Final Fantasy IV really showed what a story in Final Fantasy can properly look like
While they had delved into it a few times in the NES era, it never took as centre of a stage as it does in this one.
This has what I think are the first solid characters and factions in an FF game
This is of course helped by the step up from NES to SNES which is apparent in almost everything to do with the game, from graphics, to presentation, to the interaction with the world and the ways stories can be portrayed both through in world cutscenes as well as in battle
The revolving cast of characters are all very charming, Edward, Rydia, Kain and Edge being a few personal favourites.
Cecil as the main protagonist is genuinely amazing, from a Dark Knight destroying the land to the Paladin saving it, dealing with his old friends in the is absolutely phenomenal.
Helped more by the supporting cast that bring out the varied parts of Cecil especially at the end, his new found friends encouraging him to say goodbye to his tragic brother.
Onto the brother
Golbez is a really good antagonist, even if I wish we got more development of his character, him being a reflection of Cecil, being the Dark Knight, the position he gave up. A position the end of the game makes clear could easily have been him instead.
The combat was good, a solid ATB system, with mp instead of spell slots. But at it's basics it's still the same combat from previous entries even if you need to think a bit more now with the ATB
Overall I found it really fun, I didn't feel as directionless as I did with the older entries while still being open. The story is really well told and emotional at multiple points, a lot of the time dealing with loss, but also hope. Making the best out of the worst situation. Self reflection and working to better yourself, atoning for previous actions by putting good and hope into the world.

Played for the first time - pixel remaster
What a wonderful experience! The design of this game is so tight and balanced - if you didn’t play the original NA release apparently. I found this to be incredibly challenging. A lot of boss fights had puzzle-like problem solving. It’s quite impossible to mash attack on every enemy and win the game. I love that I died a few times and really had to think about what I was doing wrong. The progression is relatively simple but I loved visiting each town and castle. As condensed and snappy as the pacing is, they really manage to squeeze in a ton of personality to the main cast and their respective home towns. It does just enough to feel like a legitimate story with drama and twists.
I was often letting my mind visualize a modern visual style behind events that took place. FF4 made my imagination run wild. I believe the constant twists are pointed at as goofy and stupid, but for how old this game is, I think the honest and genuine attempt at creating exciting drama is commendable. Having just complete FF16 recently, I love how much DNA of 4 is obviously in certain aspects of it. Modern games need to take their time with cinematics, voice acting, 3D traversal etc. I love modern FF, but honestly I loved spending an hour or two playing 4 every day and feeling like I progressed the story a lot. Doing that with 16 was rarely possible. Not every game needs to be fast paced, but it’s occasionally nice to complete a game within a week without dedicating hours a day. The compact and snappy nature of its story is absolutely a positive aspect here.
The difficulty of the boss encounters contrasts that, instead having you slow down to think about your party and what purpose they serve for each fight. The way party members leave or get swapped out with other characters keeps your tactics fresh too. It is the antithesis of repetitiveness.

Lovely game. Beautifully designed and paced. Some of my new favorite music in the series. I did play the version available on switch, but I avoided using cheats for my first playthrough. This feels like a perfect starting point for the series if you haven’t tried out any. A game born of simpler times with some modern ideas - ideas so modern that this in a way feels like the A Link to the Past of Final Fantasy. So many ideas were conceived within this entry.

This game reminds me my childhood cartoons a lot. That's not a bad thing for me, as long as it's filled with lovable characters, I am okay with super simple "let's stop the bad guy before he destroys the world" kind of story.

I mean I can't say if any of the cartoons I had watched starts with burning an entire village but anyway yeah. This game's story is fun with lots of lovable dorks. Only thing I wish about the story to do is Rosa and Cecil's relationship to get more fleshed out... and maybe those two annoying kids didn't existed... But other than that. Yeah everyone is lovely. Rydia's heartbreaking struggle to get better, Edward's story of slowly getting more mature etc. Oh and of course our main character Cecil and his story of redemption story(cue: ff4 Prelude theme). He is the type of character that if I had played this game before I would paste his posters all over my room. His previous regrets and slowly overcoming to get better is a type of story that makes you motivate and hype you. Simple but effective.

Gameplay starts fun too

You get new magic, new type of attacks, weapons in every progress. I can't say it's strategic that much(but of course strategy gets really important when it comes to boss fights) but time based battle system rather than a turn based makes the game much more energetic and challenging. While one character prepares a magic, other character charges their attack, another one puts a barrier, last one tries it's best to summon a monster etc. But unfortunate thing is, you don't have much freedom for classes. Character classes are premade because story reasons but I wish they gave us options to select our own skills ourselves so we can do our own subclasses. I mean you get new skills when you level up also sometimes new classes because of the story but skills are automatic things, you can't choose your new skill to be more offensive or defensive or supportive etc. This small change would make grinding to more interesting

Grind
Yeah there is grind. But not much in the most of the story, just going around for a hour is enough to take down that area's boss... But it suddenly goes 5 times up in the last area because of lots of minibosses. Because it's required or something in a jrpg? I don't know but at that part I kind of lost my motivation to continue. Also I was playing on the damn ps1 and didn't know they had long loading times before beginning this game so... yeah it was a bit frustrating... I played this before ff5 but now comparing them together, ff5 had a hard last area as well but I said in there that they made grind fun with giving you the ability to diversify your classes so... yeah in this one it's not fun that much. So, I wouldn't say no to anyone for playing this game on easy for that last area sake.

So yeah, fun story, fun but near the end gets grindy gameplay. Lovely characters also. If you still have your childhood soul in it yourself, then I recommend this game wholeheartedly. You will have fun with it hopefully

-> Esta bien y tiene buenos personajes.
-> Pero Cain no es uno de ellos.
-> Cuanto consigues ballena el juego empeora narrativa y jugablemente.
-> Falsas muertes restan.
-> Rubicante es el mejor antagonista.

One of the tightest Final Fantasy games, at least in its original SNES incarnation. (Maybe others, too, but I get the sense that some of the other versions dilute the experience with all the extra Stuff.) It’s true that this is a ‘less developed’ Final Fantasy; they hadn’t quite figured out how to make the best of the SNES hardware graphically or auditorily, and there aren’t as many sidequests or battle options as later games would hold. But I’d argue that’s actually what makes it great. Some of the later Final Fantasy games have a tendency to bite off a bit more than they can chew, giving you a plethora of party members with a host of unique abilities that ultimately don’t actually change how you play the game. They suggest depth that I often find isn’t actually there when you’re looking for it, and on that front FFIV is a little more honest. Here’s a game where every character has a defined role, where your party is strictly dictated by the story, that has about three side quests in the entire game (all of which take place very late into the story). The game gives you a limited set of tools, and leaves you to figure it out.

You could also say some of those things about previous Final Fantasy games—FFII is very linear, aside from its weird leveling system—but this, of course, is kind of where the series comes into itself; at the very least, this is as close as you can get to a platonic Final Fantasy game. The first three were all fairly different in ways that didn’t really stick, but this is the real baseline that the series worked from for a while. No job changing or Espers or materia; your characters’ options are all pretty straightforward, and the only real innovation in the formula, ATB, is the only one that actually stuck around essentially unchanged in multiple games. Square leaned into the simplicity for this game, and let different scripted combinations of those mechanics guide each dungeon into a unique experience that I found later games to lack.

A party of Dark Knight Cecil, Rydia, Rosa, Edward, and Yang feels very different from a party of Paladin Cecil, Kain, Cid, Rosa, and Yang; each combination has a different set of AoE attacks, healing abilities, magical attacks, weapon types, and skills. Even fundamentally similar characters, like Rydia and Tellah, function very differently because of their spells and MP pools. Tellah has much stronger spells, but you won’t use them as much during the course of a dungeon, because he has so little MP; Rydia has a lot more MP, but the only attacks that really do anything for most of the game are her high-cost summons that are overkill on most enemies. And over time, those perceptions of the characters change; by the end of the game, Rydia’s summons are useful in general enemy encounters, but they’re also strong enough that you want to save MP for any tougher fights you come across. Some parties have more physical power; some parties give you so many frail characters that you have to put one on the front lines, exposing them to more danger.

This feels like a very conscious effort on Square’s part; characters in the game fake-die so often that it becomes obvious that they’re just trying to come up with a reason to make a new party. (This comes at the expense of the story, which largely stops giving its characters anything interesting to say or do after Cecil’s admittedly striking opening arc concludes with his grand transformation. However: they do ride to the moon on a whale. So that’s pretty cool.) Enough of the dungeons have a unique hook or set of enemies that you have to adapt your play to each area, as well. The Magnetic Cave requires you to unequip all metal weapons, which essentially changes the role of each character in your party for a dungeon (before jerking them back into place for the boss); the Sylvan Cave is rife with status effects and monsters in chests, making it a more difficult test of endurance and item/MP conservation; the Lunar Subterrane has an entire section where regular enemies are minibosses. Not every idea comes off perfectly, and they sometimes verge on annoying, but they always made me think and reconsider my situation given the tools that I had.

I appreciate that constraint; in later Final Fantasy games, the boundless freedom to do any party makeup I want usually means I’m just going to do the same thing every time. (Usually 1-3 physical attackers, a healer, and a black mage. Which is the final configuration in this game, but there were plenty of stops along the way.) This game made me stop to think, and it’s also why I single out the SNES version, which keeps things lean and reasonably difficult. There is no one definitive version of this (even saying 'the SNES version' can mean many different things; I played the US version with the Namingway fan translation), but no matter what, the game’s strengths decidedly do not lie in its story or its characters, at least not to the same degree that other games in the franchise do. This one’s all about the gameplay to me, and while I imagine the other versions hold unique values of their own, I really do appreciate how the SNES version makes a great, constantly changing experience out of so little.

It's the first Final Fantasy game with a REAL story, with actual characters with believable relationships. Still nothing truly mindblowing, but it's good, especially for the era in which it was released. Once again the characters have their own unique moves which help you connect further to them, and unlike FF2, these moves are actually useful and makes you appreciate the characters more. The one MAJOR flaw with this game's story is that it cannot commit to anything, every single plot twist or event in this game is a fakeout, near every single character in this game dies, only for a "SIKE! They're actually totally fine!" for no reason. One of my favourite points in the plot was Kains betrayal, which is not only then repeated but "oh uh he was just under mind control the whole time!" which they then use this "mind control" shtick multiple times over. Its just bad, and also totally unnecessary, it only diminishes its great moments while adding nothing, most of the fakeout deaths only come back to say Hi for a few seconds then cease to be relevant for the rest of the game, so why even bother ruining their death?

This game also introduces the active time battle system, which is huge! And greatly improves the gameplay, the entire battle system even beyond this is much speedier than before with improved UI and damage indicators to help the game flow much better. And if you're a little baby and cant manage the time battle system, there always the option to slow it down or have it wait for you, but its not necessary and much more fun to fight in real-time. The enemies are also greatly improved, with bosses that actually serve as a unique challenge, and not like FF3, where some bosses where more like puzzles, with a few clear solutions, which has its upsides, but here the battles actually feel like battles, with bosses having multiple forms and unique techniques for you to fight against. Due to these unique encounters it allows for challenging boss encounters without the need to simply grind, although if you want to grind (for some reason) there are quite a few collectibles for you to go grind for.

The soundtrack of this game is brilliant, definitely the best so far, especially all the battle tracks, perhaps some of THE best final fantasy battle themes in the franchise.


In conclusion, Final Fantasy IV represents a turning point in the franchise's history, setting the stage for what followed. With its engaging story and memorable characters, it introduced a more character-driven storytelling style. The active time battle system injected new life into gameplay, making battles quicker and more exciting. The improved user interface and challenging boss battles made the game a satisfying experience. The soundtrack is a standout. Despite its quirks, Final Fantasy IV is a classic and a great starting point for those exploring the world of Final Fantasy.