Another version difference here - the GBA and DS versions increased the usefulness of the sing command. Specifically, GBA increased sing command success rate (and added an accessory that changes it to a defensive buff to the party), DS let you select the effects and gave it party buffs as well as enemy debuffs.
Also, the DS version translated "heal" as "salve", making it clearer its item based.
See, what gets me about this is that it's a solved problem, and yet I think I can tell what went wrong.
In FF3 PR, the Bard's song first starts off with Paeon, a song of healing, then, as you gain job levels, unlock three new songs, for a total of four. So what Edward's Heal command is trying to do is already covered by Paeon, and the "inflict status effects" command is covered by another of the FF3 Songs. You could have collapsed it under a Song menu, have Edward gain more songs as he levels up, and thus give him more stuff to do as you learn to use him properly. And if you wanted a command that used items in an improved fashion, the FF3 Scholar had that!
But the FF3 PR Bard is a wholly different beast from the FF3 NES Bard, who appears instead to have different commands entirely, Scare and Cheer. The PR Bard is backported from earlier 3D port. Meanwhile, PR Edward seems to be a faithful rendition of his NES self, which was already functional enough, instead of basing him in the FF3 PR Bard.
It's not a big deal but it means Edward feels like kind of a letdown compared to the Bard of the previous game.
Golbez is up to some A+ archvillainy here. He stomps effortlessly from objective to objective, taking everything from the heroes, while they scramble about trying to scrape together any kind of a hope.
A+, no notes. If you are writing an antag you could do a lot worse than 'he takes your place because you weren't evil enough and then he does with glee the stuff that your scruples prevented you from doing.'
Definitely a very strong entrance.
Really, given that all three main villains in previous games were met when
you tracked
them down at the heart of their dungeon, he's getting a significant leg up in the context for best entrance - he only has to compete with the Emperor coming back from Hell and the Cloud of Darkness TPKing the party, which admittedly were both cool, but Gobelz gets massive points for all the build up to his arrival rather than it being sudden and untelegraphed.
Watching/Reading this Let's Play is like actually playing the game myself.
Being able to provide an experience of that sort to people who haven't played the games is a big part of why I write that LP in the thorough detail-by-detail breakdown I do instead of glossing over stuff, so thanks.
When did you get a hovercraft?
End of last update! It was a bit of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention, but the last thing Edward says after leaving Castle Damcyan is that we'll need his hovercraft to cross the shallows, and I closed the update shortly after mentioning it.
Golbez is literally Palpatine, isn't he? Lightning, deliberate acts of petty cruelty to fuck with people, a knight-turned-dark as his second in command... Yeah, Golbez is Palpatine.
Though Cecil doesn't really slot into Luke or Han, Rosa's not Leia - I think Rydia might be the best fit there - Obi Wan is a hyperwizard with anger issues and dementia, and Edward is a spoony bard who's just kind of there. Luke maybe but he's kind of shit so not really?
IV isn't very Star Wars, is what I'm getting at, I guess, except for having a Sith Lord as the villain.
FF2 was already riffing off Star Wars, and FFIV is very clearly drawing a lot from FF2, but that puts the game at two remotes from Star Wars, which make that kind of 1:1 comparison impossible. Characters were already distorted in adaptation that have changed even further here.
@Omicron just so you know there should be an option to adjust the combat formation so you have 3 back slots and 2 front ones, I notice in your pictures of mount Hobbs that you had Rosa in the frontline
Yeah. I spent a very short time with Yang in the party so I didn't bother; Rosa is in the front row in these screenshots because the game only lets me do a 3/2 formation when I have 5 people. If I have 4 people, it only accepts 2/2 formations, so one of Rosa, Rydia or Edward had to go in the front.
This is why old games getting re-releases need to give you some kind of manual, or at least some manner of summary of the original game's manual. Because stuff like this and Edward's potion use was all explained...in the manual.
Not to be a boomer about it, but the death of game manuals is one of the great tragedies of our era. I remember being a kid, unable to read English and thus unable to play our version of StarCraft which was EN-only... but which had a translated manual, thick and full of both the backstory of the whole setting as well as lore for every type of unit, reading the entire thing back to front and front to back like it was a favorite novel.
Started replaying this, after you reminded me how much I love FFIV.
Anyway, you know how entering Damcyan has you just outside of the gates, rather than just inside? Well, if you walk along the outer wall, going counter-clockwise, you can access the treasury. I don't know if maybe that's made obvious in the remake, so you didn't see any point in mentioning it, but I figured I'd mention it if you missed it.
Yeah, I brought it up briefly in the update, but had to delete the screenshots of me finding secret passages and looting the royal treasuries because I was running hard into the image limit.
This prompted me to have a look at the Four Fiends off a suspicion, and it's interesting from a cultural/linguistics standpoint!
In FFI, the Four Fiends are 四つのカオス, which apparently translates to 'Four Chaoses'. In FFIV, however, they are the 四天王, the Shitennou or Four Heavenly Kings.
Now, if you're even vaguely adjacent to anime-readers you'll probably have heard the term before; it's apparently originally a Chinese Buddhist thing regarding the four gods of the cardinal directions, but Japanese typically uses it to describe the four super-badass subordinates of a particular figure. Famously, the retainers of Minamoto no Yorimitsu are referred to as such, and they're further solidified in this by linking them to the Four Symbols, the mythical animals associated with the cardinal directions, a connection that a lot of Japanese media likes to keep (because it's awesome). Fictional examples are the Elite Four in Pokemon and the four generals of the Dark Kingdom in the first segment of Sailor Moon.
So the Four Fiends in FFIV are called that because of, I suspect, a combination of the anglosphere of 1991 having no idea what the Four Heavenly Kings are and the fact that FFI was released in English in 1990 and established the name already, and they didn't want to change that. I wonder whether it would be translated the same way today, in a world where a lot of FF players have previous exposure to Japanese media?
Hmm. Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be any settled convention. The "Four Heavenly Kings" in various video games and manga appear to be translated either literally as Four Heavenly Kings, or using a smattering of locutions, often simply "the Elite Four," I assume in direct reference to Pokémon.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
Yeah, I got two of those, actually, so I still have one sitting useless in my inventory. Why, are they hard to find?
Oh yeah. I don't remember if you mentioned this, but when you're targeting an enemy with a spell, if you try to go past the furthest enemy, your spell will target all of them. I don't think the game tells you this, so it can be easy to overlook.
Yes! I forgot to mention this, I think, but this has been a change since FF2. FF1 only had the first tier of spell be single-target, and every spell after that was omnitarget, then FF2 on moved to the now-familiar format where every spell can be either single-target or omni-target.
I have mixed feelings about it. It allowed me to breeze through the FF2 endgame with Omnitoad, but the way the game divides damage among enemies means that in my experience it's been pretty useless at dealing with random encounters in a way it wasn't in FF1, except for absolute trash that I outleveled several hours ago.
It's significantly more useful for healing spells, though. Curaja Omnicasts were a crucial part of my Cloud of Darkness strategy.
I distinctly recall being able to use Darkness to avoid the counters, which absolutely trivializes this fight by invalidating its gimmick.
Part of why the system is frustrating to me is that the way it incentivize acting fast, not taking time to think, and make it hard to keep track of the exact effects of a given move when you are juggling several enemies acting at random times and several ATB bars you have to take care off put me strongly off that kind of experimentation. I never want to risk wasting an action just to check what effect it has when it could not only be useless, but I could miss the result entirely because somebody just hit Rydia into red HP midway through me going to Black Magic and now backtracking to have her cast a White Magic spell and I have Yang hot on the docket waiting for an input and wasting valuable time.
