Sick of angsty amnesiac twentysomethings with lots of giant zippers on their clothes and haunted pasts getting in the way of your medieval fantasy role-playing games? Then you are the target audience for Square Enix's latest Final Fantasy.
Another Final Fantasy, you say? On the Nintendo DS, you say? Impossible! And yet it is true: Square Enix has announced Four Warriors of Light: Final Fantasy Gaiden via a teaser website and the Japanese comic magazine Shonen Jump. We're not going to reprint the magazine scans (possible NSFW pop-ups), but there's a good deal we can glean from Jump's coverage.
Four Warriors of Light takes Final Fantasy back to the old school. As a 14-year-old boy, you're tasked by the king of your tiny hamlet to go off and rescue the princess, a classic videogame story if ever there was one. You'll eventually form a party of two boys and two girls, who will go off and save the world.
The gameplay system is also in the classic turn-based style. The menus seem to have been designed around the DS' touch screen -- each character's list of possible actions looks like a tabbed browser window, which should make flipping between them quite easy.
The Jump article, stingy with details as it is, notes that there is no "Magic" command in the menu, but there is a "Charge" command. In the status screen, we can see that characters seem to have "AP" instead of magic points, which is represented by a row of yellow dots. Since each action in the menu, including "Fight," has a yellow dot next to it, the system seems to be that you spend AP whenever you do anything, and you can spend a round charging it up if you need more.
You can equip swords, shields, armor, and accessories, and just like in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, your 3-D character's outward appearance will change to reflect what you're packin'.
Speaking of which, while the game seems to use the same 3-D engine that's already taken Square Enix safely through numerous Final Fantasy adventures on the Nintendo DS, the colors seem a bit more painting-like, maybe a little softer and muted. I think it's a more pleasing look, a nice contrast to the sharper colors and characters of the other games.
Four Warriors of Light, from what we can see today, is as close as Square Enix has ever gotten to creating a new Final Fantasy in the classic tradition, completely from scratch. I'm quite interested to see how this plays out, since I'm more of a fan of the DS remakes now than I am of the brand new games in the series.
It's slated for release this fall in Japan. I'm sure the bankable brand name alone is enough to secure it an American release in 2010.
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