It's been a minute. Started watching a video called [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtKDTwf-9G0]("The DEFINITIVE Final Fantasy IV Analysis") and decided that it would probably behoove me to actually finish the damn game instead of watching a 5+ hour video about it.

I'm almost there. Spent a few hours on it today. Did a little grinding. Progressed some more through the story.

According to the guide I'm using (and yes, I've decided that a guide is a perfectly reasonable way to experience a 31 year old game because I do not have as much free time as a child in the 90s might have), I'm at the final section of the story.

I'm playing the Pixel Remaster and it's obviously tweaked to be easy mode (both in how quickly the party levels and how easy it is to escape from encounters) but even then, some of the random encounters are just brutal. When walking through the Giant of Babil dungeon, I kept getting encounters with multiple enemies that could one-shot most of my party. There's just not much you can do to counter some of that.

It was a good grinding area but, yikes. I'm not sure I'd have managed to play the SNES or Super Famicom version of this. I need that modern easy mode! (Ask me about Persona...)

Right now, I'm planning to finish this tomorrow. I would absolutely love to put FF4 behind me as I head into the new year.