Final Fantasy IV Log, Part I
I feel the point of crossover games is to see characters you love interact in the same universe, which is why they're not fun unless you've played or watched whatever series the characters originated from. I've played Final Fantasy V - X already, but that's still four games in Dissidia of which the characters I know nothing of. My original intention was to play Final Fantasy IV prior to Dissidia, and I did indeed begin the game but never continued. Hence when I started playing Dissidia in-depth, the plot for Final Fantasy IV, i.e. Golbez and Cecil being brothers, was completely ruined.
In the past two weeks I picked up the game again, and it's odd to get back into it. I vaguely remember the plot until then, but the fine points are lost in the bowels of my memory.
Part of the reason why I abandoned Final Fantasy IV were problems I had with the battle. You would think being a simple ATB wouldn't create an issue, but it did.
-Usually whatever order you input is the order your people do their moves. In this game magic users always go last. It doesn't matter how many people I instructed after the magic user, he/she will go last. Occasionally even if I give everyone a simple command like Attack, they won't do it in the same sequence I commanded them to. I'm trying to figure out if this was done on purpose or is a glitch.
-This problem is definitely a glitch: Occasionally right after a character does a move, his/her menu will pop up immediately again. I can make them do a second move, and then their bar will go down to the bottom and go back up. I've never seen that in an ATB, and I don't know what the hell is going on when it happens.
-I couldn't figure out what half the moves for my people do. Like Rosa's Pray. Sometimes it says Prayers not heard. Why not? Occasionally I'll heal myself, but it's barely anything to care about. So I never use it.
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So I jumped back into the game in Fabul and immediately lost my entire party, which is always a great thing to experience. I actually forgot the people we attacked at the beginning of the game were the Mysidians, so when I ended up there I couldn't understand why these people were so pissed at me. And given what I did to them, I'm surprised they were so willing to help me, spying aside. Here's what I actually don't get: Why is a dark knight so bad? I couldn't see anything morally wrong with it other than you're "dark." Why would I need to shed that title?
And thanks Square for putting me back at level fucking 1 after becoming a paladin. Cecil was my highest level and he nearly died that first battle after switching jobs because I didn't realize what happened. Although I do have to admit it was pretty fun to go to level eight from just one fight alone.
I was actually pretty pissed when Palom and Porom died, which led me to this unfortunate conclusion: When people die in Final Fantasy IV, they do not leave their armor or weapons behind. I kinda wish I could see deaths coming so I can remove armor immediately. I had an inkling though that Tellah would die simply because he sucks so much. I realize his MP never went above 90 so the player can't cast meteor, but it's pretty ridiculous a renowned mage has less MP than a fucking paladin. His presence was a detriment to the party since his defense was so low, two hits would take him out.
When the women at Troia said I could borrow the crystal, I just raised my eyebrows and thought, "Really? Something that important and you're just going to hand it over to a guy you've never seen or heard of?" And then later when I give it away on purpose, they act very surprised about the matter. What did you think was going to happen?
The people in town told me if I wore metal armor, I would be weighed down. I interpreted this as my ATB bar wouldn't fill up as fast. No, it would paralyze me. So guess who died in the first battle because she didn't remove all the metallic armor? Yes, that's me. That dungeon was problematic since I didn't have as strong armor so I basically got near-fatal hits with every strike of the enemy. I finally decided to grind a bit until I could buy mythril armor for all my people and then return.
Seriously though, is Edward coming back to the party? I kinda hope not because he sucked too.
I like how when I finally see this completely new world underground, Golbez has pretty much taken it over. I guess I have an expectation we're going to fight Golbez for each and every crystal, but Square decided to skip all of those and go straight to the last one. I also like how the dwarves immediately take to us. "We can tell you're not like Golbez." Yeah, we don't look like him, but you don't know anything about us. We may not be on Golbez's side, but that doesn't mean we're good guys per se. That's how games used to roll back in the day: People would just accept or know thing unrealistically just because the developers didn't have the space to develop an actual plot.
After Yang and Cid's death, I placed this game as No. 1 Game for Deaths of Main Characters. I remember back when I played Final Fantasy VII thirteen years ago (Christ, I feel old) what a traumatic and memorable scene Aeris' death was. Now I have characters dying left and right and I barely feel a thing. True, the scene in Final Fantasy VII was much more dramatized, but at the same time I don't feel the same connection with the characters in Final Fantasy IV as I did in Final Fantasy VII. I think in the SNES days it was impossible to make long dialogues for lack of space so the characters ended up being a little flat.
Then again, I really loved the Chrono Trigger characters, so what the hell do I know.
Rydia confuses me a bit. She just randomly shows up, says she lived with summons for a bit, grew up in the process, and then everyone just accepts it and moves on. No, that's not how life works. If one of my friends suddenly shows up ten years older, I would have many things to say to this person. If they wanted Rydia to be an adult, why not just make her that to start with? I don't think being a child really made a difference.
I just got Edge, and he's about ten levels lower than the rest of my party. I'm hoping he doesn't suck as much when he catches up.
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My original plan was to just breeze through this and then play the DS version fully with a FAQ in front of me, but it's such a short game I'm wondering if I should do a FAQ playthrough on both versions...