Lokathor
Based on watching others play this, I think the Golden Dome puzzle is, on balance, probably just a little bit too hard.
I remembered being pretty down on the game by the end of beating it way back in the day when the gamecube was current. Recently I tried to play it again with my brother and the game's play, pacing, and art direction were just miserable. We had to give up before even getting to the second dungeon.
This is the best of the "harvest moon"-like games. Movement feels good, combat is quick, farming has a good range of options, crafting has so many options you can barely keep track. It's all a great time, ready to eat up 10 million hours of your life as you work towards maxing out different parts of your farm.
It's fun to play a game from many years ago, but not having local co-op ultimately kills what could have been an amazing experience.
1993
Even after all these years, the Selenitic Age still sucks.
1994
This game's story and setting is super awesome, but the actual battling isn't the best, and also the inventory system is a joke gone too far.
Baldur's Gate 2 is totally awesome until an enemy wizard-type shows up and friks over your entire team with a Chaos spell or something like that. The main story, the side quests, the music and sounds, it's all great. If only the encounter design was as good as the writing.
With the pixel remasters released, this is no longer the best way to play FF 1 and 2, but in high school I had a blast playing this. The bonus dungeons in 1 were very fun, and the bonus story in 2 was a cool capstone to the main story of 2.
Technically my brother played this while I sad next to him and then we both did funny voices for all the characters. For podcasting purposes, you understand. Still, I think I've got a good sense of the game, and I'm confident in my "yeah it's good" rating.
The thing that I want to say the most is that all of the acoustic effects in this game are terribly done. None of the voices or foley ever sound right for their environment. I can hear it being wrong in every single scene.
2021
This is the perfect expression of everything they seemed to be trying to do with FF 1 through 3. As usual for a Pixel Remaster, the art is great and the music is phenomenal. The story is very good. FF4 continues to mix "normal" knights and wizards type fantasy with more fantastic characters, vehicles, and even locations so that things stay fresh and interesting all the way through. Completely solid game.
My time played is 21 hours, but that goes down quite a bit if you cut out the achievement hunting side stuff. At a guess, it might be more like 15h just to beat? Assuming you do use the boosts and such like I did.
I guess the one other thing to say about FF4 is that it'd be pretty cool if the FF16 voice cast did a run through of FF4 as well. Ben Starr as Cecil? Sign me up in an instant.
My time played is 21 hours, but that goes down quite a bit if you cut out the achievement hunting side stuff. At a guess, it might be more like 15h just to beat? Assuming you do use the boosts and such like I did.
I guess the one other thing to say about FF4 is that it'd be pretty cool if the FF16 voice cast did a run through of FF4 as well. Ben Starr as Cecil? Sign me up in an instant.
2023
This has the trappings of a cool game, like I can see how there's most of a cool game buried in here somewhere, but the interface isn't particularly great, and for me the final straw was having to wait on yet another download screen after it had already done like three previous cycles of downloading stuff.
This is really great. I love the setting, I love the writing. The card game is neat enough to be interesting despite having not-much player control over what happens. As a kid I read Animorphs all the time, and this is the video game that I never knew I wanted to see. It's a little slow to pick up, a little strange to get used to, but by the end of the first year I was loving it.
2021
This is a big step down from 1 and 2:
- Adding way more jobs than just 1 had and making them switchable seems good at first, but since you don't keep anything from your previous job when you switch around it always feels like you're basically throwing away experience points you've gained. It makes me almost resent the job switching stuff.
- There's too many spots where you have to put Mini or Toad on the whole party. It's just annoying extra steps to get around. You have put the status on everyone then step through a door and then remove it from everyone. Not great.
- Speaking of fiddly stuff, adding invisible items to areas changes the "get every item" achievements from being a fun side task (just check the map of each area, it's always pretty obvious) into being an annoying hunt. You have to go all over every single town, in every building, hunting everywhere. Even then you might not find it after a few minutes, and you have to go look on whatever website.
The new art looks great. The new music sounds great. No doubts there at all. Unfortunately, neither of those things can fix the fact that the story is still not particularly great. It's not like 1 and 2 were perfect, but 2 did a pretty good job for an NES game, and 3 doesn't keep up with that level of quality.
I'm not trying to say that FF3 isn't playable or anything, but it definitely slips from "amazing" down to "normal".
- Adding way more jobs than just 1 had and making them switchable seems good at first, but since you don't keep anything from your previous job when you switch around it always feels like you're basically throwing away experience points you've gained. It makes me almost resent the job switching stuff.
- There's too many spots where you have to put Mini or Toad on the whole party. It's just annoying extra steps to get around. You have put the status on everyone then step through a door and then remove it from everyone. Not great.
- Speaking of fiddly stuff, adding invisible items to areas changes the "get every item" achievements from being a fun side task (just check the map of each area, it's always pretty obvious) into being an annoying hunt. You have to go all over every single town, in every building, hunting everywhere. Even then you might not find it after a few minutes, and you have to go look on whatever website.
The new art looks great. The new music sounds great. No doubts there at all. Unfortunately, neither of those things can fix the fact that the story is still not particularly great. It's not like 1 and 2 were perfect, but 2 did a pretty good job for an NES game, and 3 doesn't keep up with that level of quality.
I'm not trying to say that FF3 isn't playable or anything, but it definitely slips from "amazing" down to "normal".
I played it for a 1 hour podcast ep and totally thought I'd get back to it, but then two weeks went by and I realized that I just don't think this cozy vibe stuff is high on my priority list these days. The game's writing was definitely fun, but I've just heaped too many super long games into my queue is all.