Well I finally finished FFIV last night. After finishing the game I went to gametrailers.com to watch the video on it. And I remember why it looked familiar. Its because this FF actually came to the US but it was titled Final Fantasy II which is why I think I may have either played it before or at the very least seen someone else play it.
This game was actually pretty tough. Now I don't mind grinding to level up my characters but usually at a certain point in most games I feel like my guys should be overpowered for awhile. But no matter how much I leveled I felt like I was always behind the 8-ball when it came to battles. So I actually spent a few days just grinding to level my characters. Thankfully the DS version has an auto-battle feature which made it much easier but still time consuming.
Another thing that made it tough was the fact that the party was constantly changing. And by that I mean as the story progressed I would lose characters and gain new ones. So going to back to the grinding issue most of that grinding would be rendered mute if the characters I was leveling would not be there later. So it made grinding frustrating. I do admit it made for an interesting story.
So basically I had a really strong main character (the only one I actually had through the entire game) and pretty strong end game characters. Thankfully there wasn't some big surprise party change at the very end. But in the last dungeon even with my high level characters it felt like I had a very good chance to die. But it was the last dungeon so I guess I should have expected that.
And there was one more thing I had a problem with but I didn't know this until I looked up some info on some rare item I had picked up. I feel that as long as you explore all parts of dungeons or whatever the fighting area is you should be able to get most of the things the game has to offer. I found out there are things in the game that you can only get once and if you miss them there is no going back to get them. Or as I call it the Final Fantasy X2 boondoggle.
In Final Fantasy X2 in order to get the 100% best ending you have to do everything in the game exactly as the developers intended it to be done. Now if this just meant exploring all the dungeons and areas throughly I can understand that. But as an example of what is wrong with Final Fantasy X2 you get a percent for sleeping at the beginning and sometimes the end of chapters. Now in pretty much every other RPG sleeping is only used to replenish health and magic. Making it a deal breaker for getting the 100% is very annoying.
In FFIV there are certain things that I missed because I didn't do a certain thing at a very specific moment and I would have no way of getting them. Now I was as through as I could be without wasting useless amounts of time however I still missed things that would have been very useful. For example 1 of the party member has a certain power and when they leave the party you will find this power. Now what is not so obvious is if you add more powers to this character before they leave you get 2 additional powers back when they leave the party. And these 2 additional powers from what I read are insanely good. Now the powers I speak of are one time use only. So if you can only add the specific power to one character. So why would I use the power on a character that more then likely would not be in my party in the future. So thats an example of things that were not obvious.
But with all that I still finished the game. And it did have a really good story. But I'm glad I am finally done with it. On to V.
