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[François]

Hmm, something just struck me. FF4 makes unique fixed-class characters with personalities out of individual classes from FF3's flexible job system, just like Dragon Warrior 4 made unique fixed-class characters with personalities out of individual classes from DW3's flexible job system. Of course I wouldn't be dumb enough to call plagiarism, I just thought it was interesting; kind of a logical progression in a way.

FF4 is one of the three old school FF games I never got very far into despite attempting several times, the others being 2 and 3, so yeah I never caught on that before.

[Classic]

Parish actually said that on an episode of Retronauts. Though he described it as "fan fiction" to justify the class changes.

[R^2]

Final Fantasy tends to flipflop between super-flexible but interchangeable characters and unique characters with their own abilities. 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 12 had characters who were interchangeable because they all worked the same way (until limit breaks were introduced in 7). 4, 6, and 9 had uniques with their own abilities; even 9 gave you two summoners with white magic, but they learned different summons and different white spells. 10 was a compromise of sorts, where your characters started on their own paths and were expected to cross over into other characters' and pick up their abilities too; with sufficient leveling by the end of the game everyone ended up the same (except, again, for limit breaks).

I'd like to see a game that does both variations, where the game has a complex job system but each character has their own take on each job. Say, you unlock Black Mage as a class, and change your characters into it. Your quiet but clever scholar does extra damage when exploiting elemental weaknesses in enemies. Your speedy rogue gets extra accuracy when using status ailment spells. Your tanky bruiser learns higher-damage spells faster. Stuff like that.

[Metal Slime]

So what you are saying is you want Final Fantasy 13 but good?

[R^2]

Haven't played 13, but haven't heard anything good about it either, so... I guess?

[Brentai]

FF13 behaves a bit like a cross between the Sphere Grid and the old D2 skill trees, where each "class" has something like three specializations that you can mix and match between, but only by traversing around the board.  It's a bit of a mess and the glitzy interface doesn't help.

Wait... no, it's nothing like that at all.  Okay, let's try this again.

Each character has three "roles".  Each role has its own pseudo-sphere grid.  Ok?  Ok.

Now, in FF13 you have one party leader and two other members.  You can issue commands to your party leader but you can never control your other guys, ever.  So how do you get them to do what you want?

You change their role in the middle of battle.

Okay, so it's a bit like the dress spheres, and maybe a little bit like gambits in that it changes their AI up a bit, right?  Yeah... and already we've got the bastard children of three different FF systems merging into one horrible clusterfuck.  But wait, surely it doesn't act like the actual sphere grid in FFX, where the grid also determined all your stats and HP, right?

Yes.  Yes it does.

So... the only way to influence ANYTHING these jerks do in battle is to carefully map out what skills are actually available to them per subclass, while at the same time being extra careful to not make any of the options so useless that switching to them is essentially the equivalent of dropping 10 levels.

The real problem is that every character in the game is a completely different set of highly specialized classes, so you don't really have that much flexibility, and building your guys out wrong can seriously impede your progress.  I stopped playing at a point where the game forces your party to be comprised of the Black Mage and the Red Mage characters, with the black mage as party leader.  Did I mention FF13 does that awful thing where any KO on your party leader is an immediate game over?

[R^2]

That sounds pretty excruciating. Now I'm kind of glad I skipped 13.

[A²]

I....have a copy of it. I feel like I need to finish it out of obligation.

[Brentai]

Come finish mine.

[TA]

 

[R^2]

Final Fantasy IV DS Music - Castle Damcyan








Ruined, thoroughly looted, and its occupants slain, Castle Damcyan has seen better days. Few of the guards have anything to say, but even though I have two people with me who can use curative magic and several healing potions, nothing can be done for them.








As Tellah runs to his fallen daughter, some fop wanders in from stage right.




Bard: oshitoshitoshit


Might wanna run and hide, Mr. Bard.

[R^2]

Tellah foregoes the use of magic and settles for whacking the bard around with his ice rod. Or... trying to. His accuracy and attack power are still awful, which occasionally leads to this scene taking much longer than it reasonably should.


Spoony, adjective; archaic: Being unduly sentimental or lovestruck. It's not a completely nonsensical line, but it is kind of weird. It's become a legacy gag for the series, though; in the DS version this line is retained, and a localizer's note mentions that while the Sand Ruby isn't a ruby and the TwinHarp wasn't a harp, "The bard was spoony. We checked!"










Anyway, Tellah's still mad and the bard keeps crying for him to stop flailing around with his staff.


This line, quite understandably, ends the beatdown.

[R^2]

"I mean, you've got so many arrows sticking out of you it looks like you ran into the assend of a manticore, but at least I get to talk to you!"


Anna doesn't get a character portrait, so you know she's not long for this world.

Anna: Still, I knew I couldn't find happiness... without your consent. I was on my way home when...


Edward's name in Japanese was Gilbert, which combined with Annea makes for an oblique Anne of Green Gables reference.

Cecil: I've never heard of Golbez before. Who is he?
Edward: I don't know. All I know is that his powers were beyond words.
Cecil: But why did they attack Damcyan?
Edward: They wanted the Crystal, and they spared no one to get it. My mother, my father... even Anna shielded me from their arrows.
Tellah: You love him enough to give up your own life...?
Anna: Father... forgive me...
Edward: ...I love you...




Anna doesn't flicker and disappear like dead people generally do in these remakes, but she breathes her last nonetheless.


Edward: He came to Baron one day and became the new leader of the Red Wings. He... *sob* He leads them in their mission to plunder the Crystals... *sniff*
Tellah: Stop your simpering! That won't bring Anna back! Golbez of Baron... I shall take his life with my own two hands!




Tellah casually bitchslaps aside a man wearing full plate armor and forty years his junior. Like most elderly men, Tellah runs on a constant stream of spite and barely-suppressed rage.


Tellah: I don't need your help. I don't need anyone's help!


Tellah storms off down the stairs. I'm sure we'll run into him again once he finds a moderately-difficult boss in his way.

[R^2]

Edward: Anna! *sob*


Rydia: You're a grownup! You're not supposed to cry! I lost my mom, but I'm not gonna cry anymore.
Cecil: Rydia...
Edward: I don't care. Leave me alone! I'm staying here with Anna. I will never leave her side.


It's Cecil's turn to lay down the backhand.


Cecil: You owe it to your people, and you owe it to Anna. Your Majesty, my name is Cecil, and I need your help.
Edward: What?
Cecil: My friend is suffering from desert fever in Kaipo. I need to get the Sand Ruby to save her. Can you help me?
Edward: ...What is her name?
Cecil: Rosa.
Edward: She is very dear to you, isn't she? Like Anna was to me...




Edward: The ruby forms from the fluid that the antlion secretes when it lays eggs. We must cross the shallows with our hovercraft to reach the cave. After we acquire the Sand Ruby, we can cross the shallows to reach Kaipo. Let us be on our way.




Not pictured: just offscreen to the left is a pot full of water from the mystic springs that started appearing in Final Fantasy 3, the ones that fully heal all wounds and restore all lost stamina. So instead of listening to Anna's dying speech, they could have carried her to the urn, and both Tellah and Edward would be a lot happier.

Oh well!

[R^2]

There's a path around the castle's curtain wall you can take without returning to the world map.


It leads to Damcyan's treasure room/armory, one that wasn't looted in the raid for the Fire Crystal.


Anybody's guess why the armory looks like a prison and requires a series of hidden passages to access, but it has a crossbow and a ruby ring inside.




The hovercraft avoids all random encounters on the world map.


It can also pass over these rocky areas of the sea. Edward calls them "shallows".




There's this mountain pass east of Damcyan...




But it is a) not the antlion nest and b) blocked by a wall of bubbles. (It's ice, actually.)

[Friday]

The best part is if you level grind enough so that Rydia learns Fire 2 before the event that lets her cast Fire

[R^2]

This cave is a bit more promising.


When I said Edward might want to run and hide, it was a joke, see -- that's actually one of his abilities! Hide removes Edward from the battle and changes the command to one that lets him rejoin; he does it automatically when his HP goes critical. He also has a Salve ability that lets him split a potion and evenly divide the healing among the whole party. Even now, when he first joins, the healing of a potion divided by three is so minor as to be useless.

There's a bug with Edward's Hide ability in this version only: if Edward is Berserk he'll attack relentlessly, as expected from the status. If he is dropped to critical HP, he'll run and hide -- then pop back out to attack because of Berserk. But because of the bug, he's not cleared from Hide status. The game considers him still gone, and won't target him with any attacks or register any damage.


Edward, being a bard, can also Sing at enemies. (The class first appeared in, yes, Final Fantasy 3, but the songs there were limited to reducing enemies' levels and increasing allies' damage output.) Each song, chosen at random, causes either Sleep, Confusion, or Silence status on an enemy. At level 20, he picks up Frogsong, which does what you'd expect.

The songs almost always miss, of course.


Edward's weapons are harps, which do as much damage as you'd expect, but generally cause some sort of status ailment when they hit. They do it more reliably than Singing, too! His main contribution to the antlion nest dungeon was keeping enemies confused with this Lamia Harp while Cecil and Rydia mop up actual combat.






Edward: It's okay. Antlions are quite tame. They don't attack people. Here, I'll demonstrate by taking the Sand Ruby, like so...


The two giant mandibles snap together. Edward barely leaps out of their grip.


This is going as well as could be expected.

[R^2]

The Antlion counters physical attacks with Counter Horn. Counter Horn isn't a lot of damage unless you're particularly careless, but it can add up between Cecil and Edward. Cecil's only option is Darkwave, while Edward... well, he can either heal the party, hide, or sing songs at the beast to try to cause status ailments that, as a Final Fantasy boss, it is immune to.




Chocobo Kick doesn't trigger Counter Horn, so Rydia can win this one singlehandedly.




Cecil: Monsters are rapidly multiplying these days, and their behavior is changing as well. I can't help but feel this is some kind of sign...
Rydia: Come on! Let's go cure Rosa!
Cecil: Right! Let's go!

[R^2]

Since the Water Cavern has that one-way dive down a waterfall in its second leg, you have to use the hovercraft to get back to Kaipo.







Final Fantasy IV DS Music - Theme of Love




Finally! A character death we get to narrowly avert in a Final Fantasy game! I bet Josef is totally jealous.

Rosa: You're alive! Thank goodness!
Cecil: How do you feel?
Rosa: I'm fine. But I thought I'd lost you. They told me you died in Mist when the earthquake hit.
Cecil: I'm sorry to have put you through all that... Rosa, who is Golbez?
Rosa: He's the new captain of the Red Wings, appointed by the king himself. But the king has been acting... strangely. I believe Golbez is manipulating him to collect the Crystals for himself. With Mysidia's Water Crystal in hand, he'll surely go after the others, which are the Fire Crystal of Damcyan, the Wind Crystal of Fabul, and the Earth Crystal of Troia.
Edward: The Fire Crystal has already fallen into his hands.
Cecil: Ah, let me introduce you. Edward is the prince of Damcyan. Rydia is a summoner from Mist. I wouldn't have been able to get the Sand Ruby and cure your fever without their help.
Rydia: Hi there.
Rosa: Hello, Rydia. Thank you both so much. Cecil, after Damcyan, Fabul must be their next target. We must... *cough cough*
Cecil: You have to rest now. Don't worry. We'll go to Fabul.
Edward: But to reach Fabul, we must traverse Mt. Hobs, and the trail is blocked by thick ice.
Rosa: Rydia, can you cast Fire?
Rydia: ...No.

It's true, she can't. Tellah had Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder magic; Rydia has only Blizzard and Thunder.

Rosa: Fire is the most elementary of black magic spells. As a summoner, you... *cough cough*
Cecil: Rosa, stop! You're not coming with us in that condition!
Rosa: I'll be alright, really. As a white mage, I promise I won't be a burden.
Edward: Rosa only wishes to be with you, Cecil.
Cecil: ...Alright. We'll go together. Make sure you get plenty of rest tonight.
Rosa: I thank you.


Rosa is a white mage, one of the few jobs to have its roots in the first Final Fantasy game rather than the third. She's better at archery than those guys(?), though, with an Aim ability that increases her accuracy and damage with bows and arrows to supplement her healing and protective magic.

[R^2]

Wow, rude.





Melody of Lute (Edward's Theme) - Final Fantasy IV DS Music Extended




Because characters in this game just can't catch a friggin' break, Edward's soulful harp solo gets him the attention of a monster out of the oasis.





To hell with that!