Konami is out here once again proving you can make a good licensed video game. It's a puzzle game where you can swap between the 4 main characters and each of them have different playstyles. There's 17 stages and each stage is broken down into multiple levels. It looks decent and has some music from the movie. But, man... Is it brutal. You make one wrong move or use an item somewhere you were not suppose to or out of order and most of the time you can not beat the level. You'll have to start from the beginning of the level if that happens.

Just like FF3 this game also continues the tradition of the main party tracking down crystals of the 4 elements. If it ain't broke don't fix it, I guess. 3 was where they finally tried a little with the story but 4 is the point where they actually start doing stories and giving characters agendas and making them feel alive in the world. They removed guest characters joining your party but to make up for it you now have a 5 character party. I really like the change from 4 to 5 members. It makes the battles feel more exciting and makes the combat flow more smoothly than ever before. I think so far this has the best gameplay in a FF game. My favorite character in this game would have to go to Rydia. I really like her arc in the game. They fumbled the ball with quite a few of the other character arcs though. Not only that, the story was quite poor and sloppy.

Parts of the story needed to be handled better. The story needed major work to actually be great. They relied on far too many plot contrivances to make everything in the story work without having to explaining anything. Rydia's fear of fire is cool and interesting because of what she went through. But at one point the party needs to get through some ice that blocks the way but can't. Rydia is the only member who can use black magic. She refuses to cast fire magic so the party talks to her and she just gets over her fear like that, no fanfare or anything. Rydia can you cast fire? No! ...Pretty please? Okay I'll do it. For this to work they should have brought this up a couple times before this and not have the whole plot resolved in a couple of text boxes. The game also relies too much on betrayals and character death fake outs. They use them so much that they lose all impact and meaning. Like one character betrays you 3 times. The "character deaths" make no sense either. When Yang sacrifices himself to try to stop an explosion he knocks the party out of the room then blows up with it. How does that help anything? Everyone should have just left the room. Him staying behind helped nothing. Or when Cid sacrificed himself to blow up an entrance with a bomb to stop the enemy from following us. Why did he jump off with the ship with the bomb? He had no reason to do that he could have thrown the bomb overboard and accomplished the same thing. You are suppose to feel sad about this but you find them both later on in the story perfectly fine. They both survived big explosions with virtually no damage. Also when the twins turn to stone to stop the walls from crushing the party you can't unstone them because they chose to turn to stone so nothing works on them. But they show up later perfectly fine and the only explanation you get is, "Oh the elder helped us".

I think the real reason for this is that they couldn't think of a better way to remove people from your party so they did a bunch of fake character deaths to remove them. Also feels like the devs heard the complaints about how almost every guest character sacrificed themselves in 2 and 3 so they made it to where they all sacrifice themselves but survive this time. Finally the game reuses the mind control plot device 3 different times. This party member who attacks you, mind controlled. You best friend who betrays you 3 times, controlled. The big bad who you spend the whole game hunting down, who keeps destroying you... Controlled by the even bigger big bad. One thing I do like though is that they use their spells in cutscenes / outside of battle. It adds to the immersion. But in doing that it also opens up more plot holes. Like why when the place was blowing up did you not just teleport out instead of slowly running down the tower?

This game got rid of the job system of 3 and instead went back to everyone having a predetermined role. This does make things easier to build around but removed the customization you had when building your party. Though this way you won't be screwed for not having the job class the devs want you to have at certain points. This game has one of the funniest spells in FF called the "Piggy Spell" All it does is turn someone into a little pig. This is the only mainline game it is in other than 14. I played the PS1 version and it's so much harder than the SNES one. For the US release of 4 they made the game way too easy because this was during the time where "Americans were too dumb to understand Japanese RPGs" so they had to dumb them down for us. In the SNES version I never had to plan out anything or gain levels just to beat a boss. But on the PS1 I got to a point where I had to gain a couple of levels just to survive the boss's first attack so I could actually continue with the battle.

Just like in 3 you go through airships like candy. I think by the end you have 4 different things you can go inside and ride, all on the map at the same time. It makes tracking them down harder when you need a certain one to make progress because they all do something that the others can't. There's still numerous hidden passages in this game but they made them into jokes. They're not hidden at all. You can see them plain as day. Why bother having them when you basically put a big sign next to them that says "Hidden Pathway Here" One modern convenience this game makes me miss is that in newer games when someone leaves the party even if it's just for a minute their equipment auto unequips meaning you get their equipment and don't lose it. But in FF4 if you don't have the foresight to know when someone is going to leave the party you lose everything they have on them. This especially sucks if you just spent a bunch of money on new stuff for them and they leave. You're just out of luck at that point.

The game also straight up lies to you. I'll get into a battle and it will say "First Strike" usually meaning I get the first move. So I start smashing the attack button to make sure I attack first, but the enemy always gets one attack off first. The is a personal gripe I have with the PS1 version, but I hate how when I click which save slot I want to load from it doesn't automatically default to my save on that card. It defaults to load new save. If I wanted to load a new game I would have clicked new game not load game.

This had a lot of unique areas to explore and other than one or two places you never really felt like you were in the same place with a new coat of paint. Though one of these unique places, the magnetic cavern, can suck it. You can't use metallic equipment in this place. I just ran from every fight until I got to the point in the cave where I could use my normal equipment. I didn't want to buy non metallic equipment for one area. The game doesn't do a good job of telling you what you need to do or where to go. This is the first time I got stuck at a certain point. I went everywhere and talked to everyone. Not a single person tells you where to go. I had to go to every location and interact with everything I could find until I got lucky and found the place where progress is made.

This is the first FF game that has a truly stress inducing fight, the Demon Wall. It's a big wall with a face that slowly moves across the screen. If you don't kill it before it reaches you it will start instant killing your party one by one. I wish there was more gimmick fights like this in games instead of who can do the bigger number faster. On that note, the final boss is miserable. On the US SNES version you can almost beat him without paying attention because they cut his damage down A LOT, but the PS1 version he would one shot 2-4 members of my party with his opening attack then before I could heal / revive finish me off. Didn't matter how well I planned out my moves or how I tried to counter him. It honestly felt unfair. It's not like I went in at a low level either. I actually thought I was going in overleveled because the normal enemies leading up to the boss were such pushovers. It was random how many were killed by the first move so I just had to be lucky to make it through to the end. After that opening salvo if enough people survived I could actually do the boss fight. Now I could have just went and grinded until I was so powerful he couldn't do anything to me, but that's not how I like to play games.

One final thought is I'm sad that Vampgirl never makes an appearance after FF4. I thought her sprite was one of the best in the game. The way she's hanging upside-down from the ceiling and her pose is cool and different from every other enemy.

Now it may seem like I hated this game but that's far from the truth. I actually really enjoyed the game except for the story. The gameplay was solid. Most of the characters were fine. The music was fantastic. Art and design were great. Honestly if the story was fixed I could easily see this making it into my top 5 FF games.

Going to start off strong and say FF3 is the best game in the original trilogy. An argument can be made that 1 is better if you like that the game is more simplified or you have nostalgia for the first one. But both of these clear 2 easy.

This game continues the tradition of the main party tracking down objects surrounding the 4 elements. A tradition that carries on to a majority of future titles. We are finally getting to the point where the story in FF games matter and there’s actual effort being put into it. It’s nothing astounding by any means but there’s effort being made to make you care about the story and characters. Speaking of characters they’re also fleshed out and there’s a lot of named side characters. This game even lets you talk to the guest characters after they join your party. You get a few lines of dialogue or hints about what to do next. For the first time I could also pick out a favorite character because they finally decided the characters actually have to have personalities and stuff. They don’t just exist as guideposts. For the main party I’d go with Refia and for side characters you can’t go wrong with picking Cid.

But not everything is improved with the story and characters. FF3 will still have a guest character join your party to go into the next dungeon. Then at the end of the dungeon they get killed or sacrifice themselves. It happens to almost every single person in 2 and 3. In terms of the story they probably spend days or weeks together but that doesn’t translate well to the player. You probably know them for less than 30 minutes. For this to work you need to introduce the characters earlier. When they die they play an emotional scene like you are suppose to care about this person you barely know. With it happening so often you already learn to not care about anyone that joins your party.

This game introduced the job system and I love it. It lets you make your team and play however you want. Though a downside of this being the introduction of the job system is at certain points in the game you are basically punished if you don’t have at least one member of your team a certain job. It’s like the devs wanted you to experience certain jobs so they almost force you to use them. One example is if you don’t have a dragoon during a certain boss battle the fight is basically 5x as hard. The final boss also almost requires you to have 2 certain classes. My favorite starting class was the thief. I love that they are actually useful in this game unlike FF1. Most of the time you’re better off going with another warrior but not here. The thief has a passive ability that lets you unlock certain doors. Usually you have to buy magic keys to open the doors but if you have a thief you can just do it and a lot earlier than you normally can too. In fact my strongest character was the thief who I never changed their job class until end game when I unlocked ninja. They were the first person to hit 9999 damage well before anyone else even came close to that damage. FF3 also introduced summons and there’s a lot of the classics here. They are treated like magic and a lot of them you just buy from shops, but 3 of them you actually have to track down and fight to be able to summon them.

Another first is that this was the first FF game to crash on me. It only happened once and it was after someone joined my party. I tried talking to them over and over to see all the dialogue after the 4th or 5th talk the game went to a pure white screen and froze.

The game also has unique sections that change the gameplay up a little by making you cast mini or toad on yourself to go through certain places. It help to diversify the dungeons. Though during the mini sections you have to have a magic user to do any real damage otherwise you’re better off running for every fight. Something else that’s new to 3 is that they got rid of the ability for anyone to use items that cast spells in battle like the fire rod. Now you can only use that item in battle if you can actually equip it. It does make the game more balanced and makes you use the actual items that cause magic damage instead of everyone using the infinite use stuff.

There’s a fat chocobo in the game and I love it. He acts as an item storage which is pretty useful in the original NES version but useless in the PSP game since you don’t have an item limit. You can summon it in certain places and to store items you feed him whatever you want to store. Then I guess when you want the item back he either throws it up or you just shove your hand down his throat and pull out whatever you need. Another interesting thing is the amount of airships you get. You go through them like candy. You get one it blows up, you get another one it gets shot down, etc. The final airship rocks. It has a place to rest, store items, buy anything you need. You never have to run to town to rest ever again.

There’s so many hidden pathways / items in this game it almost becomes too much at points. I mean hidden paths have hidden paths in them. I enjoy hidden things when used sparingly but this game takes it to the extreme and hides stuff / paths everywhere. In this game you can only find / rarely steal phoenix downs. You can’t buy them anywhere. So if you use all of them up early on or you don’t find them you are out of luck. You can steal some, which needs a character using the thief class and their thief level needs to be high enough to even have a chance at stealing one. Some enemies do drop them too but it’s extremely rare that happens.

Unlike FF2 I never felt overpowered in this game. I actually had to plan out my moves and use strategy instead of smashing the attack button until the fight was over. The dungeons are also fun unlike FF2. They got rid of most of the BS and made interesting dungeons…. That is until my biggest gripe with this game, the final dungeon.

The final dungeon sucks ass. It’s a 2 part dungeon, The Crystal Tower and The World of Darkness. You have to do both back to back without saving, resting, or leaving the dungeon. You have to go through the multi floor CT to fight a boss then after that you go to the WoD. Here you have 4 hard bosses to fight in opposite corners of the dungeon. You also have the 3 optional bosses you can fight. Now I say optional but they are basically mandatory. They drop ribbons that protect you from status effects. You only get 1 during the story. Without these the final boss uses Bad Breath and can turn you into a toad, sleep you, poison you, among many other things. So after all of that you can go fight the final boss. Now that’s 9 bosses in a row plus random fights with the hardest enemies without saving the game because you can’t leave the final dungeon once you start it.

My first attempt at this I lost. It was a 15 minute back and forth fight where I used every elixir I had struggling to find time to attack. That cost me 3 hours. I had to do every boss fight and both dungeons again. Before I tried again I went and grinded some exp. So far in this journey through FF history, this is the first game that I had to grind in. Everyone always talks about how grind heavy old FF / RPG games are and I always laughed because I never felt I had to grind just to beat the game. But not here. I felt if I didn’t grind some levels I would never beat the boss even though I was in the low 50s during the fight. So I ended up grinding 5 more levels and got 3 more levels while defeating all the bosses again. In total I was about 4 levels higher than the first attempt because I didn’t have as many random battles as I did during the first attempt. At this point I was around 55-56. Even then I still almost lost. The boss gets multiple attacks per round and sometimes they go before me and sometimes some of my characters go before them. Everything was going fine, it was still hard but not oppressively so. That is until near the end when the boss used a party wide attack that did over half to everyone for their first attack. If they would have done that again I would have lost and there would have been nothing I could have done. And that’s not it, if on the next turn the boss got to go first before my heal went off and used that attack it would have been game over.

This final dungeon has to be the reason why you can save in dungeons in every Final Fantasy after this one. They know what they did and how much everyone hated it.