Final Fantasy IV's Magnetic Cave

My thoughts towards Final Fantasy IV are pretty mixed--while on one hand it's one of the more historically important RPGs (the first TRULY epic storyline that American audiences played, one of the first RPGs to find a mainstream audience, the largest cast at that time), and while many of those aspects hold up well, and it's a generally solid game, there are tons of bits about it that just don't work. One of the more shallow considerations is that I'm playing the GBA port, which is kind of glitchy in spots--there's often troubles with the ATB system (either a character will attack twice in a row, or sometimes they'll hang on and wait a while before they do indeed attack), it's laggy in spots as far as navigating menus are concerned. There are more personal considerations--I normally dislike mages* (especially white mages), and most of your characters are magic-users. Finally, the whole game reeks of being a stage where they're just figuring things out--VI, for example, is made by a company that had mastered the sprite-based console RPG, and most of the elements are perfect in it. IV is a company trying new things, succeeding in some, and failing miserably in others. While you never really need to spend time levelling--they did make the game relatively well-paced, and if you're fighting every battle you'll probably be at the level you need to be--but occasionally you'll want to, and even if you're just moving your way through a dungeon, you'll notice that there's an extreme lack of variety in monsters. You'll fight the same exact party of monsters three or four times in a row. There needed to be a bit more randomization as far as that's concerned. But where it fails, it fails respectably--it fails because it seems like this is a developer unsure of exactly how to do certain things; even though it had made three critically- and commercially-successful RPGs, it didn't feel like becoming complacent. That, coupled with the new hardware of the SNES, gave Square license and reason to experiment, and where the experiment fails we can't fault them--in later games, we see that they learned from their mistakes.

However, one of the more notable areas--an area that stands out as a terrible idea because I have never seen a single other RPG attempt to even touch upon emulating it, is the Magnetic Cave.

At this point in the story, the party has been unsuccessfully trying to protect the four crystals which control the forces of the world and which Golbez, the Bad Guy of the moment, is chasing after. The main character's girlfriend has been kidnapped, and Golbez proposes a trade: the girl for the final crystal. So the party goes to the town of Troia, where the crystal is housed, only to find out that the evil Dark Elf has stolen it; if they can get it back, they'll be able to borrow it for the trade. Okay, well, good--a little yak-shavey, perhaps, but it's a second-generation RPG and no one knew any better. Trouble is, the Dark Elf has erected some defenses--magnetic ones which make the characters' armor and weapons too heavy. If you've got anything metal equipped, you won't be able to lift it to attack--which, as far as the game is concerned, means that in battles, your character is considered to be paralyzed and cannot attack or anything. If all four of your characters at the time are wearing metal, they cannot run away from the battle, and the party is considered to be defeated. Game over.

An extremely interesting contradtion appears almost immediately. No matter what armor or weapons are equipped, the party can move about the dungeon with no hassle; if a random battle occurs, however, they'll be unable to move. There is always a major disconnect between the Field Screen and the Battle Screen--random encounters are always jarring and are only accepted as convention and nothing more--but this is an especially prominent one: either I can move or I cannot. Either I can not only walk through the dungeon and run from enemies, or I can neither explore nor run.

At this point in the game, we have in our party Cid, who is a decent physical attacker that cannot use magic; Yang, who is an excellent physical attacker that cannot use magic; Cecil, who is an excellent physical attacker that can only use white magic; and Tellah, who can use both black and white magic. Yang can attack bare-handed. Cid's weapon is a wooden mallet that is not affected by the magnetic field. Tellah can use magic to attack enemies. Cecil is the most affected by the field: as probably the best physical attacker in the party at this time, he uses swords mainly; if we de-equip him, his attack goes down to an almost embarrassign level. And while curing is always helpful, it won't damage any enemies**. Yang and Cid can do some damage on the enemies, but it'd be helpful if Cecil were there to lend support.

As far as defense goes, obviously most of the decent armor at this point is metal in origin. De-equipping them and equipping cloth armor means that the characters' defense goes down greatly, making them more susceptible to enemy attacks. And while some armor is explicitly labeled as metal--Gold Armor, Silver Armor, Mythril Armor, etc--there are many pieces where it isn't clear--just what is a "Kenpogi" made out of?

So as far as defense goes, if you want a character to be usable in battle in the Magnetic Cave, you've got to equip him in such a way that he'll be very vulnerable. As far as offense goes, two characters do moderate damage, one does none, and one is a special case.

Tellah, it is true, is an excellent mage--he's got pretty good stats and almost all of the spells in the game. However, he's only got 90 MP, and when most of the good offensive spells cost at least 15 MP, it's clear that you can't cast much.

If I may digress--this is my blog so I may of course digress--there are storyline-related reasons as to why Tellah's MP caps off at such a low number--other characters' MP way overtakes his. Tellah is, first off, an extremely old character. He's grown, stats-wise, as much as he ever is, and even though his levels are increasing, he's not really going to get any stronger. (I read somewhere that some of his stats actually decrease, but I don't remember where, I can't find confirmation, and I don't feel like experimenting in the game to find out if that's true.) He won't get better, he'll get worse. Second, the most destructive spell in the game, Meteor, needs 99 MP to cast. Meteor is listed as one of Tellah's possible spells, but it's always grayed out because you don't have enough MP to cast it. A major plot point of the game involves Tellah using all of his power to cast the spell--with tragic results, of course--and the scene would have no import if he'd been able to cast it all along. I understand, storywise, why Tellah is given such a low MP score.

As far as gameplay is concerned, however, it's a terrible idea--it makes the game unnecessary problemmatic--either you can't use Tellah much, or you need to waste MP-healing items on him.

It's pretty much a given, as far as I am concerned, that a game's System can be used effectively to bring the state of a character across--a game like Silent Hill which stresses its protagonists' Average-Joe nature by disallowing them to run fast for a period of time and giving them shakey aim, for example, manages to convey that this is an untrained and unathletic individual, without sacrificing gameplay too much. Here, the decision to characterize Tellah as a weak person does not serve the game--it hurts it, in my opinion. This is a major problem with Final Fantasy IV, in my opinion--Edward is another character who's weak, both physically and emotionally, when we first have him in our party, and he has low accuracy, does little damage, and has the wonderful special ability of "HIDE" which does exactly what it sounds like. While it hits home that we don't have a brave hero on our side, it doesn't make the game any more fun.

To add insult to injury, literally an hour before the Magnetic Cave is confronted, we have two excellent mages--one black, one white--in our party. If they were still in the party, we'd be able to do some damage without having to sacrifice strength and defense. If Square truly wanted to make a dungeon where physical strength is not prioritized, it ought to have done that at a point where we can exercise magical strength.

My strategy for the Magnetic Cave, incidentally, is to de-equip the character with the highest agility and put him in the back row (which lets him escape most damage.) I level up outside the cave if I need to, and I then just charge through, running from every battle. It's nowhere near what Square intended, but I don't like their idea, and it's so much easier to do it my way. As I've said, I respect that they tried to do something different, but I breathe easy knowing that so few people thought it was a good idea and that no one else tried to do the same.

* Playing through the GBA ports of FF 1 and 2 did give me a bit more of an open mind towards magic-using characters, actually. There's first off much more choice in both as to what spells you can get, so while IV attaches certain spells to each level, 1 and 2 allow you to bypass crummy spells like Death or Break that never really work anyway. 2 especially impressed me with its magic system--any character can learn any spell and grow exactly how you want him or her to, so essentially you can make anyone a Red Mage, meaning that you can have a character heal--but also do some major damage to enemies. Each spell also has its own level that you can strenghten by the number of times you use them, so mages can end up becoming very devastating. The spells themselves are more useful, and you can pick only the spells you want. I do like that element of choice as opposed to, "Let's give you a character who's a white mage, whose CURE spell is the only useful one, and who can't do any significant damage." That's what I hate about mages sometimes.

** To be fair, healing spells will damage undead enemies (zombies, vampires, etc) in the Final Fantasy series--most notably, an undead boss in Final Fantasy X can be killed in one turn by using a Phoenix Down (revive item) on him. However, none of the enemies in the Magnetic Cave are undead, and therefore Cecil indeed cannot do any significant damage on them.