Final Fantasy IV

released on Jul 19, 1991

FINAL FANTASY IV is the fourth main installment in the FINAL FANTASY series, developed and published by Squaresoft. It was released in July 1991 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan, and released as FINAL FANTASY II in North America in October 1991 with alterations made due to Nintendo of America's guidelines at the time.


Released on

Genres

RPG


More Info on IGDB


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Best combination so far of gameplay and story. My favorite so far of the series.

INCRIVEL!! as trilhas sonoras são incriveis, o jogo é incrivel, as batalhas sao incriveis e a lore é incrivel

A masterpiece, incredible step up from the NES games in the series. Love the characters and story, love the setting with multiple overworld maps, simple but satisfying character progression in combat. Challenging but way more forgiving than original FF3, thank god for the introduction of save points. Maybe my most replayed FF across the SNES, PS1, GBA, 3DS, and Pixel Remaster version. Probably the most beginner-friendly of the classics

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.

Wonderful game with great dungeons, great characters, and a nice little story with some (small) nuances in the characters.

An important one in the series.

This review contains spoilers

Foi esse jogo que me fez gostar de jrpg, eu gostei muito do novo sistema de batalhas, da historia, mesmo que todo mundo reviva do nada, e personagens que melhoraram muito desde o último jogo