a milestone in puppet theatre with a bunch of cool narrative design flourishes. the battle screen is just another stage for storytelling, and i know that tellah is a knowledgeable but frail old man because he knows all the spells but only has 90mp. unfortunately, while the storytelling is quite good, the story itself is not. the pacing is too brisk for its own good, characters sprint from beat to beat with few moments to breathe, and any tragedy or conflict is quickly defused and forgotten.

i initially had a lot of trouble adjusting to atb, partially due to the early game giving you weak and fiddly characters for narrative reasons. i slowly learned to appreciate the value of a well-organized inventory that's easy to navigate under pressure and the pleasure of recovering from suboptimal decisions. but in the second half when the party is more stable, i realized that most enemies don't require much moment-to-moment tactical adjustments, you can just learn their pattern and set an appropriate autobattle loop. combined with the game's linearity and set party composition, ff4 really feels like a precursor to ff13, which is a game that i love. at the very least it does the concept of "trick fights" a lot more elegantly than ff3, and the dungeons are well-designed to drain your resources between checkpoints.

i totally understand why the smooth fusion of narrative and gameplay makes this an all-time classic for many people. it makes me feel like an actor in a play, but that just means the weak script drags it down harder.