Final Fantasy IV

7.5

I think I’m the only one on earth who thinks the first game is the best one up until the 6th Final Fantasy. However after that one I will take number 4 as the cream of the crop. It’s goofy, but touching in a 16 bit way and Cecil’s story is fun to experience. The constant combat is a major detriment as it is in all these early games. A lot of it boils down to how far you can get without needed a bloody battle. With that big flaw out of the way, the music, characters and strategy are a best in the series up to this point.

One of the tightest Final Fantasy games, at least in its original SNES incarnation. (Maybe others, too—I’ll wait for Tim Rogers’ Action Button review to give me the lowdown on the Most Interesting version(s)—but I get the sense that some of the other versions dilute the experience with all the extra Stuff.) It’s true that this is a ‘less developed’ Final Fantasy; they hadn’t quite figured out how to make the best of the SNES hardware graphically or auditorily, and there aren’t as many sidequests or battle options as later games would hold. But I’d argue that’s actually what makes it great. Some of the later Final Fantasy games have a tendency to bite off a bit more than they can chew, giving you a wide world and a plethora of party members that have a bunch of unique abilities that ultimately don’t actually change how you play the game. They suggest depth that I often find isn’t actually there when you’re looking for it, and on that front FFIV is a little more honest. Here’s a game where every character has a defined role, where your party is strictly dictated by the story, that has about three side quests in the entire game (all of which take place very late into the story). The game gives you a limited set of tools, and leaves you to figure it out.

You could also say some of those things about previous Final Fantasy games—FFII is very linear, aside from its weird leveling system—but this, of course, is kind of where the series comes into itself; at the very least, this is the platonic Final Fantasy game. The first three were all fairly different in ways that didn’t really stick, but this is the real baseline that the series worked from for a while. No job changing or Espers or materia; your characters’ options are all pretty straightforward, and the only real innovation in the formula, ATB, is the only one that actually stuck around essentially unchanged in multiple games. Square leaned into the simplicity for this game, and let different scripted combinations of those mechanics guide each dungeon into a unique experience that I found later games to lack.

A party of Dark Knight Cecil, Rydia, Rosa, Edward, and Yang feels very different from a party of Paladin Cecil, Kain, Cid, Rosa, and Yang; each combination has a different set of AoE attacks, healing abilities, magical attacks, weapon types, and skills. Even fundamentally similar characters, like Rydia and Tellah, function very differently because of their spells and MP pools. Tellah has much stronger spells, but you won’t use them as much during the course of a dungeon, because he has so little MP; Rydia has a lot more MP, but the only attacks that really do anything for most of the game are her high-cost summons that are overkill on most enemies. And over time, those perceptions of the characters change; by the end of the game, Rydia’s summons are useful in general enemy encounters, but they’re also strong enough that you want to save MP for any tougher fights you come across. Some parties have more physical power; some parties give you so many frail characters that you have to put one on the front lines, exposing them to more danger.

This feels like a very conscious effort on Square’s part; characters in the game fake-die so often that it becomes obvious that they’re just trying to come up with a reason to make a new party. (This comes at the expense of the story, which largely stops giving its characters anything interesting to say or do after Cecil’s admittedly striking opening arc concludes with his grand transformation. But, they do ride to the moon on a whale. So that’s pretty cool.) Enough of the dungeons have a unique hook or set of enemies that you have to adapt your play to each area, as well. The Magnetic Cave requires you to unequip all metal weapons, which essentially changes the role of each character in your party for a dungeon (before jerking them back into place for the boss); the Sylvan Cave is rife with status effects and monsters in chests, making it a more difficult test of endurance and item/MP conservation; the Lunar Subterrane has an entire section where regular enemies are minibosses. Not every idea comes off perfectly, and they sometimes verge on annoying, but they always made me think and reconsider my situation given the tools that I had.

I appreciate that constraint; in later Final Fantasy games, the boundless freedom to do any party makeup I want usually means I’m just going to do the same thing every time. (Usually 1-3 physical attackers, a healer, a black mage. Which is the final configuration in this game, but there were plenty of stops along the way.) This game made me stop to think, and it’s also why I single out the SNES version, which keeps things lean and reasonably difficult. There is no one definitive version of this (even saying 'the SNES version' can mean many different things; I played the US version with the Namingway fan translation), but no matter what, the game’s strengths decidedly do not lie in its story or its characters, at least not to the same degree that other games in the franchise do. This one’s all about the gameplay to me, and while I imagine the other versions hold unique values of their own, I really do appreciate how the SNES makes a great, constantly changing experience out of so little.

Talvez por ser novo ao gênero, os encontros randômicos pesaram um pouco pra mim, senti que ocorriam com muita frequência e travavam muito a exploração.

Fora isso, é um RPG muito cativante, com narrativa e personagens bem simpáticos e gameplay e universos ricos. A música é outro ponto alto.

JRPG histórico que tem no PSP sua melhor versão.

It took three naive experiments for Squaresoft to finally get it right at the turn of the generation. Final Fantasy IV (released as Final Fantasy II in the west, as the original versions of FFII & III weren't localised until much later) carries many distinctions: Several playable characters, 5-battler parties, save points, etc. With Active Time Battles standing as the true highlight. True to its name, it's a more active means to handle JRPG battles, carrying a smooth flow and favoring snappy decision-making. Despite the system overhaul and unique boss fight gimmicks, combat largely remained as slow and plain as ever - and worse, the skill system is probably their most limited yet, relying on old-fashioned character levels and story moments to dole out new spells and attacks. There are non-combat strengths to be found, at least: A longer, dramatized storyline also represented the series' foray at devoted character building - a mere sketch that later games would go on to fully explore, and hindered by the constantly rotating cast, but not without its merits.

Highly recommended to avoid the US version and play a Japanese Rom with an English fan translation. This game wasn't treated well when it came to the Western world.