This is my first review of a game on steam, but I feel as though this needs to be said.

I love Final Fantasy. I always have, especially the pre-3D games that have been released and re-released over the years. I started with origins on the PS1 back in the day playing those versions of 1 and 2 for many many hours. As time went on I bought the GBA versions and eventually the special PSP versions which I still play to this day.

I was excited to hear about these pixel remasters because I could go through and enjoy these games on my pc for the first (sans-emulator). With that out of the way however, I simply cannot reccomend this game based upon how they have handled the port of it, and I will explain below.

First off: The movement. This is more of a personal nitpick more than anything else, because of years and years of being used to simple four directional movement of the characters on the screen, having a diagonal movement added in on inbetween directional presses actually screws with how I normally move about in those games and it's a bit jarring. That is not the reason I'm giving this a negative review, more of a sidenote for anyone who's used to the original ports of the game.

Secondly: Combat tweaks
This is the first big one that struck me as I started playing the game. There's a handful of differences which completely change how the game is played and how combat is done. In the original ports, (Up to the PSP release), combat was decided on the first two rows of enemies being able to hit you, and you being able to hit them physically. Magic could reach to the back, but only the first two rows were accessible. This extended to the player's side as well, with fighters who were placed in the back row not able to take damage from the normal physical sources of damage (outside of bows).
With their new system that they have implemented, instead, we can now access all of the rows of enemies, and cool, yeah, I kinda like it, but we have damage fall off for every row past the first that we can attack. This is troublesome because some builds for teams on the old ports required that immunity to the rows behind the first two to be able to adequately funciton, and the immunity for back row fighters is now removed as well, they just take half damage from melee sources (either 33.3% or 25% depending on if guard is used as well). And that leads into another point, the shields.
Shields in the original ports were usually a key item for not only speedrunners, but also general players who understood the complexity of the mechanics. Shields, if used on both hands nullified the attack completely and simply increased evasion, magic evasion, and the "shield" skill level, which was usually a fairly improtant skill for later on to evade or signifigantly reduce incoming damage, both melee and magic. They now instead only provide a minor bonus to defense and evade chances, while giving full access to the bare handed attack instead (at 50% power from pure unarmed). This messes with a lot of grinding strategies that were developed due to the lack of attack shields gave the player.
(Also small sidenote, not being able to use curative items on enemies sucks for dealing with the undead and a relatively fresh party.)

third point: the game's performance.

Everyhting else up to this point could be forgiven, brushed aside as just a new system that they were implementing, if not for how certain means of grinding impact performance. Allow me to elaborate.

In my hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing this specific game, I have learned many means to easily grind spells and tactics to ensure that your party can become broken and absolutely godlike as soon as you recieve Minwu and the canoe. It allows access to Mysidia and the gear therein along with powerful creatures that you can utilize to grind up the skills and levels of your fighters. In the old ports, this was just a series of incremental increases towards mastery.

To break it down further, with magic, and with weapons, you have levels that you can increase for the variety of weapon types, and the two schools of magic therein; white and black magic. The more you cast a specific spell, or the more you swing a specific weapon, the more that particular thing levels up and becomes more powerful/useful to you throughout the game.

In the older ports of this game, up to and including the PSP versions, you could stack any number of spells and whatnot on your party in the fight, allowing you to essentially spam the spells you want to level. For instance, on my copy of the PSP port, I recently got Firion's white magic spell list to completely level 16, or the max allowed in the game, along with max weapon skills for all party members. This was more of a personal challenge than any intended goal, but still it felt good achieving it.

In contrast, I make it to Mysidia on this port and begin my normal spell spam to level up things and make a powerful starting party, and lo and behold, after about 6-7 casts of blink and protect a piece, things begin to slow down. First off I noticed a fairly severe pause after the animation was finished, and then it got even worse after moving to the spell selection menu. I was suffering from severe frame lag, dropping from my normal 60+ to under 10 fps while in that menu or any other sub menu from within combat. That, unfortunately mixed with the other tweaks that they have made to the combat system as a whole have made the game pretty much unplayable to me, and I do not reccomend any true veterens of Final Fantasy 2 purchase this port of the game now or into the future unless they make a "classic" mode or something like that for the combat, along with fixing the severe lag and stuttering caused by multiple buff stacking. It wasnt an issue on the PSP, so it shouldn't be an issue on the pc port.

Apologies for typos, and whatnot.