Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light
Jun. 26th, 2011 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroFinal Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light is a spinoff game from the Final Fantasy series with a number of retro-game aspects, an interesting art style and a surprisingly high difficulty level. It's not quite what I was expecting.
There are a decent number of things to complain about in this game:
- You choose your characters’ actions but not targets, which means you’re constantly needing to plan around the Artificial Stupidity. They won’t focus on one enemy, they’ll aim spells at enemies immune to them, and they won’t always apply healing to the person who actually needs it.
- The extremely limited inventory (15 items per character, which includes spells and equipment) combined with the need for one-use healing and status recovery items leads to a lot of juggling. At least there’s a storage facility for things you’ll want to hoard—and because you need a lot of elemental protection gear and elemental weapons for different areas, you’ll want to hoard.
- Oh god, the status effects! Poison stays with you for freakin' ever, but enemies don't drop a lot of antidotes and again, you have very limited inventory. Oh, and there are several bosses who like to spam status-effect attacks. A boss about 1/3 of the way in pulls out a hit-all attack likely to cause paralyze, when your only opportunity to buy anti-paralyze gear is a town you can't get back to. Time to grind!
- The system is totally not set up to allow for solo missions, yet you’re constantly left with only one character and a long dungeon to get through (usually without a town to heal at or place to grind). So you panic through the dungeon, trying desperately not to take hits because three hits will kill you, and healing out of battle is virtually impossible (because you don’t have the inventory space to carry lots of potions), only to die and lose half your gems because healing apparently has even less priority that attacking. (That is, if you attack, you almost always go first. If you try to heal—but only in a solo battle when you’re one hit away from death—you always go second. My party was wiped out four times because of this.)
- The problematic viewing angle in dungeons and lack of a useful map feature. I’m reminded a bit of Black Sigil; I feel like they didn’t bother to actually thoroughly playtest their system, especially for all of the “creative” variations they came up with to put the player through. Also in that it really could use an in-game dungeon minimap and a world map that is actually useful—when you’re not wandering into endless dead-ends, dungeons go by much faster. (Admittedly, the encounter rate in this game is much more manageable, and most battles are faster. But in Black Sigil, if you wanted your characters to be more powerful, all you had to do was level up.)
- There’s very little money until you get to the town that offers the shopkeeper minigame (you only get money from selling gems, which you also need to upgrade your crowns and equipment) at which point you can have infinite money, limited only by your patience. But remember, you can’t load up on items to bring into dungeons, and the equipment improvements are limited are sharply limited in terms of what you can buy. The best equipment comes from upgrading, which you need gems for, which cannot be purchased.
- The game tells you very little, in general, about the full capabilities of each class (classes are granted by crowns, which you can switch any time out of battle, but you can’t swap skills between crowns). Each class seems to have equipment “preferences”, but nothing in-game actually indicates this. Really, despite there being a huge variety of classes and weapons, you don’t get most of them early enough to do much with them, and random encounters don’t really require strategy anyway.
- Grinding for experience apparently gets you very little, as enemies scale with your level. Crown skills and strategy will only sometimes save you; one of the bosses is basically impossibly unless you have the party equipped with shields that protect from ice, in which case he’s easy.
- In one town, you can use gems to upgrade your equipment into “+1”, “+2” and so on versions of itself. Using this system at the right times is like the elemental shields trick: It turns sections from impossible to pretty easy. Of course, nothing actually prompted me to do this or even suggested that I could. Really, buying upgrades in this game is pointless once you can use gems to upgrade some of the best-tier equipment.
- Oh, and the old-school Dragon Warrior “try to guess where you should go next” style of play. You need to get about a third of the way in before you can talk to the NPC who gives you hints/reminders on where to go next.
Despite that, though, I appreciated the theoretically-unlimited magic use and the “pastel chibi” art style, which is different and kinda neat.
It’s one of those games where you’ll be doing okay, blazing through things with a pretty good party set-up, and then you’ll either hit a boss that’s a brick wall, or your party will get split up and/or switched out for a worse-equipped, less effective one. It became rather hard to track how much time I’d spent playing, because I’d alternate between zooming through two or three dungeons and frustratingly fighting a boss (and losing, and resetting) four times.
The plot (and characterization) are there, but never really engrossed me because it’s rather spread out and fragmentary, and at times gets incoherent. The world is twisted by dark magic at one point, causing time warps and strange effects, but the game never really explains to you exactly what’s going on. Also, most of the characterization is limited to the first half of the game. At the halfway point, the game switches to a wide open sandbox. The enemies start scaling to your level, and you need to revisit each area (and most dungeons) to find the legendary weapons hidden there. At this point, the weapon-upgrade system gets very important. I spent several hours gem-grinding after random battles on one of the quests almost killed me several times and the boss of that quest (who spams $%&#$ status effect spells on you) totally wasted me.
In theory, that section is six quests that you can do in any order. What actually happens is that you need to grind and then pray to the Random Number God to deliver you through the first one or two of the boss battles, and then you’re fine. The prizes for these quests include some of the best items in the game, including the best buff spell (Lux), which make the later boss battles significantly easier.
Here’s the stuff you really need to know to get through the game:
- Don’t waste gems. They’re critically useful for equipment upgrades in the endgame. Save the King’s Shortsword, it upgrades into one of the best weapons. Also, don’t focus too much on upgrading elemental weapons—there are too many things immune to any given element.
- Level up a Black Mage to get Magic Might. That skill can one-shot or two-shot the majority of bosses in the game. Don’t use Mirror: It seems useful in theory, but it prevents you from healing or buffing with white magic, too.
- Level up an Elementalist (separate from your Black Mage) to get Mysterio. It’s the best defensive ability in the game, as it halves ALL elemental damage.
- Once you get the white magic Lux, put it on your White Mage and cast it at the beginning of every boss battle.
- If you need to grind, turn as many characters as you can into Merchants and use Finder and Keeper in every battle. Levels don’t matter much past the first third of the game; equipment upgrades do.
- Put excess equipment in the storage facility so the rest of your separated party can access it. Consider reading ahead on an FAQ to see what elemental resistances and status resistances the next party is going to need that they won’t be able to buy.
Overall: It’s playable, but I didn’t love it. It’s frustrating and would probably be much, much moreso without the power of Gamefaqs. It’s not particularly worthy of the Final Fantasy name. Unless you have a particular love of obtuse leveling systems and old school play features, I can’t really recommend this.
There are a decent number of things to complain about in this game:
- You choose your characters’ actions but not targets, which means you’re constantly needing to plan around the Artificial Stupidity. They won’t focus on one enemy, they’ll aim spells at enemies immune to them, and they won’t always apply healing to the person who actually needs it.
- The extremely limited inventory (15 items per character, which includes spells and equipment) combined with the need for one-use healing and status recovery items leads to a lot of juggling. At least there’s a storage facility for things you’ll want to hoard—and because you need a lot of elemental protection gear and elemental weapons for different areas, you’ll want to hoard.
- Oh god, the status effects! Poison stays with you for freakin' ever, but enemies don't drop a lot of antidotes and again, you have very limited inventory. Oh, and there are several bosses who like to spam status-effect attacks. A boss about 1/3 of the way in pulls out a hit-all attack likely to cause paralyze, when your only opportunity to buy anti-paralyze gear is a town you can't get back to. Time to grind!
- The system is totally not set up to allow for solo missions, yet you’re constantly left with only one character and a long dungeon to get through (usually without a town to heal at or place to grind). So you panic through the dungeon, trying desperately not to take hits because three hits will kill you, and healing out of battle is virtually impossible (because you don’t have the inventory space to carry lots of potions), only to die and lose half your gems because healing apparently has even less priority that attacking. (That is, if you attack, you almost always go first. If you try to heal—but only in a solo battle when you’re one hit away from death—you always go second. My party was wiped out four times because of this.)
- The problematic viewing angle in dungeons and lack of a useful map feature. I’m reminded a bit of Black Sigil; I feel like they didn’t bother to actually thoroughly playtest their system, especially for all of the “creative” variations they came up with to put the player through. Also in that it really could use an in-game dungeon minimap and a world map that is actually useful—when you’re not wandering into endless dead-ends, dungeons go by much faster. (Admittedly, the encounter rate in this game is much more manageable, and most battles are faster. But in Black Sigil, if you wanted your characters to be more powerful, all you had to do was level up.)
- There’s very little money until you get to the town that offers the shopkeeper minigame (you only get money from selling gems, which you also need to upgrade your crowns and equipment) at which point you can have infinite money, limited only by your patience. But remember, you can’t load up on items to bring into dungeons, and the equipment improvements are limited are sharply limited in terms of what you can buy. The best equipment comes from upgrading, which you need gems for, which cannot be purchased.
- The game tells you very little, in general, about the full capabilities of each class (classes are granted by crowns, which you can switch any time out of battle, but you can’t swap skills between crowns). Each class seems to have equipment “preferences”, but nothing in-game actually indicates this. Really, despite there being a huge variety of classes and weapons, you don’t get most of them early enough to do much with them, and random encounters don’t really require strategy anyway.
- Grinding for experience apparently gets you very little, as enemies scale with your level. Crown skills and strategy will only sometimes save you; one of the bosses is basically impossibly unless you have the party equipped with shields that protect from ice, in which case he’s easy.
- In one town, you can use gems to upgrade your equipment into “+1”, “+2” and so on versions of itself. Using this system at the right times is like the elemental shields trick: It turns sections from impossible to pretty easy. Of course, nothing actually prompted me to do this or even suggested that I could. Really, buying upgrades in this game is pointless once you can use gems to upgrade some of the best-tier equipment.
- Oh, and the old-school Dragon Warrior “try to guess where you should go next” style of play. You need to get about a third of the way in before you can talk to the NPC who gives you hints/reminders on where to go next.
Despite that, though, I appreciated the theoretically-unlimited magic use and the “pastel chibi” art style, which is different and kinda neat.
It’s one of those games where you’ll be doing okay, blazing through things with a pretty good party set-up, and then you’ll either hit a boss that’s a brick wall, or your party will get split up and/or switched out for a worse-equipped, less effective one. It became rather hard to track how much time I’d spent playing, because I’d alternate between zooming through two or three dungeons and frustratingly fighting a boss (and losing, and resetting) four times.
The plot (and characterization) are there, but never really engrossed me because it’s rather spread out and fragmentary, and at times gets incoherent. The world is twisted by dark magic at one point, causing time warps and strange effects, but the game never really explains to you exactly what’s going on. Also, most of the characterization is limited to the first half of the game. At the halfway point, the game switches to a wide open sandbox. The enemies start scaling to your level, and you need to revisit each area (and most dungeons) to find the legendary weapons hidden there. At this point, the weapon-upgrade system gets very important. I spent several hours gem-grinding after random battles on one of the quests almost killed me several times and the boss of that quest (who spams $%&#$ status effect spells on you) totally wasted me.
In theory, that section is six quests that you can do in any order. What actually happens is that you need to grind and then pray to the Random Number God to deliver you through the first one or two of the boss battles, and then you’re fine. The prizes for these quests include some of the best items in the game, including the best buff spell (Lux), which make the later boss battles significantly easier.
Here’s the stuff you really need to know to get through the game:
- Don’t waste gems. They’re critically useful for equipment upgrades in the endgame. Save the King’s Shortsword, it upgrades into one of the best weapons. Also, don’t focus too much on upgrading elemental weapons—there are too many things immune to any given element.
- Level up a Black Mage to get Magic Might. That skill can one-shot or two-shot the majority of bosses in the game. Don’t use Mirror: It seems useful in theory, but it prevents you from healing or buffing with white magic, too.
- Level up an Elementalist (separate from your Black Mage) to get Mysterio. It’s the best defensive ability in the game, as it halves ALL elemental damage.
- Once you get the white magic Lux, put it on your White Mage and cast it at the beginning of every boss battle.
- If you need to grind, turn as many characters as you can into Merchants and use Finder and Keeper in every battle. Levels don’t matter much past the first third of the game; equipment upgrades do.
- Put excess equipment in the storage facility so the rest of your separated party can access it. Consider reading ahead on an FAQ to see what elemental resistances and status resistances the next party is going to need that they won’t be able to buy.
Overall: It’s playable, but I didn’t love it. It’s frustrating and would probably be much, much moreso without the power of Gamefaqs. It’s not particularly worthy of the Final Fantasy name. Unless you have a particular love of obtuse leveling systems and old school play features, I can’t really recommend this.
