FFIV was a curious one back in the day. We all thought that it was FFII on the snes, and we've had so many damn versions of it to be ridiculous. There was the snes one where cecil couldn't even use dark wave, the good hard version released on the psx and it wass fantastic of course.
If you have never played FFIV in any incarnation, then have a brief synopsis: Cecil is a dark knight, commander of an airship fleet of the kingdom of baron. Baron sends him to brutally slay the town of Mysidia for it's water crystal. Cecil is like WTF? But does it anyway and is super guilty. Rosa (cecil's white mage lover) cheers him up some and then Cecil confronts the king and is like wtf do we have to kill all these people for? Cecil gits pimpslapped and he and Kain (a dragoon who has the hots for rosa, but is cecils best friend (@#%^)) are sent on a mission from the king so that Cecil may redeem himself.
The plot continues through a lot of good character development and lovable characters (some of whom, but not saying who) actually die. IN his quest to stop the evil of Baron, Cecil... okay no that's too much I'm not spoiling anymore. So if you have never played FFIV, then do not read the following.
If you HAVE played Final Fantasy IV, then please read forward at your own risk. I will blue cover major game changes and black cover only the story.
They made a lot of changes to the game for the DS. First off, it's all 3d and it looks pretty damn nice. Mid n64 era 3d. IT also has some voice acting and vary minor tweaks to the menu (such as, you get full names of your equipment instead of the character limit making it read like "Dark/".
Gameplay changes:
Cecil has the equivalent of souleater as a drk, and his paladin magic has gotten beefed up a LOT. New to the game is that you can customize your characters battle commands. The only command which must remain is the item command. What? no attack? Yes. you can have characters with no attack option. This is fantastic for characters like Rosa who's attack was always replaced by "Aim" anyway, and this is good because you can free up more space for other abilities. What other abilities? Glad you asked
This FFIV introduces Augments. Augments are key items that you get from several logcations, bosses, or when people leave your party or die. You will always get at least one augment from these people, and can only get more augments from their deaths by giving them more augments before they die meaning, you have to make a choice between whether or not you want to get anything more from edward from bardsong (Oh yeah he can actually support the party with bardsong now!) Would you like just bardsong? fine if you want "salve" or "hide", then you'll need some more augments.
It also opens up ways to really help out the game. For example. When yang first! leaves your party on the ship to baron you get the counter augment. I gave it to cecil because cecil was just a powerhouse (and still drk). Just darkness and wait for hits and it kills everything at that point up til he becomes a pld. Then... cover people and defend. Rosa will never die this way and cecil gets twice as many attacks. Then... you get "draw attacks" which basically says, "Every single target ability will hit this person" He counters every attack on the party. Oh wait, what if he can't attack but kick? You can get the kick augment from yang and OH MY GOD
Anyways, it's a fantastic game and I love the new take on it. I'd highly recommend picking it up for any rpg fan, or just for nostalgia.
Final Score: 7.7 (where, for reference, a 6 is good and 8 is Excellent)
Damn... It's like the anti your you're distinction. Anyways, I fixed it.
Edited, Aug 11th 2008 1:28am by Pensive