Intro
Here we go! I played a few minutes of this on the playstation not too many years ago, at a guess in 2018. I was aware of the huge levels of hype and praise around the game and how 6 and 7 were frequently lauded as the best in the series.
Main characters/cast
Terra is the main character. No wait it’s Locke. No, Celes is very important. Or is it Edgar and Sabin? The game does a good job of making a good strong cast of characters to play as. And mercifully the game is not too tragic, though it tries to kill off people it shies away from doing anything permanent.
Battle
Nothing too exciting here but it's all solid as ever. I usually had Sabin doing a particular Blitz, Edgar using Auto Crossbow/Chainsaw/Drill, Celes dropping a spell or attacking and Cyan using Bushido.
This is probably the first game to remove itself from rigid jobs completely, or any mixture of them, so each character is different but with the help of the espers they can all learn every magic spell and summon.
I was lucky to be having such a great party. I had few, if any game overs. I found this one a little bit easier to manage and play. I had more game overs grinding dinosaurs for experience points and whatnot in the late game.
Music/Graphics
Some damn solid numbers in here. Nothing that makes it break from the pack but the Magitek Facility is a banger, probably my favourite track from this game. The boss and battle themes were super too, especially Decisive Battle.
The opera was OK!
Graphically, it looks great as ever. I am finally done with all the sprite games but am glad I took a break between 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6. Made me appreciate them all a bit more.
Plot/Villain/Allies/NPCs
Kefka is a great villain. The Emperor Gestahl is also a great villain. I was more pissed off at Gestahl than Kefka honestly while the latter does some heinous shite the Emperor made me believe in something and betrayed me!
The gooey
I scored this slightly less than 5 as there is simply less to sink your teeth into here. The Espers give you small stat boosts every time you level up with one equipped but the removal of bonus dungeons has made any long term planning redundant. I made sure to equip specific espers to certain party members after they mastered each of them but I was casual enough about it.
I will say, without a guide there are so many things you can miss. At least 3 party members, for starters. There are just so many secrets in the game I would not have come across if not for the guide. Using the Cursed Shield in battle 256 times until it became the excellent Paladin Shield? It was actually not so bad. I equipped 2 accessories that prevented the bad effects and just grinded.
Also I struggled to find Deathgaze initially so I just left it for a while and came back and found him in a few minutes my own way.
Conclusion
A rip-roaring conclusion to my Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster adventure. Having never played any of them before except for a few minutes of VI, they were all very good really. It was really interesting as a huge fan of 7,8,9,10 and 12 to see where all the elements came from. You could see them starting to all come together by the time 6 came around and it was like "let's just write a story and have a game with it". This was all fine and dandy until 13 when they wrote a story and were like "must we design a game as well, what a nuisance".
Was it better than 7? No way. Was it better than 1 through 5? Yes. Was it better than 8,9,10? No. Better than 13? Of course it was! Until I play the 'sequels' I will continue to place 13 near the bottom of the pile. 6 was very good and I look forward to playing it again maybe in a few years when I do all the funky-looking 2014 Steam re-releases.
The whole Kefka or Sephiroth thing can be put to bed by me. I was really disappointed that Kefka just sat in his final dungeon while I went around collecting power and my allies. Even in previous editions 1-5 the final bosses found ways to dick you around until you finally decided to go murder them.
The strong cast with multiple stories going on throughout the game with nice resolutions and heartbreaking moments really made this game shine over the previous 5 remasters. There were also tons of secrets and interesting places and things to do that made it special but again this one benefitted from having 5 games before it making mistakes that it could learn from.
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The achievements were grand - I had missed the Blue Flan in the Magitek Facility so I went back after the game was finished and got him with an earlier save file. I didn't mind as I got to hear the awesome facility music again! It was the last thing I did. Took an hour or two to power through the story. Before that, Siegfried was tough but I just made Celes a 16-hitter. Also the 777 death thing took a while but I just sat down one day with Setzer and grinded it. It kept hitting me so I gave up on it and came back later.
The ending was quite cute.
Intro
I have the other version fron 2014 I believe with the wacky graphics and the ridiculous amount of achievements but will save that for another time. I'm kind of looking forward to playing those 2014 versions at some point.
Main characters/cast
Bartz/Buttz is a bit slow, and that’s OK. That’s all I knw going into it and sure enough there are a bunch of dialogue scenes where he has to have stuff repeated to him. It actually suited me as I’m an idiot so having them explain the wacky plot twice was useful. I started him out as a Knight and gradually worked through all the physical classes with him.
Lenna is a princess and we’re introduced to her right away. She has an affinity with animals which is fun as she regularly makes allies with dragons and Moogles. Good thing to have! She was a white mage to start and would almost always have White Magic as her secondary ability no matter what job she had.
Galuf is the funny older guy and was a member of the Dawn Warriors so despite having amnesia initially he remembers everything eventually and is integral to the plot. I had him serve as a secondary fighter and he graduated into lighter fighter classes like Monk and Thief faster than Bartz.
Faris/Sarisa is a princess pirate captain who briefly imprisons the group but ultimately decides to align with them and help them restore the crystals. She is aided for a time first by her pirate crew and also the water beast Syldra who I loved. She was my first Blue Mage but would later serve mainly as Black Mage and so on but would usually have the Blue Mage ‘Learn’ ability equipped in case the right magic was cast at us.
Battle
Much the same, though more ATB than previous entries. I had the battle speed at very high and I say that probably worked against me a lot as enemies would get shots in while I was trying to figure out what option to select between Attack-Ability 1-Ability 2-Item usually. Once I had a nice set up I would just auto battle and they would repeat whatever I told them to do.
I did like how it required even more intervention on my part, there were many things to consider certain enemies would punish you for using magic or hitting them physically. Very very few enemies required me to Steal from them, Gilgamesh one of the handful.
Many battles in the midgame required me to Control the enemy with Beastmaster ability then have them use their special Blue Magic on the party to get the ability myself.
Minigames
None as usual! Maybe in 6?
Music/Graphics
Now 1,3 and 4 had decent soundtracks nothing particularly memorable but nice all the same; 2 I quite liked to listen to while prepping DND and stuff there were some good ones in there. 5 is the best soundtrack I’ve heard of the lot so far! The overworld themes were good to great, the dungeon themes were cool, the final two dungeon themes were awesome as well as the boss and battle themes. Not to mention the Big Bridge of course, which I think 12 did better but here is the original one, remastered. Also the Chocobo theme slapped.
The pixel sprites for all the jobs are ridiculously charming.
Plot/Villain/Allies/NPCs
This is the longest FF I’ve played in a while, certainly of the pixel remasters. About 50 hours and only the last 5 hours maybe were me grinding. So it’s hard to recall precisely but basically the 4 crystals we know and love are being harnessed for power and making life better for the citizens of this FF world (sound familiar). But then they start to break. The wind stops blowing, seas go calm etc. Your team are summoned by destiny to restore the crystals which are mysteriously shattering.
And then the villain is introduced! Well, not really. Exdeath is sort of hinted at and then eventually revealed but he is manipulating events and people to destroy the crystals. He wants to harness the power of the Void, which I presumed would be some sort of final boss space flea and I was right! Exdeath would appear a lot more in the second half of the game so he developed himself into a worthy foe. He also had an interesting background as being from the Forest of Moore, which would play into the final battles.
Your allies are more consistent, Bartz is from the tiny town of Lix which I believe is optional but they all like him there. Lenna as a princess is regularly hassled by the Chancellor of her kingdom to stay and stop adventuring and on numerous occasions you have to go back and spend a night in the castle to advance the plot. Galuf has his granddaughter who is vital to the plot later and his fellow Dawn Warriors to assist him. Faris is an outlier in that her pirate crew don’t really come up again. And just like FF4 the NPCs of the various towns and cities are interesting and their dialogue changes over time, a little bit but its appreciated.
The gooey
Here we go. Jobs. I did really like them in fairness. The hardest part about them was some didn't’ hold up on their own for me unless combined with other abilities learned from another job, and just grinding them to master level.
There are so many different possibilities but as I stated above I would have characters as a job say Lenna as a Chemist so she was locked into using Mix/Drink, but her secondary ability would be White Magic. Faris I might have been doing the same job but my secondary ability would be Learn/Blue -Black-Time Magic. The two fighter characters might have the passive ability Two Handed so when they attacked they would do more damage.
So while there were near infinite combos available I stuck to a fairly reliable set of moves. As I said above, Steal wasn’t vital but the passive abilities like Sprint, Vigilance and First Strike from various jobs were useful. Summon was very powerful as many bosses were vulnerable to particular types of summon. Dual Wield and Rapid Fire were very powerful and are and maybe when I play the original Steam version I will need them to beat the bonus dungeon, which is not in this remaster. For my playthrough they were a bit slow and underpowered at times to be using all the time so with only one or two slots free for abilities choices had to be made.
Most battles and situations had me attacking with the two warrior characters, Lenna casting White Magic and Faris using some sort of offensive magic. This could change depending on the situation. Also the auto battle was smart - if you made one character chuck a single Hi Potion or target a single ally with Cure for example they would throw it at the weakest party member HP-wise. So if an enemy attacked Bartz Lenna would heal him on her turn and so on. Usually I just targeted the group but this was handy in the late game when MP was short and enemies were tough.
The best classes were the Mimic and the Freelancer; Mimic allowed you to pick a whopping three abilities you had learned as well as having access to Mimic, which I learned from my FF7 playthrough is near god mode level good. Just don’t forget to give yourself ‘Attack’ or ‘Item’ if you need them, they are not defaults! The Freelancer was good as every job you mastered a bonus would carry over to it, so by mastering them all you powered up your Freelancer a load. The default sprite of each character is the Freelancer model too, while if you are currently a Black Mage the sprite is that of a Black Mage. The sprites were gorgeous in this one and some very cute/thoughtful models were used.
It was funny - there was a ‘see hidden passages’ ability in this game and there are only a fraction of the hidden passages as the previous entries. Could have used that in FF3!
Mix is like Rikku Mix in that there are a number of extremely potent combos that could decimate the strategies of high-level bosses but it's just not necessary. Maybe in the bonus dungeon (the other version of the game on Steam) but not here.
Blue Magic by contrast is very fun to collect in my opinion, some frustrating ones but rewarding when you get them all the same. Some of them are very powerful like Mighty Guard and White Wind (old faves of mine) but not essential. You’re often better just whipping the enemies to death the old fashioned way than using any of them for long.
Conclusion
Definitely the best of the bunch so far from 1 onwards. While the plot and characters are arguably weaker than 2 (I really liked 2) and certainly weaker than 7 onward, it had such a charming OST, world and job system that pushed it into the lead.
I got all the achievements 100% once again thanks to lylat and prius’ guide. I don't mind saying, life is short and mine is busy so I can’t and won’t spend it figuring out every little thing to get everything out of the game.
I got to level 50 after a few hours of grinding in the rift castle passage, then spent a few hours mastering the remaining jobs for my characters. 2 of them had most of the mage classes down while 2 had the warrior ones so I just had to switch it around. The Mover enemy in the rift at the second last screen before the final boss granted loads of money and ability points so it was a breeze when I got things sorted. I could just use Zeninage over and over and throw money at enemies to win.
Just going to post this real quick while it's still on my mind. Writing this mid-January when I actually finished it.
Main characters/cast
I really liked Cecil, the conflicted Dark Knight. Really cool to play a Dark Knight after 3 games of fighting against them. His love interest, Rosa, is a White Mage. His buddy from childhood, Kain, is a Dragoon, who are awesome. This is a love triangle established early but Rosa clearly prefers Cecil. They are a decent bunch to start out with, at least they have names. Also Cecil has such a badass picture:
Other characters that join later include Rydia the summoner girl, Yang the Monk, Edge the Ninja Cid the Engineer, Palom and Parom the mage twins and Edward the Bard. They are all nicely established, perhaps even more so than Rosa and Kain. They all cycle in and out the only constant is Cecil and unfortunately I did not get to have my pre-planned Attack party of Cecil-Kain-Yang-Cid-Edge for the last part of the game but was fine.
Battle
I used Cecil to attack mainly and sometimes heal the party outside of battles, not like he was using his MP otherwise. Rosa healed all the time. I sometimes had her use Pray to heal as it cost no MP. Kain was either Jump or Attack. Rydia would blast most enemies with Bio for second half of game. At the very very end she used more Flares. Finally Edge would usually Attack but his Throw helped me defeat the scary end boss.
There are a bunch of guest characters beyond the 5 I discussed above, namely Edward and Cid and so on. I liked them but I can see how they were not solid enough to go to the end of the game with. Edward certainly was crappy really. I was not enamoured with the twins or FuSoYa or Tellah or any of the mage guest characters. Out of all of them I would have liked Cid and Yang to stay but it's fine. Probably better I didn't trade out Rosa as she can heal so well while Rydia was the weak link but never got hurt much in the back row and provided classic magical artillery fire on groups of enemies. Also her Summon is very powerful and was useful in beating a lot of the optional and main quest bosses.
Crucially FF4 is now Action Time Battle or ATB, after three games of slower turn based now we have the ATB gauges! I set mine to Wait otherwise I would've died. I mainly auto-battled so had to be careful that my setup was correct. So I had to pay a bit more attention to battles this time but was a good thing. I was a bit worried that I was just going to auto battle through all these pixel remasters. At last, I was selecting particular courses of action. Certain enemies would become invulnerable at certain times and others might counter attack constantly if attacked so paying attention was more important.
Minigames
There are none. Moving on.
Music/Graphics
A slightly better selection this time around. FF2 still sticks in my mind as the best so far but there were some good ones here. Particularly at the end, the Moon and its dungeons were cool. Kind of cool to see the early versions of later game tracks throughout the game here, such as the Prelude.
Graphics are as good as ever but I think I'm tiring of the pixels a bit.
Plot/Villain(s)/Allies/NPCs
An orphaned Dark Knight and his buddy must go out into the world and seize Crystals by force for the land of Baron. So there is a lot of brutality at the start but thankfully our heroes come to their senses and try to undo Baron's plan. Aerith dies in FF7 sure but Christ a lot of characters die in the first four games.
You go on a long convoluted quest to stop all the Crystals being stolen and the evil villain's plan being activated but of course their plan comes all the way to 99% and our heroes must defeat them personally in a final battle. At least its not EXACTLY a Giant Space Flea from nowhere BUT there is a lot of man behind the man in this game. It's not bad but you do gradually zero in on the true baddy after running through a gauntlet of enemies.
All the games have Crystals and whatnot so far and the same graphics so I feel like they are all running together a bit in my mind. A lot of the side characters are fun and interesting and their dialogue updates as things change throughout the game so that creates a nice feeling of change and growth.
The gooey
There is not a whole lot to see here sadly. Spells cost MP and most characters run out fairly quickly. While Rydia and Rosa have a few hundred MP by the end of the game you often have to economise your spells. Its not worth casting Meteor for 99MP if you can only do it 6 times. Bio cost 20MP so I would spam that at groups and do maybe 1000 damage on average, more if one enemy left. Rosa has Curaja for 40MP I think but Curaga was 18MP so she would spam that. By the end of the game I had burned through most Ethers and Elixirs - I was never stuck for MP but the option to buy Ethers came very late in the game this time.
As for the guys - Attack is the only real option; Throw was less powerful and Shurikens are too expensive, late game and nerfed. Jump for Kain is pretty much all he can do, or Attack, he has 0MP. All the guests had interesting abilities but it all came back to the basics in the end. Except FuSoYa - he had every spell but like 180MP so I would get him to spam his ability, Regen, which was very slow but something.
There are no class changes or Jobs or anything (with one major Plot exception) so kind of a step back from FF3. No upgrades to any characters really unlike 1 and 2 and 3. They all get progressively stronger while I felt the game was easier, I did not game over until the very very end against the optional Dark Bahamut and all it took was me changing strategy for him. But I never felt like it was possible to hit on an OP strategy or build with any character that broke the game or anything.
So all in all a disappointment on this front, not a while lot to plan for at all. But I hear FF5 more than makes up for it...
Conclusion
So a slight upturn from FF3 but barely, FF4 had better music, characters and plot but weaker stuff like battling and mechanics.
I knew I liked it more early on but again just a tiny bit more than FF3.
Of the Pixel remasters:
FF1 = 60.5/100
FF2 = 62/100
FF3 = 58/100
FF4 = 59/100
Apparently 5 has amazing mechanics and job system and weaker plot, while 6 is lauded as the greatest title. I now have 5 in my library so might crack into it soon, am feeling a bit poorly. I actually have the 3D game as well but I can save all those versions for some other time if I want to.
The achievements were a tiny bit harder to get here, namely the obscure item drops. Took a bit of the postgame to collect those but only an hour or two. Also the level achievement creeps up every game, this game needed all 5 of the main party to be 70.
There was a particularly infamous series of drops namely the Hidden Summons for Rydia such as Goblin and Cockatrice. I had Goblin and Bomb but had to grind for the other 3 but it did not take that long at all thankfully. Another one to acquire the ultimate armour was toughter, getting the Pink Tail was apparently once a 1/64 chance but I got it in like 5 battles. I was happy with that as I sometimes have flashbacks about my grind versus the Adamantortoises etc. in FF13.
