For full clarity despite listing this version I'm only talking about the base game of FF4. I don't have enough care to list any thoughts about Interlude, and The After Years will get its own separate review cause otherwise I'd be rating this a lot lower.

Anyways, this is the first Final Fantasy usually credited for having a good story and I think part of the reason for this besides just the time it was released is cause this is the second FF game we got in the west and so by the time we learned of the existence of FF2 it was already well past the years that game was considered impressive. The story in this game isn't terrible, in fact moments like Mount Ordeals and the beginning village segment are still high quality enough that I think about them. The villain design has always been great as well, but in this game the Four Fiends and Golbez are just so iconic and it's honestly not hard to see why. But despite all of this, the story honestly isn't very great by standards today. There are a lot of really shallow characters (regretfully, despite having multiple female party members none of them really do anything on their own or develop negatively) and awkwardly executed moments, which is unfortunate cause the settings in this game have the ability to be so much greater.

The gameplay is solid though, it's the only FF game to date that lets you run around with 5 active party members as the trade-off for the fact you don't really have much team customization until the very end (and even then depending on the version you play). The debut of the ATB system really changes the game for jRPGs in general by giving speed an extra element than just dodge chances and who attacks first in a chain. It also solidified a bit of job identities that were kinda up in the air previously, specifically Dark Knight, which in 3 doesn't play like the Dark knights here on out who take damage to deal damage. It's also the first game to start using scripted battles to tell parts of the story which is something the series starts mastering even by the next entry.

Like in FF3 the music of the series has only gotten better. While I don't hold as much nostalgia for the game as whole like I once did, I do hold a lot for the Hyadain Appearance of Golbez's Four Lords of the Elements cause it's one of the first videos I saw after discovering Final Fantasy beyond 10 in 2011, and by extension really like the Four Fiends from this game.

I'm losing the sauce a bit the longer I go on, so to wrap it up I think FF4 is a game that once nostalgia and filling in the blanks with fan theory are removed it doesn't quite hold up in every aspect, but is still a fun game worth trying out to see how you might enjoy it.

The 4 star rating is for base FFIV on PSP.

FFIV sees the series returning to a more involved story, as FFII does, and it excels in building that story in a much better way than any from the series before it. The antagonist has many moments with the cast and it makes the journey all the more satisfying to go through. After Years, however, feels like a massive waste of time outside of those few moments the game sprinkles in of character interactions only to be muddled over with a retreading of the original story. The final dungeon is massive, and the game ends up taking longer than the base story, on top of advancing some established characters in an uninteresting way while introducing new ones that provide little substance to the plot. The game felt finished, so i would recommend finishing the base game and reading a synopsis on after years if you are interested in what happened to some of the characters after the base game.

Final Fantasy IV took a leap from the NES to the SNES, marking a major improvement in the series. The story is much more complex than previous entries and the gameplay is starting to cement itself and resemble a classic RPG structure. The characters are enjoyable and the graphics on the PSP remake are amazing. The gameplay is fun although the mechanics have been improved a lot in future entries and the story is entertaining despite a lack of commitment to character sacrifices which does dampen it a little. This is still a fun Final Fantasy game despite being eclipsed by its successors.

Final Fantasy IV is a classic. It's pretty flawed (ridiculous encounter rate, needing to use a spell to pull up the map, and crazy difficulty spike in the final dungeon in an otherwise easy game) but FF4 is also the true formula for the "golden age" of Final Fantasy.

The story is a bit more basic compared to 6-10 and the gameplay isn't as strong as 5's, but it's still a really good game. The characters are all pretty enjoyable, with some decent complexity to them. For being the first real ATB game, the combat is enjoyable. Music is stellar as per usual. This is just a damn good game. Easily in my top 5 for the series :)

I'm interested in checking out the DS version to see what it does for the story and then the Pixel Remaster to see if the QOL stuff changes how I feel about the replayability.

This was my first Final Fantasy. For my entire childhood I'd told myself not to bother with Final Fantasy until I was an old man suffering from carpal tunnel or something, wrongly assuming the whole series had generic turn-based battles with plots that didn't justify the effort.

Yeah, uh, so I was wrong. Turns out, a lot of them have a pretty neat little core gameplay mechanic called active time battle. And if this one is any indication, their plots are perfectly enthralling enough. Though looking it up online gives a lot of results of people criticizing it, I thought the active time battle system was fun! In JRPGs, I'm used to, you know, taking my time and carefully considering my next move. With this system, it gives you time to plot your moves while you're not in control. Because once that menu pops up, you'd better execute your plan as fast as you can... and hope that you pressed right hard enough to cast Curaja on the entire party, because there's no time to make sure your inputs registered! The enemy could kill you in that time.

As for the story, supposedly the game was influential for storytelling in the medium. While with that perspective it does feel like the first of its kind in a bad way, it still held my attention, with a chaotic start that gripped me instantly. While reviews often seem to shrug the plot off as rather trite, I thought that not knowing if it was going to be a fake-out or not only added to the chaos.

The music is also fantastic and has been stuck in my head. That boss theme REALLY pumped me up; the overworld theme instantly became one of my favorite overworld themes. One of the towns most important to the story has a theme that, in my opinion, really captured the awkwardness of the situation, but perhaps that's just me. These are just to name a few, it's a stellar OST.

Lastly, the PSP version in particular looks beautiful, and has definitely spoiled me before I play Final Fantasy V and VI. The spiraling blur as you transition into battles, the way the enemies disintegrate when you beat them... just pretty to look at. This version also comes with an optional redone soundtrack which, from what I've heard, is also excellent, as well as two other scenarios I haven't played yet. Regardless of the... less than positive takes I've seen of them online, I'm excited to come back to play them once I'm a bit more caught up on the franchise.