FINAL FANTASY IV (3D REMAKE)+

So, this is like, a fantastic final fantasy. The remake job here is super faithful while giving it a sort of n64 era charm that is super convincing to something I would have seen on that system. Character animation is great and the voice acting is superb. Overall love the vibe. What I don’t love so much is the strange quirk of the battle system. It plays great gameplay wise, but the battles quite literally run at 15 fps. It totally throws off the gameplay!!! Everything else runs at a silky smooth 60 FPS, so i honestly don’t understand it.

So, I've only played the original of this one a little bit, and the game works, it's a fun game overall,, but the battle speed is painfully slow due to the 15 fps hard limit from DS version. This being a problem is big sign of laziness by square; they didn't even bother to try changing it. The rest of the game ( outside battles) is better fps but the battles feel so laggy, and the speed itself is also slow. Other main problem: the game is in dire need of even a rudimentary quest journal, because if you miss a cut scene or even if you don't but you don't fully follow every single line of dialogue ( they go on for a while sometimes) it means you end up not knowing where to go or what to do. At all. And no way to replay the cutscenes ( *SPOILER* — best example of the above issue is right after saving Cecil's "girlfriend" from sun fever with the antlion pearl. It very vaguely mentions ONE time in a cutscene to go to a new nation that has a "wall of ice" I scoured the map nonstop for over 1 hour using the hovercraft; no luck. Had to go online to find out where to go, that's really not reasonable imo.

There is one glaring issue that I caught immediately that I’m not sure if the paid version has - if your ringer is off (phone is in silent mode), the game won’t play any audio whatsoever. Turning that off resolved the issue right away. Apart from that, Final Fantasy IV 3D Remake+ (wow, what a mouthful) is going to be more or less the same experience as the separate standalone paid version. This isn’t a bad thing, in my eyes; FFIV is still a great game all these years later, and while this remake (originally made for the Nintendo DS) is more of a sidegrade to the original 2D versions when it comes to gameplay, it’s still something that I’d wholeheartedly recommend. Just know that not much appears to have been changed in this version - Square still hasn’t adjusted battles to run above the original DS version’s hardcoded 15 FPS, for instance - FFIV DS’s game speed is tied to its frame rate, so this wouldn’t be trivial to fix, but it would’ve been nice if Square had put in the extra effort. FFIV DS is considerably more challenging than the other versions of the game - especially on Hard Mode, which lines up with the DS version’s original difficulty - but you thankfully rarely need to go out of your way to grind. It’s FFIV DS, warts and all. If you already have Apple Arcade, there’s no shame in giving this a try.