I've been compiling documents at work in hopes that I would cobble together some of those notes to write some actual entries for this blog. So far, that hasn't really happened for the most part. It might make more sense to just straight up write blog entries from work and maybe finish them when I get home. On really slow days, I might just get them completely done while I'm there, even if the productivity of such an action is extremely questionable.
I've been meaning to write about Final Fantasy Dimensions for some time now even though I completed it pretty early this month. I played through it pretty quickly considering the length of the game. This was at least partially because I was eager to be done with it, if I'm being honest. Dimensions comes from the same developer as the Final Fantasy III and IV enhanced remakes as well as Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, an immensely flawed (but still often enjoyable) episodic RPG. Dimensions is also episodic, but instead of focusing on individual characters in their own chapters, Dimensions jumps back and forth between two sets of parties composed of characters split up near the beginning of the game. These are the Warriors of Light and the Warriors of Darkness.
I'm generally a fan of games in which a group of separated characters deal with conflicts on the way to an ultimate objective in which the groups unite their powers. It's been done time and time again in different ways over the years, but I'm generally excited by working towards that point where my characters come together. Games like Dragon Quest IV and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn come to mind. Of course, those games mostly consist of static characters that learn abilities at predetermined levels. In each playthrough, they'll mostly be the same characters. Replay value comes from experimenting with different combinations of the characters available. In the case of Final Fantasy Dimensions, the abilities and strengths of the characters are left almost entirely up to the player.
What makes this take on the format interesting is the fact that the Warriors of Light and Warriors of Darkness have access to a different pool of classes. They share the basic classes like warrior, monk, white mage, and black mage--but the light warriors get jobs like paladin and memorist, whereas the dark warriors get ninja and dark knights. Once the two parties reunite, it's left entirely up to the player how to combine the light and dark warriors into a unified party and which classes to take into the final encounters.
Conceptually, all of this is very sound and it seems like it should come together to make a truly excellent game. However, it's not all good. The plot and characters are almost entirely forgettable and the combat is not always exciting. The random encounter rate in just about every location it exists is unforgivably high--and it's often the case that an immense amount of grinding is required to progress to the next location. I found myself relying on Auto Battle more often than not to slog my way through most of the game's dungeons. I can at least say that Naoshi Mizuta's soundtrack is solid, although certainly derivative of the Final Fantasy series as a whole. Whether an intentional homage or not, the boss battle theme echoes Final Fantasy VIII's "Force Your Way" pretty clearly.
Although the game does feature a nice variety of job classes with which to experiment, it doesn't seem to offer a lot of variety in terms of strategy. Negative status effects are almost universally ineffective against bosses (a trait shared by Bravely Default, if I recall correctly), whereas Final Fantasy IV bosses were almost always susceptible to being slowed, at the very least. Almost every tough boss fight eventually boils down to pooping out as much damage as possible while healing the party to full with 1-2 characters per turn. Buffing the party is, at the very least, an effective strategy, but interacting with the enemy in any other way but damage is pointless. This renders spells like Slow, Poison, Bio, Stop, and Silence to be almost completely useless outside of random encounters. Of course, this is not an uncommon thing in Final Fantasy games, but I posit that this should not be the case.
If there's anything about Final Fantasy Dimensions that really made me enjoy it in the end, it was that feeling in the final dungeon of having reached my "end game fantasy." I really chase that feeling at the end of a lot of RPGs in which you've unlocked the most powerful upgrades, abilities, and weapons, and can conceivably tear through anything the game has to offer. That feeling of being powerful after building up for a long period of time is a feeling I look for in just about every RPG I play. Dimensions did at least deliver in that aspect.
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