Thoughts on Final Fantasy IV

The main discussion point of FF4 has to be the active time battle, right? I find it frustrating here in 2022. The JRPGs I play have the more traditional structure, where everyone waits for their turn and you’re not under a time constraint to make your decision. But I see the appeal and the intention: It creates a stressful environment and makes the player’s decisions feel more important. Each moment matters more, because each moment is real. The battle unfolds right before your eyes.

This allows for some really interesting boss battles. You end up having to wait until the perfect moment, instead of just battering the bosses over and over again until they just die. That being said, I did make the game pause when I was in item and spell menus, because I think there are just way too many objects within these menus and I didn’t feel like memorizing the location of each.

It took me much longer to finish this game, though, but that was because I got distracted by other games, alas. I also don’t have as many notes taken for this one as the other ones.

Anyways, the story. It’s kinda funny seeing all the modern tropes of JRPG storytelling being used in these early FF games. I guess the tropes all had to start somewhere?

I’m rambling, this is not an essay, don’t start reading this expecting an essay, all right?

I liked some of the boss fights in this, particularly the gimmicky ones. There was one boss that required you to cast Reflect on her, so that when she tried to heal herself, she’d heal you. The same boss also would cast a total-party-kill spell if you attacked her at all during combat. You can technically survive this attack, so what you have to do is do as much damage as you can, wait for her to make her attack, survive it, cast Reflect on her, heal your team, rinse and repeat.

Another boss fight I enjoyed was the fight at the CPU of the Giant. There you fight the CPU, Defense Unit, and the Attack Unit. Normally, you would want to kill the two smaller enemies and then focus on the big guy. Except, if you do that, the big guy starts casting one-hit-KO spells. Instead, what you have to do is to kill the Defense Unit first, then the big guy, and then the Attack Unit. This way, the big guy can never cast its OHKOs, Defense Unit wastes its heals, and the Attack Unit’s spells can easily be outhealed.

For FF5, I’m planning on analyzing each boss fight — provided that it’s actually interesting and has cool mechanics. Will see how that goes.