Final Fantasy IV

I've been known to say that the Final Fantasy franchise needs to end.  I still believe this, if just because, grammatically speaking, the idea of something having the word "final" in it and then having numbers at the end just makes my brain itch.

It's partly why I had such a problem with the Final Destination series.  That, and it was mind-numbingly dumb.  In video games, you had things like Last Blade 2, Last Ninja 2, and two different Last Half Of Darkness games, which I guess if you put them together is the whole darkness?

There's also a fighting game called Last Bronx which takes place in Tokyo.  I don't even know how that works.

But that isn't to say I haven't liked Final Fantasy games.  In fact, I've loved a few of them, even if they weren't truly Final Fantasy games.  One of the first RPGs I ever played was Final Fantasy Adventure on the original Game Boy, even though it was actually a game in the "Mana" franchise.  Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is a game I played through to completion, and I even played some of Final Fantasy IV back when it was called Final Fantasy II.

Don't ask.

However, I got stuck in one area of the game and was young enough that I had never learned to have more than one save file in case I got hosed, so I had to quit the game.

Having now played it again on the Nintendo DS, I have to ask myself, does it hold up?  Is the story still as good?  Do the two little kid characters still bother me?

Here's the story of Final Fantasy IV:  You play as Cecil, captain of the Red Wings and a dark knight who, with his friend Kain, serve the King of Baron.  No, it's not confusing, the kingdom is actually named "Baron."  It's like having a Duke of Earl or an Earl of Duke.  Cecil uncovers a plot to steal a group of crystals from across the world, and starts to realize he's on the wrong side and that a mysterious stranger named Golbez seems determined to do something dastardly when he has all of the crystals together.

It's actually much, much more complex than that, and involves things like a man trying to find his daughter before she elopes with a man he hates, a young summoner whose village Cecil is inadvertently responsible for destroying, and a dark power from the moon.

The game play is extremely intuitive, where chracters have a meter that fills before they can do an action, and if you simply sit on your thumbs and don't touch the controls, the monsters don't wait for you to punch them before they resume attacking you.  Between attacking, defending, casting magic, using items, and a few character-specific abilities, you can also attach special powers to characters allowing them to do things outside their normal skill set.  I found myself never using them, but according to a few guides I read, they supposedly make the game a lot easier.

The characters are extremely interesting, and this was one of the first games where each character seemed to have their own goals and desires.  Rosa, a healer and archer, wants Cecil to be safe (as well as having some strong romantic feelings for him).  Edward is a prince who joins your party to get revenge for the bad guys killing the woman he loves.  Each story thread weaves in smoothly with the main plot, and it never has the feeling that so many RPG games do where you're just goofing off instead of saving the world.

You know what I mean.  Things like playing a crane game at an arcade in Shenmue, or collecting cards in Final Fantasy X, or being given quests by every single person you meet even if they take you miles out of your way.  It really gives the impression that the main plot isn't really that important if you have time to go dig sea shells at the beach so that you can trade one to a fisherman for a fishhook that can trade to a traveler for a book and so on and so on and so on.

The designs of the characters are also extremely striking, and with the update to the graphics engine (it was completely redone as a 3D-style game for the DS), you pick up a lot more of the individual character designs.  The only one that gave me pause was Rydia who (spoiler alert) you first meet as a small child and you become quite protective of her, just to have her reappear later in the game as a curvaceous young woman in a dress that does cover her, but...well, here:

Don't get me wrong, I think Rydia is one of the best characters in the game, and I even had her in second place as a character I'd want to bring to life (including a "mrowr" added to the end), it's just...well, it took me quite a while to get used to the idea of having her tagging along with more cleavage hanging out than Rosa, and Rosa seemed designed to be the cleavage master of the game.

I kept wanting to tell her to put a sweater on.

I'll be honest, considering that most of the time when something happens to Cecil it's actually Rydia who comforts him instead of Rosa, I was actually hoping the game might pull a Phantasy Star hook and let me pick who Cecil has more affection fore, but alas, it wasn't to be.  I thought Rosa had a more positive effect on Kain, anyway.

The bosses are challenging without being frustrating, and while there are a few stages where the monsters can be extremely cheap (looking at you, Lair of the Father), it's rarely frustrating to the point that you can't go further.  Eventually you get into a pattern in a lot of monster fights (cast "haste" on Rydia and Rosa, spam summons and prayers until the monster dies), but the game is able to mix it up quite a bit with monsters wielding different abilities.

It also has one of the few video game stories that I can claim really does feel "epic."  When your adventures take you across the world, into a Dwarven kingdom and even to the moon, you really get a sense of what's at stake if you fail.  There's one scene towards the end that involves a massive force moving across the countryside, and when you realize how it scales against the map you traveled over, it's rather terrifying.

The game still holds up, and in fact, I think I had more fun now than I did the first time, partly because I understood the game's tactics better now than when I was little, but also because they fixed all the little things that I remember bothering me the last time.  I only had one moment where I managed to level a bit before I accidentally screwed up and died without saving, forcing me to regain those levels (aaaalways frustrating), but I constantly felt pulled back to the game to complete it.  In fact, during the down time between when I had to replay part of it and my recent completion, the game stayed in my handheld system, because I couldn't bring myself to take it out and play something else.

That's a pretty rare experience for me with a game, and it speaks volumes about how engrossing the game is.

Now if they'd just stop diluting it with continuous sequels (two as of this writing) and let the series die, it might remain untainted enough to be remembered fondly in the future.