Snap Judgement: Final Fantasy Four Heroes of Light

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Platform: Nintendo DS
Total Play Time: 40 minutes

My first thought on booting up the game, "These graphics are ick."  I would rather have beautiful high-res 2D graphics than these blurry/muddy 3D graphics.  What a bad first impression.

After that initial letdown I realized the stylus was bugging me.  It created a feeling of disconnection from the game.  I'm so used to touching a screen with my finger on my ipod touch that the DS stylus feels awkward,  especially after just completing FFI entirely on the ipod touch.

There is absolutely no tutorial in Four Heroes of Light and I immediately felt lost.  I got to the first cave, at which point they told me I had to go back to town to buy a torch, but I got back to town and had no money so I wasn't able to buy a torch.  I figured it out eventually but it still would have been nice for some straight up explanation of what was going on.


The playthrough wasn't going well and then I decided to save.  I quickly discovered the only way to save was at a save point.  Save points are an unnecessary hassle in this day and age.  On handheld devices a save anywhere system should be the norm.  It's frustrating to trek back to town to save and I know it would piss me off if I continued to play this game.

There were a couple interesting things going on with inventory management, ability points, and camera angles. Sadly, these weren't enough to overcome my negative thoughts.

After 40 minutes I threw in the towel and moved on with life.  I don't think I'll every come back to play this one again.

Comments

  1. AndrewJune 18, 2011 at 6:36 AM

    4 Heroes of Light is my favorite non-mainline FF game..... sorry to hear you're not going to give it a chance.

    I think that I used buttons instead of the stylus to play.... I'm not a big fan of touch interfaces - especially on games like this. (How you got thru FF1 on touch alone blows my mind - I would have hated that.)

    Regarding save points - just close your DS..... it's not that hard of a thing to do - you CAN ssave anywhere.

    ReplyDelete
  2. VoidJune 18, 2011 at 7:54 AM

    This game had non-stylus controls!? Seriously? How did I not notice that? A tutorial would have gone a long way towards helping then...

    The main reason I couldn't stand the game was because of the stylus controls. With regular buttons I probably would have liked the gameplay. I can't believe I missed that.

    Well, thanks for the heads up. Now I may have to eat my words and give it another try.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AndrewJune 20, 2011 at 6:27 AM

    Page 10 of the manual talks about the button controls. If you don't have the manual, shoot me an email and I'll scan you the page - or just experiment - they're pretty intuitive. =)

    ReplyDelete

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