My buddy and I are starting it tonight.

[Bastian]

I have already played it (two or three years ago? Whenever the GBA version was released), but he only plays multiplayer games.

So, to get him to play this, I had to trick my laptop into accepting gamepad imputs from both gamepads as if they are gamepad #1. A lot of work, but it will be worth it.

Has anyone else played it recently?

[RedPouch]

I have already played it (two or three years ago? Whenever the GBA version was released), but he only plays multiplayer games.

So, to get him to play this, I had to trick my laptop into accepting gamepad imputs from both gamepads as if they are gamepad #1. A lot of work, but it will be worth it.

Has anyone else played it recently?
Actually yes, I ended up playing it a couple months ago or so. The GBA version of this game is significantly easier than the NES version.

[Bastian]

Err, never mind. He got the flu. After all that hard work tricking it into being multiplayer. Maybe next week.

I've never played NES version, but I DID play the NES version of III before I played the DS version, and was surprised at how much easier the DS version was when I got to it. Also, I heard that the Japanese version of IV was much harder than the SNES version we got here.

[RedPouch]

Err, never mind. He got the flu. After all that hard work tricking it into being multiplayer. Maybe next week.

I've never played NES version, but I DID play the NES version of III before I played the DS version, and was surprised at how much easier the DS version was when I got to it. Also, I heard that the Japanese version of IV was much harder than the SNES version we got here.
That's what I heard as well. Supposedly, it wasn't really that much harder than the SNES version we got. Also, both games are supposed to be inferior to the DS version of FF IV in terms of difficulty. I've played both the DS version of the game and the SNES version, and I can definitely say that the SNES "FF II" was easier, but I can't remember by how much since I haven't played that game in ages. I'm told that the SNES version of it was a joke though, and I'm not really inclined to disagree. However, FF IV wasn't terribly difficult either, so it's not really a huge deal.

[Roogle]

I really like the idea of tricking the laptop to detect inputs from both controllers. That sounds like it would be a lot of fun and add a lot of value to playing through Final Fantasy games with a friend.

In the past, I have played Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI with a few friends. You can get a lot of replay values out of certain games especially if the fan communities surrounding those games have made patches to adjust certain aspects of the game like difficulty.

I played Final Fantasy on the Gameboy Advance very recently and it had a noticeable lack of difficulty for the most part. When you play on an emulator, you can easily hold a button down and train very quickly.

[RedPouch]

I played Final Fantasy on the Gameboy Advance very recently and it had a noticeable lack of difficulty for the most part. When you play on an emulator, you can easily hold a button down and train very quickly.
I heard you ended up getting level 70 by the time you got to Chaos, when you weren't even trying to level at all. I recall being level 50~ish when I got there, even though I zipped through the game as fast as possible, and Chaos ended up being way too easy because of it. I remember the NES version of the game wasn't so easy, because I played that the same way and yet I believe I was early 30's when I got to Chaos. Also, it might be my imagination, but some of the monsters in the GBA version of this game seemed easier than their NES counterparts.

[Roogle]

I had never played the original past the part where you obtain the ship. To me, that was the end of the story and the end of the game. When I played the Gameboy Advance version of the game, I ended up having to explore dungeons manually without any references because I had never been to those places before. The high encounter rate forced me to level at a rate much higher than normal.

[Bastian]

We've been playing pretty regularly. We've just activated the Earth Crystal.

To trick my laptop into allowing us to play "multiplayer" I just had to set up the regular gamepad inputs in the GBA emulator and then a gamepad emulator assigned to keys on the keyboard for the other gamepad. It wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, because the first GBA emulator I tried would only allow either a gamepad or the keyboard, not both. So I had to find an emulator that would allow both. Even still there was some crazy problem where the gamepad emulator wouldn't recognize any keys on my keyboard but two of them, so I can't access the Start menu on my gamepad. Oh well.

Yeah, I prefer to play RPGs as multiplayer. This friend of mine and I have been playing multiplayer games together since we were in fourth grade. These days he's not much of a gamer and will only play games if I make him and if they are multiplayer. Hence all this hassle. haha.