Final Fantasy IV: Zeroedmus

Last night saw the conclusion of my Final Fantasy IV game. I cleared out most of the final dungeon (I don't know of any paths I skipped but I didn't get all the treasure so I must have missed something) with relative ease. I did almost die to the mini-boss which puts a 10 second Doom timer on the entire party but I barely took him out with 1 second left. Hurray for the Nuke spell!

Zeromus himself came close to winning once but ultimately the fact he has no physical attacks spelled doom for him. He was beating the tar out of Edge and Cecil with his spells but was barely hurting Rosa and Rydia and they're the ones with the healing spells. Cure4 wasn't good enough to keep up but Asura was a full heal. Edge didn't even run out of ninja stars to throw at him before he died and I didn't buy more of them so I just used what I found in chests over the course of the game. I would have been annoyed if I'd died since the save point was so far away but ultimately the fight wasn't all that hard.

I think the game clock in the game was around 14 hours when I finished. I died once to Bahamut but that means I couldn't have spent more than 15 hours total playing the game. 82 days to put in only 15 hours. That's a long time to plow through what I've always said is my favourite game. This time around I often found myself falling asleep while playing! I got frustrated with the ATB system multiple times as well. Did the game just not age well? Have I been spoiled by the iterations that came later?

I don't know. It's been around 8 years since I last played the SNES version but even then I'd played FFX and all previous games. Maybe I've been subconsciously comparing it to the DS version?

Maybe there's just nothing new to experience? There's no console RPG I've played anywhere close to as many times as I've played FFIV and there's not exactly a lot of deviation in how the game plays out. There are a few side quests that can be done but the characters are always the same and I mostly do everything in the same order.

That said the story is awesome. The music is awesome. I love the character and enemy designs. It was my first RPG as a kid and will always have a special place in my memory as a result. I'm slotting it in as #1 on my marathon page so far. But will it be able to hold that spot for long? Coming up shortly is a run of games featuring V, VI, VII, and Tactics which all could compete for the crown I'd just assumed would stay with IV when I started this up last year. But first we have Legend III and Mystic Quest!