B_Campbell's Full Review: Final Fantasy IV Advance for Game Boy Advance (GBA...
If your nostalgia for Final Fantasy 2 on the Super Nintendo runs high you might relive your glory days in Final Fantasy 4 Advance for the Game Boy Advance. That's because it is Final Fantasy 2, with a couple of touches, and all the good and bad that brings. If, like me, you never played the Super Nintendo original, you probably won't find much to love here; it's a stroll down memory lane for fans only.
Every RPG needs a story, and it feels a little unfair to criticize the one in Final Fantasy 4 Advance. After all, this is a classic, right? Can you really say it's laughably cliched if it helped create some of those cliches in the first place? Well, yes, because again, unless you're playing this out of nostalgia, there are other modern games to compare it to. The narrative revolves around Cecil: dark knight, airship commander, conscientious objector, and all-around one-dimensional character. After being ordered to slaughter innocents in his lord's quest for powerful crystals, Cecil defects and tries to stop the evil empire from seizing more of these artifacts by using a devastating combination of swordsmanship and horribly flat dialogue.
It's hard to pick any one plot point as the most ridiculous. For example, early on in the game, Cecil is duped into destroying a village by bringing a destructive ring there. He then basically abducts the sole survivor, a little girl whose mother was killed through his actions. After Cecil kills a few castle guards, the girl decides he's an okay guy and sticks with him in his quest. Talk about Stockholm syndrome.
Yet it's not the story that really brings Final Fantasy 4 Advance down. The pacing of the game, the atrocious battle system, and the resultantly tepid battles are the real problems. Predictably, everything is not just linear, but extremely railroaded. There's not much chance of striking out and exploring areas of the world that aren't crucial to your immediate quest goal. I say predictably because this is, after all, an older game, and it's hard to fault it for that. But even for a "classic", it's claustrophobically limiting; there aren't even any reasons to go back and explore areas you've already been to.
All of this I could forgive if the core of the RPG experience -- the fights -- were exciting. They're about as exciting as a slot machine, and as involved; just keep pushing a button over and over until you're done. The combat system uses active timed battles, a concept whose time has come -- and gone. Way back when, this was innovative stuff: instead of each character and monster waiting their turn, they have an action bar that fills up over time, and then they can do their thing (attack, cast spells, defend, use special abilities). In practice, it just means that battles feel rushed, and I found myself mashing the A button to have everyone attack as quickly as possible, since the enemies can attack while you're deciding what to do. 80% of the battles in the game can be fought like this, stripping the combat of any real excitement.
To compound things, the random battles are a little too frequent. Ultimately, much of the game falls into a boring pattern of random battle, heal, random battle, heal, and so on until a boss battle. Some of the boss battles are interesting, but because the interims are so mindless, your characters easily level to the point where boss battles aren't too much trouble. With the exception of being longer and requiring healing during battle, these fights are mostly exercises in button-mashing too.
Final Fantasy 4 Advance is a pretty game by Game Boy Advance standards. Most of the frequent cut scenes use in-game graphics with a few special effects, like a curved world for large scenes. Overworld and dungeon travel is your typical top-down, tiled layout with four-directional movement, and the towns and dungeons are well detailed. The monsters in battle are the high point, very clean, sharp, and vibrant, but there's one complaint: they're completely static. Monsters don't animate when they attack, so it's difficult to tell who's being attacked by what. I wasn't terribly impressed with the music as it's very obviously synthesized symphonic instruments, but this reflects the game's origins. As you'd expect, there are no voiceovers so prepare to do a lot of reading as the story unfolds.
As a Game Boy Advance RPG, Final Fantasy 4 Advance doesn't quite make the cut. There are many other more interesting, more balanced, and just plain more fun games available in the horde of RPG's for that system. If you're a huge Final Fantasy fan, are nostalgic for the series' roots, and haven't already played a re-released version of this game (it was previously included in Final Fantasy Origins for the Playstation), you'll probably get a kick out of it. For seriously hardcore RPG fans only.
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