ATB

I like JRPG's. I like them very much, even. However, I did not play them before I got my hands on a PlayStation. The person who introduced me to them was such a dork even, and loathed so much by my friends that Pauline was hesitant to check out Final Fantasy because Ronald (that's his name) liked the series. If he liked it it couldn't possibly be any fun.

Dorks aside, I fell in love with the genre as soon as I played my first JRPG, and I have played many since then. I have often wondered if it is the 3D glamour (sometimes with 2D backgrounds) of today that made me love them, or the story.

With my back shattered to pieces I wasn't able to move around a lot for the past 2 or 3 days. I had imagined it would be much worse than it turned out to be so I had sent Pauline out to pick up Final Fantasy IV Advance for me. It would be the first RPG with a noteworthy storyline but 2D graphics that I'd play. Thankfully I'm liking it a lot.

The first thing that struck me is the complexity of the story, especially when you project it on the year in which the game came out. I can imagine that for that time something like this must have been quite the engrossing experience. By today's standards the change of events is sometimes laughable though. In two minutes (and two sentences) people turn from friend to foe or the other way around, and the most cliche (well, back then they were not cliche I guess) excuses are used to justify certain choices the developers made.

The game's nothing without battle, of course. It uses ATB, which I think is the best system the series has ever witnessed. The combat is fast-paced, a little more tactical and a lot less predictable this way. It's too bad the game has a lot of random battles. Some more balance would have been nice.

Speaking of balance, the game misses quite a few hard-hitters. Most of the characers you're travelling with (in the first part of the game at least) are mages of some sort. While I respect mages, they're quite useless in this game. They run out of Magic Points before you're more than 20 steps into the dungeon and Ethers are hard to find. I haven't been able to buy them in stores, for example. I'm totally reliant on what I'm finding inside the dungeon, making the whole experience a little more frustrating.

All in all this is a good, albeit late introduction to what RPGs on the SNES must have been like. It also tells me why I love Final Fantasy IX so much. I never knew the stories of those two games were so similar until I played this one.