So, not my favorite game. But lets go through some of the mechanics. Levelling, this lies somewhere between annoying and abusive in this game. Yes, the best way to level your characters is to beat each other up. Or cast sap, or whatever else... Stand there in a fight for 5 minutes holding down the button with cursor on repeat so you can level your spell... yuck. And then there's weapon levels, which level very slowly if you're beating each other up, and not at all if you're just attacking enemies. There's Ultima, which apparently can be the most powerful spell in the game, but is near worthless unless you're going out of your way to make it good, and even at that, Flare and Holy are certainly powerful enough. I mean, just yuck. Plus, levelling stats is easy enough, but I never see a huge bump in damage or defense when getting the skills... even when they get boosted to 99 from the equipment.
Defense is something I'm devoting an entire section to in this... If you don't have enough attack to get over an enemy's defense, you are not going to damage it. Period. Doesn't matter what the weapon level is, or anything like that. And there's a period near the beginning of the game, where you're not getting a lot of weapon upgrades, and the npc defense is climbing and climbing. I will say, this at least makes magic useful, especially compared to FF I. Because Magic damage doesn't seem to suffer the same drawbacks. You just need to spend a lot of times levelling your MP and magic level. Most attack spells are fairly useless below level 6. And again, Berserk + Aura + Haste on bosses, or you're just not going to get any damage.
Now for the extra stuff. Let's start with Arcane Lab/Sanctuary. This was interesting, and got more interesting as the game went on. Yes, to get everything you have to run through it 10 times... but at least each run had its own compositions of rooms you had to do. And some, for the time in the game where you unlock them could be very challenging. Sorcerers with low magic defense was quite frightening. The weapons you get from it, are probably way too powerful, but they at least make the beginning of Soul of Rebirth bearable. Also, the little sidestory at the end with Deumion was very good. Just wish he had a Bestiary entry...
As far as Soul of Rebirth goes. Its a cool little challenge, however, if you were not preparing for it from the beginning of the main game, it can be nearly impossible. The first time I played the game on GBA, and loaded up Soul of Rebirth, I got destroyed because I had not spent enough time levelling up Minwu, and the monsters you face at the very beginning of the Unknown Cave, are really a tad too hard. I like the way the difficulty ramps up though, and with the skill you acquired going through the main game, its nice to fight some really difficult monsters with relatively low stats. And also, since you're fighting such tough monsters, you level up amazingly fast, the drop rates on the good equipment is very high, and by the time you're able to do the random encounters in the Unknown Palace without too much difficulty, you should be able to take down the Light Emperor. Really, it took me 3 1/2 hours to go from wimpy to fairly amazing. So, a nice little challenge, just would've changed the monster difficulty in the first couple floors of Unknown cave.
The story is certainly a high point in this. I don't really know about the password system, it seems like something they gave up on at some point as its usefulness comes and goes, but its a great little story of rebellion. No orbs or crystals though, shame. Again, the Arcane Lab story is a nice little addition(even has a small tie in with FF IX, wow). The graphics, eh. Yes, obviously a huge upgrade from the Famicom days. But, really, I think they could've done a bit more. Just a couple of cutscenes, and they're really not memorable, with the exception of the load cutscene. The remixed music is really amazing. I've always liked the Rebel theme, and I think as a whole the music from this game is underrated.
Still though, the bad mechanics really detracts from everything that could've been good about this game. What is it about the second game in series that have to go so far completely off track? Anyway, two down, twenty-five to go. Let's finish the famicom trilogy, shall we?
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