Final Fantasy IV (1991)

Um, wow. I'm in love with the Pixel Remaster version of the the Final Fantasy IV Town Theme. There's even a part at the :51 mark that's not even in the original song. It adds an appropriate feeling of somberness that I feel the setting calls for and it's just so beautifully done. What a great addition to the track.. I hope there are more surprises like this.

Original:

Pixel Remaster Remix, the new part starts at :51:

The Pixel Remaster for this one came out the other day and this confirms my feelings about the SNES entries.

I will never be convinced that this is an improvement in any way, except the translation probably. The music also just sounds so... lethargic. Just re-release the PSP version!

EDIT: Whoops, sorry, I guess spoiler tags don't work for videos. I changed it.

I finished this one over the weekend. At the end of the day, I have mixed feelings. The horrendous translation does a lot of damage. Half the game looks to the past, with meh graphics, what feels like (at least nowadays) slow paced battles where you're still using up a lot of resources to get through mobs through to the end. But it also did a lot for the series in a forwardly positive way - the ATB system, wonderful soundtrack, cool last boss battle, character driven story, a real ending, etc.

I also learned the hard way that some things are missable - after finding Yang in the Sylph Cave, getting the frying pan from his wife, and going back to hit him and wake him up, I forgot to go back to his wife until it was too late. So I totally missed out on getting the spoon for Edge.

I put this one down and realized the shine had worn off of the nostalgia a bit. Oh well, on to Mystic Quest!

I'll leave you with my favorite line of dialogue in the game:

Image from Legends of Localization

Onwards! I'm now at Mt. Ordeals with Palom, Porom, and Tellah which equals grinding more levels for more mages. It's a good thing the world of FF4 just has all these disposable wizards lying around.

The translation is still hilarious, though. This one made me laugh a lot for some reason:

Screen grab from NintendoComplete

Just stick em in your pocket!

Here we go with the next step in my play-all-the-FFs-in-order-before-I-die adventure. So, adieu to the iOS remakes of the first three NES games, and on to the SNES installments, starting with my somehow still functional copy of Final Fantasy 2 (née 4).

It's been maybe more than a decade since I last played through this one. I'm now constantly aware of the super awkward/comically bad translation. Also, oh my god I never thought about the party composition through the early game, but yikes. Cecil and Kain, fine. Rydia? Useless. Tellah comes along, great, spells and a good pool of MP. Oh, then he leaves and I get to bring along Edward, who's even more useless than Rydia was. Plus there's a significant difficulty spike in the Antlion den, so time to grind out these human shields companions.

An excellent, excellent game. This is the first time Square really added character depth and complexity to their games. Add that to solid game mechanics, and you have something truly special.

Cecil is, of course, a classic. And the game does a good job of exploring the question of redemption. That said, it does wind up being very rushed and pretty predictable (in its broader strokes, anyway) from early on. Even so, the game has stood the test of time and is worth playing even if you're new to the Final Fantasy series.

When I first played this game, my best friend at the time could not for the life of him say the word Paladin, instead saying "Padalin". I still say that once in a while as an unintentional homage... "Choboco" was another good one of his...

Anyway, I devoted the entirety of today's play session to the Paladin quest line, while also having a much easier time with Mt Ordeals than I remembered as a kid. Other inconsistencies include Palom and Porom being less annoying and more useful than I remember, and Tellah being significantly weaker. Either way, Cecil is now a (level one...) Paladin and the game feels like it's really getting started!

Another interesting development is the way I'm starting to view "cheating" in games, and I think a lot of it has to do with my not-so-recent (2013) discovery and love of the AGDQ broadcasts. Cheat codes, sure, cheating. Clever use of possibly glitchy game mechanics, well, I mean... Case in point is the item duping in FF4, and the fact that I just don't feel bad for using it. Does it break the game or otherwise ruin the experience? No, I don't think so, and frankly I find the fact that such glitches and exploits exists in these old games is a fun relic of the times.

I spent so long ranting yesterday that I never actually touched on the game itself... The truth is I'm already over the re-translation quirks and am back to enjoying my time in Final Fantasy 4.

I remember this game well enough that it's almost annoying. Every time I see something familiar or reach a new milestone I immediately go "Oh yeah, this part. Oh yeah, this part. Oh yeah..." At the same time, this does allow me to look at a game that I've always been bias towards (in favor of) in a more critical light. Even though I know it to be technically wrong, as a US gamer I'm going to continue treating FF4 as a direct sequel to FF1, and disregard FF2/FF3 when making any comparisons. Based on that, it's interesting to see how FF4 is both reflective of the Final Fantasy series in its infancy, yet also represents a major turning point for the series in terms of storytelling and character development. It's a huge leap going from barely caring about my four Heroes of Light in the first game to being so heavily investing in Cecil and company in this one. At the same time, while FF4 is definitely a large step forward technically, you still see a lot of holdovers from the first game. Even the visuals, save for things like Mode7, as are indicative of the NES original.

As for the play session itself... It was interesting to see Edward renamed as Gilbert, but I didn't care about the character enough to change his name. I remember the Antlion Den being really challenging for me when I played this game as a kid, but it wasn't so bad this time around. I made it passed the failed Fabul defense and decided to call it quits before starting my journey in becoming a Paladin.

Ugh...

I've officially restarted this game three times now, all because I wanted to try something a little different. When I bought my copy of Final Fantasy IV (FF2 US) I decided against buying the US copy as, well it was fine when I was younger, these days I don't really appreciate the intensely dumbed down version of the game. I still wanted to play the game on it's original engine and I still wanted to play it on an SNES if possible. With that, I opted to pick up a reproduction copy of the SFC version of Final Fantasy IV with J2E's retranslation patch applied to it.

I only just realized my mistake.

While I greatly appreciate a cleaned script and more accurate naming, this patch just took a few more liberties with the writing than I'm comfortable with. Add to that the ugly and often inconsistent fonts plus clunky window spacing and padding and ultimately I just wasn't enjoying the game as much as I'd have liked. My only other option was playing the PS1 version. Very brief load times and it takes longer to save, but hey, it's what I'm looking for. I don't have any PS1 memory cards lying around so I use my PS3 for all PS1 games. The PS3 plays 99% of all PS1 games perfectly... but guess which game falls into that 1%? Any form of sprite transparency causes intense screen flickering which makes playing the game physically painful, not to mention the buggy audio. After about an hour I decided I'd rather take the questionable translation over the glitches and so it was back to the SNES. Of course I'd already deleted my recording so... time to start over again.

After playing for almost an hour, renaming Cain back to Kain in the process, I decided to call it after picking up Tellah. I think I can learn to live with the patch, which is good considering I otherwise love this game.