Final Fantasy 4 heroes of Light: I fought the final boss 4 times, and every time my losses were due to some random factor, be it "he used Black Hole two turns in a row...no, we don't care if there's literally no way to defend against this, and it fucks you over!", or in the very last run that was looking good for a while...
"Oh, that character is now absorbing an element? I thought she was nulling it! I GUESS I CAN HIT HER WITH A SECONDARY STATUS ON THIS MOVE NOW
" which led to a bunch of shit that resulted. Yes, that's right; the game PUNISHES you from upgrading from "Null Element" to "Absorb." Why does it work this way? Because the game decides that Nulling = Missing, instead of the usual "0 damage"...
...which is something Dragon Quest games do. You know, Dragon Quest games have a "The move misses!" indicator if you do 0 damage, leading to things like Metal Babbles having seemingly higher evade than they really do (which is more just them having really high defense, and the game treats 0 damage and misses the same.) Yeah, this game seems to do the same, though often when you can't overcome defense, its "do 1 damage" but alas.
...this game is seriously a Dragon Quest that was changed to Final Fantasy mid-development and given an FF paint job and it shows. Let me count the ways...
-Fetch Quest Based plot
-Limited Inventory divided among PCs (instead of just a universal one)
-Clunky Menus
-Shitty Interface
-Space Flea from Nowhere Final Boss whose basically just "INCARNATION OF EVIL!!!" whose also the main villain, with no herald figure (like, say, Golbez) to at least play the role of a consistent antagonist, for at least SOME Good Guy vs. Bad Guy interaction
-Speaking of which, an army of one scene wonder henchman who pretend to have a lot of plot but actually don't, who exist to just have boss fights (at least the FF1 Fiends had BACKSTORY. That's more than these losers can say)
-Games refusal to tell you a shit load of hidden stats and factors.
I could go on, but the game is a Dragon Quest, not a Final Fantasy. Anyone who says "its a great way to capture old school RPGs!" has issues, because no, it illustrates like every problem that existed in the NES era that we've moved on from...FOR A GOOD REASON.
And to make matters worse, who in god's name thought making you unable to target manually was a good idea? The AP system is at least unique for strategy, but strategy is mitigated when you don't have full control of your PCs. And bosses are clearly designed with randomized AI too, outside of HP triggers. You can go through an entire fight, lose at the very end, prepare to avoid that scenario, only to see him whip out a move he didn't have the previous fight COMPLETELY out of nowhere at the beginning of the fight. And the way later fights are structured, you can get screwed on turn 1, if you don't do things exactly.
The game does have a Job system which is...alright, though kind of misses one of the fun factors of the Job system (ability to mix and match skill sets), without any sort of compensation factor (FFX-2, for example, made up for it by letting you swap jobs mid-battle, allowing you for a different kind of variety with the system.) The job system is poorly executed in that the balance is kind of blech, and at times it feels like you outright need certain jobs to beat certain bosses. Not to mention, again, the game doesn't tell you all significant factors for a job, like apparently all jobs have hidden weapon and magic affinities like, say, Suikoden 2/4 Rune affinities. So you can equip someone with a bad-ass sword and they'd have high strength, but you'd see them do shitty damage and question why.
See, here's another problem with the system are those affinities. In most other job systems (FF3/5/T most specifically), the game just says can you equip y/n? If you can equip a Sword, you're good with swords, and now its your stats that determine the rest (ie a Blue Mage can use a Sword, but obviously a Knight does it better because of much higher strength), if you can't, then you can't use a Sword unless you equip a skill that lets it. Pretty logical stuff! Because I mentioned it earlier, FFX-2 just side steps the entire equipment issue by not having conventional equips outside of accessories, so you never have to worry about that (which is also an acceptable way of handling the scenario.) Here, though, your Black Mage can use a Sword just like your Bandit can, but there's no way you'd know the Bandit had higher affinity in it, and you'd just assume he was doing more damage because of much higher strength. So when your Ranger starts doing less than Bandit despite the strength scores with the same weapon, you suddenly scratch your head. Ok, the game does tell you for SPECIFIC JOBS that they're "Good with this weapon!", but that to me is the game's way of saying "They have an S rank in that weapon, it is special, USE IT!"
For a different kind of flaw...
The game lacks a central main character, and is clearly an ensemble (the name is kind of not subtle about that.) This isn't a flaw in and of itself, but the way its handled is and I'll get to why. See, like FF6, FF8, FF9, and FF13, there's constant character splits and you're forced to deal with only some characters for the first half of the game.
At first, this isn't too bad when you have only Brandt and Yunita after Jusqua and Aire leave early, because shortly afterwords, you get a Temp PC. Ok, cool, if the game is handing me temps to fill in empty gaps, I can live with a party split, as my team won't feel as hindered...
...the problem is its not consistent about this. After your first temp leaves, you don't get another until a few hours later when one of your PCs is crippled by a hex (not that the stat loss is notable enough at this point) and you only get 2 more Temps, one of whom joins for not even a full dungeon, so often you're left with only 2 PC teams and in a game that keeps introducing jobs fast, it doesn't really let you get a good chance to experiment when you only have 2 PCs.
But the fail doesn't end there. See, the game doesn't balance the PCs properly either. I don't mean stat wise, I mean EXP wise. You get Brandt and Yunita used for a while...ok, then Jusqua and Aire get to be used, so they catch up...fair. Its not too bad as characters are dealing with different areas allowing for enemies to be balanced properly around lower leveled characters catching up...
...that is until late in the first half of the game. Brandt is split from his ally just as an excuse for a cheap plot device, so he's gotta go solo for a little while. This isn't too bad because Brandt has been used for some time now, he's leveled up fine, with up to date equipment, so he can deal the updated enemies solo well enough if set up fine...
Then Jusqua decides to leave his teamate for NO GOOD REASON, and you haven't been using him for a while, so he's both behind on equipment with no chance to catch him up UNLESS you knew this scenario was coming ahead of time and put stuff in storage, and he's underleveled, and he's basically about to fight the exact same enemies Brandt fought...solo. So enemies yo were cruising through 5 minutes ago are now kicking your ass and there's nothing you can do about it...
...did I mention that "run" is a Job skill? Because it is, on one of the worse Jobs in the game (Wayfarer, your first Non-Jobless Job.) Uh, yeah, "Run" being a Job skill fails for obvious reasons since its a BASIC ABILITY in games not FF3o. No, I don't mean "Escape", as in "100% Run" like Tidus and Zidane's Flee, or what the FF5 Thief gets, I mean GENERIC RUNNING. You get Escape too, and that's fine as a Job skill! BUT RUN SHOULD BE A BASIC FUNDAMENTAL "ATTEMPT TO GET OUT OF A STICKY SITUATION!" ability. FINAL FANTASY 1 GOT THIS RIGHT THIS GAME HAS NO EXCUSE!!!
Honestly, I could go on and its really hard to think of anything this game does right. Cool boss designs are smacked by the stupid randomness of the system (random variance is all over the place), neat concepts are hit by Dragon Quest level polish, etc.
What's the game getting? I'm angry enough at it to give it a 2/10, but that might be a bit harsh, but its not getting above 3/10, that's for sure. Yeah, the game is just bad, and "IT REALLY CAPTURES OLD SCHOOL STYLE GAMING GREAT!!!" is true in that "NES RPGs were shit. So glad we're out of that era."
