Oh Best Buy, why do you keep having stupidly good deals on PSP games? You are making it impossible to finish anything because just when I start making headway, another game goes on sale. Last week Final Fantasy IV The Complete Collection for PSP was on sale for 10 bucks, so I had to buy it.

Follow up:

I've never played the game before and was entirely unfamiliar with the plot, so this thing is entirely brand new to me, unlike Final Fantasy VII and Kingdom Hearts where I pretty much knew the entire plot before I even touched a controller.

As the game starts out it's really cool that Squeenix added this little CGI movie that shows all the characters full rendered out so you can see their designs, and much to my surprise I wasn't disappointed with the 32-bit graphics the game plays on. I've been so spoiled by 3D games that I sometimes forget what an art pixel graphics can be. While there are a few CGI edits for cut scenes, for the most art it's the original graphics set.

The game starts out with Cecil, the main character returning from a mission to reclaim an elemental crystal, which he could only get by murdering innocent people. Our hero ladies and gentlemen! He goes off further to a town on a mission with a friend...and ends up murdering more innocent people including the mother of a little summoner girl. Boy, Cecil really sucks at this who 'hero' thing. They end up in the desert and team up with a cranky old wizard named Tellah whose daughter eloped with a 'Spoony bard' (and suddenly I understand the origin of Spoony's nickname...) who eventually joins your team. Turns out bard-boy is actually a prince and probably the most useless fighter of the entire game. Not only is he lousy in battle as his attack is next to non-existent and he has no magical powers, he spends most of his cut scenes knocked out, fainted or sick. Whoo.

The gameplay is quite hard for the most part, as save points and healing items are fairly rare. My main problem is I keep running out of magic points for my characters and not every shop carries Ethers. Another issue is you have no control over how your characters grow. Like Pokemon, characters gain new powers as they gain level. You only really have power over what armor they wear.

Right now I'm doing a lot of level grinding, which I don't mind as much as I do in other games. Perhaps because there are so many places to explore. Even with the exploration though the story is really linear, no sidequests and a fairly small world. People like to whine about how modern RPGs are so straightforward, but a lot of people overlook older games that have the same issue.