Final Fantasy 4 Advance Review Part 2

Well finally finished it and the extra 50 level dungeon aka the Lunar Ruins. It's hard to say whether my opinion of the game has changed; the problems I've mentioned before have grown on me or I should say that I've learned to ignore them. The battle themselves are quite a blast, and challenging. In fact it does bring out a certain difficulty in the game that was sorely lacking. Battles with enemies in the Lunar Ruins rival bosses in the regular game. The boss battles are quite fun actually although a lot of them are very derivative of FFX where you have to fight dark/evil versions of the summon monsters.

Usually after every few levels, you are faced with a door that leads to a particular character's "trial" in which you gain insight in some of the character's personality or thoughts in the game. It's nothing entirely earth shattering, a lot of them tend to test their capacity for their job class than their personality. But what greatly increases the enjoyment is that you have the oppurtunity to gain more powerful weapons and more funwise...evolutions of some of your skills. Kain gains a Double Jump, Rydia increases the power to her summons as well as an added bonus to one of her summons, Yang gains an attack that triples his attack power as opposed to just doubling it. Sure it's very cosmetic but a bit exciting as well.

But therein lies a bit of the downfall of the advancements. What good is to have some of these special attack advancements when you're already capped off at doing 9999 damage with a single hit? The Twins Parom and Palom gain a unity spell that deals 9999 damage together, but they could have easily do 9999 damage individually. What's more there isn't anything special added for defeating the final boss at the end of the Lunar Ruins aside from a small sense of accomplishment, most of which is quite defeated by the certain items that you gain from each trial you perform. However if you do not use the certain items, I'm sure there is a greater sense of accomplishment for beating the final boss au naturale.

But in the end the pros cancel out the cons and behold, I daresay my original rating stands, despite having new extras, they don't really go far enough to satisfy you with a tiny bit more of effort.

Wonderful Guilty Pleasures

I've never really felt ashamed with my appreciation for cartoons. They're fun and I've always loved them. Even when I watch especially kiddie targetted cartoons I have no reservations even with a series as sugary sweet as Atomic Betty.

But it was recently that I've found one that does tickle my guilty bone not because it's by any means a bad animated series. The quality is good and the writing is pretty tight, but it's the premise of the show, TEENAGERS.

I usually dislike teen tv shows. The occasional movie could be done well, but I have yet to find a good one that involves actual teenagers and not 20 somethings playing 14 somethings. But on the whole teenage shows pander to a demographic that has an intelligence less than the average teenager. Instead of quality they decide to bank on novelty of the person. Of course this seems to reflect a lot in the animation world as well since a lot of shows dealing with "speicifically" teenagers. Not ghosts kids fighting ghosts or kids going around the world fighting evil terrorists, but *just* teenage life, tend to be utter shit for animation.

And yet 6teen manages to go under the radar of all these problems and come out as a half decent show. I dunno why I like it, I just do. Basic premise is 6 teens (3 guy and 3 girls for gender equivalency) work in the shopping mall and hang out with each other. The entire series takes place in the huge ass mall, which you might think would cause boredom or a tiresome setting and yet it somehow in it's simplicity it manages to keep it good. The result is less crap about home or school, and more about the mall which doesn't convulute things. But this is by no means a simple show...well it is, but it does have a slight continuation of various storylines that by no mean take up the bulk of the show.

But what really amazes me but at the same time doesn't surprise me at all seeing how it's a Canadian produced show, is the amount of non-teenage bullshit is involved in this. Even though not explored in detail like say....Degrassi, 6teen mentions syching up of periods, shows vomiting into someone's mouth during a kiss, mutiple on screen vomiting in the food court, cut off of swear words and best of all, physical comedy of PAIN pain pain. Granted not every show will have these, but it's really surprising that an animated show, let alone a Wester animated show would show such things.