4/5 ★ – elkniodaphs's review of FINAL FANTASY IV.

I started my most recent playthrough on the day of the Artemis II launch, which also happened to coincide with the soft relaunch of Our Game Club, r/ourgameclub on Reddit. It's an especially fitting selection considering the to-the-moon narrative. A podcast recently mentioned how FFIV is the only FF game that takes you to space, though I can think of two others—one of which is Final Fantasy VIII, the Game-of-the-Month selection for the wonderful r/VGBookclub. I'm on the edge of my seat excited about what their game for May will be. Final Fantasy IV refines linear progression, which I like. It's the perfect balance of determinism pushing against the freedom of exploration. FF 1-3 did not do this, instead favoring the whatcha buyin' approach to magic and class progression. That's still present here with weapons, but you never feel like you're punching cards outside of that framework. But you know what? I'm totally fine with that. Sometimes it's good to keep your head down and proc higher numbers for the sake of the practice alone. I almost dipped out on the fight with the Central Processing Unit inside the Giant of Babil. Fighting a literal CPU in a video game is the kind of meta I like, but I was following bad advice; take out the Attack Node (leave the Defense Node intact) then focus your attacks on the CPU. Taking both nodes out results in a devastating *Object 199* attack. After several failed attempts, I realized this was not the strategy; the Defense Node heals the CPU faster than I can damage it. I changed my strategy, take out the Defense Node (leave the Attack Node intact) then focus attacks on the CPU. Here we go. With the Defense Node down, the CPU wasn't getting healed, and sure... I was taking damage from the Attack Node, but so what? I have a healer. The working strategy was suggested by my in-game party member FuSoYa, I should have just listened to him. That's just kind of how FFIV works. Because the development team knew who would be in your party at any particular part of the game, they tailor a scenario to suit it. Your job as the player is to familiarize yourself with this interplay and select the best equipment, cast the best magic, and deploy the best battle strategies to overcome this prearranged system. That sounds like a bad thing, but it's not; sometimes you get a better-looking picture when you color inside the lines. FFIV devolves into a numbers-go-higher game of sleuthing Coke's secret recipe, but when it hits, it hits. Trash monsters will go down easy, but discovering the "battle recipe" for each high-level encounter *is* the game, and it's quite satisfying. Defeating that CPU was a fist-pumping moment, and then again with the final boss and the narrative reveals along the way. Persona might be the Taste of a New Generation™, but it just Can't Beat the Real Thing™.