"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

Somehow, through a method that I must misunderstand, myself and others (such as you gentlemen) have played FF2/4 what I assume is perhaps a dozen times, without a new game + feature.

Now, along comes a version of a game that by all accounts could have not had a new game + feature. You have played the other versions knowing that such a feature did not exist, yet you replay it because it is a game worth playing from the beginning.

And FF4DS comes along and allows you a limited new game + feature, a bonus that it never had to give you and you complain about it?

Here's what you do.

Play through the game twice. Make a separate save file. Now, whenever you feel the urge to play that game again, load up that save file and save to a different slot. Voila! Unlimited new game +'s, perfect for you whiners since you aren't interested in collecting stuff.

- Eddie

FF IV DS was what I like to call special. And by special, I mean evil. I didn't have boss trouble till the Giant of Babel, who then ripped me a new one. The bonus bosses were evil, and those -Ga spells meant nothing unless you had the right augments. And to continue a side quest, you had to grind for a 0.2% chance drop off [easy] flans. Guess who spent hours grinding and gave up? Guess who also decided to start a new game and in the first dungeon you can get the drop, I get it on the 5th battle? And until I get an AR, no way am I getting those other low drops. [This is coming from the guy who wasted an entire summer getting all four characters to 9999 HP, 99 Job Class levels, level 99, and 4 entire sets of Onion Gear in FF III DS. That's 8 swords/shields and 4 helms/armors/gloves. These are all 1.5% and lower drops.]

I can't help but think that this conversation has inevitably shown which of us are in that crowd I mentioned who can't be satisfied with self-imposed challenges...

Well, I also didn't really care much for FFIVDS that much (though I did appreciate the challenge) so when I want to replay, I have no reason to replay that version. But if the augments and NG+ had been what I expected from the early reports it would probably be my favorite version. It was just a disappointment that apparently still stings a bit.

No.

I don't care about collecting everything, but I'd like to have something carry over from the previous run. Maybe I want to save a Darkness augment for Yang or Dualcast for Palom/Porom without screwing over the endgame party. I don't care if Eddie thinks it's worthless, it'd be fun to have fancy new abilities on those guys.

But regardless, you're offering a solution to a problem that should not exist. There's literally no point for this limit to be here in the first place. A point you keep ignoring in favor of calling everybody a whiner.

So no, I'm not grateful that SE decided to bless me with a limited NG+. If there was some kind of technological limitation, sure. I'd be fine with it. But there's not here. The designers went out of their way to make this the most limited version of the feature ever made, for absolutely no reason. During a design meeting, someone had to have suggested "Hey, let's put NG+ in, but put a cap on it," and it's just absolutely baffling to me that anyone could have possibly thought that was a decent idea.

Also I'm pretty sure I said that I'd rather have no NG+ than half-assed NG+ another time this came up. And I stand by that.

I'm done talking about this now. I'm sorry I even brought the game up in the first place.

The thing that I think some people are missing here is that the problem is that the NG+ limit is not something they just forgot about, or exists as a result of some other system. Unlike every game with NG+ that I can think of, S-E went out of their way to intentionally program in a maximum number of times that you can play through 4 DS.

It's not that the NG+ is limited, so much, that people are so riled about. Even if I would never make use of NG+ in 4 DS (and I don't even make use of NG+ in a LOT of games that I have with the feature), I am actually really not interested in the game as a whole because of this.

And really, it makes perfect sense. S-E added a feature to this game; a feature that they've made use of in the past. That other companies have made use of before. A relatively easy feature to implement, and then intentionally hamstrung it by adding a loop limit.

So please. It's not a matter of people wanting the game to be easier. It's not a matter of people wanting to collect everything. It's a matter of people not liking when they get a product that was sabotaged. Of people who don't like being told how to play their game. If there was no NG+, then people would just lament the fact for a moment, and then carry on; NG+ by itself is still not a super common feature. It not existing is the normal state.

Think about it like this: Games these days all come with a warning saying to take a break every so often (especially MMOs). What do you think people would do if games physically enforced this? Shutting themselves off or locking up for 15 minutes every hour. It's not too much different then the NG+ limit; it's a restriction tossed in for very little reason, even with the NG+ already being limited heavily as it is, and does nothing except control the way people play the game.

The better analogue in this case is a game that shuts off after 72 hours of continuous play. Yes, it's an annoying restriction, but not one that the average player is likely to hit.

The problem is that Squeenix's bread-and-butter fanbase is comprised of an abnormally large number of non-average players. Raise your hand if you played through Chrono Trigger more than three times. Yeah, that's what I thought.

But I do agree that in this case, the restriction IS more conceptual than practical. Personally? I tried out NG+ just so I could see what the bonus bosses were like, then I traded for TWEWY.

There might have been very technical reasons for not allowing more than three new game pluses. Maybe there was limited battery space that would be strained if they allowed three save games to have keep track of having 10+ different augments on each character on top of all of the items. Maybe it would cause glitches and bugs. I don't know.

Maybe it was arbitrary. And so what if it is? There are many arbitrary aspects about games that we casually allow. Why only allow the player to collect one Excalibur in the game? Why not allow the player to purchase augments, or rare items? Why force the player to micromanage augments in order to achieve maximum stats?

You said it yourself Umbalgo; if there was no New Game + people would shrug and move on. But, instead, FF4DS gets attacked because of the presence of a limited New Game + feature, rather than celebrated for having it in the first place, as if being able to play the game only a limited amount of times on the same save file was a negative rather than a positive. Who cares if the number is arbitrary? Why not just be glad they gave you the option in the first place, instead of making you start from scratch like they've done with every other final fantasy game ever.

I'll repeat: you're kidding yourself if you think you're playing this game more than three times. Go ahead. Beat it three times. See if you're really that interested in beating it a fourth time. It's a great game! But there is heavily diminishing returns with its New Game + feature. Just start a new game, like you have with every other version of FF4, or create a save file chock full of augments and have fun doling them out as you wish.

But yeah, I'm done derailing Brick's thread. PM me if you're really interested in continuing this nonsense.

- Eddie

I says, if you're gonna make a game with New Game+, then make a game with New Game+. If you want to limit the number of benefits you can carry forward for design or technological purposes, then put the limit on the benefits themselves. Putting in half a feature is worse than leaving it out.

I don't dislike FFIVDS because it's hard. I dislike it because it bores me. Being bored by FFIV is one of the saddest things I can think of happening to me, and I hate the DS version for making that thing happen.

I never would have guessed Eddie had a hot button issue, never mind that it would be New Game +!

Okay, missed some heated argument about New Game Plus, I see.

Not giving a crap about speaking of it any further than in this one post, I generally agree that an arbitrary limit is stupid, but I don't really care about the NGP in FF4DS anyway because I didn't wanna play through it more than once and its carryovers are severely limited. I had a hard enough time beating the regular bosses, and I'm not particularly fond of grinding the most "FUCK YOU, PLAYER!!" enemies in the entire remake to get some absurdly rare tails to trade for ore to make the only equipment that will carry over to make the early game easier and take on a couple of even more difficult bonus bosses. Oh yeah, and many of the augments suck.

tl;dr I'd care more about the game cap on Final Fantasy IV DS if its New Game Plus was more like Chrono Trigger or one of those DS Castlevanias.

Funnily (eerily?) enough, the underling's "But I won't blame you!" translates more accurately to something like "He's the kind of guy who won't die even if you kill him!"

eta: Jesus, am I late to this thread. Sorry about that. I guess I gave up hope after the first couple months without updates.

I wouldn't mind seeing a screenshot of that. Or just a cut-and-paste of the Japanese text.

殺したって死ぬような人じゃないですからねえ！

Gotta love literally translated Japanese expressions, eh? Hell, sometimes Japanese authors take the expression literally and make characters who refuse to die no matter how many times they get killed.

That's the joke with the last panel, actually. Shiro has a stubborn tendency to live even past the point where his body's essentially turned into a pile of swords stuffed in a human skin, and a few other instances.

The last panel is a reference to this.

Yep, that fits this game perfectly.

It's actually closer to "Just because you kill him doesn't mean he's gonna die!" In other words, Cid is awesome.

And the Enterprise is his phylactery. Better be careful not crash it again.

Despite the obvious Japanese versions of "he won't die even if you won't kill him" I still don't see how this statement could be even remotely true.

So do you mean that the second line in this guy's text box got cut during localization? Because there is no way this translation is possible. I think what you meant was "Squaresoft cut a line of text that went like this..."

No, I mean it's a shitty translation, one of many in FF2. If you want the underling to say all three of his lines in that one text box, they're all going to have to be trimmed to within an inch of their lives. This "wouldn't die even if killed" thing simply can't be made small enough to fit, so the translators shrugged and put "But I won't blame you!" instead, thinking it at least referenced Cid's tenacious personality.

For reference, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the Japanese and English scripts here. Scroll down to the second "Prologue" table. (And as background, I'm a Japanese-English game translator with over a decade in the business who's worked on over a hundred games; FF2 twenty years ago is what made me want this career today.)

Because it was the best idea ever.

Good Lord, and I thought I wasted too much of my youth searching in vain for contrived 16-bit JRPG secrets. Did you also go nutty trying to find definitive proof of Shadow's identity, and/or the location of Schala?

I tried landing the Epoch on every dang ice floe in 12,000 B.C.

Also hilarious is naming him "Fuck Me!" or "Holy Shit!" in any game with a helper as Navi/Minda/etc. will appear to start every sentence with a random exclamation. "Fuck me! we should see what's happening on Death Mountain." "Holy Shit! that's the Master Sword!"


I did the same damn thing. I also obsessed over trying to find secret areas landing the dragon on that damn mode-7 map in Secret of Mana, even though it almost always snapped to the same landing area.

I was utterly convinced that finding Schala had something to do with Alfador and Magus in The Last Village.

A friend of mine named her Final Fantasy VI cast things like, "a boy" and "a girl," so you had dialogue like "Hey a boy, let's go save a girl."

Another friend of mine had named Tifa "Queefa" back in the day. I was in line to buy something yesterday and I just remembered that out of the blue and I had to struggle to keep from cracking up in public.

This reminds me of an old thread.

Also, this:

I'm making a pizza and I'm out of tomatoes. If I say that Brickroad has only 12 hours left to finish this LP, will you all throw enough tomatoes at me to make my pizza?