This is it, at least for now with regards to the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole for me. I have played many games, but considering other franchises I have yet to touch as well as these games being on the more modern systems and such, I need to talk a break from reviewing Final Fantasy games this much. And I ended on, shall I say, a rather peculiar title. A spinoff if you will, one that garnered a number of sequels plus a remaster in short time, but ended up fading into obscurity anyways. The one Final Fantasy title to be on the Gamecube, this game ended up being a hack-and-slash action RPG. Which I think I established with Digimon World 4 that I am just not a real fan of that kind of genre anymore. Especially when this is another game that was meant for multiplayer.
Or, is it? I played this singleplayer like with DW4, but it's got such a complex system for those playing multiplayer that to this day I wonder how one could get up to three friends, have a full link cable and have all the buddies hook Game Boy Advances to play while the host has his Gamecube on. It's such a weird system to go by just by the peripheries necessary. With singleplayer, I really don't have to do that, though the going is tedious. Battles will be a little longer and I have to be far more managing with what I got. But it was much better to plow through in singleplayer than DW4, and more balanced, so it gets those points.
So much, that I beat it in 10 days from the start! And on the 31st anniversary of Doom no less. You can probably guess I wanted this sucker out of the way so I can focus on other stuff, but I did follow a guide that said to finish the base game by Year 5 (the guide was apparently for the remaster which had a post-game, but I didn't get to experience any of that). The main goal in this game is as follows: travel by caravan to locations, get some better equipment by either buying from shops or by pillaging from enemies, going through the motions of complex dungeons with some puzzles of varying annoyances, battle a boss at the end, and collect myrrh from a tree. Rinse and repeat three times, you get a cute little dance festival and diary entries, and somehow those are quite important as you transition from year to year. With the way AI is in this game, I found it useful to cheese against many, many enemies, though the strongest ones with multiple attacks were the toughest, and you usually get those in the last dungeon by far. There's also the miasma gimmick, and the moogle partner was an okay thing for this game although I really just had him hold the chalice unless I was solving puzzles or something.
The game's got an absolutely killer soundtrack filled with great instrumentation and the composer here deserves a lot of praise, but seems to be forgotten in time. I haven't found a soundtrack for any RPG as good as this since the two Chrono games or any Suikoden game, this is FANTASTIC MUSIC. And it's the best thing about the game arguably, the combat can get tricky but I got the hang of things, and the plot almost entirely is given out thanks to the overall setting, how miasma slowly eats away everything and you as a caravaner get myrrh to keep your home hanging by the threads. The side stuff with other characters is nothing to rave about, the bosses all vary, and the main villain is just something out of nowhere. But as far as a game like this goes, it wasn't bad!
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