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.
