The views and opinions in this article are held solely by me.
With the release of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster on console, it is now possible to play every mainline game in the Final Fantasy franchise on either modern consoles or PC. Thus, it is with great excitement that I have finally begun a lifelong "gaming achievement" dream of beating - in order - every mainline Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy 4.?Sorry folks, but this is going to be a short review.?And in a half-edited bullet form.?I can't be arsed with this game (which should tell you where this is going).
- The pacing is terrible. Too much happens to characters too fast that we don't get time to understand them as characters.?There's a lot we don’t see, and because of that there's no connection with the player. We find Rydia when her family and town are already dead. Boom move on. Oh something happened to Rosa in the desert but we didn’t see. Boom move on. Tellah's daughter had run away which we didn’t see and when we find her she's dead. Boom move on. Oh and Edwards entire family is dead when we meet him. Boom move on. Oh hey they killed all of the monks with Yang already, didn’t see it. Boom move on. They try to add things like the ghost of Anna but that felt like an afterthought.?I did like experiencing the raid on Fabul, though - the first moment in the game where it slows enough to let you experience something.?I liked the twins sacrificing themselves.?But then everyone sacrifices themselves.?Oh but then most of them are still alive.?Screw this game.
- The dialogue is poor fan-fiction-tier garbage.?So many one-word responses.?A majority of the dialogue is rough draft prose that needed multiple rewrites.
- "Time works differently in the summon world so I'm older now" get out of here - how come time didn't work all that differently when the party goes to the summon world??Oh, I know why, because screw this game.
- Coming off the turn-based system in favor of ATB takes getting used to, but that isn't the game's fault.?That said, I'm not a fan of "wait" only waiting when on certain menus. It should wait at all times.?What they really needed was three options: pure ATB, wait on certain menus (as it is now), wait at all times (aka adhere to turn order).
- Something about the visual aesthetic is too soft. It doesn’t feel as crisp as the predecessors.?This was a general issue I had with a lot of SNES games, a personal taste thing.?For what it's worth, I didn't grow up with a SNES (I had a Genesis) so there's that to consider.
- They force you into certain classes at certain times, which can be okay if the developers wanted to achieve a certain effect at certain times.?But I don't think that's the case here - that gives them too much credit.?Relative to ALL previous entries they rob you of player choice in favor of the narrative which is already a really bad rehash of the previous games.
- Running around with three mages and one physical attacker is LAME, especially when it's not easy to refill magic early on
- Towards the end of the game I turned off encounters and put on the 4x experience boost to just power through to the end - after a while this game was no longer fun or entertaining
- Like FF2, there were large areas of unnecessary world space to stretch out the world to make it look bigger, which wasn't at all necessary given the three different world maps you end up exploring
- Dungeon design felt very "trial and error" like FF2 as opposed to interesting exploration
- Here's something positive to say: summons were better in this game than FF3
- And I liked having 5 characters (when the game let me)
Overall I would rate Final Fantasy 4 a 6.0 based on the remaster, and you can thank Nobuo Uematsu that it managed to get that high. I realize this might be a hot take, especially for those who grew up with it, but FF4 is simply just a good game (aka above average which review scales SHOULD equate to a 5 but whatever). I didn't care about the characters, the world, the plot.?The gameplay felt more of a hindrance than a set of tools to play with. For a Final Fantasy game, I felt FF4 was a huge step backward for the series, especially coming off of the spectacular FF3.?But as a game on the whole, it was good. I suspect the jump to the SNES caused some challenges with budget, resources, schedule, what-have-you that brought the quality down. Next up, I'm hoping for a redemption story (meta-wise) with Final Fantasy 5!
Current Franchise Ranking:
