I just bought the FFIV Complete Collection (PSP) about a week or two ago, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. FFIV is my favorite RPG and I own like 4 versions of it. I guess I'll try to organize my critiques here.

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I love that it comes with the original, the new interlude, and the sequel, FFIV: The After Years. There's a lot of artwork and rearranged music with it that's also pretty cool. It's also not terribly expensive which I like (for comparison, this cost me 30$ while my FF Chronicles cost about 45$ when I bought it). The script translation is also much, much better than the original SNES version. They also added the Lunar Ruins and the Cave of Trials along with party switching back in, whereas the DS version lacked that. Furthermore, there is a much nicer autobattle option setup- you can turn the cursor to Keep, and then the characters will just perform the last action they took each round. It's nice because you can change what command they use during battle

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I'm not entirely sure I like the new graphical style. It feels a bit overdone and out of place, especially the magic animations. And oh god, the frickin encounter rate. I have literally had 4 battles in 4 steps and average a battle per 3-5 steps. It really feels like the encounter rate was just turned up to 11 in this game and unlike the amazing DS version with its Safe Travel augment, there is no way to turn off encounters. The aggravation of playing through the game with my fingers on the shoulder buttons 70% of the time was unbearable. And of course it was just as bad in TAY.

My only real complaints of the Interlude is that the characters seem a bit underpowered for the Sealed Cave (you are guaranteed to lose at least 1 character per Trap Door fight) and it's very, very short. Not even 2 hours.

TAY has it's own set of problems, the first being that it's so frustrating having to play every character's tale from lvl 5-10 onward. You rarely have enough money to buy equipment when you want it and you HAVE to grind out at least 5-10 levels just to not die playing through the stories; 10-20 if you want to do the challenge dungeons. Tail hunting was my least favorite part of FFIV and of course it's now an even bigger deal in TAY, so just shoot me. Good luck trying to get tails whilst not in the final area, because your characters are generally way too weak to get them from their own chapters unless you find a way to exploit the system (like using Rydia to Stop the Green Dragons and then just pounding away). You can't even focus on hunting the tails either because every ~30 minutes the moon phase automatically changes and you need to leave wherever you are to use 6 tents to change it back to the correct phase. I really liked the idea of Bands but the game should tell you how to do them; you shouldn't have to guess with different character's commands to figure out what is a Band and what isn't.



I could probably forgive pretty much everything though if it wasn't for the ridiculous encounter rate. That pretty much ensured I'll never willingly choose to play this version over my DS version.