Final Fantasy 4 : The Nintendo DS remake of a spoony Super Nintendo RPG.
Story : Despite the fact that Cecil is a dark knight, he seems to have regrets when his king asks him to do a few decidedly….dark things. His second thoughts wind up sabotaging him and results in a quest with a ragtag group of colourful partners to stop evil forces from collecting sacred crystals that serve a more sinister purpose. Back in 1991, the storyline of Final Fantasy 4 was considered groundbreaking (so I’m led to believe) in that it was unheard of for your party members, let alone protagonists in general, to die. With the shock value long since passed, one can see that the writers at Square thought that they were really clever at the time to have thought up this idea of killing off the good guys, as members of your party seem to be all too willing to leap at the chance to sacrifice their lives to save the group from a mildly dangerous situation. The melodramatic nature of the script is accentuated by the occasional voice-acted cutscene, and the one aspect that I like about these particular sequences is that you can skip them. The actual dialogue, on the other hand, you’re still forced to scroll through while hammering the A button, (always a big no-no in my books, especially right before a major boss fight.) Otherwise, I’d say that if you’re into the Final Fantasy story format then you’ll probably enjoy it here too, but later games feel more fleshed out in contrast to the paper-thin cast of characters you’ll see here. On top of all that, I hate it when the main character of a game is gullible, and Cecil can’t see an ambush coming if there was a sign pointed in front of him reading “TRAP HERE, DO NOT STEP FORWARD!”
Final Fantasy 4 sits uncomfortably in the middle of an imaginary RPG spectrum. On the left are early Japanese RPGs from the NES onwards, like the first Final Fantasy, where your party of backstory-less, emotion-less avatars plodding through dungeons filled with harsh random battles while grinding up your levels for hours on end to hope that they’re strong enough to thwart the difficult end level boss in the dungeon who’s location you needed a strategy guide (or 1-900 hint line from back in the day I guess), partly because the translation from Japanese to English was so poor that the in-game characters don’t make a lot of sense in the clues that are supposed to lead you there. On the right, more recent JRPGs with hours of cutscenes about characters with elaborate backstorys and motivations that are all out of the player’s control, (though what is in control is some kind of needlessly-convoluted chart used to “level up” the characters) and the combat is simplified enough that you can mash the one button to continuously attack all your enemies on your guided path to the next cutscene. Playing through the Final Fantasy 4 remake, the idea I got was that this game seems to obtain the most notorious aspects of both ends of the spectrum, though I wouldn’t call it an ideal balance of old and new virtues.
As you can guess from the first paragraph, the game leans towards the radical right when it comes to story. Perhaps the flaws in the story were easier to forgive in 1991 when people were amazed that a Super Nintendo game had so much storyline. Nowadays, anyone who’s played an RPG or two in their lives can guess most points, like how the presence of magical crystals that can summon an almighty evil force in the wrong hands pretty much guarantees the forces of evil will get their hands on these crystals as to force the player into a climatic final battle. And while it was shocking to see your party members die to save the team, that characters are frequently making the ultimate sacrifice means that they’ll get inevitably replaced by new, lower-leveled party members. And there will be grind. You’ll get to a point where you’ll have to grind levels to move on. The FF4 grinder isn’t as lengthy as other RPGs, but it sure is rustier. The later dungeon enemies are powerful, and develop area-sweeping attacks that can wipe out your party and erase all the progress you’ve made after your last save point, including all that grinding. These dungeons want you to grind too, they’re begging for you to grind. The original game had plenty of corridors with matching tiles and paths leading nowhere, all vying for you to get lost, wander and have plenty more random battles. Maybe that's why your party members seem so eager to take any excuse to be put out of their misery.
Fortunately, this DS update includes a map of the areas you’ve explored on the bottom screen, as to reduce the random wandering and make this random battle issue…slightly less bothersome. There’s a few tweaks, including a summon whom gets powered up by playing DS touch screen mini-games, which means no one will actually care. And I’ll admit that the graphical update is actually quite welcome here – the original game had a very technologically limited, stripped down visual style that was all too eager to show off this brand spanking new Mode 7 technology the SNES was bringing (despite how pixilated it may be) and new, much cleaner 3D graphics help to bring out of the nuances of each character without butchering them (unlike, say, every single Mega Man game released after the NES).
I could start listing the “innovations” that Final Fantasy 4 made but when looking back on old games like this, I value the replayability more than anything else, and Final Fantasy 4 can be a tough game to replay, as you can see, as it requires the same level of sacrifice as some of your allies in the game. For what it’s worth, this is the definitive version of Final Fantasy 4, and someone who’s new to the franchise and is eager to explore the history or some kind of nonsense like that would do good to pick it up. It’s a solid role playing game, but it brings the archaic game design of days gone by, mixed with the need to shove a story (good or bad) down our throats. To its credit, I’m aiming to finish the game, so I guess it has value to JRPG fanatics. But this game was already re-released on the Game Boy Advance a few years ago…
Pros : Enemies are depicted as more than a single, motionless sprite.
Cons : Cecil has chicken legs.
3 ½ stars
And most reviewers will kindly point out that Final Fantasy 4 was originally released in the States as Final Fantasy 2. But I tend to think the only people that actually played Final Fantasy 2 back in the day were the diehard RPG fanatics who already knew this so I tend to think there’s no need to try and point this out every freaking time someone brings up Final Fantasy 4.
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