26th February 2007, 8:41 PM
You failed to mention the extra dungeons and summons and stuff :D.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and add my two cents.
Graphically, the GBA does have a lower resolution, but it's ALMOST the same as the max resolution the SNES worked with anyway (which the SNES simply upscaled for display on a TV), so it really is the same resolution as what the SNES game had, only not upscaled to fill a higher res display. Upscaling doesn't add quality to an image, it just makes it fit the screen, so that's nothing to miss. Keep in mind it's only ALMOST the same, the game has, like all SNES ports, been trimmed at the top and bottom, and just a tad on the left and right. For the most part, it doesn't really affect anything, and it was either this or showing the full image but distorted and fuzzy, plus it's to be expected. Perfectly acceptable. There are a handful of graphical anomalies, but really unless you've played the original I suppose you won't notice anything. Most of them really only happen in the battles.
As far as sound, that's the big one. Most of it is in the form of sound effects in battle being just completely off. It gets the job done though. So far the most noticable music issue has been the lack of a lot of "fade out" so the music just stops into silence in a lot of places where it originally faded away nice and dramatically. One of the most noticable is fortunately an out of the way cutscene where a bartender laments for the days when he was being oppressed by the Empire and the ol' flapper music starts playing. Aside from this, yes, the music is mostly exactly as I remember.
The game has some slowdown. Walking around, for the most part, it's fine. Sometimes there will be a lot of characters all moving around on screen and some background animation and you'll notice a little slowdown, like when talking to people the text displays slower than normal. There's also the slowdown for really big graphical effects in battle. The game isn't perfect here, but it is fairly close and I'd say FF4 had worse slowdown issues to deal with.
The new translation is great, though a lot of it is nearly identical to the original translation. The extra lines here and there and the clarification do add interesting bits to the story that were orginally not included for either space or censorship reasons. The items monsters and spells are all way better. They did keep a lot of things in there for no reason but nostalgia, which I'm not sure I like. Further, there was censorship at play here. It seems they were really going for that E rating and so Relm's act was cleaned up once again (and she still doesn't refer to herself in the 3rd person). There's also that whole Celes chained to the wall and beaten thing. Translation is still superior to the original though, which had all the same censorship and more.
Really, at this point I'm pretty sure Squeenix is going to go ahead and rerererelease all 6 of these games on the PSP now, and if they do, I think a completely authentic translation would be warrented, right down to Sabin being called "Mash"... okay maybe not that... Yeah like with FF5 I think some name changes are warrented (Butz? BUTZ? Are you kidding me? Still, "Bartz" isn't much better...).
Anyway, I'll go ahead and add my two cents.
Graphically, the GBA does have a lower resolution, but it's ALMOST the same as the max resolution the SNES worked with anyway (which the SNES simply upscaled for display on a TV), so it really is the same resolution as what the SNES game had, only not upscaled to fill a higher res display. Upscaling doesn't add quality to an image, it just makes it fit the screen, so that's nothing to miss. Keep in mind it's only ALMOST the same, the game has, like all SNES ports, been trimmed at the top and bottom, and just a tad on the left and right. For the most part, it doesn't really affect anything, and it was either this or showing the full image but distorted and fuzzy, plus it's to be expected. Perfectly acceptable. There are a handful of graphical anomalies, but really unless you've played the original I suppose you won't notice anything. Most of them really only happen in the battles.
As far as sound, that's the big one. Most of it is in the form of sound effects in battle being just completely off. It gets the job done though. So far the most noticable music issue has been the lack of a lot of "fade out" so the music just stops into silence in a lot of places where it originally faded away nice and dramatically. One of the most noticable is fortunately an out of the way cutscene where a bartender laments for the days when he was being oppressed by the Empire and the ol' flapper music starts playing. Aside from this, yes, the music is mostly exactly as I remember.
The game has some slowdown. Walking around, for the most part, it's fine. Sometimes there will be a lot of characters all moving around on screen and some background animation and you'll notice a little slowdown, like when talking to people the text displays slower than normal. There's also the slowdown for really big graphical effects in battle. The game isn't perfect here, but it is fairly close and I'd say FF4 had worse slowdown issues to deal with.
The new translation is great, though a lot of it is nearly identical to the original translation. The extra lines here and there and the clarification do add interesting bits to the story that were orginally not included for either space or censorship reasons. The items monsters and spells are all way better. They did keep a lot of things in there for no reason but nostalgia, which I'm not sure I like. Further, there was censorship at play here. It seems they were really going for that E rating and so Relm's act was cleaned up once again (and she still doesn't refer to herself in the 3rd person). There's also that whole Celes chained to the wall and beaten thing. Translation is still superior to the original though, which had all the same censorship and more.
Really, at this point I'm pretty sure Squeenix is going to go ahead and rerererelease all 6 of these games on the PSP now, and if they do, I think a completely authentic translation would be warrented, right down to Sabin being called "Mash"... okay maybe not that... Yeah like with FF5 I think some name changes are warrented (Butz? BUTZ? Are you kidding me? Still, "Bartz" isn't much better...).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)