Review of Final Fantasy (4)

Final Fantasy IV
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I have only played the Playstation release of this game, FF4.
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Allows all playable characters to be named.
Story progression might get frustrating at times.
NPCs give increasingly more vague instructions as the story continues.
Side quests are extremely confusing.
The quality of the story is very good for such an old game. It is basically top tier anime story like Dragon Ball or Naruto TV series.

Worth noting that this game has my favorite version of Cid, a character name found in most/all FF games. The main character of the game is Cecil. He cycles through many playable characters as combat party members, none of which if I recall are guest combat party members. However, the game will not allow excess combat party members, so the game comes up with ridiculous story contrivances to kick characters out of the party and players are trained to be skeptical of whether playable characters are actually gone forever or will make a return.

There are many things that occurred in this game that can be plainly seen as something that later games were inspired by. But I cannot go into too much detail without spoiling things for the player. Many of the newer games that I've played have similar story components to those in this game. It's also clear that this game got some inspiration from older literature such as the bible as many FF games have.

Each character is their own flavor of a particular class of fighter. There are a lot of classes of fighters here. We have Dark Knight, Dragoon/Lancer, Red Mage, Summoner, White Mage, Bard, Engineer/Mechanic, Monk, Paladin, Ninja, and that's about all I can remember. Most of these classes are represented by only one character. Many weapons and armor pieces can be used by more than one class.

Battle progression is very linear other than while collecting battle items and equipment. Characters level up with experience gained from battle, and gaining experience can be very, very tedious, especially towards the end of the game. Many easy battles are ridiculously lengthy for no good reason. FF7 and other FF games fixed this kind of problem by introducing the preemptive materia among other things which allow the players to deny the opponents to waste valuable battle time attacking uselessly. Often, enemy monsters in this game would get 6 attacks or so in before the player's combat party would get to take any action, which was profoundly frustrating if all the enemies were weak anyway because it made it feel like runnning away was a better use of time. To make matters worse, many dungeons required an incredibly high amount of going in and coming back out because of how expensive and how necessary healing was. Without White/Red Mages, the game was essentially impossible. This meant bringing around revival items for the mages to ensure that you don't get a game over, which isn't a big deal... but the MP gain per level was not meaningful and the grind really showed throughout the game.

Many of the Boss Fights were interesting and fun, and even with low levels, they could be taken down. However, the dungeon progression itself was annoying at times due to easily running out of MP. Another problem the game had was getting lost on the globe. I never got more lost on a FF globe, or in any RPG's map for that matter than I have on this game. Trying to figure out which shops sold which items was also a nightmare, and even when I thought I knew the answer to which shop sold a certain item that I wanted to buy, there was no guarantee that I could quickly find the town that the shop was in.

Chocobos were simple, interesting, useful, and cute.

Now that I've played this game and many of the other FF games,
 I would say my ranking of FF games for overall fun factor is:
Best
8
13p3
7
9
13p1
1
13p2
10p1
10p2
4
2
Worst

If we're ranking them purely by story appeal, then the ranking becomes:
Best
13p3
9
4
7
2
1
10p2
13p1
10p1
13p2
8
Worst

If we rank them only on their exploring satisfaction level, then the ranks are:
Best
8
7
9
13p3
1
2
13p2
13p1
10p1
10p2
4
Worst

Considering that FF4 managed to get dead last on exploring satisfaction level, that helps explain why it's rated so low on the overall fun factor for me.

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If you would like to see me play the game, you can visit this address https://www.twitch.tv/collections/yR66MHVMshWUAw which is for the collection of videos of me playing the game on stream for the first time.