[Spira]

looking back, having recently played Soul of Rebirth (which is still ff2) again.. FF2s battle system seems very much unbalanced, and is one of the last of its kind from Square/Square-Enix.. which would learn alot from the mistakes from this series entry...

Stat growth was very iffy.. as was weapon skill growth. To be powerful in the game, it didn't require any leveling, but simply getting weapons and armor 'beyond' your current position in the game. This was easy if you could kill monsters much stronger than you... and that was even more easy if you took time to train up on an instant kill spell. Toad, Teleport, Warp, Death, etc.. there were so many of them (I liked Teleport best)... and many bosses were actually vulnerable to them too.. which made it seem rather strange.

Many spells were useless.. and weren't ever worth leveling up.. but others were so powerful.... Ultima was a useless spell compared to Berserk, Haste and possibly Aura. This is cos those spells increase your attack rating by so much (especially berserk that increases attack) that each hit you do can go well beyond what a single casting of Ultima could. This is especially cos they stack.

When forced to fight things far more powerful than you (bosses), you could easily exploit this system by buffing 1 guy and putting him on the front line, whilst the rest were relegated to casting and keeping him alive..
It was an inbalanced system but rather fun if you could get on the better side of it...

That said, I hope no more games are made in a system even remotely similar to this... with the flawed stat mechanics, even enemies way weaker than you always get to attack first... and its annoying when nearly every single battle you have is either Pre-emptive strike on far weaker monsters, or attacked first by everythign else