Proto:Final Fantasy II

This page details one or more prototype versions of Final Fantasy II.

While the NES sequel to the original Final Fantasy was never released in the United States, it was planned at one point. A prototype, with the translation clearly still in an early stage, was uncovered and released by Lost Levels in 2003.

General Differences

Japan	US Proto

The copyright info on the title screen was modified and updated, with the latter giving a likely reason for this project's cancellation: namely, 1991 was the year the SNES and Final Fantasy IV were released.

The text drawing routine was updated to support single-line linebreaks, ala the first game's localization, but here this is only utilized to draw the black backgrounds behind the character portraits in the menu. Additionally, the speed of text scrolling for dialogue spanning more than one window is significantly slower than in the Japanese version.

Graphical Differences

Even at this stage, changes had been made to satisfy Nintendo of America's religious imagery policies.

Japan	US Proto

The Star of David was replaced with a triangle. On the upside, some color was added.

Japan	US Proto

The cross that replaces each character's face on the pause screen at death was replaced with a gravestone.

(Source: Lost Levels)

Japan	US Proto

Maria's face portrait was given a slight hairstyle change and made a tad more feminine.

Japan	US Proto

Unarmed (Japan)	Glove (US Proto)

The fist icon representing "unarmed" was replaced by a hand, likely because the glove icon added for the English translation is very similar to the original fist icon.

Unused Graphics

These status "icons" are part of the font and were intended to be used in battle when a character was inflicted with a status effect. They use values below $80, which are reserved for text compression in this build, and normal text strings are used for these status effects.

A few status effects still use squished text like this, but they all use values greater than $80.