SPOILERS for those who've never played FFIV in any of its incarnations (SNES, GBA, DS), just so ya know.
Alright -- perhaps I should change "musings" to "mild complaints", since this post will be focusing on my quibbles with the otherwise largely enjoyable Final Fantasy IV remake for the Nintendo DS. By all rights, the treatment is fantastic: Augments add a little depth to character development and take away the odd pool-party "hey, at the end, let's just get everyone back into the game" mentality of the GBA version. Not that I really minded that much, but it just didn't seem "FFIV" -- I kind of like having this new, additional development system over just letting you pull back old characters. I also like how everyone is represented in 3D -- so far I've not encountered one character who looks off-putting when compared to his/her 16-bit counterpart. Finally, the challenge is tasty. Some of the bosses are just vicious, even moreso than they used to be, and for once I actually got angry at the game because of one particularly cheap instance where I got hit by two debilitating frost attacks in a row in one battle on the Tower of Zot, killing my party and wiping out 30 minutes of progress.
There a few small things I take issue with, though:
- Choosing a spell in battle is less friendly a process. In the older versions, if you realize you fat-fingered and selected a wrong spell, you could press B and it would kick you back to the Spell menu with the cursor pointing to the spell you last chose. On the Nintendo DS, it kicks you all the way back out to the main battle menu, and when you choose the Spell menu again, the cursor rests on the first spell in the menu. This completely removes the ability to recover from a slip of the finger in a split second. Being that I play on Active battle with the fastest setting on, the extra second or two it takes to re-scroll through the spell list can be vital.
- Swapping rows versus defending feels kludgy. In the older versions, if you wanted to switch rows, you'd hit left on the d-pad in the battle menu and then press A. To defend, you'd do the same except you'd hit right instead of left on the d-pad. Here, both commands are allocated to the extended menu, which is accessible by pressing right. Now, whether your cursor appears on Defend or Swap Row depends entirely on where it was before you pressed right. Instead of always appearing at the top of the extended menu, or instead of the old way of choosing between Row or Defend being a no-fail proposition (since the two were completely separated from each other), now you have to get used to figuring out where the cursor will be when you open up that extended menu. It's not hard by any means, but it's very much a nuisance when you're trying to get used to it. More than once, when thinking and then settling on a decision to defend, I swapped rows instead of defending like I wanted to, putting my weaker back-row characters in the line of fire.
- Some of the leveling is borked, or at least one instance is. In the old days, my benchmark for getting Rosa back in the Tower of Zot was a 720HP. (Cecil was always around 1300 or so.) That was what I got her back at the very, very first time I ever played through the SNES version in 1992, and on subsequent replays I'd try to level-up so that I could get her back at a higher HP level. Whenever it dipped below that, I knew I wasn't doing my due diligence with my leveling. Now, I just reached that point again in this game. Cecil is at level 39 and has already eclipsed the 2000HP mark. Even Tellah -- who in years past I have NEVER ever gotten to anything above 700HP before he died -- was at 1045HP before he iced himself with the failed Meteor attempt. So one would expect Rosa to come back at a healthy mid-30s level, with 1000HP or more, at least. WRONG. She comes back at level 26 and is barely pushing 600HP. Kain, meanwhile, is only at 32, with barely over 1000HP himself. (Meanwhile everyone else is strongarming with numbers like 1300, 1900 and 2000.)
- The voice acting is inconsistent. Cecil's actor -- who is Yuri Lowenthal, by the way, the man who starred as The Prince in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Two thrones -- is remarkably and disappointingly flat in some instances. After the magnificent job he did as The Prince, and considering that Cecil is the game's lead character, it's just plain disappointing. Also, Cid sounds like Yoda at times. Rosa, meanwhile, sounds like she's 87 years old. (Kain and Golbez, however, are completely badass. I love the voicing choices made for them.)
- The 3D representation of the dungeons is great, but the camera distance is somewhat close to the map. Therefore, you really lose the expansive feel that the old tiled view in the 16-bit versions gave. It feels almost claustrophobic. Now, this is where the lower-screen map comes in, and by no means is it "worse" -- but when this is your first true console RPG (though true, Final Fantasy Legend was my truly first RPG -- but that joint was on GB), and you're so used to how this game looked from the old days, it's a bit jarring.
- Airship and chocobo travel is incredibly slow when compared to the old days. There's not much more to it than to say that these travel methods have all tested my patience.
Almost every single one of these gripes has to do with the fact that I'm so used to the way Final Fantasy IV worked on the SNES and then on the GBA. I had that game down to a science (almost, well, at least relative to all the other games I've played) and it's just jarring to see how it works now. As I alluded to during my camera distance gripe, these aren't necessarily "bad" things -- they're just really hard to adjust to for me. I will say that the way the magic menu works in battle IS a "bad" thing because it really does cut down on efficiency, but that's about it. Anyway, the point is, I really, really love this remake -- but even as it's the "best" version for my tastes so far, it still falls short of being the "perfect" version for my tastes. Such small tweaks go a long way.