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If this is real, this is exceptionally cool.
By now, everyone knows the story of Final Fantasy. Its name stems from the fledgling studio at SquareSoft betting everything on the game, and for Hironobu Sakaguchi in particular, it was to be his final attempt at a hit (he helped design eight games before working on Final Fantasy). Launched during the holiday season of 1987 for the Famicom and nearly three years later on the NES in the west, Final Fantasy’s legacy has since spoken for itself. It’s one of the most successful and well-respected franchises in RPG history.
But as much as everyone knows the tale of Final Fantasy and its surprising success, fewer people know about the hullabaloo surrounding its direct sequel, Final Fantasy II. Final Fantasy II was released a year after the original on the Famicom in Japan, but it never came to the United States. In fact, until its release on the PlayStation in 2003, Final Fantasy II was never officially playable in a language other than Japanese. But that doesn’t mean Square didn’t intend on releasing Final Fantasy II in the west, because it very much did.
That’s where this rather interesting eBay auction comes into play. Square had originally intended to release Final Fantasy II in the west under the moniker Dark Shadow Over Palakia, but the game was subsequently canned as the studio (and developers generally) instead took aim at Nintendo’s newest console, the Super Nintendo. Final Fantasy II was thereafter released in the west in 1991, but in fact, that Final Fantasy II was the Japanese Final Fantasy IV.
But Square worked on a translation of Final Fantasy II and famously advertised the game, including with the picture above scanned by Rob Budrick, supposedly from Las Vegas’s 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. And that eBay auction? Well, it’s apparently for a working NES cartridge of the translated game.
The seller, who listed the copy of Final Fantasy II for $50,000, claims that the game is “100% authentic” and will work in your NES. “As most of you are no doubt aware,” he continues later, “the original version of Final Fantasy II was never released in the United States. This particular cartridge was put together by the fine folks at Square Soft USA (a very small company at the time) to display at the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The plan was to release the game later that year, but instead, Square scrapped its 8-bit NES plans to focus on the new 16-bit Super Nintendo.”
Furthermore, the seller claims to have purchased the game in 2003, and that it’s fully playable from front to back and in English.
Whether or not the cartridge is real remains to be seen, but I for one hope it is. If it’s real, it’s an amazing piece of videogame history chronicling a fateful, last minute decision by Square to not release Final Fantasy’s true sequel in the west, opting to only do so 12 years later.
(All images in the story are courtesy of eBay seller fefea.)
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