You spoony bard!

[vovat]

I played a little of Final Fantasy IV Advance last night, and made it as far as Mount Ordeals. That means that Edward, the most useless character in the game, is no longer in my party. Most of what I've played so far has been fairly straightforward, and I remember it quite well (although it did take me a while to remember how the front and back rows worked). I can remember reading over the game review in Nintendo Power many times before actually getting to play it, so I knew the strategies for fighting the Mist Dragon and the Mom Bomb pretty much by heart. I had loved the original FF, and my brother and I frequently checked at the drugstore where we used to rent video games to see if they had FF2 (which is what they were calling FF4 at the time, because they didn't want us Americans to know that we were missing out on two earlier games), but they never did. We actually found FF6 (known then as FF3, because...well, you get the idea) first, and by the time my brother actually bought FF4, it seemed somewhat primitive by comparison. Still a fun game, though.

In most respects, the Advance version seems to be the same as the Super NES one, although there are now headshots shown when significant characters are speaking. The translation is definitely better as well (I tend to think the SNES translation was done by someone who didn't speak either English or Japanese as a first language), and there appears to be a higher character limit in the names of things, so some aspects now have the longer names that they were probably supposed to have in the first place: "Octomammoth" instead of "Octomamm," "Scarmiglione" instead of "Milon," "Meteor" instead of "Meteo," etc. I haven't gotten to the part where Cecil introduces Tellah as "Edward's father," but I'm hoping they fixed that as well.

Comments

[petie-s.livejournal.com]

I thought Ted Woolsey (same translator as FF3/6 and nearly every other Square SNES game) did the translation. Which doesn't excuse that fact that, you're right, it's ridiculous.

The GBA version gets tough near the end. Pretty much, once you land on the Moon, get ready for beatdowns. And the Cave of Monsters wasn't much better, at least the Leviathan/Asura battle.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I knew that Woolsey did the translation, but it seems worse than his other ones, which aren't always so great themselves. (I still have no idea what "loaded for bear" is supposed to mean.)

I know the SNES FF2 was the "easytype" version, but I'm not sure about the GBA one. It hasn't been very hard as of yet, but I haven't played that far into the game.

[petie-s.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's the Japanese "gonna kill you" version, but I did notice it getting a bit tougher later on. But yeah, the first half is as easy as the SNES version.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I kind of have to wonder why Japanese games tend to be harder (see also the two totally different games called "Super Mario Bros. 2"). Are they really that much better at playing them, or do they just get frustrated less easily?

[petie-s.livejournal.com]

I tend to think it's the latter, especially for RPGs. RPGs aren't hard as much as they're a mix of finding the right mix of leveling and some simple strategy. I suppose there's also some element of patience.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's probably true. Usually, if you level up enough, you can get through just about anything in an RPG. It's tedious, but not really HARD per se.