After success with the original Final Fantasy on the PlayStation Portable, Square naturally wanted to continue the magic. In reality, the only thing making it a sequel was the number 2 tacked on the end. The original game strayed away from character levels and lacked a general background story, instead offering a new system. Unfortunately, some of these changes weren’t received well by gamers, and are still a sore spot on the new PSP version. On the other hand, these changes set the tempo for an ever changing series that may not have made it so far without as many fresh ideas coming into it.

Just like the re-release of the first Final Fantasy on the PSP, the graphical updates one number two are amazing, and they are what will potentially sell this game. Square Enix has updated the graphics from the old NES 8-bit, and it looks more like a great looking SNES game in the end. Along with the graphical update, audio takes advantage of the newer technology on the PSP and it really allows some of Nubuo Uematsu’s older work to shine. This is best experienced with a nice set of headphones plugged in to get the full effect. This, unfortunately, can really only do so much to offset some of the flaws that really bring this version and the original down.

Your characters have a fairly defined role in the beginning of the game. They are the regular crew of a couple guys up front ready to bash the bad guys in your way, and another duo in the back, ready to do ranged attacks and support the group with magic. As expected, they are here to rid the world of evil and restore peace to the land. While you don’t get a choice as to what characters are actually in the group, you have full control over what they actually do. With a skill leveling system not unlike what is seen in much newer games (such as Oblivion) play style dictates character skill development. For example, If Firion is constantly attacking with his sword, and meanwhile holding another sword in his off hand, his sword rating will go up, while unused weapons like axes will stay at the same level. After a few skill levels, the damage done with him by using swords will far outweigh that of axes, even of a higher quality. The same goes for all other weapons too. Not only that, it also affects spells, mana, and even health.

While this is admittedly a very unique and innovative system, especially for the time it was first introduced, it is not without some serious flaws. In order to effectively level up a main stat for any type of character (like hit points) you actually need to let them get beat on. So purposely putting your back row characters in harm's way and letting them take a good beating makes them stronger. Meanwhile, you’ll have to be sure to spam on your offensive and healing buff spells so that they can level up too.

This can’t really be done deep within a dungeon as you are going along on your quest. Wasting magic points needed for spells and letting your party linger with low health isn’t a great idea with tough monsters lurking everywhere, so expect to do some grinding outside of town. While it is easily possibly to get past weapon and spell skill ups, the part dragging the whole system down is hit points. It was a huge problem originally, and not enough has been done to fix the situation. In the end, the player ends up taking a fair bit of time tediously leveling up his or her characters' weaker stats. While this may be fun to some, putting my healer on the front line and getting them beat up just seems fundamentally wrong to me. On a bit of a side note, later in the game the battles tend to prefer magic damage to melee, by a larger margin. At this point, the only real advantage to using weapons is that it cost nothing to use them.

For better or worse, random battles pop up on the screen at a pretty high rate. While this will help in the quest to get stats and skills boosted, it becomes pretty tedious after awhile. When you are at a point where you are not so concerned with leveling skills up, and just want to get on with the main storyline, some might find it fairly annoying. Speaking of which, compared to the first Final Fantasy, the storyline shows some improvements. The characters actually have a back story and their own emotions, giving a bit more of a RPG feel. Of course, you can still expect many people in the towns wandering about, seemingly oblivious to the outside world.