Final Fantasy Marathon Journals - FFIV

For the past five or six years now, my friend Kyle and I have been trying to play through the Final Fantasy games. "All of them?" I said. "All of them," he said. It would be new to me: besides the not-actually-Final-Fantasy "Legends" subseries, my experience with the franchise had been minimal, and even Kyle only knew the PSX trilogy and X.

While we went on, I kept a record of our games for our own purposes. Now, I've been polishing those entries up for public consumption. Not quite a Let's Play, not quite a review, more of a comprehensive break-down by one ex-programmer and game developer (myself) and one lifelong tabletop gamer and LARPer. The gaming gods help us, we've been at these Marathons for seven years, and there's no reason to stop now.

Yesterday we got started with the FFIV journal posts. FFIV was one of our favourite games to Marathon, and gave birth to way too many in-jokes for our own good. Join us in celebrating the birth of these now-great Marathon values: high-cost laziness, shouting your own name to show that you're evil, and showing spleens to children.

Final Fantasy IV

We've got some back entries up already for FFI, FFII, FFIII and FFLI, if you're interested in reading them. Final Fantasy journals update on Sundays and Thursdays. Feel welcome to comment here or on the blog!

Posts by Game

It looks pretty good. I like how you mentioned that many aspects of the game seem like typical RPG fanfare since you're a seasoned player, but this was the game that introduced them. Being dated, the best way to approach the game is with a sense of humor, which will help you overcome many of the old RPG cliches. I find FFIV to be the entry in the series I have the most fun playing.

At the time, the modernisms of FFIV were a great relief. It's comfortable, and the comfort lets its quality gameplay shine through.

Arguably, FFIV's real unique factor is the fact that it forces your party layout by repeatedly and literally tossing people into the ocean. Frustrating as that can be, I can see what they were going for with that: it was meant a direct contrast to the free strategy of the FFIII job system. I just wish they didn't take their equipment with them!