The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

I Fucking Hate Final Fucking Fantasy IV

FUCK!

So, now that we have the introduction out of the way, let's get straight to business: Final Fantasy IV DS.
In case you were wondering, the DS stands for Dual Screen (as in Nintendo DS), not Damned Shitty, which is what I found myself thinking most of the time whilst playing this game.
This is the remake of the SNES original, which was also rereleased on PSX and GBA, but this time, rather than a more or less direct port, you get a FULL remake, 3D graphics, remastered sound, bells, whistles, the WORKS.
It follows in the footsteps of yesteryears FFIII remake featuring the same kind of improvements and also being amazingly similar in terms of frustration and unforgiving difficulty. In fact, I was amazed at how much FFIII and IV resemble each other in many many ways, which only goes to deepen my suspicion that in fact, every Final Fantasy before VI was total and utter CRAP. YES, that includes V. Cos V comes before VI donchaknow. Ask any Roman!

Now I already vented my frustration on the PSX remake, and I thought, why go through the trouble of writing all that AGAIN, when I can just copy and paste the whole lot (I'm good at that) and perhaps write in a bit more sparkly letters, thusly providing a rather clever allegory to the game itself. Man, I rock.

So here goes, my entry of May 1st, 2005: Setting things straight. The original text is in italics (that'll be the Romans again), my new comments are in standard text. Standard seems to sum me up pretty well, I think, ahaha. SHUT UP!

Okay, I have to be honest here, I may have been overreacting in my angered response to FF4 just a little. See, thing is, what was annoying me most were the battles, which just seemed unfairly hard, but I found out there is a mitigating factor. The game, like most FF's I think, offers a configurable Battle Speed Option, and I, being the impatient freak that I am, set it to the fastest speed.
Now this shouldn't be a problem, cos it never has been, it merely means the pace of the battles is upped, and they won't take as long as is the standard.
That's how it works in all the OTHER FF's at least. Not here though.
No, here it means the enemies are 5 times as fast, and you are NOT.

The DS remake offers the same adjustable speed, but does not seem to suffer from the same inane mistake Square made before. Mind you, I never really took the risk long enough and just kept playing at the default speed to avoid unnecessary frustration. I was having plenty of that as it was already. It looked to be okay though.

And now, I shall switch to Boldface, just to screw with your mind.

There were basically 3 kinds of situations:
- Back Attack: You are attacked from behind and will get hit by every enemy before you can do anything.
- Surprise Attack: You are attacked from the front and will get hit by every enemy before you can do anything.
- Preemptive Attack: You surprise the enemy and your fastest character can hit once, and the rest have to wait until they are hit by every enemy before they can do anything.
Technically speaking there are also plain battles, but I hardly got those for some reason. They just mean that 3 out of 4 enemies can attack before your fastest character can move. Nice.

This still holds true. The game's rate of non-normal battle-starts (How the HELL am I supposed to describe it in any other way?) is friggin' ASTOUNDING. I guess I should be happy that it's not just Back Attacks and Surprise Attacks but Preemptive Attacks are plentiful too, but still, it gets real annoying real fast.

Fact remains, you are at all times insanely overpowered by the enemy, new equipment has no noticeable effect and levelling up hardly helps. In fact, I've read that once you hit a certain level, around 70 or something, your status actually starts GOING DOWN. I swear, this is so insane, I can't make this stuff up!

True again, although Levelling up actually seemed to make some difference this time round. Also, I can confirm that Cecil at least will keep groing UPWARDS even after hitting level 70, so either they fixed that or my sources on the original were not reliable. Or it happens AFTER level 74 or something.
Beware that you WILL have to level your characters up to these lofty regions if you want to stand any chance against the final boss, or indeed, practically ANY enemy in the Final Dungeon.

It amazed me to find out that the original game is so incredibly popular in America.
I mean, I can understand Japanese loving this, they're friggin INSANE. They're masochist freaks who spend hours and hours cheerfully levelling up to Level 99 at the START OF THE GAME so this will be right up their ally.
Also, they tend to have Lolita-complexes and get turned on by criminally young girls, which I guess further proves my point that they like things that are hard to get into (Man, I'm classy)
Later, I found out that back in the SNES days, America actually got a DUMBED down version, known in Japan as Final Fantasy IV Easy Type, and that explained a LOT.
I've personally never played that one, but it might actually be enjoyable.

The game just feels like it should have been better, gameplay-wise. One one hand, you see, you have an RPG of a decent size, with a great soundtrack, and above all a great storyboard.
There's so many things happening at every turn, it's really overwhelming, in a good sense of course. The story is rich and rewarding and there really never is a dull moment.

My opinion on this also, remains unchanged. The story REALLY is great, there is such a fantastic shitload of stuff happening after practically every dungeon and in any new town you get to, it is quite understandable that this game scores lots of points with story-loving RPG-freaks, which makes it all the more painful that you have to go through the insufferable game that accompanies it.

Dungeons are a slightly different affair. They're all pretty much the same, walk from A to B kind of affair, loaded with treasure though, that's nice. No puzzles, no gimmicks, nothing, just pathways. Not too maze-like, just dull and pointless.

That point also still stands, but the DS version does you the IMMENSE BALLWARMING favor of supplying you with a map on the bottom screen. The map fills in as you move along (get 100% for a handful of items), but it helps a LOT, oh man does it ever help a lot, plus you can see all the treasure strewn about the place, which is extremely convenient. Kudos to Square for that.

Not only battles but also the shop and equipment system totally suck. Shops only show who can equip what, nothing more. You can't see how many pieces of a certain item you are carrying or already have equipped which is annoying enough, since you might be buying something you already have on. So first you have to look at all your equipment and memorize it. This would also be easier if you could go into the equipment screen and scroll from one character to the next using the L and R button as is customary in, well, EVERY game on earth, except this one. So you have to go into and out of the equipment screen for EVERY character. Nice.
THEN, even if you're not carrying said item already, you have NO clue whatsoever if it will improve your status or not, until you actually equip it. So if you don't want to waste any money, you'd have to save your game, buy what you want, try it on, then load your game to buy what you actually need. Super.

This, I am glad to say, has been completely fixed. You can see who can equip what, and how much it will improve their offense, hit rate, defense and evasion rate. There are however, much more status elements which might go DOWN with a new weapon that you will not be able to see until AFTER you bought the item, but that is a minor gripe. Still kinda annoying though.

Speaking of hit rates, the DS version also maintains the INSANE amount of misses that plagued the original. GOD, how frigging annoying. Lots of RPGs have hit rates and you will occasionally miss in even the best games out there, but FFIV is retarded. Seriously, at some point I wanted to go inside the screen (EITHER OF THEM) and STRANGLE Cecil, the Paladin PUSSY, because he seemed to be the biggest offender. Not that Kain does much, mind you. Fuckheads.

Furthermore there are no helpful descriptions for magic and skills, you don't know what ANYTHING does until you use it, and even then the effect might not be immediately clear. It's like the creators assumed you are familiar enough with the series that you don't need any explanation. Stupid.

Man, I don't know who wrote this, but give the guy a Cigar! Brilliant! Spot-on!
You do get item descriptions, which is a BIG help, and you get magic descriptions in your normal inventory screen, but NOT in battle, when you need them most.
Also, some descriptions are completely inane.
"Ifrit: Summons Ifrit", WELL FUCK, SHERLOCK, THANKS A SHITLOAD.

Which brings me to another thing, Using Magic and Items in the Inventory Screen (man, I love how I can bridge all this stuff together).
You see, this game has full detailed (for lack of a better term. Oh wait: Crappy) Polygon Models for the once 2D rendered characters, and apparently Square is so proud of this feat, that they want you to enjoy, even savour, this new-fangled technology at every turn in the Inventory screen.
But you know what, clocking in at a hefty 128MB, this is a rather sizeable cart, and apparently the DS has some trouble conjuring up these models on the fly, so it takes a couple of seconds (and any gamer knows that seconds of waiting can seem like HOURS when they become frequent enough) for the model to load. So while you are just trying to QUICKLY heal/cure your character, which is something you have to do a LOTLOTLOTLOTLOTLOTLOTLOT, you are sitting there, pointlessly pressing buttons to no effect, because the game is busy LOADING THE FRIGGIN CHARACTER MODEL!
And do we actually NEED to see the model at that point!? FUCK NO! There is no point to it WHATSOEVER! IT ONLY SLOWS THINGS DOWN! THANKS SQUARE, I LOVE IT! MAYBE NEXT TIME YOU CAN KICK ME IN THE BALLS EVERY TIME I TRY TO REVIVE SOMEONE, WOULD THAT HELP THINGS!?

Christ.

And you know what, the game also suffers from all these polygons during battle scenes. There is no real slow-down as such, but that's largely because battles run at a frighteningly low framerate in the first place, which in turn can lead to unresponsive controls, such as your cursor not moving quite as speedily as you want it to. This is really only a minor gripe though, it's not that much of a problem, but it's a minor gripe on a pile of steaming dung, so it doesn't exactly help thins.

Speaking of which (bridge!) who on God's Motherfucking Green Earth ever decided it would be fun to have Dungeons with TOXIC/LAVA puddles strewn about the place!? Is it anyone's idea of fun to HAVE TO run around on flooring that will HURT you with every step!? Seriously, can someone explain to me what's fun about this!? And they did this in every FF BEFORE this one too! GREAT IDEAS ARE HARD TO LET GO HUNH!?

Thirtyfifthly, WHAT'S the DEAL with all these invisible walls and pathways!? Every dungeon has like, several THOUSAND. And it's fine if they just lead to hidden treasure or something, but as the game progresses, you NEED to find these hidden passages just to progress, and you can't see where you're going, if you didn't have the map (which you DON'T in the original) you can't even see if you're actually moving because of all the darkness around you. You just have to randomly press directions to see if you end up somewhere. LET'S PUT THE 'FU' IN 'FUCKING FUN' RIGHT!?
And you know WHAT!? You get these invisible passageways in dungeons WITH TOXIC/LAVA FLOORS TOO! HUZZAH! God I can't tell you how much I love all of this.

Did I mention the insanely overpowered bosses yet? I think I did, but they deserve second mentioning. This is the kind of game where you HAVE to put a lot of effort into EVERYTHING to just be able to get by.

Only Masochists need apply.

Anything positive?
Well, the opening movie is gorgeous, as always, the 3D revamped graphics are pretty decent, the vocal version of Theme of Love is quite beautiful (you'll have to finish the game to hear it though), the newly added Voice Acting is really quite good and you can throw the game at passers-by and watch them sneer at it. Most fun I've had with it at least.

For Die Hard fans only.

5.0

posted by Ingen! @ 2:28 PM