you're forced to check them anyway). Battles aren't particularly themed around each dungeon either, as you'll fight similar monster patterns with different palettes throughout most of the game, and most don't have very distinct gimmicks outside of basic elemental weaknesses or status effects. Gold basically becomes irrelevant 1/4th into the game outside of healing items, making finding it completely unsatisfying. Topping it all off, pretty much every boss is a cakewalk compared to the difficulty of reaching them (outside of the occasional trapped treasure chest)- though this complaint is perhaps a blessing.

A rare dungeon secret. Savor it, for there are few.

 

Now having bland dungeons isn't necessarily a show stopper for an RPG. Sometimes a dungeon just needs to be about pacing out the story and being a place for battles. If anything, bland can often be better than when a game tries too hard with unique gimmicks such that they just end up becoming annoying (hello Persona 5). The real problem with Final Fantasy II's dungeons is just that they're ridiculously long to get to the end of. Not just a few dungeons, but almost every dungeon in the game is just too damn long. The final dungeon's whopping 15 floors being the worst example of it (though at that point you at least have the tools to easily manage your MP. Earlier dungeons often require warping out early, not because the battles are too hard, but because you ran out of MP are actually far worse). In short, the dungeons are awful. 

It turns out Final Fantasy recycles a lot of ideas.

That said, I should give the dungeon design some credit. While horribly bland, their shapes are actually distinct enough that when you do your second or third run, they'll be dramatically faster since it's fairly easy to remember the "correct" path. Maze dungeons that you have to write down, these are not. I got through them just fine without writing anything down or looking up any maps.

Although the protagonists are undeveloped, they do talk throughout the game. A big step up from Dragon Quest II, at least.

If you haven't noticed, I've been avoiding getting to the battle system. The basic idea of it is pretty simple: if you hit things with a sword, you get better at using a sword and gain more strength (but lose intelligence). Cast a spell, you get better at that spell and gain intelligence (but lose strength). Get hurt a lot, gain more HP. It's a system that pops up in various games, but rarely sticks around because it tends to promote boring, grinding behavior. In the case of Final Fantasy II, the flaws are so many and so varied that the only way I can describe them is by giving up and writing a list:

I tried to keep Maria's HP low all game so I could use the swap hp spell on the final boss, but it ended up being unnecessary.

• The way MP gain is triggered requires unnatural behavior. Most magic spells can destroy monsters in 1-2 turns, but gaining MP requires using 25-50% of your MP pool in a single battle. This means that you'll basically never gain MP by playing naturally, which results in brutal situations where you'll never have enough MP to survive a dungeon. You have to grind it, and grinding requires sitting in one battle spamming spells without killing monsters- which is something you can't really do while progressing through a dungeon, where the goal is to conserve MP. This is assuming you read a guide that tells you how leveling MP works, a completely blind player is in for a miserable experience until they figure out the trick. (Similarly, using spells in a menu doesn't count so your white mage ends up in the awkward position of being better off healing in battle)
  
• Leveling spells is also unintuitive. While you might expect casting the same spell over and over in the same battle to be ideal, what you actually want to do is cast it once per battle (as there is a first time cast bonus each battle). Once you realize this, it's technically a somewhat interesting system that forces you to use a variety of spells every battle if you want to avoid a more direct grind later on. But I had no clue until I absolutely had to level up a critical spell and ended up looking it up in desperation.
• This one is as much of a positive as it is a negative: There are a ton of spells in the game, leveling them up takes forever. The end result is that it's impossible (without an absurd amount of grinding) to try everything. This is positive in that it means everyone will likely end up with a somewhat unique party, but it's also a negative in that it's also very easy to lose the spell lottery and end up having wasted your time on junk. I have to imagine discussing the best spells was popular on Japanese playgrounds.

(Not Pictured) One of the cool things the game does is have the first guest character have all the white magic spells in the game, so you get to mess with them ages before you get them for yourself. None of the other guests are that cool.

• In the case of curing status effects, it also meant I had to stop in my tracks and grind Esuna for like an hour in order for it to heal the petrification that a dungeon was full of (buying items wasn't an option because you can't stack items in this game even though the first game let you, and key items and unique equipment will end up clogging your inventory). Grinding isn't unexpected for a NES game, but having to grind a status effect cure sure is something.

It doesn't take long before Gil has no meaning.

• Progression just feels mushy and ambiguous. A traditional leveling system combined with purchasable equipment throughout a game makes it relatively easy to feel "on target" for a dungeon- once you have bought/found the nearby gear and random encounters are easy enough, you know it's time to reach the boss. Final Fantasy II barely having purchased equipment, MP being the main hindrance for clearing a dungeon, and random encounters often not feeling much easier even on my third dungeon run due to not having leveled the right spell or whatever made it very hard for me to tell if I was "ready" to tackle a dungeon boss (until several dungeons into the game where it became very clear that all the bosses were easy. Whether that's because I overleveled by accident or they're just easy... I'm still not sure)
• The game features a rotating cast of guest characters that join your party. While this is great for the plot, it goes entirely against the battle system wanting you to grind spells for hours on end (as only one guest comes with their own spells). Guest characters end up as a rotating kind-of-crappy physical character. It makes the game feel like it's at odds with itself.
  

In a regression from the first game, you can't stack items and key items take up inventory space such that you get less inventory space the longer the game goes on. It is a nightmare of constantly tossing unique elemental equipment in the trash because you can't carry it.

There's probably more I could complain about or point out (despite the main power of the system being that anyone can learn any spell, numerous systems work against letting you do this, you can hit yourself to reach 9999 hp if you want and people call this a "flaw" but I got to merely 3000 hp naturally and it wasn't a problem anyway and I suspect the healing MP drain wouldn't be worth it anyway, etc). If you squint really hard, it's easy to imagine that the designer's intent was to create a "self-balancing" RPG given the way HP/MP gains operate off percent lost in a single battle- that is, if a player is having a hard time and losing too much HP then the system swoops in and gives them more HP until they're ready. But in practice it works about the same as a normal leveling system, just with convoluted methods to level.

One of the few nods to the first game (aside from recycled art) is a tasteful village of black mages.

Still, while people mainly complain about the oddball battle system, I don't think it's actually what makes Final Fantasy II miserable to play so much as it is the dungeons and other fringe design choices. The sometimes rewarding party customization likely would have made up for the jagged edges of the system if everything around it wasn't so bad. 

One of the coolest areas in the game is a town inside a sea monster, because everyone keeps falling for the same trapped "rare" quest item that causes it to eat their ships. This review has way too many screenshots because I'd rather gush about the cool story stuff than talk about the game.

So should you play Final Fantasy II? No. Almost certainly not. The story is really cool, but only if you're so into video games (or the series) that you can appreciate it from a historical perspective. But everything else just completely overshadows it by so much that I can't really recommend it to anyone. I half regret playing it myself (but the other half of me is like: holy crap so many characters died in this, dang multiple towns got blown up, wow I didn't know dragoons were introduced this early in the series, wondering how many story bits in Final Fantasy XIV were actually nods to this game all along, etc)