Final Fantasy II (US version)

Final Fantasy II is an RPG for Family Computer released in Japan on December 17, 1988, and is the second installment in the Final Fantasy series. It was planned to be released in the US market as well, but was cancelled.

Overview
Following the success of Final Fantasy in North America in 1990 with Nintendo, Square Soft, a subsidiary of Square North America, decided to begin development of an English localization of FFII. The translation was done by Kaoru Moriyama, who would later go on to translate Final Fantasy IV and Secret of Mana. A beta version of the game was developed, and it was apparently being prepared to be exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show in the winter of 1991. However, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had already appeared at that time, and it was time to move the development of the game to 16-bit, so it was decided to cancel the release.

Moriyama said the following about that time "We had so very limited memory capacity we could use for each game, and it was never really 'translating' but chopping up the information and cramming them back in. back in. "It is also worth considering that in the early 1990s, Square and other Japanese video game companies did not put much effort into translating their English versions. "Our boss [Hironobu Sakaguchi] had no understanding in putting in extra work for the English version at that time," Moriyama adds said.

Prototype Release
Around 2012, a prototype of Final Fantasy ii suddenly appeared for sale on eBay for $50,000. The seller was Frank Cifaldi, a video game historian, and the prototype was intended for display at the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. According to his description, he had owned the prototype for over nine years. As far as he knows, this is the only legitimate copy; the game has been in safe keeping since he bought it in 2003 and he had never touched the console until he took photos of it for the auction. He dumped this game in 2003 and released it to the public.