Final Fantasy IV Review (Moogle Tarp)
Final Fantasy 4 has been an interesting change of pace that makes it hard to outright give it a thumbs up or down. The game continues to build upon the great atmosphere, music, and story that the franchise is known for. A few points of contention that I have with the game is mob / boss scaling, story execution, lack of sorting / management, and the newly introduced Active Time Battle.
Starting with Active Time Battle, this combat system slightly circumvents turn-based combat by allowing enemies to take their turn if you take too long to perform an action. After a few hours of playing, I had thought I had gotten used to the combat system, but it wasn’t until the later parts of the game that showed how punishing the system was even if you aimed to play optimally. In short, mobs and bosses began to cycle their turns faster than the casters / healers of your party. This led to a cycle of just casting AOE heal whenever it was the healer’s turn, or opting to not use summons because of the cast time. Something worth noting is that this combat system opened up scenarios where I would have to dedicate healing and reviving with DPS characters because leaving recovery solely to the healer was essentially achieving half the goal in double the time. Which brings me to my next point of contention, lack of sorting / management.
Sorting and management is a feature that I greatly appreciate especially when a few seconds could be the difference between you or the enemy taking their turn. Towards the middle to late game, many of the black mage spells that were less than 30 MP started to show less impactfulness and soon rendered unusable. This led to a lot of hassle trying to navigate towards the bottom half of the list to find the appropriate spell for the respective enemy. For the healer, if it wasn’t a heal, revive, or Esuna, it was not used. Protect and Shell were useful towards the earlier parts of mid game, but when the enemies began to scale, keeping the party alive became more important. Segue into my next point of contention: mob / boss scaling.
The mob / boss scaling, especially in late game, was abysmal. The game had turned into a complete stat check that resulted in unavoidable grinding. To put in perspective, here are the average party levels at the time of the Final Boss for the previous Final Fantasy games:
FF1 Average Party Level for Final Fight = Lv. 51
FF2 (The game used weapon level proficiency, less of a comparable here)
FF3 Average Party Level for Final Fight = Lv. 53
FF4 Average Party Level for Final Fight = Lv. 58
It is worth noting that the final boss was attempted twenty times at Lv. 55 and three times at Lv. 58. The only reason why I was able to complete it on the 3rd try at Lv. 58 was because I rng’d a fight where the boss missed for 3 turns where Cecil and the Summoner were the only ones alive. I can confidently say that for a better, more consistent result, the average party level would have needed to be at least Lv. 60.
Once the boss was defeated, I got to experience the ending and reflect on the story. Final Fantasy 4 presented a welcome change where instead of the player reflecting themselves onto their party, we were given a cast of characters with their own identity and history. This made interactions more distinct, memorable, and overall more organic. In addition, the world was even more vast than I had expected. Much of my contention with the story execution is with how certain characters in the story were built up to have their respective exit, only for it to be remedied after the fact. For some of the characters, I am able to make peace with how their return panned out. For others, they felt too forced.
Overall, Final Fantasy 4 was a slow start that gradually kept me engaged and introduced a cast of characters that made interactions meaningful. As the game progressed, it started to feel unforgiving where each level gained was just to keep score with how many hits I can take before I can cycle recovery. In the context of every game that has been released, I would rate this game a 6 out of 10. If I were to look at this game as its remastered version while in the context of its original release in 1991, I would rate this game a 6.85 out of 10. I would still recommend to play, with diminishing returns on replay-ability