1. curlybrace

   10

   The 4 Heroes of Light is everything you love about old school RPGs, requiring a lot of exploring with a just-big-enough world to explore and a hint of guidance. It comes wrapped in a deceptively cute aesthetic, with lush, painterly graphics which I hope to see more of from Square.… Expand

   • Helpful? 2 of 2 users said Yes.
2. ttocs

   8

   Final Fantasy: Four Heroes of Light is the most recent installment into the Final Fantasy handheld market. While itâ

   • Helpful? 2 of 2 users said Yes.
3. CorazonAzul

   5

   Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light presents an equal number of great and terrible things to classic RPG lovers. While it delivers a more than capable story, characters, navigation system, art and even memorable music to satisfy a painful longing of lost tradition, haunting this game from the other side is the worst battle and quest planning I've seen in 20 years of RPGs. __________ Bosses are largely fought via equipping your characters with the appropriate elemental affinites beforehand. Unfortunately, it's not just a matter of bringing along all your element gear and making a choice at the boss' save point, thanks to an extremely limiting item storage system- and the game's single save slot. Specifically, each character only holds or wears 15 unstackable items, including potions, weapons, armor, spells and treasures. Therefore, making the wrong choices before trekking into a dungeon can mean heading back out just to swap equipment for a repeat journey. Townspeople aren't offering much help either, as you'll soon find their subtle clues more frustrating than charming. A town storage vendor safekeeps 99 unstackable items for you- think fat chocobo- but it doesn't fix any problems. __________ Job classes, or "Crowns" as they are called in this game, give you some cool looks and battle options, but the truth is if you don't go with specific classes- you're toast in most boss fights. Further dulling any sense of strategy is the auto-targeting system. For any ability used in battle- fighting, items, offensive or protective spells- this dreaded system dictates it all. Shielding or power-up magics always affect the caster first. Healing and potions are cast on the character with the most HP loss- not necessarily the one at the lowest HP. Anti-ailment spells choose at random- meaning instead of curing your silenced caster, you may be taking off poison from someone else. __________ To add insult to injury, many bosses later in the game take several turns in a single turn-based round, dishing out ailments and killing characters faster than you can cure them or keep them alive- or even bring them back to life. Even when you can determine who will be the target of what, it's normally a matter of waiting, being forced to use an ability twice, outright deeming an ability useless for the game, or worse yet standing strategically hopeless. __________ The amazing part is this: had they simply given you any break here at all- a second save slot, or a bigger bag, or the ability to target- they may have saved your adventure from being absolutely frustrating and miserable- and I mean that from the first boss to the end boss. It's truly saddening to see interesting mechanics like the AP system- meant to replace MP- get lost in translation and lose all their potential. __________ If you're going to play this game for the story, I highly recommend extreme grinding, gearing with the multiplayer feature, cheating, whatever you have to do to muscle through the content. Surprisingly after having developed the enjoyable Final Fantasy III DS remake, Matrix Software really dropped the ball here. I am hopeful in perhaps a sequel, they will fix the awful problems and produce a deserved 9 or 10 rpg experience.… Expand

   • Helpful? 3 of 3 users said Yes.
4. Serin

   4

   This is one of those games I wanted to like so much, but it just couldn't live up to its potential. I'd just come off an invigorating Etrian Odyssey binge, and I wanted another game where you get to customize your characters with class/skill levels and gear and whatnot. And it really does sound promising. You have a team of four heroes who can constantly switch classes in order to learn new skills and become even more powerful as time goes on. There is a pretty huge catch, though: rarely do you control all four at one time until close to the end of the game. This led to frustrating sequence after frustrating sequence as every time I felt I had characters that complemented each other well, one of them would bugger off and leave me with just one character plus a worthless TEMPORARY one. And don't get me started on the gems. Oh, the gems...because if you want to level up your classes, you better be memorizing what gems are showing up where when you fight, because otherwise you can't learn new skills at all without them. These two things combined with a very limited inventory system that punished you on boss fights for not looking at a FAQ beforehand were enough to kill my enjoyment of the game. The music was fine, the graphics looked good, the plot...was a Squeenix story, I guess. I just wanted a fun game to play, and I didn't get one.… Collapse

   • Helpful? 1 of 1 users said Yes.

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