Thursday 30 June 2011

Final Fantasy IV: Better Than Child of Eden

At least as far as price goes, anyway. A couple weeks ago, I walked into my local Gamestation with the intent of buying Child of Eden, but the price blew the steam out of my sails. 40 of my english pounds for a pretty shoot-'em-up was more than I could possibly justify, so I poked around and found myself taking Final Fantasy IV: Complete to the counter, much to my surprise. I've never been much of a Final Fantasy person, Breath of Fire is my JRPG of choice, but I'm always open to trying something I've never played before.

It's not the first Final Fantasy I've played, or even the first 2D one, those accolades belong to 7 and 1 respectively, it is, however, the only one I hadn't played up until that point. I was happy to discover that the story involves crystals, which every one up until 5 has. The ones which don't have a completely different feel - more serious, more epic. Which has its place, but I like a more friendly feel in my Japanese turn-based story adventures.

Anyway, long story short, you are Cecil, the worst Dark Knight ever, the Dark Knight with a conscience, who's having second thoughts about slaughtering innocent people to get the crystals for his King. The King realises this, promptly demotes him and sends him on a quest which ends up with him murdering a village of summoners by accident. Whoops! He saves a little girl, meets an old guy, finds old guy's daughter, who promptly dies, and goes on a journey to save the next crystal from capture, but not before curing his love interest's desert fever. Quite the adventure for two hours in.

The story is happening rather quickly. In two hours, two out of four of the world's crystals are in the hands of the corrupted King, and I am racing to save the third (which will undoubtedly fail, where would the story be otherwise?). I am wondering where the story has to go after he has all the crystals, but I guess I've got to play more to find out!

A brief comment on the sound. I'm not sure what it is about the music, but it hits my nostalgia brain cells hard. Which is strange, because I didn't play a FF game until I was almost 14, on the Playstation 1. Is it something about the SNES-ish sounds? I did spend a large amount of my youth on one of those things. Something to muse upon until next time, I guess.

1 comment:

  1. The problem with FFIV was the fact that it was so damn hard. I made it all the way to the... Dark Tower, was it? It was a levitating building anyway. I couldn't get past some of the trash on that level, and I never even got to some of the bosses. Difficulty level just spiked. :(

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