July 12, 2012: Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection

 Final Fantasy IV

System: PSP
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Working through sidequests before the final dungeon.

I suppose its always going to be odd, going back to a game that is so old, and then revisiting a story you've already experienced. To be fair, I've been skimming most of the story. I've seen this before after all, I know where to go, but once I started paying attention again...well...it really doesn't hold up anymore. Weirdly enough, the main characters themselves, the ones who pass through your party, are probably the part that holds up the best...albeit rather one dimensional still. Kain lives up to his biblical namesake and does so many half-explained betrayals it gets rather silly, Rosa loves Cecil end of story, Rydia hates Cecil and Kain, then helps him after one effort to protect her despite him murdering her entire village...ok, even the characters aren't even that well detailed. Hell, some of them seem so eager to remove themselves from your party so you can get a new one in a few moments that they do rather stupid things, ergo "We need to close this gap, lemme jump from the airship with this bomb!" "Oh, I'm alive again later, no explanation!". Practically every character death is reversed at least once (except for the big one which I won't spoil for the five people who haven't played that far), and yet no one seems to react beyond "Personname! You're alive! Let's never mention this again."

The story itself is so bare bones...there's no lead up to anything that happens. Go fight new threat, go here, fight this threat, oh there's other crystals, go get them, sudden large monstrous doomsday weapon, stop it! In such a short game, with the actual final villain not mentioned till about 2 hours till the game is over, its really hard to get any emotion invested in it. Hell, most villains just show up, get killed, and are never mentioned or explained. Elemental archfiends introduce themselves, get offed, get revived later, offed again, with out a single motivation or explanation as to where they came from or why they worked for the current big bad.

This is all probably looking in hindsight, after all, the game previous to this in the Final Fantasy series was...really bare bones, though 2 had a comparatively Star Wars story...too bad the system was trash. I am rather glad we didn't pay a lot for this, and that it comes with two other side games, otherwise I'd have felt a little irked at paying for a game little more than 20 hours long with no real replay value. Will have to see how the other two games in the collection go before any final judgement though.