This article has a talk page!This page details one or more prototype versions of Final Fantasy II.
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This prototype is documented on Hidden Palace. |
A prototype of a scrapped US localization of Final Fantasy II was released by Lost Levels in 2003. At this point, a number of graphics have been altered to adhere to Nintendo of America's religious imagery policies, but the translation is clearly still in an early state, most notably retaining multiple references to death.
A (possibly early) box design seen in a 1991 CES advert has the text "Dark Shadow Over Palakia" along the top of the front, suggesting that was to be the localized game's subtitle.
General Differences#
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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#
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The Star of David was replaced with a triangle. On the upside, some color was added.
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The cross that replaces each character's face on the pause screen at death was replaced with a gravestone.
(Source: Lost Levels)
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US Proto |
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Maria's face portrait was given a slight hairstyle change and made a tad more feminine.
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Unarmed |
Glove |
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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.