Topic: Are the Final Fantasy GBA remakes worth buying?

I'm not exactly a fan of it either. It's like he can only draw like two faces

Keep in mind that I only complain about the mobile remake (and even then, only about the character sprites), not FFV as a whole... Since you mention it's your favorite.

I never had any complaints with them, in fact I still play them to this day on my DS. I also recommend looking into Dawn of Souls as well.

@Morpheel

I'm aware. No worries.

Not sure whether I really need another dungeon, actually. I tend to enjoy the stories in RPGs more than trudging through difficult dungeons, especially if they feel tacked on.

Hey, I'm all about doing things the easy way when it comes to difficult games, as long as it doesn't make them feel too cheap. I can look it up, but what kind of bugs are we talking about? Easy EXP/Level up exploits or something similar?

Gotcha, thanks!
Well, too bad I don't have a PSP... That sounds nice. The DS version seems pretty good apart from frustratingly difficult battles.

I can respect that. If I find it first, or if I like the other games, I'll have to check it out.

I think I just might have to. I feel like starting with the simplest games might be the best introduction to the series.
It's kind of like with Pokemon, I started with Red and loved it, and now that I've played the newer ones I don't feel the need to go back to the days before there was a run button or the many other new features that have been added, yet Red set the foundation for me, making the newer ones feel less overwhelming than they might have been had I started with, say, Y.

@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.

Several games let you turn on auto-run. Depending on the game, it might be a bit too fast, if you use ingame methods to increase the speed further.

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. ^^;

@Zibene999

I've noticed that every odd-numbered FF of the first six revolve around a similar core plot; evil is about, four warriors destined to stop it, pick your classes and go save the world. Each game advanced not only the job system, but the plots got more detailed with each entry: 1 had the most basic plot, 3 had the same core plot, but it added more history and depth (while still being an overall simple plot; this was the Famicom afterall), and 5 again had the same main plot elements, but it had a few twists and depth that one could expect from Super Famicom / SNES.

It's all relatively speaking of course. 2, 4, and 6 had stronger plots, and their own character development systems.

Also, FFV Advance (and all versions based upon it) are best where translation is concerned (I was under the impression that the PS1 version seen on PSN had a rather "meh" localization).

Finally... Gilgamesh. That's all that really needs to be said.

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.

@KingMike

Must've been the same guys behind Tales of Phantasia's "Kangaroo".

@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.

@Zibene999

I didn't think Faris had a very strong pirate talk... at least, not in GBA / mobile.

I don't mind the more light-hearted plot either. Not everything has to be grimdark to the extreme.

......I wonder how some would freak out about the few memes in the GBA / mobile localization? People act like it's a new thing, but they've been doing it for years (note that FFV Advance was localized by NoA. Clearly Square liked it, since they keep using it).

FF5A had a Homer Simpson reference I think.

@KingMike

A few off the top of my head:

• "Take a look, it's in a book!" from Reading Rainbow.
• "I'm S-M-R-T, smart!" from the Simpsons
• Ghido makes a TMNT reference, rhetorically asking Exdeath if he thought that all he's been doing all these years is eating pizza.
• "For Gilgamesh, it is morphing time!", a reference to Power Rangers. He later makes a "prepare for trouble, and make it double" Team Rocket reference.
• The description for Gladitor's Finisher ability mentions "attacking the weak point for massive damage".
• "STELLA!" from A Streetcar named Desire.

A few I didn't know about include references to "You are a Pirate" and Skittles commercials. And an achievement added in the mobile and / or PC version is apparently a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, of all things (what, no Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch reference?)