SYNOPSIS: If you liked Dragon Warrior, buy Final Fantasy.
Well I had been anticipating this release for a few months, biding my time.
I was getting bored of beating on Baseball Stars so finally I broke down and
went out to find it. I looked all over the damn place to no avail. I was
about to give up and leave when I walked past a KayBee toy store and decided
to check it out. Lo and behold, they had it! ($47.98) I quickly scooped it
up in my sweaty little hands and ran home with it.
First off, this game is very similiar to Dragon Warrior, except better. You
get four guys this time around, picking from Fighter, Thief, Black Belt,
Red, White, and Black Mages.
The fighting in FF is more fun than in DW because your four guys take on from
one to nine enemy guys at once and you can use different spells in addition to
traditional mano-a-monstero. Otherwise combat is pretty much the same as DW.
I got real bored with building up my levels in DW, but so far I haven't gotten
all that bored in FF. The variety monsters is much better in FF.
I also like the fact that they provide you with maps so you don't have to
spend hours mapping out your world, which would get incredibly tedious in
a world as big as FF (it is a fairly gigantic world). It also has a neat
little onscreen map function which is almost useful.
I don't like the fact that the instruction manual is a virtual walk-through
of the game. My advice is to use the book to learn game basics, then lose it
and figure out the plot on your own.
A BIG dissapointment, though, is that the save mechanism sucks. No password is
needed. So after I played the game a couple of hours, my roommate accidently
erased my game by picking New Game instead of Continue. Without so much as an
"Are you sure?", my game was vaporized. So if anybody else uses your deck,
better lock up that game.
This game is a serious time consumer. I can tell its going to take much longer
than DW did. It has the potential to become a chore, but hasn't become one
yet. I would have to give it a thumbs-up so far, with advance warning that
this hasn't passed the test of time yet. Caveat Emptor.
