Whoa now, take that back. FFXII is IMO the hardest FF game, at least when it came out. Iāve played through both the original and the āupdatedā versions and both have you frequently dying to even regular enemies, status effects galore and fighting most bosses without a strategy will get you killed. Get used to have āif dead > phoenix downā gambit on, because youāll need it. I never even bothered with the optional superbosses, they were way out of my league. FFX, on the other hand, I wiped the floor with every challenge boss in the game without any trouble.
The gambit system removed the need to constantly fuss with basic combat mechanics so you could focus on overall strategy, so the designs got super tight with little room for error. Plus, on easy enemies its no less engaging that auto-battle or tappa-tappa-tappa on the A button until the battleās over. Itās also probably the most mechanically dense game of the series, excepting maybe Lightning Returns.
If the game is to become difficult, my prediction is that the lack of flexibility is going to backfire eventually.
So far this game is much less customizable than the Famicom entries. Weāre basically handed out prebuilt characters with very few opportunities for customization.
The way the charactersā special skills tie the gameplay with the lore and background story is quite fun, but in the end many of these skills are fairly lackluster from a pure gameplay perspective, either because theyāre underpowered or unreliable.
In most RPGs if I hit a difficulty wall I will generally try to tweak my loadout and use a different strategy, but in FF4 so far I only ever see Iāve way to play each character with only one or two viable actions at any moment, the rest being padding in the menus.
The game never really becomes difficult, and itās never mean. Like i said before, there are eventually battles where you have to pay attention to basic FF tactics like elements and buffs, plus boss specific mechanics. They make up for how easy it is to res by killing you way more often. They make bosses harder because they know you are fully healed and you just saved.
Its the hardest ff so far, sometimes, but only because I killed every previous final boss with autobattle, and I canāt autobattle most bosses in this one. Thereās no builds, so every fight comes down to brass tacks. So its not punishing, and its not big brain tactics, you just have to pay basic attention to the tools youāre given and maybe retry a boss because you didnāt know its trick.
I donāt know if this counts as a spoiler, but I think ādifferent loadoutsā in this case would be switching characters.
I donāt know why, but I just assumed you had played the game before this.
I disagree with this so much! It really will depend on what version you play, and I obviously have no idea how they rebalanced the pixel remaster version, but in the PS1 version I found the endgame to be brutal. I donāt remember the details at this point, so itās probably not fair for me to call it āmeanā, but it was not a fun experience at the time. Donāt get me wrong, I still really enjoyed the game overall, but I am hoping that things go a little more smoothly this time around.
Do you never get more than 5 characters at a time and get to choose which party members are active? Itās been a long time since Iāve played FF4.
Nah, Iāve never played FF3. It wasnāt available on PS1 when I played through the other original NES and SNES games, and at this point in my life I wasnāt inclined to play the original three, which is why I didnāt join the club until now.
That reminds me of when I was fighting the optional super boss in FF9. All my party members were down except one, and I wanted to avoid the Phoenix Down death spiral, so I just did one last attack out of desperation, and somehow it defeated the boss. Sadly no record feature on the PS2 like there is now on PS5, so I canāt look back and see exactly how it played out.
I have played the game before, but so long ago and at a period where I was playing so many games (and so many JRPGs in particular) that I barely remember anything. In particular I keep mixing up this game and 5 in my mindā¦
Thatās also why Iām basically ignoring what @JupiterJesus is desperately trying to tell me about the difficulty curve, I prefer to idly speculate and see for myself as we progress through the game.
Bit late playing this week, since last weekend ended up being busier than I expected, and what time I did have, I used for playing Earthbound/Mother 2 (Iām so far behind on that club itās not even funnyā¦)
Week 2
Not that much to comment on, other than that so far, itās just as fun a game as I remember it being! I do have to defend Gilbert (why did the English version change his name to Edward? Such a weird changeā¦) a bit - both the Sing command and the harp we got in the Antlion den were at least occasionally confusing or putting the enemy to sleep for me. So he wasnāt totally uselessā¦
I actually love the ATB system. A large part of that may be nostalgia, since it was my intro to RPG battles, but the full party/enemy turn systems from 1-3 was a definite step back, and I havenāt actually played any of the FF games after 7, so I donāt know anything about the systems in later entries. And I hate real time, non-turn based combat in games. My reflexes just arenāt good enough for themā¦
One simple reason: playable characters are limited to six characters for their names.
More than enough to make longish names in kana, but Gilbert would be just one letter too longā¦ So they changed it to Edward because āGilberā is not an English name.
Also, my hypothesis, with the reveal that heās a prince, āPrince Edwardā immediately sounds more āroyalā to a western ear