Final Fantasy IV - Chapter Eleven
We continued travelling deeper and deeper into the moon, collecting more ultimate weapons and quality armour like Masamune and Ribbbons. Along the way I had to fight three more bosses: Plague Horror, Ogopogo and a pair of Lunasaurs. Frankly though, having fought Dark Bahamut before, these were a walk in the park.
Plague Horror tries to cheese you by casting Doom on your whole party immediately, which could be very bad if you're too underlevelled. I was not though, so it didn't have the HP to last out the counter and was quickly destroyed by me throwing my best attacks at it. Ogopogo was a weird Leviathan clone and did some heavy damage with Deluge, but Rosa was able to heal that damage up as fast as I was taking it. Meanwhile the big snake was getting repeatedly Megaflared by Rydia's Bahamut summon. The Lunasaurs were the weakest of the bosses, but they were kind of annoying because they cast Reflect which, once again, put my best damage out the fight. It didn't matter that much though really, the others in the party were more than enough for them.
The next part, which actually came after Ogopogo, was where things actually got hard. While there were no bosses in this section, it was a long walk through the moon's innermost levels with resources rapidly depleting and enemies consisting primarily of behemoths and red dragons to fight through. It was pretty difficult to make it through with Cecil, Rosa and even Edge being out of MP and Rydia barely keeping hers going with Osmose. On top of that, I was running out of items too. But my options were to press on towards what I hoped would be another heal/save point or to backtrack through the gauntlet to the last one. I kept pushing my luck.
Eventually, we reached the end of the dungeon where Fusoya and Golbez were fighting Zemus. They hit him with all their best spells, finishing him off with a double Meteor. But this wasn't even his final form. A twisted monstrosity, Zeromus, the embodiment of his rage and hatred emerged and easily defeated them, taking out the party as well. Back on Earth, the parties allies prayed for them in Mysidea, saving their lives (and also Golbez and Fusoya's) and fully recovering their HP and MP.
Then the fight was on with Cecil using a crystal given to him by Golbez to reveal Zeromus' true (and damagable form). The actual fight from there was surprisingly easy when I compare it to the likes of Exdeath and Kefka. It was leagues easier than the bullshit that is Necron. This fight was more in line with Jecht's difficulty level, if not easier. It was a lot of fun though. Zeromus bombards the party with powerful moves like Flare and Big Bang and has a lot of hitpoints. This meant that the biggest challenge was keeping my glass cannons - Rydia and Edge - standing so they could make ample use of Bahamut and fuma shurikens. Kain and Cecil were also doing solid damage with their holy weapons and were bulky enough to not be at risk of dropping. Rosa's main role defaulted to healing and bring Edge and Rydia back up a few times. This was unfortunate though because, although it was risky because of the retaliation, her Holy spell would (like Edge's shurikens) always deal the max 9999 damage to Zeromous. In the end, it was Kain who scored the final blow with a Jump.
This was definitely a quintessential, classic Final Fantasy experience. I could see the precursory building blocks for the elements that would make later games like VI, IX and X as amazing as they are. The story wasn't groundbreaking in any way, but it was very fun (and very FF) and well-written. The execution of that story did leave a bit to be desired in places though. During the first half of the game, the pacing was a mess and characters weren't given the room to grow and develop in ways that made me actually care. This got much better as the game progressed, but by then a problem with repetitive plot elements (noble sacrifices, death fake outs and mind control fuckery) had developed. I think that if this game was revisited in the modern day and some time spent on the pacing so characters could develop properly, it could potentially rival VI or IX, but as it is, it doesn't quite hit that level.
What's weird to me though, is that despite all the great foundations this game set for the future, FFV is so radically different and the writing is so much worse. Where IV definitely has issues, the plot was still compelling and the characters were too, despite there being a large cast dropping in and out of the game. Then in V, you have five protagonist characters, and of those only two have any personality and one drops off significantly as the game goes on. I feel like VI is much more of a successor to IV as it also has a very extensive cast of characters that drop in and out of the narrative but are almost all much more complex and compelling.
That's enough about FFV and VI though. Gameplay-wise, IV is typical FF fair. It's the usual turn-based ATB (although the first to use the ATB I think) with characters with set classes/roles/abilities. Dungeons were usually nice enough to navigate, although there's some secret passage shenanigans that take some working out in some latter ones which I'm not sure how to feel about. What was not fun to navigate though, was the overworld. Specifically surface Earth's - the moon and Underworld were fine. This is because, despite being a pretty empty map, it is very large without much variation. Furthermore, the various location on said map are weirdly spaced out and sometimes the methods used to traverse them are clunky (looking at you hover craft). Cid's cutscenes went on way too long also. The sidequests in this FF were a lot better than I've come to expect though which is worth noting.
Musically the soundtrack was nice, but not memorable. It complemented the game and its moods perfectly, but none of it really stood out to me as particularly incredible to listen to and just enjoy as music. That's fine, but later titles definitely upped their game here. Visually I was in a similar boat. I played the PSP version, which definitely cleared up and refined the original visuals, but it didn't really do anything overly impressive beyond that and none of the character designs are particularly great, although not bad by any means either. The exception here is the Giant of Babil cutscene which I thought was excellent.
Over all, FFIV was a really interesting experience for me. I absolutely love Final Fantasy VI, IX and X (and XIV is slowly growing on me) and IV showed me the precursor where a lot of what makes me adore those games was starting to develop. It's a bit weird that V ignored much of that and they didn't pick it back up until VI, but whatever. There was definitely a lot of flaws, especially when I look at the writing from a technical perspective, but there's a lot to like about Final Fantasy IV too and I'm glad I played it. I'm looking forward to exploring more of the franchise as this challenge continues, but it might be a while before I feel like braving the After Years.
Story: 7/10
Visuals: 7/10
Soundtrack: 7/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Total Score: 28/40