Nobody's Perfect

While wandering around, searching for the elusive Pink Puff and fighting what seems like an endless supply of Trickers, I finally did receive the Imp summon as a reward. This means that my earlier statement about such hidden summons being merely the work of rumor-mongers was incorrect, and thus I am offering a retraction. It does seem rather odd to me that after years of searching for such objects, I finally stumbled across one. The odds of getting them must be extremely small, possibly less than 1/255. If I were Square, I would have made the Imp summon the best summon in the game. I mean, come on, the thing is nearly impossible to find, and who would expect that something as unthreatening as an Imp could pack such a wallop? If anything it would have been humorous. As it is, the Imp summon is worthless, as are (from what I have seen on the internet) all of the other hidden summons in the game. As players would have to spend hours upon hours attempting to obtain any one of these spells, the fact that they are so underwhelming is rather disappointing. I suppose that Square can be forgiven for its lack of foresight regarding making the installment's rarest objects less than spectacular, but even at this early stage in their development careers the makers should have realized that the rarer an object is, the more useful it ought to be for the player. In Final Fantasy IV, however, this is not the case, which is rather unfortunate.

The Imp summon, by the way, uses an attack called "Imp Punch." Now, if Square wanted this to be almost exactly like its Japanese counterpart (therefore the switch of the name Crystal Sword to Ragnorak, and so on), then why did the company not revert the name "Imp" back to its original "Goblin?" Why keep the American name, when it has called the beasts "Goblins" in all of its other American releases? Had the name been kept, this attack would clearly have been termed "Goblin Punch." In any event, it is the birth of what would later become a regularly used (and occasionally learnable) attack used by these otherwise inept fiends.

While I am on the subject of correcting myself, I realize now that there was one other statement I made earlier that was not quite accurate. I essentially said that Edge eventually had the best attack power in the game. That is incorrect, as I had forgotten how much of a stat bonus is given by Ragnorak. Cecil has the best straight out attack in the game. Edge does the most damage when he throws the Fumas, but when it comes to simply using the 'Fight' command, Cecil has the Ninja beat.