Dysphoria (Day 211)

I've made some progress on Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light! After finishing Final Fantasy II, I moved on as quickly as possible. I'd been planning on playing it for quite awhile but I'd made a pact (to myself) not to start it until my business was done. Unfortunately, my DS is dead and I'm letting someone borrow my charger--so I've had to resort to emulation. That's fine, though; I'm used to it.

The 4 Heroes of Light

Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light is a throwback to classic Final Fantasy with a 3D makeover. It was developed by Matrix Software, who were also responsible for the DS remakes of Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IV. I enjoyed those games for the most part, but my main gripe with them (and this game as well) is the graphical style. I'm not a fan of it. I think simplistic graphics are fine, but in the case of these games, the playable characters are positively formless and lack visual personality. I have always been a staunch supporter of hand-drawn 2D graphics. The sprites in the PSP versions of the first two Final Fantasy games are absolutely fantastic, for instance.

In the end, graphics are not that important in determining whether or not a game is fun to play. In the case of 4 Heroes of Light, the gameplay is solid. Touch screen controls are integrated seamlessly into the game instead of being treated as an afterthought. In most cases I feel like it's more fluid to use the touchscreen than it is to use the d-pad. Instead of magic points, this game operates on an Ability Point system. Each character generates 1 AP per turn by default. Basic attacks cost 1 AP, but spells and other skills vary in cost. Fire costs 2 AP for instance, but Black Mages reduce the cost to 1.

A boss battle.

One questionable design decision was in how targeting works. Every spell and attack in the game is smart-targeted--that is, you don't have control over who you target with what ability. In most cases this doesn't matter that much. The random encounters are not especially challenging and heals automatically target whoever has the lowest health. I would have appreciated being able to choose a target for buffs such as Berserk, however. I gave the spell to my White Mage and wanted to cast it on my Bandit for the 50% attack increase--but she cast it on herself instead. I had to opt to give it to the Bandit, but it costs him 2 AP to cast instead of 1, so it would have been much more effcient on the White Mage. 

Boss battles are actually typically quite challenging. I died to the first boss in the game and had to grind quite a bit for another early boss because he one-shotted my team with one attack. One of the main reasons I like classic Final Fantasy games is because boss battles need to be prepared for and require strategy--and that is definitely true in this case. I hope that the boss difficulty scales with my power, because right now my characters are quite weak. 

So far I quite enjoy 4 Heroes of Light . It has a lot of character customization and it's satisfyingly challenging. I'm looking forward to unlocking all of the classes. For right now I have Freelancer (default, Wayfarer, White Mage, Black Mage, Bandit, Bard, and Musician--but there are 28 and all, one of which I know is Mystic Knight. It might not be translated that way but that's what they were called in the fan translation of Final Fantasy V.