So last time on Sailor Moon Z, I talked about how absolutely terrible Final Fantasy III for the DS was, and how certain design decisions make for one incredibly craptacular RPG "experience." Let's get the bad taste out of our mouths.
Let's talk about Final Fantasy IV for the DS.
It's a remake of the SNES classic, Final Fantasy IV (no, not the one with Firion. You're thinking of that other Final Fantasy II.) and, to its credit, the game sounds absolutely beautiful, and the voice acting is great all around, even if Yuri "Protagonist of Every JRPG Anymore" Lowenthal voices Cecil Harvey. Fun fact: Yuri Lowenthal, not content to voice the Prince of Persia, Radix Farrence in Star Ocean 1's remake, the Persona 3 Protagonist, and Sasuke Uchiha in the crappiest anime about ninja ever produced by humanity (not Ninja Scroll: The Series), also voiced the male Courier in Fallout: New Vegas. Yes, doing pain grunts counts as voicing a character.
That said, let's start with the random encounters. FF4DS's random encounters, like FF3DS's, are massively buffed up from the 16-bit era. Those sandworms you can randomly encounter in the Damcyan Desert? They can one-shot kill you. A lot of monsters do a lot of damage with their basic attack, to the point where your party might as well be wearing cardboard armor for all the protection it gives you. (Bosses had their stats buffed, too, but that's another paragraph.)
About a third of the way through the game, you get to go to the Lodestone Cavern, where any character wearing metallic equipment is permanently paralyzed in combat. Considering Cecil is a knightly paladin at this point, this is a problem because his swords are awesome. Fortunately the nearby city sells three daggers that aren't made of metal that only he can equip!
(SPOILER WARNING: The Flameshard, Frostshard, and Shockshard SUCK MAJOR. I say without hyperbole that you can do more damage with your equally terrible unarmed attack than you can with those piece of crap knives.)
"But Snorb!" you say. "I played Final Fantasy IV, why didn't you just buy a bow and a whole bunch of arrows and give those to Cecil!?" Good question! Thing is, Cecil can't equip bows in Final Fantasy IV DS. Squenix's reason for doing this is
A couple paragraphs ago, I talked about bosses. Bosses aren't actually buffed as much as the monsters, but some of them do have frustrating gimmicks. The Antlion, an early boss, countered every physical attack made against it in any version. In FF4DS, it does the same thing... then you notice its eyes change color. And it starts counterattacking magic...
That's right. The bosses, whose gimmicks you know by heart if you know FF4 like the back of your hand, decided to pull a Punch-Out Wii and messed with their gimmicks so you need a new strategy. That's not bad, and I really love it, but there's one major problem with this: The Giant of Babel's CPU. It's protected by an Attack Bit and a Defense Bit. The Attack Bit attacks the party, the Defense Bit heals the CPU. Kill both, and the CPU steamrollers two random party members and revives the Bits.
You are told in every version to kill the Defense Bit. While this advice holds water in the GBA version (where the Attack Bit's attack is rather pitiful and the Defense Bit heals about 2000 HP per turn), doing this in the DS version will result in a very short, frustrating battle, followed by a hole in your wall about the size of an opened Nintendo DS as you hurl it at the wall. The Attack Bit hits the entire party like a dump truck in this version while the Defense Bit does some rather pathetic token healing to the CPU. You are still told to kill Defense Bit before fighting the CPU, so I guess this is "Barrett, be careful!! Attack while its tail's up!! It'll counterattack with its laser!" for the portable generation.
Two other frustrations make Final Fantasy IV DS not as fun as it should be: Augments, which give your party members extra abilities, are earned by either revisiting dungeons after you beat them and have no reason to go back, or by giving departing party members Augments that you hope you won't need later in exchange for actual good abilities.
The most terrible thing about FF4DS: The Rainbow Pudding sidequest. That no-good (obscenity deleted) (bleep) (I should probably leave this chain of profanity out) (hilariously obscene complaint) (extremely profane comment about Rainbow Pudding) Rainbow Pudding sidequest. One recurring NPC wants a Rainbow Pudding for his girlfriend. Cecil being the protagonist volunteers is shanghaied into getting one for him.
Rainbow Pudding is dropped by Flan-type enemies, several of which you've met by this point. Too bad for you that they have a .4% (decimal point assuredly not a typo) chance of dropping one when you kill it. Even with the Augment that boosts rare drop rates, you still only have a .8% chance of getting Rainbow Pudding. People have been known to take weeks to get one.
Your reward for getting Namingway his thrice-bedamned Rainbow Pudding? You win JACK. (Some would consider "But you get to advance Namingway's little subplot!!!" as a reward. I would consider that you reconsider your idea of what considers a reward.)
At least the CG promotional art for Rosa (this game's love interest) made her look really sexy, so... I guess that takes some of the bad feelings for making me remember this stupid Rainbow Pudding quest away.
(Edit: Removed a couple words near the end that, while not censor bypassing in and of themselves, could be interpreted as bypassing the censor if you're in the right state of mind. But after playing some of the games on this list, you might not be. Or might be.)
Last edited by Snorb on Thu Jul 3, '14, 6:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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