Customer Reviews
The best Final Fantasy you've never played
This title marks the point where the folks at Squaresoft finally hit their stride. Though previous FF titles offered battle systems, story elements, and world designs that were unique enough to sustain a loyal fandom, FFIV was the first home run.
Though FFIV, originally released in the U.S. on the Super Nintendo as "Final Fantasy 2", lacks the complexity of proceeding titles such as FF6 and on, this game offers much to RPG fans. I'll add that if you've never played an RPG before, FF4 is a wonderful choice as an introduction balancing challenge and simplicity well.
In this game you control Cecil and his band of warriors as they attempt to thwart a powerful dark wizard and a corrupt kingdom from unleashing ultimate destruction upon their world. Cecil is a conflicted character who must betray his own kingdom and his whole way of life to wield the power to fight evil. (I'm not giving much away here, you find this out in the first five minutes or so).
When I say world I mean world. This game was one of the first to enable you to explore a mode 7 "globe" complete with continents, landforms, and towns. As you seek new powers to aid you in your quest, you will also make new friends, discover new weapons, more efficient forms of transport, and you will add and (gulp) lose beloved party members along the way. A new player could spend 40-60 hours playing this game before reaching the end of this tale.
Ultimately, FF4 delivers well designed gameplay and an easy to use battle system, a compelling story, memorable characters (slashdot.com still uses Tellah and Edward as icons for their gaming articles), and beautiful music to keep you playing to the finish. Trust me, you'll like it.
Old gold polished back to life...
Back in the late 80's - early 90's a lone game developer was out of money, out of luck, and out of time. He was on his last leg, and wasn't getting anywhere. Seeing his current state, he decided to go for broke and produce his goodbye present to his small, and probably dying group of fans, and produce what would soon become the greatest legacy of games to hit the market for going on two-decades now. It was his "Final Fantasy."
Hironobu Sakaguchi produced the finest saga of games and now has the largest fan-base of any game series to date. This current work "Final Fantasy IV Advance" is an attempt to let his old-school fans relive some of their most memorable moments in the Final Fantasy series over again in an all new updated format, and a VERY successful attempt at that.
Final Fantasy IV Advance brings in new character sprites, updated background mapping, smoother textures overall, and revamped musical score...well more-or-less touched up and re-formatted. The new musical score is beautifal, and is one of the finer points of this game. The changes are so dramatic yet at that the same time suttle enough as not to totally change this classic, that this remake pulled off without a hitch.
The revamped Final Fantasy IV is excellent and will serve as a collectors item. The game itself is a legend in it's own right, if anyone thinks it was a bad idea to re-vamp it, I can tell you from first hand-experience it was a very good idea.
Square took an old, yet still very valuable piece of gold and polished it up like new. A fresh breathe of life to a great game. 5 out of 5, hands down.
I am absolutely without words.
Plain a simple. Ok, now I thought of words.
This game really impressed me as a little kid. So much so that it may be the one reason I decided to be a video game creator myself. This game was my inspiration. No other game I've ever played has inspired me that way (That doesn't include the other FF games. They ALL were my inspiration, I mean.), and also, I spent probably 500 hours playing the SNES version. My dad got me playing it because I used to watch him play it constantly. On his save file he'd played the game for 55 hours, counting the actual game time and save data, not the real hours he'd played. I loved this game to death. I still do. I actually like this new version even better. But one thing though. Everyone else says this game is the hardest RPG ever. I highly disagree. It's incredibly fun, but it's short. It's too short. I'm at the end of the game already and I've only been at it for 21 hours (Game hours, not real hours). I've beaten most of the side quests in the game, such as getting Asura, Leviathan, Behamut, and the three secret summons (Imp, Mage, and Sahagin). Well, I got two of the secret summons anyway. I doubt the third one is Sahagin, but anyway. I think they did an awesome job on the graphics redone. The only complaint I have about this game regards the battles. It seems like every three steps I take, I'm faced with a battle, and it's usually the same battle being repeated over and over again until it forces me to drop money running away or until the bad guys can hit me. It's different in Dawn of Souls, where when you entered a room, the 'battle squares' would automatically form, meaning no matter how many times you retried, you'd always encounter bad guys after moving a certain number of squares. But that really doesn't bother me terribly much. Now back to FFIVA. I still haven't beaten the final boss yet. Apparently, you have to beat the last boss with every main character in order to unlock every gate in the hidden dungeon after the game is beaten. In my SNES version, I'm at a level high enough to defeat Zeromus in only a few hits, and he does little damage to me no matter what attack he uses. Therefore, at least I know what the ending is. But I'm sure it's been a little bit redone in the Advance version here. I find myself advancing through this game rather quickly, and it seems my game playing skills have really improved lately. I simply can't wait for FFV & VI to arrive on gameboy this summer. Along with FFIIID on Nintento DS. (It's called IIID because it's FFIII, but in 3-D, so yeah...) But anyway, this game is simply one of the best video games ever made, of any genre. Any civilized and sane person would agree with me.
