Square Enix's GBA version of Final Fantasy V Advance will have numerous improvements over the original version, including new job classes, optimized system, improved graphics, and new dungeons.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't adding new job classes and new dungeons make it not so much FF5 anymore? I mean, if they wanted to improve upon it, they could name if FFV-2 or something. Just a thought.

(Not that I'm not psyched (even though I don't own a GBA). FF5 was easily my favorite after FF6. And in terms of replay value, it's definitely tops in my book.)

Edit: And this belongs in the Gaming section, not Game Music.

But wouldn't extra stuff just ADD replay value? If the argument here is that the extra stuff isn't necessary or will break the balance, that's sort of hard to prove (especially at this point, since it isn't even out yet). To be fair, some of the classes already existing in FF5 are relatively useless (Geomancer, I'm a-lookin' at you). Besides, the extra stuff is basically the same thing they did with FF4 Advance. It's intended to make it more appealing to those who've already played the games years ago. All I want out of this, as I've said before, is better dialogue for Faris. Almost every single line in the Anthology version had YARR, MATEY or SHIVER ME TIMBERS or something, and over the course of some 30-odd hours that gets incredibly irritating.

I guesssss....   You make pretty good points. I didn't really know about FF4 Advance. (I'm so out of the gaming loop it's not even funny. I've been playing Suikoden recently. Suikoden 1. On PSX.) Hey, wait a sec. I have a Game Boy Player for Gamecube... will these games work on that?

Oh yes...yesssss.
It was quite a treat being able to play Castlvania: Circle of the Moon...and being able to SEE what was going on!

There, you have no excuses.

I'm more worried that the game will be dumbed down ala FF4 Advance. Part of the FF5 charm was its difficulty. It's not like the story and characters make up for it.

SquareTex: Sweeeeet! I will look into it.

Wanderer: Yes, dumbing down is quite teh suck.

YARRR!

Get an SP, because of the much brighter screen and because it is one of the greatest consoles ever made. But if you mean on the SP then you must have pretty bad eyes.

And with this topic, comes this new pic:

http://image.www.rakuten.co.jp/edigi-ga … 84461.jpeg

What we can see is that there will be at least two new job classes -- Gladiator and Cannoneer -- and that, much like Dawn of Souls and FFIV Advance, there will now be facial portraits for characters.

It's been a while, but it looks to me as though that battle shot on the ship seems more detailed as far as the background.  What do you think?

These are a nice but subtle improvement over the original graphics which IMO lacked the charm of later Square's later games on the SF. I'm not crazy about the fluorescent colors on the upper left battle screenshot, but maybe the colors will be toned down a bit in the final version. Aside from the battle screens the other screenshots too have a more polished, smoother look. If only they'd given the earlier PS editions the same treatment. I can't seem to remember the name of the company that's handling the actual porting of these titles, but so far it looks like they're doing a nice job.

Edit: Found the name, it's TOSE. Apparently they did the PS remakes of FFIV-VI as well :\
Luckily these GBA remakes look more like the work they did on the FF and FFII PlayStation versions. They probably handled porting the FF games to the WonderSwan too.

Frankly, the port of FFIV to GBA was so bad, I didn't feel compelled to play through it for the new content (not saying I won't in the future, but the state of the game isn't pushing me in that direction). Seeing the GBA barely able to handle an SNES launch game kind of made me lose a bit of faith in it. Hopefully, the guys porting V and VI are far more competent.

Edit: Nevermind, I just read .59's post...I have zero hope for this port now, given the way both Anthology/Chronicles games turned out. They actually got FF4 to run well on PS1, but FF5 and FF6 (and CT) were mangled, near-unplayable messes.

I hear FF6 was one of the most powerful SNES games ever made...If GBA struggles with FFIV, I know it's going to have difficulty with that one when it comes out.

V was fairly average to me...Just kind of felt like the whole game was building up to the Mime class. It was good, but I thought it was the weakest of the 3 SNES FF's.

What were the specific issues you had with the GBA port of FFIV (I haven't played the port myself)? I don't know how common this knowledge is but TOSE is a huge company (employing 800 people in Japan alone), which has worked on lots of high profile games in the past while rarely taking credit for it. Someone over at Insert Credit linked to this list a while back: http://review-site.net/developer/to.html#%83g%81[%83Z

They worked on titles like FFVII, Dragon Quest VII, Biohazard 0 etc. While the same company  handled all the FF remakes it is possible that there were different teams of people working on porting the games to different platforms.

Here's a link to an interesting interview with the company:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060 … d_01.shtml

Several of my friends back home played through FF4 on the GBA and said that the biggest problem with it is this weird long delay between when you push a button and when the game registers that you've done so - apparently really annoying when you're used to being really fast with your battle commands from the original version.

For the most part, the music and the sound effects were pretty bad and the enemies were stuck in retard mode (most of the time you could clear them without them making a move...goes with the theme of dumbing down the GBA ports of games). I never got past having two characters in my party (I sampled the ROM and got past the Mist Dragon, then did the Rydia scene), so I can't comment on slowdown. It definitely didn't feel as smooth as the SNES version, but the loading times were quick at least (outside of sound, the thing that completely destroyed the Anthology games).

Eh, I'd just like to think GBA could handle a perfect port of FFIV. Anything less feels insulting.

"Load times"?  Were you speaking of the GBA version or Anthology?

The biggest offender in FF4 Advance was certainly the stunted delay when cycling through the menus.  The overworld maps also took a hit, since the parallex scrolling looked choppy whenever you moved.  It was speculated that TOSE largely data-dumped the Wonderswan version to create Advance, as at times, it really does feel like it's being played as poorly run rom.

I am surprised at the negative comments leveled against the music and sound effects, though.  Given the GBA's sound capabilities, I thought they did a superb job.  The editing was a little sloppy, though, particularly during the epilogue at the end; how on EARTH do you justify cutting out the finale before jumping into the credits theme??

It probaboly could. But Square was lazy, and ported it from the Wonderswan version, which caused many of the bugs (much of which was fixed in Europe)

-Joshua

Well, the transition from the field to the battle...Newer RPG's have made me refer to that as a loading sequence. Both versions were good and what I saw was one of the few promising signs for FFV or FFVI Advance. Looks like I got ahead of myself, as I was talking about the loading for Anthology while originally talking about FFIV.

I found the music/sound effects quite painful...They were always comforting in a "gamey" sort of way on the SNES and here they just...hurt (literally). Especially the sound effects. Impressive feat or no, I can't say I'm happy with the end result. I'm cringing at the eventual thought of "Dancing Mad" or the opera scene on the GBA.

Seeing how poorly the GBA fared in handling FFIV was a consideration when I decided to pick up a DS, which I'm starting to wish they would just port FFV and VI to.

*shrug* I can always hope these "enhancements" that are offered for the games make their way into the Virtual Console versions of FFIV-VI.

All I want to know is if the original names will be restored rather than using the horrid FF Anthology ones.

Hee hee.  Salsa.

Bartz? X-Death?

*giggles*

Then again, it's not that the original names were all that great either.

Too bad about the FFIV GBA port being so sloppy. I must admit though, that I first and only played FFIV-VI on PlayStation and never felt that annoyed by the loading times. It's become such a common problem I just tend not to notice or be frustrated with it anymore. That said, the fact that the SNES/SF versions actually ran smoother than the PS ones is unexcusable.

I guess this means that, like GoldfishX, I'll wait for the Virtual Console versions and see how those turn out.

A lot of the 'original' FF5 names are matter of interpretation. One shouldn't use the fan translation to judge...

ANd in FFVI, well, I prefer prefer some of the US ones...

-Joshua

Generally speaking, using the original names is not recommendable since the way they are pronounced in English will be different from the Japanese pronunciation most of the time, while in order to get closer to the Japanese pronunciation you'd often end up with very awkward looking names.

'Buts' is one of the closest transliterations you can get for FFV's main character's name (if you want people to pronounce the name 'correctly' that is), but nobody in his right mind would publish the game outside of Japan using that name. The same thing happens with the newer FFs too, by the way. For instance, Tidus' name would really become something like Teeda.

For FFVI, changing Tina into Terra was done for a good reason: the former is just too common a name in the West. The test audience didn't approve of it either. I always thought it would be funny if it was the name Terra that inspired the later nature-themed names of FF protagonists. I guess they could have left Mash's name alone, but what some tend to forget is that a closer approximation of his name's pronunciation in Japanese would actually be the decidedly less cool sounding 'Mush', as in mushy.

It's all a matter of how close you want to get to the original source without alienating the target audience. From what I've seen of fan-translated games, I'd prefer a Woolsey translation any day. In any case, aren't you free to change those names if you want?

Me too, I just couldn't go through with it, something about it just bothered me for some reason. The Amano portraits sure were nice though.

And yes I'm worried about FFVI, I'm sure it'll be better than the PSX version, but I'm still worried. However MAYBE since there weren't any previous ports (IE WSC), maybe they'll work a lot harder and make it direct from the SNES version so that it'll turn out better.

Well now, this is interesting.  It's been said that TOSE went back in for the European version of FF4 Advance (which was released in June) and fixed all the bugs that plagued the Japanese and U.S. versions.  That means no more menu lag time and uneven battle speed turns between your characters and the enemies.

Has anyone played the EU version that can confirm this?

Yep, I've played both versions and can confirm that the european one is indeed much better. You don't have to press a button several times to get it to register in the menus and, in general, the battles seem to be fixed. I did have a few occasions where I thought the battle speed was still a bit funny but I may be a little paranoid after buying the US version and being so disappointed by the bugs.

The menus seem better in the European version but the battles are still insanely fast, with your characters getting in more hits than the enemies. Maybe it improves after the opening.

I've been studying Italian so the option to play in that language (and four others) is quite cool.

There's some new scans of the game up over at GAF: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. … 452&page=2

I like the inclusion of more kanji in the dialogue, and the new opening scene could work as well (I thought FFV's opening was really dull). I don't much care for the added jobs, as the game's job system was balanced well enough already, but I suppose it makes for a nice bonus for people that already played the game. One thing I'm not very exited about are the character portraits that now accompany the dialogue. Amano's style just doesn't seem to mesh that well with the 16-bit graphics.

Is that picture of Terra in the FFVI blurb a new one btw? This winter seems awfully fast for a release date.

Parish has a new 1up.com preview up for the game, from PAX.  So far, things are sounding very encouraging.  Great to hear of the new translation, and even better to hear that Faris' pirate speak has gotten the heave-ho.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3153183

BGG also has a set of new screenshots from PAX: http://www.britishgaming.co.uk/?p=1186

It sounds promising...It's nice to hear the obvious issues of FFIV and Anthology being pointed out and improved on. Parish might want to relay that to his co-workers who missed them in their EGM reviews. ;p

I seem to have forgotten...What was the issue with Galuf's speaking in the Anthology version? I definitely remember the Faris pirate speak, though...