I only got halfway through this game so this will be brief and mostly complaints about WHY I only got halfway through this game.

Don’t let the OP movie fool you, the graphics aren’t beautiful like they are in that video. They really look like this:

But that’s fine, it’s an old school game, I’m not gonna picky about graphics, no what the problem with this game is the shitty garbage ass system. Infamous for their horrible Final Fantasy Steam ports, Square Enix STRIKES AGAIN with their masterpiece where the game fucking crashes every 10 minutes. I tried disabling steam cloud, I even stopped my broadcasting on Twitch, but no, ultimately I ragequit halfway through the game (right after we defeated the wind crystal boss). The final straw for me was when I decided to go into some abandoned castle (which I later found out was Edge the Ninja’s castle)  and ended up fighting some random durds that were really tough. I eventually did defeat them and they gave my party tons of exp……….UNTIL MY GAME FROZE DURING THE VICTORY FANFARE SCREEN AND I LOST EVERYTHING I JUST SPENT 10 MINUTES GETTING.

Needless to say, this is where I shut down my game, opened up some youtube videos with cut scenes and watch the usual rabtoons parody of FF4 in a nutshell.

I still have no clue as to why all the dead people came back to life, but I do regret not meeting the dwarf village folk because I had not reached that part of the game. I ended up finding someone’s actual explanation of the plot in detail based on the SNES version here which made me realize the dwarf leader was Jiott, similar to the Giott we got in FFXIV and that they got to fight Calca & Brina, the boss of the FFXIV dungeon the Antitower. I have no idea why Rydia came back as an adult, and I have no idea when/why there was a timeskip and I’m sure if I read some plot somewhere it will tell me but at this point the game has been basically ruined for me all because Square Enix hired a bunch of monkeys to code their Final Fantasy STEAM ports. But even so, in a way I’m glad I quit because the primitive system was beyond belief annoying as hell. A lot of the newer FF games know that ain’t nobody got time for this 30 year old kusoge bullshit, and will usually add things like turbo mode, or even OP mode so you can just 1 shot everything to see the story.

Here unfortunately you got nothing. You’re slogging through nonstop durd battles. sometimes you barely even have time to save or recover your party’s HP and MP.  One example is there’s characters in your party constantly dying as per MSQ but every time they die they take all their GEAR AND ITEMS WITH THEM. So you have to like strip them naked before proceeding with the quest or else you will just lose all those items. Another example is how when you clear a dungeon you have to make your way back and fight even more trash you just fought despite already defeating the boss of that dungeon WTF? Most MSQs will take you to the next area to proceed with the next scene so if you didn’t have a teleport skill or the emergency exit item you have to crawl back through the dungeon. Then there’s the complete unbalanced nonsense of how Tellah had almost no HP and despite me putting him in the BACK of the party what did the bosses do? Attack and one shot him first. Same for Rosa. WTF is the point of party formation if the bosses are going to just basically ignore it. So once I became Paladin with Cecil, first thing I had to do was cover Tellah or Rosa to make sure they weren’t instantly one shot by the boss. Unfortunately with Edward (btw whose Japanese name is Gilbert so it was really weird in cut scenes with JPN voices) I was still a dark knight, so he basically just died non stop every time. (　´_ゝ`)

Despite this, I was still willing to put up with a bullshit old system and trek through with guides on how to defeat bosses because usually if you followed them most stuff was pretty manageable. I even went around every town to try to upgrade all my gear before proceeding with the story JUST in case. But no, Square Enix doesn’t give a crap about updating their old games to go with all the system updates of both Windows and Android and it was just not meant to be. ┐(´д`)┌ Unfortunately I bought the sequel to this game and also FF3 and it’s too late to refund any of these games on steam…so I will be trying to them out and if they don’t crash like this one maybe I can write a real review next time.

Update 6/10/2021: I actually downloaded an emulator and got a bunch of codes to give me 9999 hp, max level unlimited gil etc – the kind of stuff FF9 basically let you do legitimately knowing that people don’t wanna slog through these geriatric gaming systems. I’m glad I did because I got to basically then focus on the story and funny dialogue and not care about battles or whatever other nonsense the game had. Unfortunately because I didn’t grind out whatever special items you needed the last boss fight with Zeromus was weirdly hard and I literally only won because Kaine would just jump up into the ceiling and pretty much avoid every single boss buff/debuff/attack so wheneveryone was dead, Kaine just kept doing his jump thing and basically solo killed the boss on his own. 😂😂😂

And now some parting words from my husband who finished the game on Android a million years ago before all the updates killed it:

I played this game maybe…10 years ago when the Android version came out (which is the same as the Steam port, which is the same as the DS port). I didn’t have as much trouble with it, but that’s entirely because the Android version wasn’t crashing nonstop like this one was. The other reason was that I was pretty much doing everything exactly as the walkthroughs explained. Now this is a pretty straightforward game, so even though it’s still at its heart a 30 year old game with all the primitive elements that that would entail, you can pretty much always figure out what you’re supposed to do.

The problem though was “what you’re supposed to do” is only on a really top level. So I’ll know things like “okay, I should go to the antlion’s den to get a sand pearl to cure Rosa” (and that there’s pretty much only one direction I can go in so I basically can’t miss it), you end up with so much frustrating trial and error along the way without a guide. For example in our playthrough this time, we got almost instantly oneshot by the boss with the earth crystal, then in one second attempt at him we killed it in like, two hits. We followed the guide on the Magus Sisters and completely locked them down so they couldn’t attack and we were at max HP the whole time.

But we didn’t do the kind of stuff that normally I would call powergaming, but in any modern game would be built in because it’s just a smart idea. It’s stupid for example that when characters die scripted deaths or leave the party you don’t get their stuff back. This encourages you of course to strip them ahead of time…which you wouldn’t know to do on your own. Or new characters will enter your party with garbage gear, but you might not think to immediately leave whatever you’re doing to check every town again to try to outfit them with something usable. Again, just basic QOL stuff that’s been ironed out in the decades since.

When we played FFVIII and FFIX recently, we were so glad that they threw in all those cheat mode functions. The point wasn’t because it turned the games into VNs, but because the battle and leveling systems in these games was so tedious and unfun. It wasn’t really combat per se that was the problem, since the more modern games like FFXII and the FFXIII series were basically fine. Instead it was all the little things that weren’t there, like auto-healing after battles reducing the time going back to rest at inns or the need to grind to circumvent these annoyances.

The reason this stuff matters is because it takes your head out of the game. Instead of caring about the story, or (if you’re a sicko) caring about optimizing your party, you’re sitting there stewing about all the dumb shit the game forced you to do that you wish wasn’t there. Then again, even if they cleaned up the systems you’d proably instead by raging about the dumb story stuff, like “OH BOY, MIND CONTROLLED INTO GIVING UP THE CRYSTALS YET AGAIN!” (and I should clarify “dumb story stuff” was things like the characters doing dumb stuff to move the plot along, not like how I still have no idea wtf happened in the entire FFXIII trilogy.)

And as usual: