I have to start with a caveat: reviewing a game that took me eleven months to play is a bit unfair to the game. There were several times when I stepped away from the game for months at a time, and each time I came back I had forgotten more of the story and characters. Eventually I’d piece things together but still I spent a lot of time reorienting myself to the game, and the lack of momentum with my game play hurt my sense of appreciation for some parts to the game. Nevertheless, I thought I’d offer up some thoughts on Final Fantasy IV.

Story
Wow! Following on the heels of Final Fantasy III—which seemed to be a game that in many ways forgot to add a story—Final Fantasy IV delivers a compelling story and a twisting plot. Combat drives Final Fantasy III, but the story drives Final Fantasy IV. Rich, detailed, and filled with character interaction, Final Fantasy IV sets the standard for the series so far in terms of quality story. Kudos!

Combat and Character Development
Coming on the heels of Final Fantasy III, with its complex job system and richly detailed combat, I have to say that the combat in Final Fantasy IV was a disappointment in many ways. Character classes are predetermined, and there is little to no gamer involvement in how characters develop.

This doesn’t mean that the game is necessarily a failure with regards to combat. Final Fantasy IV introduces the Active Time Battle system (ATB), which adds a real-time element to the combat. By nature, I like turn-based combat, so there was an adjustment curve for me here. Add in the fact that it can take me more time to read the Japanese and you end up with some stressful combat encounters in the first section of the game. However, once I got used to the system it worked fine. I actually found myself spending most of the game with the combat on the game’s fastest setting, and I appreciate that you can move through random encounters quickly. I wish, however, that you could change the speed setting mid-battle, as there were a few times when I unexpectedly ran into a boss battle with combat set on the highest speed and lost valuable seconds because of it.

I also like the combat balance in Final Fantasy IV. Battles were challenging at times, with enemies using a variety of strategies and moves that forced me to think in order to overcome them. For all its combat complexity, Final Fantasy III suffered because it had several jobs and attacks that were simply much stronger than the others. Despite the simplicity in Final Fantasy IV, I found myself forced to use a greater variety of spells and combat moves in order to succeed. Good stuff.

Game Balance and Progression
On the whole, Final Fantasy IV is the most balanced game in the series so far. The story stays focused and tight. I never felt totally lost or that things happened without cause or reason. Money did get meaningless at the end, but for the majority of the game funds were limited and I had to think about expenditures. Combat was mostly on the easy side, but overall was balanced and engaging, with only a couple of exceptions. Dungeons were of a reasonable size, and except for the last battle, I never felt like the save system hurt me that much.

Visuals
The graphics in Final Fantasy IV hardly compare to the updated and immersive graphics of Final Fantasy III, which of course leads the pack so far. With Final Fantasy IV, we’re back in the Game Boy Advance era. The graphics are functional, but not inspiring.

Save Me Now
I can’t get around this one: I hated getting killed by Zeromus, losing an hour’s worth of experience and fighting, and then having to do it all over again in order to get another shot at the guy. I realize I could have run from the random encounters at the end to speed things up, but I needed the experience. A game shouldn’t punish you and make you replay so much content just to get another chance for victory. A more modern save system would have been greatly appreciated.

Final Word
On the whole, I enjoyed Final Fantasy IV a lot. The great story and challenging combat kept me engaged the whole time. I honestly think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had played in straight through rather than playing it in chunks over the course of a year. It can be work to get back into a game after being away from it for a few months, and except for the beginning of the game, I never felt like I achieved any momentum with Final Fantasy IV, though no fault of its own. In the end, I have to give my experience with it an 85%, putting it in second place on the list so far. Well worth playing.

Overall, I liked Final Fantasy III on the DS more than I liked Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II. In the most important areas the game is right on target.

Visuals
The biggest surprise for me was how much the improved visuals helped to draw me into the game. I’m not a graphics whore, but I have to admit that DS-enhanced eye candy made the game more fun. Monsters looked great, and moving around the world and through the dungeons was a visual treat. Coming after Final Fantasy I and II, the difference is remarkable.

Combat and Character Development
The gameplay in Final Fantasy III is also excellent. With so much fighting in a Final Fantasy game, the combat system and character development system have to be good. I had a blast with these in Final Fantasy III. Combat was fun, rarely got tiresome, and had a nice amount of variety to it. I thought the job system in the game was creative and enjoyable to mess around with.

I do have some minor gripes though. As with Final Fantasy II, the animation sequences in Final Fantasy III have annoying elements to them. At the end of every combat, for example, the camera would gradually zoom up to your party before showing you your battle results. This only takes about two seconds, but after you’ve been in a dozen battles, you really don’t want to wait for the zoom. By the time you’ve had a hundred battles, these delays are a pain. Other spots in combat have equal waits, although I found the in-combat animations to be much more tolerable and on the whole much quicker than in Final Fantasy I and II. Still, it would have been great to have a button press to skip the repetitive sequences.

Lastly, with a combat and character progression system as complex as Final Fantasy III’s, it would have been nice to have better information in the manual. A couple of additional paragraphs on job levels, experience, and character levels could have provided helpful information that would have been nice to know before playing the game.

Game Balance and Progression
I liked the overall balance and progression in the Final Fantasy III. There were a couple of spots where things were definitely hard, but these could be overcome with some old fashioned grinding and some revised tactics. For the most part, random battles were frequent enough to be interesting, and rarely so frequent that they became a pain. Dungeons were large enough to bring a sense of accomplishment when you cleared them, and small enough to not get tedious.

I do have minor quibbles with the balance. Some of the job classes in the game seemed like they could use a bit of tweaking. My Devout, for example, could heal our entire party with her top three healing spells. This gave us tremendous healing power later in the game. She almost seemed too strong. Ninjas, on the other hand, seemed incredibly powerful offensively. With their speed, they add job levels quickly, which makes turning them into powerhouses easy compared to other jobs.

As with previous Final Fantasy games, money in Final Fantasy III loses meaning after about two-thirds of the game. It seems silly to include this in the game if doesn’t add anything to the decision-making process towards the end. As it stands, I could buy anything, immediately, once I got past the halfway point.

Also, on the whole I was surprised at how effective traditional weapons were in the game. For the most part, my offensive punch came in the form of regular weapons, and I didn’t need to think about magic damage. In previous Final Fantasy games, there were enemies that were impervious to regular weapons or impervious to magic. This made me think about balancing magic casters and fighters in my party. With Final Fantasy III, I don’t remember any such enemies. I could always kill something with anything.

Story
Maybe my expectations were high after Final Fantasy II, but I was disappointed with the story in Final Fantasy III. Final Fantasy II’s story made sense, drove the action, and added a lot to the game. It might have been my Japanese hindering things, but in Final Fantasy III I never really clued in to the story. Things seemed to happen for no reason, and I was sent places to do stuff without really having a good sense of how everything was connected. Sure, I understood that I was to collect crystals to fight the ultimate evil and bring the world into balance again, but the specifics of this were largely lost to me. Fortunately for me, the game pretty much puts you on rails for the first 30 hours or so. I had a good sense of what to do, but rarely any idea of how my actions fit into the larger story. The weak story especially effected things at the end, when the game stops leading you by the hand. I felt abandoned for the last ten hours or so.

Save Me Now
After bitching about the save system in Final Fantasy III in my initial impressions, I was surprised at how little it bothered me while playing the game. There were two or three places where I lost an hour or so of gaming, but for the most part the save system was much more bearable than I thought it would be.

It did change the way I played, though. At the end, I knew the final boss battle was going to be a rough fight, and I knew that the dungeon was huge. As a result, I spent a few hours grinding before I went in. If the save system were different, I would have likely tried that dungeon sooner. There were other places in the game where I did similar things to avoid losing a chunk of time to the save system.

To be completely honest, I should mention that in some ways the save system actually increased my enjoyment of the game. The final battle was a tense, epic struggle, largely because I was scared to death of losing the two plus hours of fighting that it took me to get there. Still, I would definitely prefer a game where you can save almost anywhere.

The Little Things
I liked all the extras in the game. The side quests, the extra dungeons, and the post-game Iron Giant are neat touches that add polish and gameplay to Final Fantasy III. The Iron Giant, in particular, is a neat addition that gives the game another five to ten hours of play, and gives meaning to the Onion Knight class. Good stuff.

On the other hand, the letter system, with it’s (circumventable) one-letter per hour limit and the need to send seven letters to a real person, were more of a chore than they were fun. Someone mentioned in a comment on this blog that they thought the letter system was added because the DS had these capabilities and the developers felt the need to include them in the game. I agree with this completely. I have no problem with the letter content and with the game concept, but the execution seemed clunky.

Final Word
On the whole, Final Fantasy III gets the most important elements right. The combat system, game balance, and character development are extremely well done for a game of this length. The story disappointed me, but again, my limited Japanese ability is likely playing a part in this. Overall, I’ll give Final Fantasy III an 87%. It’s clearly my favorite game in the series so far.

It’s hard for me to comment on Final Fantasy II without comparing it to Final Fantasy I. I’m actually looking forward to this aspect of this whole adventure, as I get to see the evolution of the series from game to game.

First off, Final Fantasy II is a much better game than Final Fantasy I. Final Fantasy II’s story—which holds up fairly well when compared to modern games—is light years beyond that of Final Fantasy I, which is basically a “go collect the crystals” game. This element of Final Fantasy II surprised me the most, and kept me interested in the game. It’s an amazing accomplishment that the story of Final Fantasy II is as complex as it is, considering that the game was released 19 years ago.

Combat in Final Fantasy II is better as well. The combat in the GBA version of Final Fantasy I is insanely easy compared to that of Final Fantasy II. Final Fantasy II actually had a number of spots that were challenging and rewarding, although to be fair, the difficulty may have been more due to my incompetence rather than any difficulty inherent in the game. The Jade/Pandemonium combination dungeon was a particularly satisfying final dungeon.

For the most part, I found the combat/skill/leveling system a lot of fun to play in Final Fantasy II. I enjoy RPGs like Morrowind and Oblivion that have a direct correlation between skill use and skill advancement, and Final Fantasy II does a great job in this regard. The luster started to wear off, though, in the back half of the game. The Drain and Aspiru spells were so powerful that they allowed my party to live off the energy of my enemies, and they reduced much of the complexity of combat to a narrow range of simple attacks and strategies. It would have been nice to have a greater need for a variety of tactics in order to be successful.

I have a couple of other quibbles as well. Unless I missed it, there is no way to skip over combat animations (watch, someone will post a comment that tells me the super secret button-press I never knew), and by the back half of the game combat was getting tedious because it took so long for all the animations to play out. For the most part, the animations are ok, but once you’ve seen them a hundred times, any animation gets pretty stale. And some of the animations are quite long, as well! The worst offender in this regard was the Ultima spell, which in the middle levels (5-10) felt like it took about 20 minutes to run through its dazzling effects. I swear I could have finished the game in half the time if that one spell had a reasonably short animation.

I suppose I should mention Soul of Rebirth as well, but I’m not sure what to make of that add-on game. It was kind of neat to get some extra content, it was fun to play with the dead characters from the main game, and the new range of monsters was semi-interesting. However, outside of a beginning and an end, there is zero story in Soul of Rebirth. Also, the combat is identical to the main game. If you like grinding, it’s kind of fun, but for me, I was just going through the motions with this add-on.

On the whole though, the gaming experience in Final Fantasy II was very satisfying. I don’t think I’d want to play it again, but I’m glad I played it through to the end. Overall, I’ll give the game an 82% rating.

(written on September 11, 2006)

I don’t know what happened to all the guys dancing in the woods, but let’s face it: they couldn’t have been all that concerned with the plight of the world in the first place if their response to worldly peril is to go dance in the woods all day long. I can just see it now.

Townsfolk: Evil monsters are attacking our world!
Heroes: Oh.
Townsfolk: What should we do?
Heroes: Um, let’s go stand in a circle in the woods and dance.
Townsfolk: Huh?
Heroes: Eventually some real heroes will show up and we can tell them what to do.
Townsfolk: Huh?
Heroes: Someone get the repetitive Japanese game soundtrack and let’s go!
Townsfolk: Huh?
Heroes: Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to dance we go!

I’ll just assume that they are still out there, dancing in the woods.

The game took me a little over 46 hours to finish. I’m guessing that about 10 of those were spent Cluelessly Lost, which isn’t bad for me.

My characters reached Level 87. I cheated three times.

Overall, I liked the game quite a bit. The random encounters were gentle enough, the puzzles were decent, if not easy, and the variety of fighting and locales was good. There is a lot of exploring to do in the game, and it’s all quite fun.

Having said that, there are some playbalance issues with the game. Since I’ve finished the game, I’ve read a bit about it, and apparently the four dungeons that are unlocked after you get each of the four crystals are actually bonus dungeons that were not included in the original game. While these four dungeons were entertaining enough, the experience gained and weapons earned in them make the core game ridiculously easy. The final battle was over in a matter of seconds, which is a shame considering how tough of a fight the boss was in the third optional dungeon. Also, most of the random combatants in the back half of the game could barely touch my party, and we had enough cash to buy a small planet by the mid-point in the game. All these factors added up to make the game easy on the whole. The tricky part was figuring out where to go and what to do.

Overall, though, considering the age of the game, I’ll give this remake of the game a 75%. Enjoyable, but not great. I wish there was an option to turn off the bonus dungeons, or a better way to tell the player that the dungeons are optional.

Up next…

Final Fantasy II

I have to confess. I came up with this dumb idea to play all the Final Fantasy games in Japanese about eleven months ago, but wasn’t sure if I could even finish one game given how rusty my Japanese was. To see if there was any hope at all, I decided to play what I thought was going to be a “Warmup” game before digging in to the Final Fantasy series. I broke out a used copy of the original Breath of Fire in Japanese that I picked up on a trip to Japan. I stuffed it into my GBA and got busy. And busy. And busy. I figured such an old game would take me about 10 hours to finish, but it ended up taking quite a bit of help from a walkthrough and a ton of time: I probably spent 60 hours or more on the game, two-thirds of which was spent in various stages of Wandering in Circles or Fast Asleep. It took me about four months of real time to complete the game, as most of the gaming sessions would pick up at the CL (Cluelessly Lost) stage carried over from the previous gaming session and within ten minutes degenerate to the Fast Asleep stage. But with liberal amounts of walkthrough help, I finally finished the game. This was actually the first Japanese RPG that I have ever finished, so all things considered I’m satisfied with how things went.

Not that I liked it, mind you. I actually found it a boring game, which is probably natural considering I spent so much time wandering in circles through the same towns looking for hints that I missed the first time around. It gets pretty old talking to the same people over and over again, especially since they say the same things over and over again and half the time I don’t even know what they are. My general impression of many of these conversations was something like this:

My Party: Hi!
NPC: Hi, warriors of destiny. (unintelligible Japanese sentence #1) (unintelligible Japanese sentence #2) (unintelligible Japanese sentence #3) You must do this! It is very important!
My Party: Why?
NPC: Because it will save the world!
My Party: Very well, we’ll do that.
NPC: Good luck.
My Party: Bye.

And off we’d go Wandering in Circles again.

You might be wondering how I managed to stick to the game if I found it so boring. Well, I’ll tell you. As any follower of epic fantasy knows, all heroes are aided on their adventure, and I, too, had some fortuitous help in the beginning. I was aided by A Broken Reading Light. What, you say? Well, my wife and I will often read before we fall asleep, but a few months ago my night light broke, which means, yes, you guessed it: no reading before bed! Instead, I fired up the GBA a few times a week for some pre-sleep gaming. Without the Broken Reading Light, I doubt I would ever have made it through Breath of Fire.

But anyway, enough dallying around with the warmup. Let’s go on to the adventure!