If you’re the sort of person who rends their garments when the subject of modern Final Fantasy games comes up — the kind whose knee reflexively jerks at FFXIII‘s despicable lack of towns! — the existence of Final Fantasy Legends will warm your heart. Unlike, say, FFIX or the upcoming The 4 Heroes of Light, Legends isn’t simply designed in the spirit of the series’ 16-bit days; for all intents and purposes, it could be a brand new Super NES game. Developed by the same team behind FFIV: The After Years, Legends maintains that same retro look, this time patterning itself after Final Fantasy V.
Of course, what you won’t like about Legends is that, for the time being, it’s exclusively a Japanese cell phone game. Not an iPhone game, either — it’s an old-fashioned DoCoMo i-Mode cell game, the kind that was all the rage a few years ago over in Japan but seems to be falling by the wayside. That makes Legends doubly retro, which is charming in a metatextual sense. However, it doesn’t do much good for anyone outside of Japan who’s actually interested in playing the thing.
