Topic: Are the Final Fantasy GBA remakes worth buying?

@Morpheel:
@DarthNocturnal:

I can't say as though I'm a big fan of Yoshitaka Amano's character art, either. I understand it's a cultural thing, but I feel like most of the characters look too similar to each other. Plus they mostly seem to be universally pale, effeminate characters who all look like they're wearing black lipstick and eye-shadow. It makes it hard to tell a character's gender and personality when they all look like that.
I remember when I first saw the box art for FFIV Advance and being sort of confused.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Oh, a couple of other things I'm wondering about are saving progress and walking/running speed.

Can you save anywhere outside of battles in FF games, or can you only save in certain areas, like in Chrono Trigger?
And can characters run in these games or do they always walk at that painfully slow Classic RPG pace?
I've played a couple of games where the avatars plod along like crippled turtles and I just couldn't put up with it.

In Dawn of Souls, you can save anywhere (outside of battles, of course).

In all the others you can only save in save spots and in the overworld map, but you have a quick save feature.

With the case of most mobile ports, they autosave a temporary file pretty frequently. In case you need to stop playing you can just close them and then come back later.

The games have a regular walking speed, not too fast and not too slow. You also have a run button, and in ff6 you can actually double your walking/running speed with an item.

V's walking/running speed can also be doubled with an ability.

One exploitable SNES bug is that the Evasion stat is unused and Magic Evasion is used for both. So some people like to raise the Magic Evasion as high as possible.
The other, most famous exploitable is "Vanish Doom". Vanish is a spell that makes the target immune to weapons but also certain to get hit by spells. The reason it's so exploitable is because it seems that when casting a status spell on a Vanished target, the SNES version will ignore immunities, making Doom/Death work on any boss in the game. The GBA version fixed that so using a spell on a vanished enemy will only ensure it works IF the enemy does not have an immunity.
As a consequence, it makes farming "Magic Points" (spell-learning points, not spell-casting MP. They really should've just left it AP to avoid confusion) more difficult as there was one enemy that started out Vanished, so as long as you had a caster who take (or be a sacrifice) for its ~1000HP death countteract, you could get 10MP quickly (that's the maximum you can get in one fight, and that means you get at least 10% progress towards learning a spell in one fight). It is very difficult and has insane HP for the point in the game where it appears so it is probably not worth it on the GBA except maybe killing one for Bestiary/Rage completion purposes.

I can't remember the GBA version, but I do know on SNES FF6 you need to equip a certain item to be able to run.
I remember FF5 (SFC) made you have a Thief in your party or have a party member learn an Ability to be able to run, and that at least in the PS1 version they added a permanent run button which stacks with the original run ability (making 4x speed possible).

In the GBA port of final fantasy 6, there's a glitch that's useful by the late game if you want to make the game easier:

1-You must save the game, then do a quick save.

2-On the main menu start a new file and say that you don't care about the quick saved file.

3-You can play until you recruit some of the early party members, but do not save the game. You can do the next step as early as the first battle, since Terra already counts as a party member by then, however the glitch will only affect the party members that have joined your team in the new file.

4-When you have the party members you want, die in combat.

5-After losing the battle.... You'll be back at your old file! And any party members affected by the glitch will be at their levels from the new file, not the old file.

Their stats do not go back, only their level, so you can use this to get some easy stat points with the espers. Also, your characters will gain crazy amounts of HP and MP really quickly.

The higher their original level, the better the effect.

Again, it's easier to try it with just Terra and the other really early characters. For the ones you get later on, its probably not worth it since their levels will be a bit high anyway.

Mm, FFV's job system is a lot of fun! And you're right about the difficulty, it's great. FFV is my favorite FF game ever as well, played it around a dozen times now, heh, and it's nice (and pretty rare) to see someone who loves it as much as I do.

That said, as a really big fan of FFV, the line about the story being "complex".. what did you mean? Honestly, and unfortunately, the story for the game isn't very strong overall.. one of it's biggest weaknesses, according to most reviewers and players.
It's very straightforward, and though it has some really great moments and some characters I felt personally were very well done, it didn't seem to be very original with a lot of the tropes it used.

The best parts about it are, I feel, the way the party interact with each other (great chemistry, really comes alive, feels like the happiest party in the FF series and they make you smile), the humor (the Faris Inn scene still gets me, and between Galuf and Faris.. oh dear.) the great gameplay with the job system, and the little neat details like being able to learn the piano as you travel the world.

Whoops, went on a fan rant, sorry. Though you did ask about old FF games and if they were worth it, haha.
I liked the PSN FFV port the best, for playing, however the GBA version is almost the same (in graphics and translation) so it's worth picking up if you're looking for FF games. The mobile game is not handled well graphically (not the sprite artwork, I mean they did a bad job all in all. For instance: http://www.siliconera.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/0... (new) http://www.siliconera.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/0... (original) You can see the new one has chopping issues and bad gradient habits.. making things look awkward, not to mention it's blurry for some reason.

I'd write out some stuff about FFIV which I also like a lot, but I'm a little tired now and some other people have covered most of everything. ^^;

Those enemy name translations in PS1 FFV... I wonder how many were far below Square's typical quality standard. "Y Burn" (Wyvern) was the most famous translation screwup but Soccer (Sucker) is another one.
How they let a machine translation-level error in.

@DarthNocturnal:
Yup, pretty much agree with everything you wrote.
About the PSN thing, it's just easier for me to play that version as opposed to on-the-go play, nothing to do with the quality of the game port, sorry about the misunderstanding. On the translation, I thought it was pretty funny. I think most people don't like Faris's exaggerated 'pirate-talk' and the like (which I actually liked! Sad that just because it's unpopular it's 'WOW THAT VERSION IS WAY WORSE!!1!' (what a lot of people make it sound like for some reason), even though it makes things a lot more lighthearted imo, guess some people can't handle some silliness in their rpgs, but I digress..lol) but other than that, the PS1 does have worse loading-times and no extra content, so I would definitely recommend the GBA port as the 'definitive' version.

FF5A had a Homer Simpson reference I think.

Okay, so the saving and travel speed sound like they won't detract from the games.

@KingMike:
@Morpheel:
Awesome, thanks for the detailed descriptions of the exploits. I'm not sure which one sounds better, but it does seem like the GBA version still has the overall edge over the SNES original, at least for me.

Well, thanks very much for all of the input, everyone.
I'm gonna head to the game shop sometime soon and if they have any FF games in stock I feel like I'll be pretty well-informed in terms of which ones to grab and which ones to avoid.

Hopefully my selection won't be limited to just the spinoffs.

@InvisiBulbasaur: The IV on DS extended most of its bosses life too. But a strong point for this version is the fact that you will read a far better english rendition of the story (without omission). Also, all the other versions are "easy" because they are made after an easier Final Fantasy IV if I remember right (in Japan this version comes after the original release to simplify the game)

Speaking of IV, I had the opportunity to play a bit of the original SNES version yesterday while I was hanging out with a friend.
It seemed... really dated. The translation holds up especially poorly. I'm not sure about the SNES FF6 but as for 4, yeah, if and when I play it, I'll definitely want to try for one of the newer versions.

Oh yeah, the original translations for the SNES games are dreadful. Specially IV.

Thankfully they fixed them with the rerelases.

I've actually heard of Woolsey, specifically that a few things about his translations were so iconic that they were left in the retranslations.
I really enjoyed the story in Chrono Trigger DS. I only played up to the part where the party arrives in Antiquity and first meets Schala, I think, but it's a game I plan to play from the beginning again soon.
Anyway, the only retranslation change I'm aware of is the changing of Frog's corny King James style pronouns to modern ones, but then I've never played the SNES original.

From what I heard Ted Woolsey was involved in the "FF2" translation but he came in pretty late so he only did like some editing of the translation someone else had already done.
I think his first full translations were SaGa 3 (Final Fantasy Legend III) and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (it was a Japanese-developed game, made in Japanese even though they only planned for the NA localized version to be released originally)

Ted added several "comic relief" lines to the SNES translation of 6 (which were almost if not completely removed when the translation was redone for the GBA).

Woolsey liked to sneak jokes in when he could. One such moment in FF6 was arguable, when during a dramatic scene Terra says I want to know what love is, despite a comic relief moment right after of Locke getting seasick. The GBA line I recall was definitely rewritten to avoid any such reference.

I mostly enjoyed the GBA ports of IV and VI and do think they're worth getting if you haven't played them(though there are better alternatives to IV like the Complete Collection on the PSP)

Don't know about the others though

The usual complaint about them is their price, so that's great. I actually bought FFIV on my phone during a similar sale.

Well, thanks to a combination of Black Friday sales and existing store credit, I am now the owner of Dawn of Souls, FFIV, FFV, and FFTA for GBA, FFIV DS, and the original Crystal Chronicles for GCN. I fear I may have gone slightly overboard considering my lack of experience with the series, but, hey, I couldn't think of anything else to spend that credit on.
Worst case scenario I'll have to sell them on eBay later.

I've been playing Dawn of Souls for about two weeks now, and I'm really enjoying it. I just got the canoe in Crescent Lake and am preparing to explore the ice cavern when I get the chance.
It's been interesting having the chance to experience the series from the beginning, as well as seeing just how foundational FFI was for the RPG genre. I realize that not every now-standard classic RPG element featured in this game originated in this game, but its influence in popularizing most of these concepts is obvious.