Final Fantasy II (GameBoy Advance) - Review

 

 Final Fantasy I and II Dawn of Souls @ Amazon.com

Official Nintendo Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls Player's Guide 

I am gonna be arrogant here and say that I am probably one of the very few people who has played all the way through FF2.

 There's a good reason for that. The game has long been touted as being overly difficult, in part to an "innovative" battle system where instead of leveling up the usual way, you instead....build stats. Agility, Defense, Mag Defense, HP, MP, etc. How do you gain these? Easy! You want more stamina (which in turn, builds HP), you...take a hit to the face! Want more MP? Use spells! Leveling up your spells? Repeated use.

 Somehow, it seems as if HP is given/leveled up more easily in this remake than in prior versions which may skew my review slightly.

It seems so intuitive, creative, and simple but in actuality, it's a practice in frustration. Everything's fine as long as you follow a fairly linear path and know who to talk to - speak to the wrong person, go to the wrong part of the world map, however, and you'll find yourself becoming increasingly acquainted with the "Game Over" screen. I had this happen repeatedly when I first busted this out years ago on the PS1 (sup Final Fantasy Origins) and almost broke my controller. I wasn't safe from it this time around either, but at least E was there to keep me in check. There was one night where I almost stopped and was ready to sell it so we could play something else.

As for the story, the main reason I play RPGs, it's a bit sparse. A real shame considering it has SUCH potential. I tend to gravitate towards those RPGs whose stories are a bit more believable, a bit more political (see: Suikoden <3). It's a very simple story - a group of people (presumably late teens) loses their parents in the war, join the resistance, and kill the Emperor - who has, of course, gone a little bit crazy and power hungry, offs some cities, the usual. And while there are a fair bit of characters that join you temporarily on your quest to help flesh things out, it simply...isn't enough. Those characters join briefly, give only a few sentences of back-story (and no side quests to flesh this out!) and...leave. Some die, some just vanish. I barely remember which is which. I'll sum it up this way - I spent 26 hours on this and still didn't know what my characters were fighting *for* - neither did the Emperor/Last Boss, who simply says upon his defeat "Who...who are you!?" Who are we, indeed.

This is where it all starts - Chocobos, fighting against an EMPIRE (see FF4, FF6, FF12, FF13), "Cid" spotting, crystals, etc. Surprisingly, that's where the similarities end. Already noted, the story is very shallow - it really even reminds me more of one of the spinoff series instead of an actual Final Fantasy (a la Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy Legends, etc.). The reason for this is most likely that Final Fantasy 2 was not produced by Hironobu Sakaguchi (Square, now Mistwalker) but rather by Akitoshi Kawazu who just so happens to be responsible for the SaGa series (including Final Fantasy Legends) and the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series.


I really wanted to like this game. Truly. There's so much potential (the characters, setting, and feeble interactions in the game) and it's just squandered. While playing this, it just didn't have that certain "feel" that most Final Fantasy games do. There's no sense of adventure, no endearing relationships, no real reason for killing the villain. It really feels like this game is a product of getting wrapped up in minutiae - the potential is there, but it just doesn't fit in. Maybe they just had too many ideas (or not enough...)? The GBA version does attempt to make up for this by having an epilogue of sorts included. Honestly though, since it runs parallel to the main quest (these characters go on an adventure while the main FF2 party is doing their thing), there isn't much it adds. It seems a little tacked on, after-thought attempt to enhance what little story there is and garner fans.





If you like Final Fantasy and you desperately need to play 2 for completion purposes - go at it. Save it for a weekend when you have little else to do, or a time when you have spare time to grind mindlessly (say, for example, when your roommate wants you to watch stuff with them, but you don't really want to). This is a title only for die hard fans of the series. I wouldn't at all recommend this to a casual gamer or even someone who plays every other RPG series - the story isn't there, the gameplay is frustrating at best, and there is little to no reward for your efforts.

-A

Review: Final Fantasy V

Final Fantasy V Advance

Official Nintendo Power FINAL FANTASY V ADVANCE Player's Guide

As promised, part one of our thirteen-plus part review of the Final Fantasy series.

So, we wanted to begin with one of the more underrated Final Fantasy titles, Final Fantasy V, in order to build our tolerance for the series early and make adapting to later, "easier" titles that much faster. After playing FFV, I'm pretty glad we spent the time playing all of the Shin Megami Tensei games we did prior, given the game's challenge level as well as its depth of customization and sheer, well, we'll say that a lot of series and games owe a lot of creative debt to this game.

Concerning the story, those who have played any pre-PlayStation Final Fantasy can probably spot most of Final Fantasy's tropes and archetypes from a mile away: your characters are infused with one of the four elements and are charged with the responsibility of maintaining the balance of nature in the world. The ultimate bad guy is an incarnation of a sheer force of evil, somewhat of a destructive and malignant fifth element, There's chocobos, airships, Meteor, Holy, you name it.

Surprisingly, this is not a bad thing.

Final Fantasy as a franchise has always done one thing right, and that's stick to the script. Their theme has always been the potential end of humanity by its own hand, usually due to resource exploitation. Usually this abuse rears its head as the personification of some negative force, who coincidentally is the final boss. Sticking to this motif allows them to reinvent themselves at the nuts-and-bolts level, telling the same story but with different characters, settings and events, hopefully to give us a different perspective on their message. Sometimes this reinvention goes completely sideways. Sometimes it's the story's fault, sometimes it's the battle engine, sometimes it's the levelling.

Final Fantasy V is not one of those games.

If you've played Final Fantasy VI and understand the Espers system, you understand most of the job system in V, but there's some under the hood stuff that's worth reading.

FFV features a job system that gives you your expanded attack, defense, special command, passive ability, and weapon class attributes as a character. You start off as a Freelancer, who can equip any weapon and only has Attack and Item for options. As you progress you unlock new jobs, beginning with Black/White/Blue/Red Mage, Thief, and Knight, all stalwarts from the series' perspective, but eventually you get classes like Ranger and Mime whose influences on your stat development may be minor, but completing their jobs unlocks some of the best attacks in the entire game. At a point the game gets somewhat cheesy, but considering the minimal hand-holding at the beginning and the amount of elbow grease required to unlock some of the better skills, it ends up making the end game extremely satisfying. The cool thing is, once you max a job out, the passive skills (for sake of example, Thieves learn the passive skill Find Passages that makes hidden pathways visible) rub off on you once you pick a neutral job class. Once you get the hang of the delicate nuances of the system, you can build every character precisely the way you want.

The above is squarely the reason I feel many of today's games owe a great debt of inspiration to FFV, including FF Tactics, the Disgaea series and most other Nippon Ichi games, World of Warcraft and its ilk, etc. Beyond the more obvious face-value inspiration, the blown-outness of the game's core mechanics is something we rarely see in games today, and that level of polish is normally the realm of fighting games, open-world adventure titles (which RPGs are, just with more numbers), first-person shooters, you name it.

I have some problems with the game overall, but many of them are relics of their time, and since this port is particularly faithful I must forfeit some of them. However, one sticks out as particularly inexcusable: the final boss of this game takes constant left turns into "so bad it's good" territory, and the game as a serious effort suffers. While certainly not as terrible of a villain as Sephiroth (really, who could be), Exdeath (in this port, sometimes it's translated as Exodus) does his fair share of wiping out hapless innocents and making sure the justice league (that's you) has a lot of personal sacrifice to endure. Let's just say that someone's home town doesn't make it to the end of the game, which if you've been paying attention, is not much of a spoiler when it comes to this series.

If you have a Final Fantasy itch but are (somehow) sick of replaying IV and VI for the seventeenth time (okay, on second thought...), then V's totally worthwhile. We prefer the GBA version for the updated script, the PSX version will play on your PS3 if you have one of those and it's probably like $15 on eBay or Amazon so pick whichever you like. It's up in the higher ranks of our favorite, if not our actual favorite, because while it doesn't bring the freshest of ideas to the house consistently and the villain's story is hilariously bad (but good!), the things it gets right it hits out of the park. The job system is truly revolutionary and is fleshed out to near-perfection, and the integration of the rest of the game's systems into it shows they truly stood by this element of their design. "But E, we play RPGs for story!" Go for it, so do we, and even though it's a story we've heard a few times already, this was a particularly excellent retelling.

-E

Review: Final Fantasy IV (Nintendo DS)

Buy Final Fantasy IV

For many years, I have had a torrid love affair with the fourth entry into the Final Fantasy series. As a young child, I downloaded a rom on an emulator and the rest is history. Life got in the way so I never got around to beating it. Per my usual habits, I'd pick it up, stop, pick it back up and have no idea where I was and then restart it. Rinse, repeat.

I then bought the Final Fantasy Chronicles 2 disk set - which I never beat because the FFIV disk was in my Playstation 2 when it was stolen. On that particular playthrough I was already to the Moon....and so outraged and disappointed that I dare not find another copy and try to pick it up again.

2005 - I pick up the Game Boy Advance version and the guide as an early Christmas present to myself. I did my other usual habit and ended up playing the hell out of it for a few days and then set it aside (I worked two jobs at the time).

Cue Square Enix deciding to not only bring it to DS but completely revamp it - I all but foamed at the mouth at the previews online. Game, preordered. When I picked it up with the guide I again tried to play it but got stuck and set it aside.

Today, after almost a decade of false starts, stops, and everything in between - I have beaten the beast.

Story
Shit is going wrong; terribly, terribly wrong. You are a Dark Knight (no, not Batman) who is following your just and righteous King's orders - murdering people for...crystals? No, that's not right. Too bad you asked questions and are exiled now! Four's story is a fairly realistic one, I believe - as realistic as magic and dragons and summons can be. You meet some new people along the way, you lose some too - but they leave an impression on you - they inspire you to be a better person, to set things right! The depth of every character's personality is refreshing in this game - even if they're with you briefly or for a while, you like them, you genuinely care about them - weird quirks and all. There are a few great albeit predictable plot twists but I genuinely enjoyed the story and that's probably why I have such a soft spot for it and have wanted to completely beat it through all those years.

Gameplay
Gameplay is quite a bit different this time around. That's what I like about the various ports/remakes of 4 - there's always something new; Though I wonder if perhaps they overdid it in this one. The augment system is a new but "not sure if want" addition. It's very easy early on to mess up and screw yourself for the rest of the game (That's what I did the first time I attempted to play through it). On the other hand, they're god-tier when done correctly. So it's got a very significant learning curve - this is a game where strategy is important and you can't just button mash your way through it. I died a LOT. Let me repeat - a LOT. And not necessarily in boss battles - some of the dungeons later on in the game will ass rape you and hard. You have to use a good mix of strategy and knowing when to cut and run.

Also, don't be afraid of the augment system - I wasn't really sure what I was doing until the middle of the game and I beat it pretty easily with my final five around 65-69. The augments also carry over into New Game + so if you have any you haven't used or are aiming for a perfect run, that's the way to do it.

Soundtrack / Graphics
The game's soundtrack is absolutely beautiful - I don't need to go on and on about that. If you love it as much as I do, go do yourself a favor if you haven't already and pick up the Celtic remix CD. Absolute heaven. The minorly tweaked and updated versions of songs for DS are incredible.

Graphics wise, I'm a huge fan of the remake. It was beautiful, well-drawn and had gorgeous colors.

Overall
I think this redesign was perfect for Nintendo and Square to introduce this beloved classic to a new generation. The updated graphics/story not only appeals to newcomers but draws out every last bit of nostalgia from an old fan who picks it up. If you have not played FFIV, do it immediately. If you have but have not played this version, pick it up now.  FFIV was THE first Final Fantasy game to combine it all - great storyline, great characters, the traditional battle system - all establishing what makes the series so popular and a fan favorite.

8/10

- A

Final Fantasy VIII: Thoughts So Far, Part One

I don't hate it. Not by a long shot.

Junctioning is pretty sweet, and the plot, while having not gotten too far off the ground yet, is at least not up its own ass with symbolism. Yet.

However, the character designs feel like a very dreadful precursor to the insanity Square Enix would later pump out: see Kingdom Hearts, FFX, The World Ends with You (even if the latter is my all-time favorite game).

- E