So second platinum of the year is FF2PR which I played with Vicas as a guide. I very much bounced off this game as a kid when I wandered in the wrong direction from the second town in the game and got my ass beat out of nowhere by way too strong enemies, put it away and played FF5 instead.
Playing it now as an adult and with knowledge of how this game actually works, I have a lot of thoughts about it. I'll write a longer post later (or maybe Vicas will, we've definitely talked about this game a lot the last couple of weeks) when I've got more time but my thoughts boil down to it being very similar to FF3. It's a very interesting, deeply flawed game and you can see the genes of this game in the rest of the series after this one. The stat, weapon and magic leveling system was trying something new and had some real potential but it ends up encouraging or outright requiring awful, sloggy, grindy play patterns. Without even trying to, I broke the game's attempt at a difficulty curve into tiny little bits. Also it is still very annoying to cross an invisible boundary on the world map and get slapped into the ground by ridiculously strong enemies, teenage me was not wrong for being mad about that lol
Overall, I had a good time playing FF2 but FF5 is still the king by a very, very wide margin. FF6 is the only one standing now. Can it dethrone 5? No, absolutely not, I've played it before and I like 5 more. But Vicas hasn't and and I'm excited to show him probably the second best Pixel Remaster.