July 11, 2012: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Just got Edge, here I come Rubicant!

I'm always a bit wary when I play a remake of a game I've already finished, though Square always seems to do a good job about it...to a degree. I had only played IV back in the old SNES days, and never actually owned it, just rented it from a local store. This of course led to me trying frantically to beat it over the course of a single weekend, getting near the end of it, and due to having rushed (and ran from encounters for a good chunk of the game), I was never powerful enough to finish the game. Still, it always struck me as a well balanced game, no grinding needed to finish out classes, no uber-powerful bosses that you have to spend forever trying to beat (that all came later). If you played through it and fought every random battle, you would be at the perfect level for the final boss to be a challenge, and the few side quests ended you on a still even note.

Memories are always a nice thing though, and playing the remake on the PSP has left me with mixed feelings. For one, the sprite art for both the characters, the world, and the monsters is out and out -beautiful-. It makes me glad I never spent the money on the DS remake, because the chibified 3d images always looked so...blegh. I would rather have well done sprite art than poorly rendered 3d graphics any day. The game still feels very old school, beyond some ease of use changes, though some of those leave me wondering why they didn't do a few more tweaks.

My memory of the old game isn't perfect, so I can't say with 100% certainty...but did the old games really have such a hugely annoying encounter rate? There have been numerous times I've gotten out of one random encounter...and walked right into another, then another, then another. Many times I've had 4 random encounters in a single small room, walking to and from the chest inside. I know random encounters are a fact of life in pretty much any JRPG, but good lord people....put a limiter on these things. Even if the original game didn't, you can make tweaks! It's ok! Up the experience and gold gained from each encounter a bit, make them a tad less frequent, and it will be fine. Being a portable game makes it a bit more forgivable, after all, you can just flick the power button and put it down, so no need to truly rush for a save before work.

The random encounters themselves are....meh. When I found the auto-battle feature, I've pretty much left it on all the time except for the locations where I know it'll get my character killed if I'm not paying attention to who they attack (life drain with undead enemies, etc). Otherwise, I'll take the massive hit to HP from just wailing on enemies automatically, and watch TV for a bit while I wait for it to finish. The battles run a bit faster then anyway, I can turn it off with one button, and using magic and summons really doesn't speed it up that much.

Otherwise, the boss battles are still well done, though when you already know all the tricks and how to beat them and have played so many Final Fantasy games...well...they're rather simple. So far, no one has given me a remote challenge other than having to revive once or twice. Again, I can't state it enough, the sprites are beautiful and well detailed, and the music is typical Final Fantasy fare. I'm chewing through this at a pretty rapid rate, and expect to finish it rather shortly, then I can move on to the two other games on the disc.