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Final Fantasy is a very special franchise that has entered the hearts of thousands of players. It is now a real "idea", a way of making a genre, the Japanese Role Playing Game, with which only a few other software houses have managed to compete in almost twenty-five years of honorable service. For some years there has been a lot of debate on the path taken by this historical saga: now in its fourteenth episode, including the two online chapters and excluding the various spin-offs, Square Enix seems to have lost some sight of the spirit that characterized the first episodes of the series, focusing more on the spectacularity allowed by technological progress.

Here, in this sense Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light it is a rather sensational turnaround. Producer Tomoya Asano himself calls it "a classic RPG that uses today's technology" and in fact this spin-off fishes heavily in the 8bit tradition of the series to offer a paradoxically new experience to those who have lost the origins of the saga. Said this way it would seem almost a positive thing, in reality there is some problem too much ...

A Tale of Other Times

The story of Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light it looks more like a fairy tale than a psychological sci-fi smash like the ones Square Enix has accustomed us to with the latest iterations of the parent series. Here the main protagonists are four boys united by a common tragedy, the petrification of their kingdom by a dark witch, and by the will of the entity that appears to them in the form of a Crystal.

Brandt dreams of adventure unlike his lazy friend Jusqua, Yunita is the scrupulous bodyguard of the spoiled princess Aire: the interactions between these characters are the real heart of a story with a decidedly fairytale development, in fact it goes from enchanted forests to a village built on an immense whale and an ice country that holds the last surviving dragon egg. To make the evolution of the story a little more lively there is a script that half the time enjoys uniting and dividing the four heroes continuously, projecting them into quite different situations: the story is still very simple and the characters rather stereotyped, but to embellish the whole there is an excellent artistic sector. The character design has been entrusted to Akihiko Yoshida (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story) and his delicate line goes perfectly with a clean graphic creation full of style and personality: we are certainly not talking about a 3D engine that squeezes the DS to the maximum. , but the art direction is extraordinary as well as the attention to small details such as the wind that moves the grass, the adorable animations of the protagonists and enemies or the aesthetic variety of the equipment. A little less satisfying the soundtrack of Naoshi Mizuta, deliberately retro but generally repetitive and monotonous, apart from some excellent songs.

A Game of Other Times

The structure of Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light it is very reminiscent of "old-fashioned" RPGs by offering the classic city-dungeon-city iter for the entire duration of the adventure: the dungeons, in particular, are rather dull and visually repetitive, and the challenge in that case becomes more remembering the way return than to solve the simple puzzles proposed.

Random fights, on the other hand, require a certain flexibility on the part of the player thanks to the new Crown System, who actually fishes heavily in the Job System proposed in various episodes of the franchise. In Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light essentially "Crowns" are acquired that represent the 28 classes and the relative combat skills of the various characters: it is in fact possible to change a character's Crown by changing not only its appearance (ie the visible headgear) but also the statistics and the usable skills .

For example, a White Mage will not only be more effective in healing magic, but will be able to use it by spending less Action Points: these are the heart of the combat system and each skill consumes a certain amount of AP, which are generally recharged one at a time. every turn. The fights take place following the rhythm of the old-style JRPG, the player chooses an action per character and these will be performed during the next round, in order of speed: careful planning is necessary, however, because elements such as elemental weaknesses or the inexplicable automatic choice of targets, including non-hostile ones, which one does not get used to before several hours of play. Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light in short, he has an interesting game system on his side, but unfortunately he runs into a series of problems that derive from this excessively vintage philosophy, starting with the individual inventory of the characters, limited to only fifteen spaces, many of which soon occupied by the tomes spells, healing items and equipment. The result is therefore a complex micromanagement of skills and inventory marred by a decidedly not very intuitive interface; a combination that soon frustrates the player's progression, furthermore hampered by the lack of clarity of the plot: often there is no objective or precise explanation of what needs to be done, the player is therefore forced to talk to each character about a new city in the hope to find suggestions, often cryptic, that indicate how to unblock the situation. Added to this is a massive dose of old-fashioned grinding, necessary to balance the power of the party in relation to the new challenge to be faced, especially in the final stages where the difficulty of the game undergoes a terrifying and unjustifiable surge.

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Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light it abandons the almost cinematic guise of the last few episodes in favor of more traditional mechanics. It is an experiment that is only half successful, since some of these features are more obsolete than classic and the player is forced to fight above all the choices of game-design rather than the monsters that crowd the world of Brandt and company. The technical sector is probably the best feature of a JRPG that will especially appeal to nostalgics, but which unfortunately fails to match the quality of Dragon Quest IX: The Sentinels of the Sky, which for the moment undoubtedly wins the challenge of the best portable JRPG for Nintendo DS.