By Ramuh.Rikapi 2008-05-13 02:49:02
Considering that I've played FF4 on basically every platform it came out on (SFC, SNES, PS, WSC, GBA, and DS... my god I just realized that I've bought the same game six times...) I'll put in my quite lengthy two yen.
The graphic bump up to polygons a la FF3DS is cute, but it makes some parts of the map really hard to see (especially when you're looking for the hidden passages that you KNOW are there). And along the same lines, the movement via touch-screen is cool in the beginning, but as time goes on I found it easier to just do the D-pad action. The "reward" for completely automapping each floor of a dungeon is also a nice touch (incentive to complete the automap), but can get irritating when you're at 99% complete and cant' figure out where the one pixel you haven't unearthed is.
The full-voiced movies was really nice (especially with the high-profile actors and voice actors that were in some of the key roles... like Takeshi Kaga, the guy that says "Allez Cuisine!" in Iron Chef, was the voice behind Golbez), but at the same time it's unfortunate because it deprives you the liberty of changing everyone's names (which leads you to the mini-quest series involving Namingway, who is now a bunny that kinda looks like the FF12 version of Moogle IMO)...
The "Decant Ability" system (the one that lets members of your party learn certain abilities from parted characters or certain enemies) was a nice touch as it adds flexibility, but when you're playing it with three loops in mind you have only so much liberty to ensure that your final fivesome in loop 3 has all the uber-abilities.
The most disappointing part was that both the ability to select characters for your final dungeon party and the post-final battle dungeon that were added in the Game Boy Advance version got cut (as a result of the full-voiced cut scenes, most likely) -- honestly, I don't think the Decant and the full-voice cutscenes were worth the omission of the GBA extras.
The battle difficulty was jacked up quite a bit -- most people who have played any previous incarnation would agree with me that finishing the game at level 60 is a piece of cake; in the DS version you will probably go through hoops and whistles to finish the game at level 60. From mid-game, I consistently found myself 10~15 levels higher at any given point in time in the DS version than in the same place from any previous incarnation, and even then I still found myself wiping at times (damn flame dogs, I think I must have wiped at least 10 times in bab-il)...
All in all, it wasn't a cakewalk like the previous versions, but I was really able to enjoy the main storyline in all its glory, so I'd still say it's worth a shot.
There have been a couple serious bugs in the JP release (if you watch the "prologue" in the movie-player option and then save while playing loop 2 -- and the movie in question doesn't even shopw up until loop 2 -- the game will freeze up during the ending sequence and you won't be able to start loop 3) and I think fixing these bugs (as well as ADR for the voiced cut-scenes) is why the NA release is taking so long.