Final Fantasy 4 Advance, Upgrades and Changes

[Julius Seeker]

1) Character Portraits will now appear beside dialogue windows

2) Graphical and animation updates. Everything seems to have a lot more colour and detail to it without departing too much from the original design. The animations have also not been touched, just smoothed out.

3) New Bonus dungeons and towns

4) Instead of having a locked party, the game will now allow for players to pick and choose party members; IE, take Yang along to the Final Dungeon instead of Edge. This likely means that updated weapons for characters such as Yang, Cid, Tellah, and Edward will be available.

5) Gameplay issues that the original version had have been fixed for this version (I have no details on them yet, but this is a key point for me since I felt the original gameplay was wretched).

6) The Game Script has been completely redone.

7) Spell and item names have been updated to Final Fantasy 8 terminology (IE, Fire 2 = Fira, Fire 3 = Firaga). I am just wondering what they will call spells such as Cure 4 which existed in the game? Also, character names will change, Milon Fiend of Earth becomes Scarmiglion.

Sources - Compiled from IGN/RPGamer

[Torgo]

6) The Game Script has been completely redone.
Sources - Compiled from IGN/RPGamer

But will Edward still be a Spoony Bard?

[Flip]

6) The Game Script has been completely redone.
Sources - Compiled from IGN/RPGamer

But will Edward still be a Spoony Bard?

He'd better be!

[SineSwiper]

FF4's story was horrible, when it came down to it. Everybody died and came back at least once, and there were a lot of characters.

[Don]

That list of feature sounds like 'more of the same old but send money please'.

Game makers should really look at Shining Force Neo to see what a good remake is.

[Nev]

6) The Game Script has been completely redone.
Sources - Compiled from IGN/RPGamer

But will Edward still be a Spoony Bard?

He'd better be!

No kiddin'.

[Eric]

FF4's story was horrible, when it came down to it. Everybody died and came back at least once, and there were a lot of characters.

Oh come on you make it sound like Final Fantasy games kills off characters regularly. In this case the "death" of the characters were a means for you to experience the other classes, nothing more/less.

I don't think the death of characters came into play until Leo got offed in 6(who wasn't really a main character) and Aeris got offed in 7(Which was Square trying to rush it out the door and never reviving her).

[Don]

I'd say a guy jumping off an airship exploding in a blaze of glory would normally be assumed to be dead.

The twins, Cid, and Yang really should've all stayed dead even though technically none of them were ever dead.

[Kupek]

(Which was Square trying to rush it out the door and never reviving her).

According to who? My impression was that she was a character created explicity to die.

[Julius Seeker]

6) The Game Script has been completely redone.
Sources - Compiled from IGN/RPGamer

But will Edward still be a Spoony Bard?

Yes, they kept that line in the game, that is one they confirmed would still be there =P

[Julius Seeker]

Personally, I didn't care if a character stayed dead or not. I mean, in RPG's, characters die regularly and usually it just takes a potion to bring them back. Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics are different stories, if a character dies they're dead. What does it matter if they explode in battle, or explode in a cutscene?

Well, anyways, I'm usually hard on this game, I wasn't a fan of it back in the day. I really enjoyed what they did to Final Fantasy 1 and 2 Dawn of Souls, so I think I will like this one as well. The real one I am waiting for though is Final Fantasy 6 Advance. More than any of them, I think I might be looking forward to Final Fantasy 3; it is essentially a completely new game; and the original FF3j is one of the most fun games ever developed by Square.

[Don]

Aeris's revival was one of the those my friend's neighbor heard it was true thing that somehow managed to persist. There's no indication that Aeris was ever supposed to live. She even gets her ultimate weapon way before anyone else, and her limits are grossly overpowered. Consider even her level 1 limit heals 50% of total HP and 50% damage to her is enough to trigger it (less if you keep her on Fury), you pretty much have an indestructible party with just her level 1 limit unless something can consistently pump out >50% damage to everyone in one round. Not to mention the totally ridiculous stuff like the 3/1, 3/2, and the 4/1 limits.

On another note, Fire Emblem's death system is dumb too. Because character deaths are unrecoverable, you'd always load if someone die. It's not like there's ever any reason you have to sacrifice someone in order to win so character death is just as meaningless. Instead of paying X gold to revive character Y you just hit reset and waste Z minutes to do the same fight again.

[Julius Seeker]

Aeris's revival was one of the those my friend's neighbor heard it was true thing that somehow managed to persist. There's no indication that Aeris was ever supposed to live. She even gets her ultimate weapon way before anyone else, and her limits are grossly overpowered. Consider even her level 1 limit heals 50% of total HP and 50% damage to her is enough to trigger it (less if you keep her on Fury), you pretty much have an indestructible party with just her level 1 limit unless something can consistently pump out >50% damage to everyone in one round. Not to mention the totally ridiculous stuff like the 3/1, 3/2, and the 4/1 limits.

On another note, Fire Emblem's death system is dumb too. Because character deaths are unrecoverable, you'd always load if someone die. It's not like there's ever any reason you have to sacrifice someone in order to win so character death is just as meaningless. Instead of paying X gold to revive character Y you just hit reset and waste Z minutes to do the same fight again.

Reloading is for newbies to the series who lose at least 3 or 4 characters per battle.

There's no reason for even mildly experienced players to reload chapters; because most experienced players lose no one in a chapter, and at most 2 people. You get anywhere between 1 and 4 new characters per chapter, and they are usually on par with your current characters anyways. So people are easily replaced. If a player is one of the types that needs to be perfect, then Fire Emblem is certainly not the game for them. I always disliked watching people play Civilization games, and reload over and over again if they have even a single unit die, that is cheap, I have the same feeling about Fire Emblem games.

Anyways, one of the reasons that I personally enjoy Fire Emblem is because it has something that other RPGs do not have, a degree of challenge. Keeping your characters alive is actually important in this game, you have to watch out, because when a character dies, they really do die.

[Don]

Fire Emblem isn't exactly a game I'd brag about skills. If you just always use your best characters (usually the guys with highest evade), you'd never die unless you run into something with a weapon type that happens to kill the type of your best characters (Knight killers and whatnot). Characters die only when you want to bring those underleveled guys to respectability.

It's about as dumb as Langrisser 4 or 5 where one death on a character gets you bad ending for that character so it's pretty close to perma death, and yet bosses like Omega with critical attribute can instant kill any of your guys regardless of what the stats look like. Or having to trigger L4's C path requires you to attack Emily with Angelina at something like a 20+ attack/defense differential in Emily's favor which means you just keep on load until Emily failed to instant kill Angelina if you don't want to get a bad ending.

In FE you just end up using your team of doom to kill everything to get around the perma death thing, just like in Langrisser you end up having your characters doing nothing while your High Elves kill everything (except L4 where you must use Angelina to trigger path C). In Final Fantasy Tactics you have perma death too which amounted to absolutely nothing. When's the last time you let one of your guy rot away, or better yet one of the story guys to die?

[Julius Seeker]

Well, the stronger characters usually end up much weaker in the end. For example, in Fire Emblem Advance, Marcus, who is the General of Pharae (the nation which one of the main characters comes from) is the strongest character by far that you have. The development rate of Marcus is very low, however, he gains much less experience than your weaker characters and his level ups often only upgrade a stat a bit. Soon your weaker characters will be quite a bit better than Marcus. The ultra powerful ones that you get are really only last resort characters, ones that you throw in when there is no one else left to fight.

Perhaps it was true that you could just use your godlike characters and mow through everyone in earlier Fire Emblem titles, it is not the case in later ones. In fact, if you just used your ultra powerful characters, you would most certainly lose the game in the long run, there would be no way you could pass the later levels with those characters and undeveloped characters who had the potential to be much stronger.

Well, actually, that is only true for the first one, the newest Fire Emblem title on GBA allows you to re-visit a lot of locations, and so you can level up everyone indefinitely. I finished the latest Fire Emblem once and only lost four characters total in the whole game (I still can't get through the first Fire Emblem on GBA without losing at least 8 through the course; and if I only lost 10, I would consider that an amazing run).

Sure this system isn't for everybody, I am one who really likes it; but I am also a Civilization fan, and I believe that is why. It is my favourite strategy RPG series by far.

[Don]

That just means you've to know what characters develop into what. For example in FE4 it's almost impossible to beat the game without Yuria promoted even though she absolutely sucks at the beginning and is likely to die horribly while you try to level her up. But, that just means you probably should've invested in a strategy guide so you'd actually know Yuria is the only person who can hurt Yurius in a meaningful way no matter how much her stats suck.

[Zeus]

Are we all forgetting that this was a game made in 1990 and, for its time, was FAR more complex than anything?

Sure it looks shitty now if you sit back and pick it apart, but back then, this game was the shit. It was the best thing since sliced bread until FF6 came out....

[Julius Seeker]

Are we all forgetting that this was a game made in 1990 and, for its time, was FAR more complex than anything?

Sure it looks shitty now if you sit back and pick it apart, but back then, this game was the shit. It was the best thing since sliced bread until FF6 came out....

I disagree, the Phantasy Star series was what it was all about until Final Fantasy III. They were all out before Final Fantasy II as well.

[Don]

I fail to see how FF4 is any more or less complicated than anything else. RPG isn't a genre that has benefited much from the technology in terms of complexity.

[Blotus]

Can't wait! Can you still get GBA players for the Gamecube?

[Julius Seeker]

Can't wait! Can you still get GBA players for the Gamecube?

Yes. At futureshop for fairly cheap.

[Zeus]

I fail to see how FF4 is any more or less complicated than anything else. RPG isn't a genre that has benefited much from the technology in terms of complexity.

It was the first RPG that I played where the people were characters rather than just "warrior" or "wizard" and where you had multiple people come in and out of your party (there was a total of 12 or 13 if memory serves me right). This did WONDERS for the storylines 'cause now you had established characters with established storylines and much more freedom to expand the storyline than we did with DQ, Wizardry, or the other FF games, which tried more to be more of electronic versions of D&D.

Not to mention FF4 was the first one that really expanded the soundtracks. If you go back and just listen to the ST now, it's quite good. Before that, we had the original FF melody (the scales) and everything else was just background. In FF4, it was a full ST.

For it's time, it was a landmark game. FF6 took it to another level and just did everything that much better (except the ST, which was about equal).

[Zeus]

Can't wait! Can you still get GBA players for the Gamecube?

You can get a used GBA SP for the price of a new GB Player and they're MUCH easier to find.

[Kupek]

You can get a used GBA SP for the price of a new GB Player and they're MUCH easier to find.

Personally, I preferred to have a GB Player, which is why I bought one. I'd rather play it on a big screen while sitting on the couch than play it on a tiny screen sitting on the couch.

[Julius Seeker]

I fail to see how FF4 is any more or less complicated than anything else. RPG isn't a genre that has benefited much from the technology in terms of complexity.

It was the first RPG that I played where the people were characters rather than just "warrior" or "wizard" and where you had multiple people come in and out of your party (there was a total of 12 or 13 if memory serves me right). This did WONDERS for the storylines 'cause now you had established characters with established storylines and much more freedom to expand the storyline than we did with DQ, Wizardry, or the other FF games, which tried more to be more of electronic versions of D&D.

Again I direct you to the Phantasy Star series which did all of that well before Final Fantasy II; and had much more solid feeling gameplay on top of that.

[Zeus]

I fail to see how FF4 is any more or less complicated than anything else. RPG isn't a genre that has benefited much from the technology in terms of complexity.

It was the first RPG that I played where the people were characters rather than just "warrior" or "wizard" and where you had multiple people come in and out of your party (there was a total of 12 or 13 if memory serves me right). This did WONDERS for the storylines 'cause now you had established characters with established storylines and much more freedom to expand the storyline than we did with DQ, Wizardry, or the other FF games, which tried more to be more of electronic versions of D&D.

Again I direct you to the Phantasy Star series which did all of that well before Final Fantasy II; and had much more solid feeling gameplay on top of that.

Yeah, I played the first three of those as well. They did do it before FF, but FF had much more of an audience and was on a little more of a grand scale as well. PS3 was a much more complex storyline but the execution wasn't the best.

[Zeus]

You can get a used GBA SP for the price of a new GB Player and they're MUCH easier to find.

Personally, I preferred to have a GB Player, which is why I bought one. I'd rather play it on a big screen while sitting on the couch than play it on a tiny screen sitting on the couch.

Fair enough. If you don't really play while out, it is better to get the GC adaptor. I'm a commuter, so to me, it would be worth it to get the SP. I have both, BTW, and play the GBA MUCH more since I have much more time to play away from home (I also take it travelling and camping with me). Just figured I'd point out the fact they were basically the same price now.

[Julius Seeker]

I am not sure if they will fix all of these, but, essentially my gripes with FFII originally were:

1) Lack of customization - FFIII later on allowed for extensive customization using Magicite and Relics; something that became a staple in the series (and in my opinion, done best in FF8 and FF10). FFII had all characters exactly the same every single time. Cecil was the best attacker, Edge was the second best attacker (but only if you threw every turn, which came to be a headache), Kain was the third best attacker, and Rydia was the 4th best attacker (she used spells to attack, which was also a pain as they tended to run out with too much use; she was also easy to kill), Rosa was the healer (every single time; though Cecil could use some weak healing spells that were only of value when healing after battles, so you wouldn't have to use up Rosa's MP). In the remake they will at least allow players to choose party members; it still is a very shallow character system compared to later FF games; originally the most shallow in the series, it might now be less shallow than FF2 dawn of Souls.

2) Slow and very frequent battle system - What can I say, this game had a lot of random battles. This made for a very annoying chorelike adventure. The action bar thing was incredibly slow, I only had a large problem with it in this game, probably because it was a lot slower in this game than in any of the others. Encounter rate remains a problem, but it has never been as bad as it was in FFII. Most of FFII is fighting random battles. I am not sure what they will do about this, I do not think it will change (since they didn't do anything with FF1 when they remade it).

3) Item selection system; as I said, you can't just select an item and use it multiple times; you use it once, the menu exits, and then you have to select it all over again. Due to this it takes A LOT longer to use items than in any other games. Earlier FF games don't have this problem even though they have the same item selection system. They don't have the problem because you don't need to use nearly as many items. FF2 expects you to use thousands of potions throughout the course of the game, FF1 you can get by with only using somewhere between 75 and 200 (well, that became untrue in the remake which made items much more valuable, but they also changed the item selection system so it is like later FF games). This problem will be resolved with the remake.

The dated nature of the game (graphics, music quality, etc...) was not really a problem for me, they are updating it though. This is probably my final thought on the game until its release.