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Final Fantasy IV for DoCoMo phones: TGS 2009 Hands-on

By Janelle | September 27, 2009 at 11:06 am

It’s Final Fantasy IV, recently ported and remade a whole lot of times. What’s one more time, right? This time, the game’s for cell phones, and it looks all right. The colors are brighter, but the character sprites looked a little bit off. The file loaded right at the top of Mt. Ordeals, before the fight with Scarmiglione. Moving around and navigating menus was easy outside of battle, where there was little pressure for speed.

Inside of battle was a different story. Heaven help me if I had needed to cancel out of a magic or item menu, because the time it would take to cancel and reposition my thumb was crucial. It would probably get easier with repeated use, though. Other than that, the demo was pretty uneventful. The characters were armed with a lot more magic than I’m used to at that point (I speedrun the SNES version in about five hours), so the battle was a cakewalk.

Maybe I’d buy this if I had a cell phone that could support it, but I already have the nice DS version, and would probably rather play that. Still, if someone wanted Final Fantasy IV on their cell phone, this port is fine. It doesn’t have any technical issues or real interface problems, and once that hurdle has been vaulted in a cell phone game, the rest is mostly up to personal tastes. If the game is difficult to play, out of the question. If it runs fine, why not?

Topics: Final Fantasy IV, Previews, Tokyo Game Show 2009