The second game in the Final Fantasy series. This one never made it to America. (although, there were emulation groups that managed to translate some/all of it.) This game actually had more of a story than FF1, and you had set characters for the first time. They each had a portrait on the subscreen, and they had separate appearances in battle. I assume there was a better story to this game... but it's in Japanese.

The above screenshot was taken from a translated ROM.

Starting your game in FF2j, you name the four main characters. Then you fight a hopeless battle, and are KO'd by a group of very powerful mounted knights. You only keep your first 3 characters. The 4th character who you named must have been captured. Throughout the game, you get additional "temporary" characters who help you in battle in his place.

Since it's in Japanese, I havn't really been able to understand the story, but from what I've seen in FAQs and such, you join the rebel group who's fighting a powerful empire.

The gameplay in FF2j was turn based, where you put in commands at the start of the battle, and then, depending on your relative agilities, took your turns attacking. If you happened to attack an enemy that had been killed, your attack was INEFFECTIVE, and was wasted! That is the biggest problem with this game's battle system -- and it was carried over from FF1. You'd think they'd have changed that by the second game.

The system of advancement in this game was MUCH different from FF1. There were NO LEVELS.
You gain stats based on what you do in battle. If you get hit a lot, you'd gain HP. If you used Magic, you'd gain MP. If you attacked, you'd gain strength, and skill level in weapons, but you'd loose wisdom and intelligence! If you used magic, you'd gain wisdom and intelligence, and skill in magic, but you'd also loose Strength!

Everyone on the team could use any weapon they wanted to, or even magic books. You gained skill in weapons and magic each time you used them. This system of increasing stats and weapon skills was a big adjustment from the orignal game. A very drastic change. However, it was a really neat system. If the game were in English, it would probably be pretty good.

I believe this was the first FF with a rows for the characters, changing the damage they did, and took.

Well, I didn't play this game long enough to really see what the game turned out to be like. However, I could pretty much tell that there was going to be a LOT of building up involved, focusing on certain stats for each character, depending on what you wanted them to do. Building your HP and other stats took a LOT of dedicated work. There was no easy way to just gain XP, and see all of your stats go up at each "level."

One neat thing about FF2j, was that you could talk to people with keywords, to find out additional information. This wasn't kept in following FF games, unfortunetly.