Final Fantasy : The 4 Heroes of Light - Review

Sometimes, it’s hard to put into words the way I feel about a game I’ve played. Sometimes I try and try to describe things just so.. “Yeah, that was fun,” or “I’ll never get that part of my life back.” Let me say that for Final Fantasy : The Four Heroes of Light… “THIS GAME IS AWESOME!” comes to mind.

Final Fantasy : The Four Heroes of Light has everything I could ever ask for in a game. It is, one of the best Nintendo DS game I have EVER played. I am an RPG junkie, and this is a pure cut of RPG awesomeness.

The storyline is extensive and engaging. As you play the game, you are thrown into the roles of the “Four Heroes”- Brandt, Jusqua, Yunita and Aire. As you embark on your quest, you encounter many enemies, battle bosses, level up, earn, find and buy new weapons, earn “crowns” – which allow you to have new classes for your various characters. As you play on, you can enhancing each of your characters and their “crowns” – to upgrade their healing, fighting and magical skills.

FF:4HoL has a long, mostly linear storyline. There are some spots that choices can be made in progressing, but the choices ultimately lead to the same result. Throughout the storyline, you play each of the characters. With the progression of the game, you swap between them, playing in different combinations, and sometimes with the help of other guest characters that join up in a number of the various maps.

I love how you must develop each of the Heroes levels and abilities through the course of the game, and enjoy the fact that via the storyline, the focus can shift in a moment to a different character, breaking the monotony that sometimes these fantastically long story-driven games can fall prey to. Some of the progress can get hung up over a minor clue that you haven’t revealed, and this could get frustrating for some players, but the creators did put all the answers in the game, and it may just be a matter of going through the local town and talking to every single NPC to find the one with the right clue. (If all else fails, you can search Google for walkthroughs!) Editors Note: Cheating.

The game-play combines real-time exploration of the world with a turn-based battle system. Everything outside of the actual fighting happens on a real-time basis, and some of the events in the game are regulated by the time of day (day/night). I really enjoy the turn-based fighting. The system is easy to learn and is more forgiving to the novice. Versus a real-time RPG, such as is typical to the Zelda franchise (which is my favorite RPG series of all time) the turn-based system is a lot easier to master.

There are multiplayer gaming options for those of you who have friends with a DS and a copy of this title. Players can join in one-anothers games, and one player can bring one of their characters from their own game into the hosts game. There are some perks other than the simple cooperative play. As you play, you earn battlepoints which can be used to buy special items/upgrades. During multiplayer games, players earn bp’s at an accelerated rate. When done with multiplayer mode, you retain those bp’s you can then use to purchase those items in your own game. The multiplayer game works like the single player game. The host guides the party around, and the other players retain autonomy in controlling their individual characters during battles.

Graphics well drawn, colorful and fun and lack the “cheese” factor that many DS games tend to have. The graphics are as good as I would expect from a game developed by the likes of Square Enix. They are uncompromising and take full advantage of the capabilities of the DS.

The musical score is good, but repetitive. There is not a wide range of music, but the sound effects are, as with the graphics, as good as anything you’ll experience with a DS title, (and sounded very nice with my Lift Audio Icon earphones – see related review!)

The replayability is probably low on this, because of how long the story line is. On the flip side, because the story line is as long as it is, I’m not as concerned with the replayability factor. My goal for this title is to be able to finish in a reasonable amount of time, not worry so much about being able to play it AGAIN.

The bottom line is this, and it is really quite simple… This game has a high awesomeness factor. If you like RPG games like Zelda (or prior incarnations of Final Fantasy, and there are so, so many) and you like to not waste your time or money buying lame games, then this is a MUST HAVE. I don’t need to tell you that this game gets a 99 out of 100, or that I give it 16 thumbs up. It is awesome. Go buy it. It’s $34.99 and it’s money well spent for your DS collection.