My exploration of JRPGs I played as a kid but this time in Japanese continues with Final Fantasy IV. Although it's kinda hard to call it an exact replay, as there's quite a fair bit different between the original SFC release and the American SNES localization. I originally started on the PS1 version before the red laser (the PS1-reading one) in my PS3 died and I had to start over on the Wii U Virtual Console, so between both versions it took me about 28 or so hours. FFIV, as a whole, is a very transitional game from the 8-bit era to the 16-bit era, and that can be felt in just about every part of it, from the mechanics to the narrative.

This game has a few very notable exceptions in its difference from the SNES port. A very different script, some different enemy and boss balancing (I think), a removal of the multitude of items that are just spells in item form, a removal of the multitude of status recovery items and their replacement with cure-all Remedy items, as well as making MP restoring Ethers much more plentiful and making most hidden passages completely visible as opposed to just hinted at subtly. Most all of the mechanical changes made for the localization I would personally say improve the overall game, as especially having so many more items really clogs up your inventory and highlights just how much of a pain manually sorting your inventory is. The only real advantage I would say the original game has over the localisation is script-wise, but that's only a minor advantage (as I will explain in more detail later). The really cool thing the SFC version has that the SNES version doesn't is a secret room in the Dwarf Castle where you can talk to (and even sometimes fight) a bunch of the developers and staff from the game! It's a really fun, silly little bonus room where they talk about everything from how they wish they had their own personal desk to how they'd like you to try out Seiken Densetsu after you're finished with Final Fantasy 4 XD.

The mechanics are a weird first step towards the real time battle system that would define the next two generations of FF games. Instead of the timers represented as bars as so many later FF games use, FFIV has hidden timers. Couple this in with weird transitions as to when exactly you can start telling a character what to do, what menus do or don't seem to stop that timer, and the fact that a lot of spells have quite long casting times (which were mostly heavily reduced for the SNES port), and the combat can feel quite frustrating at times as characters just seem to refuse to fight when you tell them to. Item management is a real pain, you need to reselect spells in menus to cast them in the inventory outside of battles, there's no in-battle cursor memory feature. A lot of this game's runtime is honestly just fighting with the menus to try and make the battles go better.

Edit: Upon closer inspection there IS an inventory sort button, just in an odd place. I still maintain that the menus are overly clunky and annoying though :b

The difficulty curve is also all over the place. Maybe it's like this in the SNES version as well, but there are numerous dungeons that have SUPER hard and deadly normal encounters and utterly trivial boss fights. Mostly due to how a lot of enemies have really viscous counter attacks that range from a really powerful physical attack to casting stone or even confuse on a party member. It makes grinding a really difficult thing to judge the timing of (although I honestly barely had to do any, thankfully), as it frequently feels more efficient to just run from difficult encounters because you'll probably be able to rush down the boss anyhow. I had also heard for the longest time that the final boss was made a lot easier in the American version of the game, but I honestly couldn't notice that. I beat him on my first real attempt (the first actual attempt I immediately had to restart because I used an item I didn't know the purpose of an it casted reflect on Kain, so I couldn't heal him XP), albeit by quite a lucky break with only one character surviving a cast of meteo XD

Another thing the game suffers quite frequently with is putting mechanical/plot convenience in front of actual character development, and simultaneously also struggles just as much with putting huge design inconveniences in the game for the sake of sticking so some (occasionally nearly pointless) plot contrivance.

We'll start with the latter. Two points in the game REALLY stick out for me in this regard. The first is Cecil climbing the Mountain of Trials in order to become a Paladin. There are a lot of really powerful undead enemies here who Cecil can almost literally not affect at all, so all you're left with is hoping your 2 offensive mages in your party can rush them down before they kill you (or you just run away). It makes the whole walk-up the mountain super tedious and frustrating. A much more magnified version of that is in the Magnetic Cave, where having any metallic armor equipped results in your being perminantly held (and effectively dead) in battle, so your party that the game barely half an hour prior made such a big deal about reducing down to one mage and 3 fighters is effectively whittled down to one mage and 1 fighter, as you're forced to basically run from every encounter in the dungeon because your resources have been stripped away so harshly. All this for the sake of a long, cinematic and uninteresting boss battle for the sake of a totally flat character whose payoff you don't even SEE unless you remember to talk to them afterwards. It is a baffling bit of game design that the game would lose almost nothing for for cutting entirely.

On the subject of plot contrivances at the sake of characters, this happens very numerous times, but largely towards Rhydia (whose name utterly baffles me, as Lydia is a super obvious translation of her Japanese name, but I digress). Being introduced to her is a really neat bit of storytelling. Cecil and his best friend Kain accidentally carry out a plot to burn down her village and kill her mom, and Cecil is left to carry her to safety after she inadvertently summons a titan and creates a massive mountain range. She quite logically doesn't trust him, which he accepts, but he wants her trust her anyway. Some guards from Cecil's kingdom come to take her away, he defends her, and she believes that he does actually want to protect her and tells him her name. It's a really nice little scene. There's even a brilliant bit of mechanical storytelling in how Rhydia, despite knowing black magic, never learns fire spells, implying that she still has a fear of fire from when her village was burned to the ground days prior. But it's all downhill from here.

How does Rhydia overcome her traumatic fear of fire? Her friends REALLY need her to because there's an ice block in their path. Not even a boss battle she needs to save them from: Just a stationary ice block the plot would prefer to be gone. It is an absolutely baffling bit of short-changing that element of her character given how carefully it was set up. Then later on, she get taken from your party by Leviathan when it attacks your ship and she could be dead, but then later saves you as she's mysteriously all grown up. She says she was raised in the world of summon spirits that Leviathan took her to, and time passes more quickly there so now she's like 8 years older. But now Kain is back in the party, so perhaps there's some element of mistrust between her and he who murdered her mom? No. There's nothing like that and it's just hand waved away as she trusts him because the summon spirits brought her up to speed on EVERYTHING.

This is a really common problem throughout the whole of the game, and is probably the roughest element of FFIV's status as this transitional Square game from 8-bit RPGs to 16-bit RPGs. SO much linguistic real estate is wasted for throw away line after throw away line on countless 1-dimensional comic relief characters (this game has nearly as many playable characters as FFVI's huge cast, you just get them taken away from you frequently instead of having them be able to be swapped out all the time). Basically no one in the game has any kind of character arc, as even Cecil, whose story is supposed to be this big internal moral battle of realizing the empire he's worked all his life for is actually evil, is just a facade. The game opens with Cecil coming to this realization, and we the audience never get any view of him before he was a good guy. Even him becoming a Paladin and throwing away his being a Dark Knight is entirely mechanical, as his actual character doesn't change. It's not like when he's a Dark Knight, Cecil is more cruel, short-sighted, or vindictive in achieving his goals and then becoming a Paladin changes all that. The game simply tells him that shadow can't beat light so he has to be a Paladin, and that's really all there is to it. From a narrative perspective, he is exactly the same generic hero as a Dark Knight as he is as a Paladin.

And this is every character with only slight exceptions. Yang is a captain of the guard and is valorus. Cid is an airship fanatic who is silly. Palom is an immature comic relief of a teenager and Porom is his more prim and proper older sibling who yells at him a lot. Edward is a bard mournful for his lady love. Tellah is angry at the world for killing his daughter. Rosa is super in love with Cecil and she's his shoulder to cry on and his reason for fighting. Edge is a silly, somewhat lady's man prince out for revenge on the main bad guy. Their characterizations are consistent, sure but they're completely flat for the whole game, and it makes a lot of the story just tedious because characters really never have anything interesting to say other than just plot exposition.

Even the character who has something closest to an arc, Tellah, has his story compromised and reigned in. His story is pretty explicitly about how his quest for revenge bound in his hatred of the enemy for killing his daughter will only lead to his destruction, and it does. He casts Meteo on Golbez and it overwhelms him, making Tellah die and Golbez only retreat. But This Meteo spell saves the party from Golbez, and also breaks the mind control spell holding Kain in their power. So while it may've brought about his death, it still saved the party and Kain, so it hardly ruined everything. On top of that, the whole party spends the entire game effectively just on a quest for revenge because they hate the bad guy, since they barely have any idea what his collecting the crystals will even DO for like 90% of the game's narrative. They set up Tellah to be this big flawed character with this big cinematic death, then do absolutely nothing with the lesson he's supposed to teach the player/audience, and if anything outright ignore that whole lesson entirely.

Verdict: Not Recommended. At the very least, the original SFC port of FFIV is not the way to experience this game. Beyond that, it largely feels like an inferior version, mechanically and narratively, of everything that FFVI would later do. I do feel I was a little harsh on it due to how much I was expecting of the story and was then disappointed by it, but at the same time the story is so frequently a vapid waste of time I still believe a lot of that criticism is well deserved. If you're gonna play this game, make it the American SNES port for a more palatable difficulty, or make it the DS port which adds a lot more story and deeper battle mechanics. Otherwise just avoid it, because it's honestly nothing that special aside from a footstep of FF for what it would later become as a series.

At this point in time, the Final Fantasy series had created a pretty successful, albeit divisive at points, trilogy on the NES. These three games that would redefine the entirety of the RPG genre as we know it, garner many fans worldwide, and would cement the Final Fantasy series as Square/Square Enix’s flagship franchise from that point onwards. So naturally, after achieving a hat trick with those games, Square was ready to keep this gravy train rolling, with another installment in the series that would be the final entry for the NES, while preparing for what would come out for the SNES later. However, due to the fact that the SNES was about to be released, Square decided to shift gears and re-develop that NES game for this new system, and while they were at it, they were going to release it overseas as well… only, they would end up changing the name of the game to Final Fantasy II for us, because “lol, get fucked, America”. But anyway, just a few months after the SNES would come out for us in America, we would get this next chapter in the series, which we now truly know as Final Fantasy IV.

Before initially playing this game a good couple years ago, I had no clue about the reputation this game held, nor what it managed to do for the Final Fantasy series as a whole. I had just thought it was just gonna be another entry in the series, this time now being brought onto the next generation of consoles, with nothing else to really get too excited about. However, then I played through the game, and needless to say, I immediately fell in love with what I was presented with, as this game is, in my opinion, the best entry in the series that we had ever gotten at that point, and definitely my favorite of the series that I have played so far. Granted, it does have plenty of issues, ones that became abundantly more clear as the years would go by, but for what we have here, it is a massive leap in quality from the previous titles, and one that manages to take the series, and the genre as a whole, into new heights once again.

The story, for the time, was the most developed, character-focused, and engaging one not just in the series, but for video games as a whole, showing that video game stories didn’t have to be just one-note, and that they could show off plenty of emotions and dramatic moments when treated with care…………. even though, looking back, you can see that the story here is kind of a mess, but trust me, we will get into that later on. The graphics are pretty good, having plenty of great sprites for characters, enemies, and bosses, but when you look at it side by side with previous games, you can REALLY tell that it is just an NES game that was prettied up for the SNES, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is worth pointing out. The music is some of the best the series has ever had, with there being plenty of wonderful, iconic tunes that I love hearing even after having played it several years ago, such as with the boss theme, the common town theme, and, for my personal favorite track in the game, the Red Wings theme. And finally, as for the controls and gameplay, both of them work basically the exact same way that you would expect from a Final Fantasy game, but with notable changes that make the game so much more enjoyable by comparison.

The game is a traditional RPG, where you primarily take control of Cecil Harvey, go through plenty of different locations not just on the world that you live on, but also the Underworld and even the fucking moon at some point (yeah, things get pretty ridiculous), talk to plenty of NPCs that you will encounter who will either give you helpful hints/advice, or they will aid you on your quest in some way, find plenty of items that you can use to either upgrade yourself, get better items with from shops or otherwise, or to help you progress along in the game, and of course, get into random battles, where you will slash away at your foes before you either using your main weapon, spells, or whatever else you have lying around in your pockets, and gain experience points to level up and increase your stats. For the most part, it is your standard RPG through and through, which, even on its own, would’ve been fine enough to play through, and I would have had a good time with it. However, with the changes that this game implements, it sky-rockets it upwards into being some of the best content that I have seen out of this series so far, making me eager to get to the other titles in the series sooner or later to see where we can go from here.

In terms of the gameplay, not much has really changed, except for one key difference when it comes to the main battles, which now introduces the Active Time Battle system. Rather than taking turns to fight your opponents like in the previous Final Fantasy games, here, the battle is constantly moving, with characters taking turns based on whatever their speed is, allowing them to use commands faster than opponents in optimal scenarios. That may make the game sound pretty easy, but then you remember, the enemies can use this too, which means that, in a battle, you always have to be quick on your toes to use commands before your opponent can, making battle much more fun and exciting as a result. I have never played any other RPG before this that used this type of battle system, so needless to say, it was somewhat odd seeing this play out for the first time for me, but soon after, I quickly fell in love with it, and adored every second of it, as it did make things feel a lot more active, a lot more reactionary, and a lot more strategic, which made me get invested even more. It’s a good thing too, because apparently, this style will be used for plenty of other FF games later down the road, which I am all here for.

That’s really all that got changed for the gameplay though, as again, for the most part, it all plays practically the same as every other game in the series so far. In terms of other aspects of the game though, such as the story, the characters, and what occurs in said story… well, really, what hasn’t been changed? For the first time in any Final Fantasy game, or most other video games at the time for that matter, we have a set of characters that are already defined, have definitive personalities, relationships with other characters, and moments seen throughout that further define them. Yeah, we saw a brief bit of this in FF II, but that was pretty limited in terms of what it managed to do, as this game takes those ideas and pushes them even further.

Not to mention, each character also has a predetermined job class that they work with. You can no longer change up what job a character has, which does kinda suck, but at the same time, not only do the jobs that the characters get fit them pretty well, but they also grow and develop them overtime, learning better skills and different tactics to use in battle. This especially helps out with the boss fights, which do have more strategy to them rather than just “kill this guy while not getting killed yourself”, requiring you to pay attention to what they are doing while you continue attacking, as performing the wrong move at the wrong time can change the heat of the battle very quickly. With that being said though, for what we do get in this game in terms of character traits, dramatic moments, and character chemistry, it is all pretty basic, with elements that we have seen plenty of times ever since, which can make going back to this game feel generic and underwhelming as a result, but for what it is, I was still able to enjoy the cast of characters and the story that we got here… despite how flawed it comes off as.

Which speaking of, in terms of the story, again, it needs to be asked, what DIDN’T get changed? Out of all the Final Fantasy games so far, this one has the most developed and thorough storyline of the bunch, with plenty of character moments, overarching plotlines, and development that we have seen. On the surface, it is all pretty basic, just being another game about collecting a bunch of elemental crystals to stop a big, bad evil person, which is all well and good, but we also have Cecil going from his dark, “evil” nature to becoming a Paladin, Cain being brainwashed and needing to have himself snapped out of it by our party, Rydia losing her village and needing to learn to overcome her trauma, and several other moments that I haven’t mentioned here. Again, a lot of this is pretty basic looking back, but around the time when most video game stories were “Go save your girl” or “Go kill this big evil thing”, this went a long way, influencing video game storytelling all the way up to this day.

However, this then leads perfectly into one of the biggest problems with the game: again, the story is kind of a mess. Yes, it is pretty generic all things considered, and some parts of it have definitely not aged well over time, but when you ignore all that, there’s also several other elements of the story that feel overused and are, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. First of all, throughout the journey, you will lose a lot of party members, such as with Cid, Porum and Pallum, Yang, and so on and so forth, with you being led to believe that all of them sacrificed themselves for the sake of your quest. But then, as you keep going through the game, you then learn that everyone is ok, and almost nobody ended up dying whatsoever! So with that being said, I have to ask, what was the point of all those fake-out deaths? Sure, a fake-out death can be effective when used correctly, and for most part, they are all pretty well done, but the more times you end up doing this, it not only becomes more predictable and less effective, but it also becomes, again, fucking stupid.

And speaking of fucking stupid, there is also the means in which a lot of the plot elements in this game are carried out. For some reason, Cecil has the biggest case of Murphy's Law that I have ever seen, as whenever he and his crew go on to doing anything in this game, and I really do mean anything, SOMETHING will go wrong, and prolong the journey forward. It all usually involves them going to some place, finding out the problem in said place, taking care of said problem, only to then have the reward or goal snatched away from them in the last second because “Ha ha, FUCK YOU”. There is one part of the game that stands out heavily when it comes to this. It’s when Cecil and the gang defeat Golbez, one of the game’s villains, inside of this sanctuary that holds one of the crystals they need. While celebrating their defeat and discussing what they should do next, Golbez’s hand starts to crawl around the room and go towards the crystal. Cecil and the crew then proceed to watch this hand go up to the crystal, steal it away, and then leave, WHILE DOING NOTHING AT ALL TO STOP IT. Call this story good all you want, but moments like that you cannot defend, as it is just way too stupid to justify.

But don’t worry, my problems with the game don’t just go as far as the story, because oh no, I got some gripes with the game too, albeit very minor ones. Most of the gameplay works pretty well, and again, I would consider it to be the best in the entire series so far, but like with all of these games so far, there just seems to be one or two areas that’s entire purpose is to piss you off. One such place is the Sealed Cave, a location in the Underworld that has one of the crystals you need to get, but it is filled to the brim with these Trap Door enemies, who can all throw themselves into lava for all I care. They can do massive damage to you whenever you fight them, most of the time even one-shotting party members, and to top it all off, they can split into multiple enemies, which can also mean more damage can be dealt to you. But then again, these kinds of issues only apply to one or two areas throughout the entire game, and even then, if you are playing the original SNES version of the game (the US version, anyway), it is very easy, so there aren’t too many instances where you will have a lot of hard-as-hell situations to deal with.

Overall though, despite having one or two annoying areas to go through, as well as a story that is repetitive and flawed when looking back on it, FFIV is, without a doubt in my mind, the best game in the series so far, bringing the classic gameplay to the next generation of consoles in a brand new and exciting way, while further enhancing elements like the story and characters even further, influencing not just RPGs, but all of video games further as a result. I would absolutely recommend it not just for those who are big fans of FF and RPGs in general, but also for someone who wants to get into either FF or RPGs in general, because while it may not be one of the most approachable or beloved game of the series, it is one of the best places to start, and I cannot recommend it enough. Although, now that I think about it, this game sets a pretty high bar for the next game to top. I’m not sure how it will be able to do it. I dunno, maybe they will find a way………. or, you know, they might fumble the ball along the way.

Game #503

A significant step up from the previous three Famicom FF games, Sakaguchi had attempted the whole character-driven narrative thing in Final Fantasy II, but with new and improved hardware it was time to try again. While still rough around the edges, the fourth Final Fantasy game is a much greater success in this regard.

Proper exposition is given this time, with main character Cecil questioning his loyalties to his king after being ordered to use force stealing a crystal from innocents. The player is also introduced early to the ongoing love triangle between Cecil's lover, Rosa, and his friend, Kain, who enviously also vies for her affection. FF4 does a good job of setting the stage early in just a few short scenes, impressive for a 1991 video game.

Kain's dragoon design is still the iconic one used today, and he functions as one of gaming's earliest anti-heroes, changing allegiance more than once. In fact, many party members come and go (12 in total!) with Cecil being the only constant. The party size has even been increased to 5 at once to accommodate the sizable cast. Gone are the days of Final Fantasy being a Dungeons and Dragons style dungeon-crawling RPG with customizable party classes/jobs. Now, the party comes and goes as the story dictates, for better or for worse.

Spoiler Paragraph Below
The cardinal storytelling sin and most frequent criticism of Final Fantasy IV is its comical overuse of the fake death trope. Characters seemingly die in fiery explosions or sea serpent's mouths several times throughout the story, only to reappear later, sometimes bedridden, but other times completely fine. The second and arguably worse storytelling sin is FF4's overuse of mind-control as a plot device. It's cheap and unsatisfying to learn that Kain was actually being mind-controlled by the main villain, Golbez, only to learn much later that Golbez is ALSO being mind-controlled by the spooky real villain, Zemus, all the way from the moon. It's okay for characters to just be bad guys, they don't all need to be influenced by some eldritch unholy entity, Kain and Golbez would've been much more compelling characters if they truly were acting of their own volition.
Spoilers End Here

While the narrative may be the main selling point, the primary mechanical innovation of FF4 is the new Active-Time Battle (ATB) system. For those unfamiliar, characters can take their turn as soon as their ATB gauge fills up, at different speeds for different characters. There are mixed opinions on this, but it did a good job of separating Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest and was a clever way to make use of the speed stat.

Other nitpicks are fairly minor, it would be a nice change of pace if Rosa was treated as anything more than a damsel in distress, but maybe that's asking a lot of a '91 game. Worth mentioning is the music being a big step up from previous entries, Nobuo Uematsu is one of gaming's all-time great composers, and witnessing his work freed from the shackles of the primitive NES sound chip is great to see and a promising sign of things to come.

The oldest FF I'd actually consider recommending to play, Final Fantasy IV is no doubt an iconic game, to the point it can feel generic. Really though, this is because it set a new standard to follow in RPG's formative years, an important stepping stone on the SNES which would later be home to some of the best JRPGs ever made.

3.0/5.0

This game is good. Very good in fact. Taking what worked from the first 3 games and stitching it together to make a cohesive narrative with a new and exciting battle system makes this game a groundbreaking achievement. In particular, the ATB system was revolutionary, making a kinetic and action-oriented RPG system that influenced several different games going forward. This is truly an iconic game that deserves to be recognized.

With all that said though, when compared to its contemporaries it is inferior in every way. Graphically the Overworld looks like a slightly better NES game, in battle the monster designs are great but the backgrounds are plain with few exceptions. The music, as always, shines brightly thanks to the seasoned composers they had at Squaresoft.

The story is somehow both dense and light at the same time. The throughline of this game is strong and the characterization is done extremely well, yet they don't give enough time to flesh out each scene. It's almost like the team had to work within a limited time frame. This is my biggest sticking point, and it truly is a "me thing" but this bothers me to no end. This is a game that deserves to have an expanded plot, and thankfully later renditions to work on that.

Finally, while the ATB system is revolutionary, it is still the first iteration of this system and therefore has some kinks to work out of it. Not having any meter to tell when your character can fight is very annoying, as is not being able to change your party. These things make this game a bit less bearable for me to come back to, though later versions of this game rectify it.

Despite all I have said, this is a fantastic game. It is extremely interesting and a welcome addition to the series. I just believe that it needed a bit more time to cook.

Final Fantasy IV is one of the most important installment in the Final Fantasy series; it was the first Final Fantasy game that featured a fully realized story, fleshed out characters and it introduced the ATB system which was used for the next 5 mainline games in the row. Basically, Final Fantasy IV was a new beginning for the series.
However, being pioneering doesn't mean timeless.
The story in Final Fantasy IV is amazing... for the time it came out; I mean, it's still interesting, but the writing is very weak at times, there are so many fakeouts, tropes or straight up dumb plot twists, and the last few hours feel completely out of place. It's a somewhat captivating but deeply flawed story, unfortunately.
The characters are quite... forgettable? They get in and out of the party so fast that I couldn't get emotionally attached to them at all and their story arcs feel rushed. Surprisingly, I really liked the protagonist, and the story has some decent character moments in general.
The gameplay is quite similar to Final Fantasy VI's but the UI is just worse.
Also, despite the game's flaws, the music is quite good.
Unlike Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger though, the pixelated graphics in Final Fantasy IV look stale.
Lastly, most areas - particularly the dungeons - are dull and the towns look very similar to each other.

Pros:
+ Engaging plot
+ Combat system still holds up to a certain degree
+ Nice music

Cons:
- Underwhelming narrative and characters
- Unresponsive User Interface
- Outdated visuals
- Bland areas and boring dungeons

Narrative: 3/10
Gameplay: 4/10
Content: ?/10
Characters: 4/10
Music: 7/10
Graphics/Audio: ?/10

Final Rating: 4/10
- Weak -
Final Fantasy IV is a great example of a game that was groundbreaking when it came out but has since been surpassed in every way.
I appreciate Final Fantasy IV for everything it has done to the series, however, I can't help but see it as a "relic" from the past.

Do I recommend it?:
I'd recommend it only to people who want to get deeper into the series and experience the origins of what Final Fantasy has become since then.