Nintendo Okie

A review by Josh Beebe

I’m a big Final Fantasy fan.  I love the stories.  I love leveling up.  I love fighting bosses.  I even love collecting equipment.  I’ll go ahead and boldly say that FFX was the best in the series, topping even the monstrous FF7.  However, when you think of Final Fantasy these days, it just isn’t the same as it used to be.  You used to lose hours upon hours of time and were punished heavily for not saving.  The difficulty was drastically increased back in the 8 and 16-bit days, and this game is a direct throwback.

The 4 Heroes of light goes back to Final Fantasy’s original roots.  Traveling the top down world, you will eventually meet your fellow party members, in which you can have up to 4 at a time.  You equip these party members with the best equipment that you can find and go out to save the day.  Nothing new here; combat will also feel familiar.  It’s very traditional turn based combat where you select an action for each character to perform, then the battle plays out.  I have one huge complaint here.  Generally, you can always select a target for your action.  If you want to attack an enemy, you would select the enemy to attack.  If you wanted to heal your comrade, you would select the comrade to heal.  For some reason it was decided to leave this option out….WHAT??  Yea, it can get frustrating.  The game will auto-pick your target.  It does an okay job of selecting the right target, but there’s the occasional “well that’s just great” moment.  Sometimes you feel as if you could have won the battle if you had the option to target correctly.       

The battle system; the staple of any Final Fantasy game.  It’s different every game, and always interesting to say the least.  The system implemented here is a crown and AP system.  You essentially equip different crowns to change your abilities and statistics.  It feels a lot like the job system.  It is pretty cool when you get a new crown though.  To gain new abilities, you equip these crowns with different types of gems, which are found by defeating enemies.  And apparently, wearing different crowns changes your entire outfit.  AP is what you use to perform an action.  You have a total of 5 AP.  Each turn you gain AP, and you are even given an option to boost your AP at an expense of a turn.  It’s not much, but it works.

One thing to note about this game is that it’s difficult.  I found myself anxiously looking for a save point and usually dying before I found one.  Even at the first boss, I felt that I was severely lacking something, but I wasn’t quite for sure what that was.  After roaming around and beating a few baddies, I eventually triumphed.

Overall, this game doesn’t bring anything new to the table.  But is it fun?  Sure.  If you like traditional turn based battles, this will definitely occupy your time.  For me, the best thing it has going for it is its old school charm.

Final Score 3/5
Review copy provided by Square Enix