Oh, how nostalgic and yet new Final Fantasy IV Advance is. I can still remember the days when I played this game on the SNES as Final Fantasy II when it was released stateside.

Fans of the Final Fantasy series since the beginning will appreciate this game and new fans can look back at how the Final Fantasy craze started. Not only does this game bring back the classic that was known to us as Final Fantasy II but it also adds a few new features that improve gameplay.

The most notable feature is the Bestiary. Not only does if have important statistics about the monsters such as Hit points and their weaknesses but it also includes the rest of their stats such as the items they drop, experience points given. Another feature allows you to do a quick save anywhere in the game just in case you need to quit and can’t make it to the next save point. The gameplay and story are relatively untouched with only a few tweaks to make gameplay a little smoother.

The classic story of a hero that must rise and grow to defeat an evil that threatens the world still exists, but there are a couple twists to this classic. The hero is not someone you expect to be: a Dark Knight under the service of a power-hungry king who wants the world’s elemental crystals for his own selfish reasons. Realizing this injustice, the Dark Knight Cecil must fight for good to atone for his wrongs. And by doing so he goes through unexpected changes that no one believed he could do because of what he once was.

New and old fans of the Final Fantasy series will not be disappointed with this game.