1978 (Day 220)

After considerable difficulties I have finally finished Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light! That is not to say that I have completed it--there is considerable bonus content available in the game but after reading up on said content I have precisely zero interest in tackling it. It is not a game I would recommend to anyone looking for a good RPG, but as a Final Fantasy fan I'm glad I played it. It is certainly not without merit but its numerous flaws are just as apparent.

If 4 Heroes has one thing going for it, it is its difficulty. Although inconsistent, most bosses are very challenging--and sometimes this is fun and engaging. In other cases it's simply frustrating. Many bosses will pepper your party with harmful status effects that strip all control of your character. Other times you seem hopelessly at the mercy of RNG as you pray that your enemy doesn't choose to target your frailest character eight times in a row, efficiently removing them from combat. The counterplay, of course, is to make your characters as defensive as humanly possible. This is not a terrible gameplay decision to make per se, but the fact that it limits your creative choices is certainly frustrating.

4 Heroes of Light is an RPG in the Final Fantasy tradition of job systems. It most closely resembles Final Fantasy III (and indeed Matrix Software was responsible for developing a remake of this game) but it does borrow some elements from Final Fantasy V as well. Like III, job classes (called Crowns) can be changed at will once they are unlocked--and like FFV each class sports a number of unique skills. In this particular case, each job has exactly four skills and a passive that is always in effect once the Crown has been fully upgraded with an array of gems dropped by defeated monsters. Final Fantasy standards like Black Mage, White Mage, and Monk (although it's called Fighter here, perhaps in homage to the series' debut title) are available to the game's four playable characters.

Unlike Final Fantasy V, job classes are static and abilities from different Crowns cannot be mixed and matched. If one were to adorn Jusqua with the Salve-Maker's Crown then he is a Salve-Maker that has access to only abilities from that job. However, each class can equip any weapon, armor, and/or magic in the game. Base stats and proficiencies may make certain combinations awkward but they are nonetheless doable. White Mages, Black Mages, and Shaman reduce the AP cost of white, black, and dark magic respectively, whereas every other class must pay the full cost when casting.

On paper, most of these elements sound pretty great, but sometimes things just don't work out in practice. In a game with 28 different job classes, you would expect a great number of different viable class compositions. Although I have not experimented as extensively as perhaps I could, I have to say that this is just not the case. The lionshare of boss battles require a healer, which means that your party composition already must include a White Mage or Salve-Maker. I decided to opt for the latter for the sake of variety and was pleased with their playstyle because they're able to re-use recovery items like X-Potion and Remedy to great effect--not to mention they can use them on the entire party simultaneously.

Beyond that, many classes are very situational or not intended to be used frequently in combat. The Merchant class, for instance, serves only the purpose of finding more gems, which can be sold for cash or used to upgrade Crowns. I had to spend a fair amount of time using this class to upgrade some of my Crowns, hoping against hope that the RNG would favor me. I'll be honest--I would have preferred a simple leveling system to unlock new skills for these Crowns.

Bard and Musician are two musical classes with various buffs and debuffs at their disposal. When they are first acquired they are at most passable. In most cases I found I had more success by concentrating mostly on offense and dedicating a single character to the healing role. I thought maybe this might change as the game progressed--and in a way it did. In the latter half of the game the difficulty really started to ramp up. If the player characters were not equipped with the correct gear to resist whatever element bosses used most prominently, it was close to impossible to proceed.

As soon as this starts happening in 4 Heroes of Light, you get access to the ultimate white and black magic spells: Lux and Desolator. Lux is the ultimate support spell. It's so good in fact that it completely invalidates the aforementioned classes as well as a whole slew of other white magic spells. Lux costs 5 AP and lasts for a battle's entire duration--whereas previous buffs generally lasted 3-4 turns. Lux not only causes the party to regenerate about 10% HP every turn, it increases the party's maximum HP, increases damage, and increases defense. This is essentially Musician Serenade, white magic Protect, and white magic Berserk all rolled into one, with even more power added in just for good measure. It completely warps game balance--and because it becomes mandatory to conquer the later boss battles, it must have a dedicated user in your team composition.

Now, I probably could have gotten by without Desolator even though it is also incredibly strong. However, it only does damage--and there are several options for dealing a lot of damage in this game. Granted, there are very few options that deal quite as much damage as Desolator, and for this reason I felt I was forced to include a Black Mage in my final party composition despite not using one for the entire game. Black Mages can cast Desolator for 4 AP and have access to two very strong damage buff abilities in Magic Mojo and Spell Focus. I felt as if I would have been crippling myself if I had chosen not to include one.

Once I made it to the final boss I felt like I had run into a brick wall. Its second form tosses out huge amounts of magic damage every turn from every element in the game. For most bosses, equipping the correct elemental shields allowed you to nullify a considerable amount of the damage they would deal--but since this boss in particular abuses every element, that was no longer cutting it. My Salve-Maker was equipped with the legendary Shield of Light which reduces damage from all elements, but there's only one of those in the game. Therefore, I felt I was also forced to include an Elementalist, a support Crown that passively receives less damage from elemental attacks and is able to impart that same bonus to his allies with the ability Mysterio. Before including Elementalist in my composition I felt as if I didn't stand a chance at defeating that boss.

So that left me with one slot in my final party composition that was completely up to me. I chose Monk because I really liked their combination of durability and extremely high damage output. With Lux and Chakra, I was able to boost his HP to the game's cap of 999--which meant he was also regenerating over 100 HP per turn.

There's honestly still a lot more I could say about this game--and why not, I spent a lot of time playing it--but I've already written a lot and I want to move on. I'm ready to play Bravely Default. I'm hoping it's considerably less frustrating, but I'm going into it with a fresh perspective.