Personally I’d have to say, Final Fantasy II. The actual II, and not IV which was first introduced as II in America.
The game has a bare bones story, an antagonist with no practically no purpose. And he’s just called ’‘The Emperor’’. The leveling system, while innovative, doesn’t work. I mean it gets the job done, but for the amount of effort you have to put in, they might as well just have made the contemporary level/experience system which is present in most games. The tank of the party may have three times more HP than anybody, but every time he gets hit, he takes three times as more damage as anybody…I was always reviving him, bleh. Plus you have this word system that remembers key words so you can bring them up in conversations with characters. But not once have I ever found it to be of any use, aside from the odd time where you’re talking to some guy who has something you need, and the word of that need pops up.
I could have looked passed all that, if the story was memorable. As it is, it’s boring, the characters suck ass…you’d have to play this for the gameplay alone, which does work even if the leveling system sucks…but most other FF’s have all the cool gameplay, plus cool stories. Don’t know what the hell happened with this one, or how I had the patience to actually go through it.