I wanted to play Final Fantasy 4 DS, so I went to dig my DS out of my messenger bag. I hadn’t plugged it in for awhile and was probably going to be low on battery power so I reached in to grab the USB charger cable (and apparently the ONLY means of charging it since some dumbass bulldog chewed up my normal charger cable, grr) only for it to snag on something and… uh… said charger cable snapped off at the base. This DS isn’t getting charged, and I can’t get my FF4DS fix. Dammit!
I could have just… ordered a replacement charger cable (or better yet, just loot a 3DS now since there are actually games I want for it– Super Mario 3D Land looks awesome despite its complete and UTTER LACK OF ME YOSHI, but thankfully there is also Mario Kart 7 dropping next month) but I was having a bad night and needed something to drag me back into my happy place. Then I remembered that there was a PSP port of FF4. Sure, it was 2D and lacking in the awesome voice acting but it would do for now, and as a FF4 nerd I was going to have to loot it eventually, so off to the PSN store to loot me some FF4.
It follows the GBA path (as in, bonus dungeons and ability to change your party for the endgame and way easier than the OMG difficulty that the DS version got ramped up to). I was expecting it to be a straight port of the GBA version graphics-wise… oh, how wrong I was. For being yet another 2D iteration of FF4 and with one exception I will address, holy chocobo crap on a stick this takes the prize for “ooh, purdy.” Dude, the Mist Dragon EFFING SPARKLES IN BATTLE. SMOOTHLY. The menu portraits are not crap! Yes!
Just… one teeny problem here, though: the field sprites for the characters look like ASS. It’s, like, yes they are super-detailed and actually make some attempt to be faithful to the original concept art, but at the same time they look like some POS sprite sets out of one of those RPG Makers. This sucks! (I get the feeling that the task of the field sprites got shoveled onto a non-artist, because there is no excuse for them to look this bad.) But, fwegh, if the rest of the game looks so damned awesome, I guess I’ll just have to put up with it.
Other, more trivial but still cool things: Yay for being able to switch between using the original SNES music (Uematsu) or the rearranged DS music (Nakano).
The only other complaint stems from my being a VA nerd. Why, Square, why? Why couldn’t you have either transplanted the voice acting from the DS version and replace the 3D cutscenes with illustrated stills by the dood you recruited to do those kickass menu portraits, and then add onto that with all the extra space you have available? (FF4 PSP only eats up 750-something MB, barely half of the theoretical limit of a PSP UMD) Yeah, I know, tweaks in the scripting and such but… boooo. The voice overs was what cemented (and still does) the DS version as my ultimate favorite, and to have transplanted that into the PSP version would have put it at a very close 2nd place. Very, VERY close 2nd. Maybe even tying for first, even though I love the FFT-like character designs for the DS version. :P
And yes, there is still some spoony bard. If you think Square would EVER ditch the Spoony Bard line…
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This week in Beavis and Butthead… OMG CORNHOLIOOOOO. You would think that, with Cornholio footage being the first to be leaked, we’d have been all “ho hum, we saw the Comic Con video already but there is sooo much more to it than the teaser said. And please tell me I wasn’t the only one who double Picard-brand facepalmed at the end. WTF YOU GUYS. You just walked away from the ultimate cult! You turned down the best ticket to scoring! BOO THESE GUYS! (On the flipside, Stewart finally has something good happen to him.)
We got two new episodes this week, actually. “Drones” was okay, though I’m not sure how the dudes could pull Grand Theft Auto out of something that looks more like a flight sim. :P
Also, I don’t care too much for the “snarking on Jersey Shore” bits, but you have to admit that Butthead’s pseudo-Italian accent is pretty damned funny. It’s not quite Craig Ferguson-brand but it’s still lulzy.
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I have a love-hate thing with Subway. 99% of the time, the store is invisible to my food radar because I don’t care for subs, but once in a blue moon they roll out some variant of a chicken parmesan sammich and it’s instant HOLY CRAP DO WANT. Right now they have a chicken parmesan melt as part of their $5 footlong monthly highlights, and I’m just… “do want, yesterday.”
Why can’t Subway keep chicken parmesan as a permanent menu item? I would give those doods so much of my money if they did that. :(
Hi, I’m Yoshi and I like chicken parmesan, be it in sammich form or with spaghetti.
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I know November is supposed to be “Lazrigees Academy” but I’m just not feeling it. I should have done it in September when it would have been topical but buhuhuh bromides came up and yaaaarrrr and things got all messed up. Also I need to do revised Avatar designs for Blastoise and Dinah, the latter of which I never got around to doing even though she became a MacBook last year!
But I know some doods really want to see Aries and Denlan done up to resemble Bulk and Skull (if those two were to appear in an anime high school AU). So… I make no promises, but time permitting after Blastoise and Dinah’s design upgrades… >_>;
Plenty of fodder to draw upon for Snowschemes, though. Oh my word, so many things to play with there. I kinda want to sneak in an Angry Birds reference, too… :D
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And with that, I shove off to play FF4 PSP. No thanks to LifeForce, I will also have bad images of Cagnazzo dropping Cornholio lines. “I need MP for my Tsunami-hole!”