Final Fantasy IV for Game Boy Adv Reviews by Gamers

I haven't played too many Final Fantasy games, but I've really enjoyed most of the ones I have played (FF1, FFX, FFX-2). What they all have is a good battle system, but this game lacks that.

Though this game has a good story and good graphics, its battle system is seriously flawed. Instead of a normal turn-based, you have the ATB system (which is fine in other games) which has gone through some changes for the worse. From what I played, enemies' actions are all pre-determined (enemies of one type will all attack on their turn, or all use magic, or all use a certain skill, two of the same monster never do a different action unless they have a status such as silence). This makes for some very annoying times when faced with four Malboros, and all four of them use Bad Breath (inflicts every status ailment except KO on a character).

On the player side, when issuing commands to multiple people in quick succesion, the order in which they act is pretty random. You might have certain people act before others even if you issued their command last, so a certain spell or attack you want to use might be delayed quite a while and allow the enemies to attack you more. This may not sound too bad right now, but there are some dungeons late in the game where monsters will suddenly deal tons more damage than monsters in the previous area. You'll go from being able to kill monsters in one or two hits to taking 6 or 7 physical attacks just to kill one. It's because of difficulty spikes like this (and that monsters deal massive amounts of damage to your characters, forcing you to CONSTANTLY heal, even at high levels like I was) that I didn't bother to finish this game. You're better off renting FF1&2 or other GBA RPGs such as Golden Sun or Breath of Fire.