MMBN: I started playing this, beat a couple bosses while trying to ignore the plot as much as possible, etc. but then I got through the train station and found some green haired girl's food stand or whatever and suddenly all the enemies in there are -really hard.- What's the deal, game? You went from "real easy, don't even worry about anything" to "okay all the enemies here will obliterate you if your play is less than perfect" in like two seconds, and it's not like I'm sequence breaking.
FM4: I mentioned before that I finished this, and I did, but I didn't really comment on it so I'm going to. Combat system was fun times for me, ranking pretty high up there as SRPGs go in my opinion. Granted, it's mainly up against the likes of FEs and the OG games I played, but I'm pretty sure I liked the system here a lot better than either of those. Aside from just being fun to play, the game is also willing to make you pay attention and play well, and if you don't then it has no problems with -really- messing you up, especially on Darril's path. Darril's got some hard missions; I have a tendency to throw caution to the wind and charge right on in, and there were certainly times when my reward for this behavior was a bunch of Galbados rockets nearly obliterating my team (at great expense, since you pay a maintenance cost) and forcing me to scrape together a win with a few half-destroyed mechs being held together by Anti-Break (which leaves a part alive and at 1 HP when it normally would have died) and some desperate healing. It's never cheap difficulty, and the Battle Simulator means you can always build yourself up more and acquire more money/EP if you want (unlike, say, FE7), but it was nice to feel threatened by an RPG, really. Durandal side had some of that action going on too (I had to scrape through the floating megabase mission with just my missilers surviving, due to overextending myself) but once your Elsa/Latona war machine is up and running and everybody's got offensive links to Latona, it's a matter of putting Latona up next to the thing you want to kill and you can have it dead -that same round- with no questions asked.
Plot wasn't particularly heavy on either side. The Durandal is a bunch of altruists who are trying to stop a war between international powers that's been secretly set up by a third party, there isn't a terrible amount interesting about them either in plot or character backgrounds really but that's looking at it too coldly. Potential Hollywood drama situations are pretty much averted completely (see Latona; it looks for a second like the fact that she's Zaftran is going to matter, but then she says "No, it doesn't matter" and it really doesn't), there's no obligatory romance going on or anything, but the interactions have their moments and they're pretty likable anyway. I blame the VA, which is awesome throughout. The U.C.S. is largely the same story, there's no incredibly deep characterization going on but they're some cool dudes and their voices carry them. Plus they've got a somewhat less RPG-ish premise, which is that they're deserters trying to smuggle millions of dollars out of their country, and while they're noble enough and we all know they're gonna turn out to have hearts of gold at some point they also don't stop wanting to be millionaires off this ill-gotten loot. The villain cast is a joke, it is uniformly jocular, but I didn't really care.
Basically it's got great gameplay, really, it lets you tweak with a whole bunch of stuff and the combat is a bunch of fun just because of the Link system, and the cast is strangely awesome thanks to some real solid voice acting. Good times all around. We should go ahead and rank it! Elsa for Heavy! She's got 50%+ chance of flat-out evading anything regardless of your accuracy (unless you've got perfect accuracy), she resists a lot of status, high speed, has the AP to attack twice and counter twice, eats things alive with Double Shot, and in-game she's always got a defense link set to Beck's Salvage so in the DL she should be autorevived twice!!
