(This is a review I first published in 2021, elsewhere. Now it's here)
If you’re short on time or haven’t played it, here’s what I’ll say: 1991’s SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy IV is, in my opinion, best enjoyed by those who can appreciate a short, dense, no-frills, melodramatic JRPG. It’s an essential game in the genre and, for whatever my judgement is worth, good. If that sounds like your cup of tea and you don’t know anything else, then I’d recommend playing it and forming an opinion before reading (if you regret it, you can bug me later).
This is a retrospective of where I was when I first played Final Fantasy IV, and a rundown of where I'm at now. I'll try not to spoil too many other games in the process.
On Final Fantasy IV (Or — "Jumping the Lunar Shark”)
It was all Chrono Trigger’s fault. A series of coincidences had guided me toward that prolific blend of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and I waltzed into 2019 wide-eyed and fascinated by a genre I'd once thought laughable. So now, having marveled at the results of their combined effort, it was time to pick a side for my next adventure. Yuji Horii beckoned to me from across the void, his latest Dragon Quest installment due on my game console that Fall, but Hironobu Sakaguchi leapt in with an ace up his sleeve. Not only would the ridiculously popular Final Fantasy VII release on Switch by March, but he’d recently converted a good friend of mine with its Steam version. So, in anticipation of that day, I began the new year with (let’s face it) the series’ foundation.
Dusk had settled over the city skyline, silhouettes of heavy coats retreated into apartments for blankets and coffee, and I was conjuring meteors to blow up an incarnation of living hatred. Final Fantasy IV had been my winter game, a boundless ongoing saga, and at last I’d arrived at the end. It should’ve been triumphant, the climactic conclusion to an epic quest spanning countries, realms, transcending even the planet itself. Finally I’d experienced a classic that meant so much to so many, that had contributed massively to the development of a genre and a generation of video game players. As Cecil and Rosa stood before their beloved crew of allies turned friends turned surrogate family members during their coronation, I felt a wave of relief as I realized it was finally…over with. I’d crossed Final Fantasy IV off of my bucket list.
But something about it lingered, and still does. I think back to Final Fantasy IV all the time. When ruminating in quiet moments, I sometimes rewind and play back the burning of Mist, the bombing of Damcyan and the death of Anna, the raid on Fabul and Rydia's return, and I can appreciate how pieces of the narrative seem to hold more layers than its charmingly chunky sprites let on. It’s hard not to notice specks of its influence in nearly every successive game in the genre, to say nothing of the groundwork it laid for the future of its own series. Though I can pinpoint the precise moment when my fascination clambered its way up and into a fat chocobo, there’s a lot to admire, even love about its dizzying ambition. It’s evident from the moment Uematsu’s incredible John Williams-inflected Red Wings theme booms over its soaring intro. Here’s where it got its hooks in me:
An earth-shattering event in the opening hour of the game has the player guiding a condemned Cecil Harvey through a scorching desert, burdened by the weight of his armor and an unconscious orphan while fending off hordes of vicious monsters. Until now the player has only seen flashes of the Dark Knight’s festering conscience over the atrocities he’s committed, but now he becomes decisive. Despite injury and lack of direction, with nobody to hold him to a moral standard, Cecil takes his first steps toward redemption by taking responsibility for the last surviving member of a village he’s inadvertently incinerated. It’s a powerful and understated gesture, represented only through the player’s own desire to press on through the overworld map and clobber goblins in intermittent random battles (curiously, a blue-clad hero would usher a green-haired girl to a desert oasis following an act of terrorism a second time just two games later). Subtle pieces of characterization like this permeate the battle mechanics. Cecil’s special ability as the Dark Knight is to cut a fraction of his own health for the sake of unleashing a powerful attack, evocative of his self-hatred, which is countered by Rosa’s potent healing spells. It even develops when Cecil becomes a Paladin and, effectively, becomes more like her. This is one of the key elements which makes Final Fantasy IV and other games of its ilk so fascinating to me. Since the developers were working in a time of abstractions, they had to find ways to use the language of the genre to convey their intent. How do you make a character feel like a person in a role-playing game? Square took to the tools they’d developed over the three previous installments and rearranged them in the shape of a drama.
Where previous entries in the series (and the next) would be content to keep classes significant only for strategic purposes, Final Fantasy IV uses them for character development as well. Palom’s rambunctious attitude is evident when he’s casting devastating offensive spells as a black mage, and even though he has a rocky relationship with his sister Porom, their “Twincast” ability assured me that they could get along when necessary. Yang’s focused and calculated physical combat maneuvers are emblematic of his discipline, which take time to build, but pay off in spades. Rydia refuses to cast fire spells until Rosa can help her come to terms with the aforementioned arson of her village, and eventually matures to the point at which she’s willing to trade in her aptitude in white magic for greater proficiency in those offensive abilities. Kain's bouncing between both sides as he’s repeatedly mind-controlled by Zemus is reflected in his elongated disappearances during battle as a leaping Dragoon. I’m half-joking with that last one, but this stuff really is all over the place. You might say I’m giving it too much credit given the simplicity of the characters, most of them are little more than archetypes, but the handful of ways those archetypes are expressed (and in some cases developed) still leaves an impression when every battle becomes an opportunity to participate in characterization.
If the DS remake is any indication, with its cinematic cutscenes, voice acting and the like (which nuke the pace from orbit), the Square Enix of today doesn't value these techniques as I do, but this is precisely the sort of thing that makes classic RPGs so special, and particularly Final Fantasy IV. It takes advantage of its game-dom to find routes to the player’s empathy using interactive systems. I mentioned that Cecil’s metamorphosis was one of my favorite sequences, and it’s not just the implication for his character, but the execution which makes it so memorable.
The setup is fantastic. A lone, weary Cecil is left to take refuge in Mysidia (the very place he pillaged as captain of the Red Wings), and the villagers try to tear him apart until the elder advises him to take to Mount Ordeals. Only there can he be purified of his sins and become a holy Paladin.
On arrival, the shambling undead who stalk Mount Ordeals take minimal damage from Cecil’s sword, emphasizing his nature as an agent of evil, unable to stand against it. He has to rely on the support of his allies, twin mages Palom and Porom and the elderly sage Tellah, to help him find redemption. His dependence reaches its apex as they stand against one of the Four Elemental Dante’s Inferno references and resident spelling bee stumper “Scarmiglione” (or Milon, if you like being wrong) and kick him off of a bridge to the beat of The Dreadful Fight. At the summit, the group crosses a rift into a mysterious chamber, and just as Cecil receives the Paladin’s blade and transforms, a manifestation of his past wrongdoings, fully clad in the armor of the Dark Knight, emerges from his reflection to face him. No matter what the player tosses at their doppelgänger, it cannot be defeated. “A true paladin will sheath his sword,” a voice whispers into the text box at the top of the screen. Cecil’s evil half pummels him again and again, and it can easily kill the player if they aren’t careful. It’s only when they recognize the metaphorically and mechanically self-destructive nature of the Dark Knight that they hold back to defend and heal themselves with Cecil’s newfound power, and his shadow dies expending the last of its violent energy. The player wins by refusing to fight, rejecting self-destruction and embracing love, and they do it using Final Fantasy IV’s battle mechanics. He takes up the Paladin armor and he returns to level one, but quickly ascends beyond his previous limits. It’s awesome. It’s Final Fantasy IV at its best. Just seventeen hours to go.
So yeah, here comes the heel turn. If you want a gauntlet of battles that’ll put your RPG combat skills to the test in a world of exhilarating twists and turns, you’ll find what you’re looking for in Final Fantasy IV. Part of me loves that about it, that I can boot it up and know exactly what I’m getting myself into, that I won’t have to bother with character customization or stat manipulation and just get the dungeon-crawling monster-fightin’ show on the road. That strict attention to pacing, party composition and encounter design is a quality it shares with MOTHER 3, Dragon Quest V and Chrono Trigger, but it’s all about the execution. These games weave the story into progression in meaningful ways, carefully constructing both elements alongside one another to great effect. FFIV was slated to do exactly that.
But in one hilarious moment, it became all-too clear to me that Sakaguchi had no idea where this was going.
Co-writer and director Takashi Tokita would tell you that they were only able to cram one measly fourth of Final Fantasy IV’s sprawling, epic script into the original cartridge. As Patrick Roesle of socksmakepeoplesexy.net once said (in an excellent write-up on the topic), “even though Square Enix proclaims itself a shaper of unique multimedia interactive art experiences, the SquareSoft that created Final Fantasy IV in 1991 made video games.” Which is to say, “bull[crap].” You can’t tell me that Sakaguchi had carefully and painstakingly deliberated over the implications of a man leaping off of an airship and strapping himself to a bomb to “seal the entrance” of a colossal chasm in the Earth and surviving. “JUST THROW IT, YOU MORON,” I howled (telepathically) at the screen. This guy had a daughter at home.
Final Fantasy IV began as a tale of self-reflection, revolt and redemption, and it is that for a good while. Cecil travels the world, proves himself to those he’s failed, and recruits a group of companions from across a variety of cultures and kingdoms, all to stand against the corruption of his homeland. Then they return to Baron, and so begins the slow descent into the Twilight Zone. I made a face when the evil king was revealed to be Cagnazzo all along, having killed and supplanted the real king. But wait, wasn’t that real king still the guy responsible for raising Cecil as a Dark Knight? Maybe Golbez had a hand in that, he seems to know what he’s doing. I thought the revelation that Kain had been mind-controlled the entire time was silly, but it was nice having him back in the party. Then, after a fierce fight with Barbariccia (Valvalis sounds cooler) and a thrilling escape to…Cecil’s room(?)…Kain’s gotta break the news. Golbez only has four crystals. Only? Whaddaya mean, isn’t that four outta four? Cid drops this gem of a quote, “So the legends are true after all!” (“Legends,” to which not one character has even tangentially referred over the course of this entire game), and this could’ve been anything. Instead, there are four more crystals underground. But, ya know…They’re dark crystals. They're darker.
Tellah died and took the story with him.
That was my first impression as a recently-converted Chrono Trigger shill in 2019, but even that wasn’t entirely fair. All of this plotting, this attention to the staging of events with animated characters and personalities whose crisscrossing actions and motivations contextualized the adventure, was completely unheard of. Dragon Quests I through IV were less “narratively-driven” and instead centered around exploring worlds whose goals and scenarios provided players the thread to weave their own experiential stories. Nobody does it like Yuji Horii, and if Final Fantasy had stayed its course, it’d have remained an awkward, lesser Dragon Quest. And so, Sakaguchi sought out and studied under Shonen Jump editor Kazuhiko Torishima in an effort to distinguish Final Fantasy from that philosophy. Tokita leapt at the chance to lend his theatrical expertise, and the result speaks for itself. The story may have commitment issues, but its manga-like attention to escalation and efficient characterization can’t be denied. In no previous JRPG did the party sit around a campfire mid-dungeon to discuss their worries, hopes, and doubts. Rarely did the player’s units bicker amongst themselves, turn against each other, or change their minds. Everyone is given their own animated identity, especially impressive given how few overworld sprites there are. It’s just unfortunate that the game’s chosen structural devices are horribly, goofily brittle.
I didn’t feel the need to mention the crystals up until now because…what’s there to say? Cecil just needed something precious to steal from the Mysidians. Baron needed justification for conquest aside from “just cuz”. They gave our heroes an urgent, tangible reason to seek out and protect other countries and people. Now you can forget about that whole theme of agency and redemption because it’s crystal time. It’s far less graceful about swapping party members around (now they all die (except not really)), Kain gets mind-controlled a second time, they recruit an edgy ninja named Edge whose parents have been turned into monsters by a mad scientist, they go inside a giant robot (and hear the best song in the game), we find out that Golbez was also mind-controlled so he’s a good guy and he’s Cecil’s brother and their dad was an alien, and one of the aliens has been behind everything from the very beginning so they take a spaceship to the moon to kill him (if you squint, you might notice that almost all of these points made their way into Final Fantasy VII in some form or another).
The tonal whiplash of fighting aliens with Cecil, the man who burned down a village, rescued an orphan, and spent the first quarter of Final Fantasy IV paying recompense for war crimes and becoming a holy knight, never left me. In fact, the sheer strangeness of later events got me to start poking holes in earlier bits of the story. What’s the point of Rydia’s mother’s soul being connected to the Mist Dragon? Cecil incinerated the entire village, I could’ve believed that she’d burned to death. How did Rosa reach Kaipo on foot? Couldn’t Cid have just taken her there on an airship? How did Edward end up all the way in Troia if he drowned in the ocean? Why does Leviathan attack the party if he’s actually a sapient, moral being? Why does Cecil sleep in his armor? How did Yang get captured and mind-controlled if he drowned in the ocean? I'm being deliberately facetious here, but the point stands. The magic began to evaporate as soon as I realized that SquareSoft had no interest in developing the premise that got me invested.
But in its place, something different bubbled into being. In spite of all I’ve said, I’ll admit that the longer I spent with Final Fantasy IV, the more appreciation and affection I developed for its bizarre, freewheeling narrative approach. It may not hold together on a literary level, but, strange as it might sound, there’s something endearing about that. The way its theatrical setup and dramatic cast dissolves further and further into incoherent chaos brings to mind a late-night tabletop campaign gone horribly wrong in all the right ways. The Dark Crystals exist because you and your buddies are having too much fun, the contrived reveals and sacrifices and even the fake-outs feel epic when the group is coming up with them on the fly around an empty pizza box, and, even as I was picking it apart with a scalpel, I couldn’t deny that familiar energy. While one half of me was laughing at the stupid alien spaceship, the other was laughing with it. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy IV is a videogame. It’s a digital monument to the joys of role-playing. If the first Final Fantasy is the manual, the fourth is the first to demonstrate its potential. There’s a reason why nearly all subsequent entries (in the entire genre) look to it for inspiration — it represents the unfiltered imaginative spirit of a team wading into their first generational leap. Final Fantasy IV is absolutely bursting with ideas, and it’s easy to get swept up in the fun of its exquisite corpse of an adventure.
And yet, it was just as easy for me to become detached from its increasingly preposterous twists and turns, and my inability to reconcile these two perspectives on my initial playthrough became exhausting. Time and reflection and revisits have tempered my judgement, but even if I never found it in my heart to forgive Cid’s idiotic sacrifice, I’d have more than enough reason to see it through.
Because I kept at it anyway, all the way to the end. I even decided to complete a handful of optional side-quests to add Odin, Leviathan and Asura to Rydia’s summons. I conquered the PSP’s Cave of Trials to get Yang, Palom, Porom, and Cid back up to speed (c’mon, I couldn’t keep Edge in the party). I had a rough go of it too, this was my first Final Fantasy. I did a frustrating amount of grinding before the Tower of Zot, a whole lot more before I could survive encounters on the moon, and had yet another sprawling session before I could give Zeromus so much as a sidelong glance without instant annihilation. Definitely a far cry from Chrono Trigger, where a rearrangement of equipment and a bit of tactical reconsideration was preparation enough, but something kept me going. Maybe it was a feeling of obligation, maybe it was the awesome ludo-narrative characterization, or maybe I’d come to appreciate the dissonant story in all of its Silver Age comic book-ish glory. I’d like to say it was the music, and I’ll get to that, but Uematsu couldn’t have done it alone. No, I think it was because, despite it all, Sakaguchi and co. had succeeded at making exactly what they’d envisioned. The game was kicking my ass, but settings and level designs were varied, enemy strategies kept me on my toes, I always felt like I had to discover and conquer whatever came next, no matter how stupid the narrative justification. I wanted to find treasure, see what was on the other side of that door, explore dungeons and vanquish monsters. Something clicked.
This wasn’t technically my first brush with Hirouki Ito’s Active Time Battle system, but it was dramatically different from the one I’d become used to. My first thought was that I preferred Chrono Trigger’s iteration of the concept, with its dynamically wandering enemies and tech system, but there is something to be said for this heavier, more direct style. You know how it goes, you’ve gotta think fast or you’ll get clobbered. Some enemies and bosses make use of it by requiring the player to bolt in during a rare opening in their defenses or wait until they let their guard down to avoid a massive counterattack. In one weird, memorable battle, a demonic wall (with a Xenomorph stuck inside?) creeps closer to the party in real time in an attempt to crush them. If it closes in, it’ll annihilate all five party members at once. Yeah, five.
This remains the only RPG I’ve played to use a five character setup, and if the ATB didn’t make things tense enough, managing five different characters at once took a bit of getting used to for a novice like me (especially after Chrono Trigger’s three character format). Still, I insisted on using “active” mode instead of “wait,” which essentially pauses the game while the player cycles through spell books and darts through their inventory, because I really came to enjoy the momentum it brought. You’d think that five characters would make things easier, but battles can get pretty frantic. If your experience was anything like mine, you found that the FFIV crew isn’t a particularly durable bunch. There’s not much the player can do to shape them, so they’ve gotta learn to deal with each character’s weaknesses by figuring out how to juggle their skills in the heat of the moment. Powerful abilities take time to perform, adding another layer of strategy to their use, and retaining the weaker abilities’ utility. Learning when and how to arrange characters in either the front or back row (and knowing who to select to strike which enemies, who abide by a similar system) according to their strengths is essential to minimizing damage taken and maximizing output (the dreaded “back attacks” made that all too clear).
With time, my appreciation for FFIV’s combat design has deepened. It may not be as solid as Dragon Quest, but they certainly hit on something here. It's energetic and nerve-wracking, patient and explosive in equal measure. FFIV is still absorbing on replays, still able to generate a brand of momentum that effortlessly carries me through its various setpieces, dungeons, and boss encounters. With better planning and more decisive strategy, I’ve never had to spend as much time grinding levels as I did on that first attempt. It’s edging toward that prolific marriage of action game design and RPG mechanics that Chrono Trigger would eventually master, and what’s here is still blood-pumping when all of its ingredients gel. No doubt Uematsu’s contributions have more than a little to do with that.
I’ve made no secret of my love for Final Fantasy IV’s soundtrack, and it’d be criminal not to dedicate even a small paragraph to it. When I emerged onto the overworld for the first time and heard the Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV, I was still for at least a minute. I’d already been exposed to Nobuo Uematsu’s work intermittently throughout Chrono Trigger and had heard some of his stuff out of context (the classic victory fanfare, Final Fantasy VII’s battle and boss themes, etc.), but not until playing FFIV had I been hit with the full force of his talent. Final Fantasy IV’s overworld track might just be my favorite in the series, maybe because of that staggering first impression, and it continues to impress me now. Like a rising shepherd tone, it’s a melody that only seems to ascend with every loop. When I finally did move, that classic bass line (the very best in video games) ushered me into Fight 1, and I was blown away all over again.
Where most RPGs use their battle themes to heighten the dread of combat and the threat of the enemy (and the boss themes certainly accomplish that), Final Fantasy IV’s always sounded to me like an expression of hope that the heroes will overcome this trial and prevail against any obstacle. The airship theme lasts only twenty two seconds, but beautifully elicits the feeling of soaring through the mode seven skies, an exclamation of joy for the party’s newly-earned freedom. Even when I was rolling my eyes as the story reached the peak of its lunacy, I couldn’t deny the power of The Lunar Whale. Without voice acting, Uematsu’s music serves as something of a narrator for the adventure, managing to make even the story’s worst contrivances sound incredible. That the last dungeon features the triple whammy of Fight 2 during every enemy encounter, Within the Giant, and The Final Battle almost makes up for everything I’d groaned about.
Notice the past tense.
My first playthrough of Final Fantasy IV left me torn and unsure how to feel about the game as a whole, but time has been kind to it. On every revisit, especially since becoming more seasoned in the conventions of the genre, I find more to love. FFIV is a daring game, and even where it fails, it fails with passion. It’s easy to sneer at the fake-out sacrifices (and god knows I do) but I feel that the consequence of each sacrifice, whether the character lives or not, belies a little something about the game’s philosophy. That so many of the character deaths are fake-outs draws attention to the party members who truly die. The one who does.
Tellah destroys himself failing to avenge his daughter Anna, a moment during which he’s completely overcome with hatred. Palom, Porom, Yang, and Cid all survive (and succeed) in their sacrifices because all of them are concerned with keeping others alive. Edward lives after Leviathan’s attack because he was able to grow beyond his cowardice, honoring Anna’s memory by helping those in need. Rydia has to overcome her fear of fire because, tragically, she can’t do anything about those she’s lost, and that frightening power can still be leveraged for the benefit of humankind. FFIV spends its entirety teaching the player the same lesson Cecil had to learn in that chamber on the peak of Mount Ordeals: one should not fight for the purpose of bringing death, but to nurture and cherish those whom we can still protect. Maybe the team picked up this idea as they went along, but Sakaguchi ’n pals would spend the rest of their careers zeroing in on and more deeply exploring this concept.
I have to admit, wild though it was, I did feel something triumphant when Edward revealed that all of those dead party members were still alive. However idiotic the instruments of their demise, they all deserved to live.
If you’re short on time or haven’t played it, here’s what I’ll say: 1991’s SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy IV is, in my opinion, best enjoyed by those who can appreciate a short, dense, no-frills, melodramatic JRPG. It’s an essential game in the genre and, for whatever my judgement is worth, good. If that sounds like your cup of tea and you don’t know anything else, then I’d recommend playing it and forming an opinion before reading (if you regret it, you can bug me later).
This is a retrospective of where I was when I first played Final Fantasy IV, and a rundown of where I'm at now. I'll try not to spoil too many other games in the process.
On Final Fantasy IV (Or — "Jumping the Lunar Shark”)
It was all Chrono Trigger’s fault. A series of coincidences had guided me toward that prolific blend of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and I waltzed into 2019 wide-eyed and fascinated by a genre I'd once thought laughable. So now, having marveled at the results of their combined effort, it was time to pick a side for my next adventure. Yuji Horii beckoned to me from across the void, his latest Dragon Quest installment due on my game console that Fall, but Hironobu Sakaguchi leapt in with an ace up his sleeve. Not only would the ridiculously popular Final Fantasy VII release on Switch by March, but he’d recently converted a good friend of mine with its Steam version. So, in anticipation of that day, I began the new year with (let’s face it) the series’ foundation.
Dusk had settled over the city skyline, silhouettes of heavy coats retreated into apartments for blankets and coffee, and I was conjuring meteors to blow up an incarnation of living hatred. Final Fantasy IV had been my winter game, a boundless ongoing saga, and at last I’d arrived at the end. It should’ve been triumphant, the climactic conclusion to an epic quest spanning countries, realms, transcending even the planet itself. Finally I’d experienced a classic that meant so much to so many, that had contributed massively to the development of a genre and a generation of video game players. As Cecil and Rosa stood before their beloved crew of allies turned friends turned surrogate family members during their coronation, I felt a wave of relief as I realized it was finally…over with. I’d crossed Final Fantasy IV off of my bucket list.
But something about it lingered, and still does. I think back to Final Fantasy IV all the time. When ruminating in quiet moments, I sometimes rewind and play back the burning of Mist, the bombing of Damcyan and the death of Anna, the raid on Fabul and Rydia's return, and I can appreciate how pieces of the narrative seem to hold more layers than its charmingly chunky sprites let on. It’s hard not to notice specks of its influence in nearly every successive game in the genre, to say nothing of the groundwork it laid for the future of its own series. Though I can pinpoint the precise moment when my fascination clambered its way up and into a fat chocobo, there’s a lot to admire, even love about its dizzying ambition. It’s evident from the moment Uematsu’s incredible John Williams-inflected Red Wings theme booms over its soaring intro. Here’s where it got its hooks in me:
An earth-shattering event in the opening hour of the game has the player guiding a condemned Cecil Harvey through a scorching desert, burdened by the weight of his armor and an unconscious orphan while fending off hordes of vicious monsters. Until now the player has only seen flashes of the Dark Knight’s festering conscience over the atrocities he’s committed, but now he becomes decisive. Despite injury and lack of direction, with nobody to hold him to a moral standard, Cecil takes his first steps toward redemption by taking responsibility for the last surviving member of a village he’s inadvertently incinerated. It’s a powerful and understated gesture, represented only through the player’s own desire to press on through the overworld map and clobber goblins in intermittent random battles (curiously, a blue-clad hero would usher a green-haired girl to a desert oasis following an act of terrorism a second time just two games later). Subtle pieces of characterization like this permeate the battle mechanics. Cecil’s special ability as the Dark Knight is to cut a fraction of his own health for the sake of unleashing a powerful attack, evocative of his self-hatred, which is countered by Rosa’s potent healing spells. It even develops when Cecil becomes a Paladin and, effectively, becomes more like her. This is one of the key elements which makes Final Fantasy IV and other games of its ilk so fascinating to me. Since the developers were working in a time of abstractions, they had to find ways to use the language of the genre to convey their intent. How do you make a character feel like a person in a role-playing game? Square took to the tools they’d developed over the three previous installments and rearranged them in the shape of a drama.
Where previous entries in the series (and the next) would be content to keep classes significant only for strategic purposes, Final Fantasy IV uses them for character development as well. Palom’s rambunctious attitude is evident when he’s casting devastating offensive spells as a black mage, and even though he has a rocky relationship with his sister Porom, their “Twincast” ability assured me that they could get along when necessary. Yang’s focused and calculated physical combat maneuvers are emblematic of his discipline, which take time to build, but pay off in spades. Rydia refuses to cast fire spells until Rosa can help her come to terms with the aforementioned arson of her village, and eventually matures to the point at which she’s willing to trade in her aptitude in white magic for greater proficiency in those offensive abilities. Kain's bouncing between both sides as he’s repeatedly mind-controlled by Zemus is reflected in his elongated disappearances during battle as a leaping Dragoon. I’m half-joking with that last one, but this stuff really is all over the place. You might say I’m giving it too much credit given the simplicity of the characters, most of them are little more than archetypes, but the handful of ways those archetypes are expressed (and in some cases developed) still leaves an impression when every battle becomes an opportunity to participate in characterization.
If the DS remake is any indication, with its cinematic cutscenes, voice acting and the like (which nuke the pace from orbit), the Square Enix of today doesn't value these techniques as I do, but this is precisely the sort of thing that makes classic RPGs so special, and particularly Final Fantasy IV. It takes advantage of its game-dom to find routes to the player’s empathy using interactive systems. I mentioned that Cecil’s metamorphosis was one of my favorite sequences, and it’s not just the implication for his character, but the execution which makes it so memorable.
The setup is fantastic. A lone, weary Cecil is left to take refuge in Mysidia (the very place he pillaged as captain of the Red Wings), and the villagers try to tear him apart until the elder advises him to take to Mount Ordeals. Only there can he be purified of his sins and become a holy Paladin.
On arrival, the shambling undead who stalk Mount Ordeals take minimal damage from Cecil’s sword, emphasizing his nature as an agent of evil, unable to stand against it. He has to rely on the support of his allies, twin mages Palom and Porom and the elderly sage Tellah, to help him find redemption. His dependence reaches its apex as they stand against one of the Four Elemental Dante’s Inferno references and resident spelling bee stumper “Scarmiglione” (or Milon, if you like being wrong) and kick him off of a bridge to the beat of The Dreadful Fight. At the summit, the group crosses a rift into a mysterious chamber, and just as Cecil receives the Paladin’s blade and transforms, a manifestation of his past wrongdoings, fully clad in the armor of the Dark Knight, emerges from his reflection to face him. No matter what the player tosses at their doppelgänger, it cannot be defeated. “A true paladin will sheath his sword,” a voice whispers into the text box at the top of the screen. Cecil’s evil half pummels him again and again, and it can easily kill the player if they aren’t careful. It’s only when they recognize the metaphorically and mechanically self-destructive nature of the Dark Knight that they hold back to defend and heal themselves with Cecil’s newfound power, and his shadow dies expending the last of its violent energy. The player wins by refusing to fight, rejecting self-destruction and embracing love, and they do it using Final Fantasy IV’s battle mechanics. He takes up the Paladin armor and he returns to level one, but quickly ascends beyond his previous limits. It’s awesome. It’s Final Fantasy IV at its best. Just seventeen hours to go.
So yeah, here comes the heel turn. If you want a gauntlet of battles that’ll put your RPG combat skills to the test in a world of exhilarating twists and turns, you’ll find what you’re looking for in Final Fantasy IV. Part of me loves that about it, that I can boot it up and know exactly what I’m getting myself into, that I won’t have to bother with character customization or stat manipulation and just get the dungeon-crawling monster-fightin’ show on the road. That strict attention to pacing, party composition and encounter design is a quality it shares with MOTHER 3, Dragon Quest V and Chrono Trigger, but it’s all about the execution. These games weave the story into progression in meaningful ways, carefully constructing both elements alongside one another to great effect. FFIV was slated to do exactly that.
But in one hilarious moment, it became all-too clear to me that Sakaguchi had no idea where this was going.
Co-writer and director Takashi Tokita would tell you that they were only able to cram one measly fourth of Final Fantasy IV’s sprawling, epic script into the original cartridge. As Patrick Roesle of socksmakepeoplesexy.net once said (in an excellent write-up on the topic), “even though Square Enix proclaims itself a shaper of unique multimedia interactive art experiences, the SquareSoft that created Final Fantasy IV in 1991 made video games.” Which is to say, “bull[crap].” You can’t tell me that Sakaguchi had carefully and painstakingly deliberated over the implications of a man leaping off of an airship and strapping himself to a bomb to “seal the entrance” of a colossal chasm in the Earth and surviving. “JUST THROW IT, YOU MORON,” I howled (telepathically) at the screen. This guy had a daughter at home.
Final Fantasy IV began as a tale of self-reflection, revolt and redemption, and it is that for a good while. Cecil travels the world, proves himself to those he’s failed, and recruits a group of companions from across a variety of cultures and kingdoms, all to stand against the corruption of his homeland. Then they return to Baron, and so begins the slow descent into the Twilight Zone. I made a face when the evil king was revealed to be Cagnazzo all along, having killed and supplanted the real king. But wait, wasn’t that real king still the guy responsible for raising Cecil as a Dark Knight? Maybe Golbez had a hand in that, he seems to know what he’s doing. I thought the revelation that Kain had been mind-controlled the entire time was silly, but it was nice having him back in the party. Then, after a fierce fight with Barbariccia (Valvalis sounds cooler) and a thrilling escape to…Cecil’s room(?)…Kain’s gotta break the news. Golbez only has four crystals. Only? Whaddaya mean, isn’t that four outta four? Cid drops this gem of a quote, “So the legends are true after all!” (“Legends,” to which not one character has even tangentially referred over the course of this entire game), and this could’ve been anything. Instead, there are four more crystals underground. But, ya know…They’re dark crystals. They're darker.
Tellah died and took the story with him.
That was my first impression as a recently-converted Chrono Trigger shill in 2019, but even that wasn’t entirely fair. All of this plotting, this attention to the staging of events with animated characters and personalities whose crisscrossing actions and motivations contextualized the adventure, was completely unheard of. Dragon Quests I through IV were less “narratively-driven” and instead centered around exploring worlds whose goals and scenarios provided players the thread to weave their own experiential stories. Nobody does it like Yuji Horii, and if Final Fantasy had stayed its course, it’d have remained an awkward, lesser Dragon Quest. And so, Sakaguchi sought out and studied under Shonen Jump editor Kazuhiko Torishima in an effort to distinguish Final Fantasy from that philosophy. Tokita leapt at the chance to lend his theatrical expertise, and the result speaks for itself. The story may have commitment issues, but its manga-like attention to escalation and efficient characterization can’t be denied. In no previous JRPG did the party sit around a campfire mid-dungeon to discuss their worries, hopes, and doubts. Rarely did the player’s units bicker amongst themselves, turn against each other, or change their minds. Everyone is given their own animated identity, especially impressive given how few overworld sprites there are. It’s just unfortunate that the game’s chosen structural devices are horribly, goofily brittle.
I didn’t feel the need to mention the crystals up until now because…what’s there to say? Cecil just needed something precious to steal from the Mysidians. Baron needed justification for conquest aside from “just cuz”. They gave our heroes an urgent, tangible reason to seek out and protect other countries and people. Now you can forget about that whole theme of agency and redemption because it’s crystal time. It’s far less graceful about swapping party members around (now they all die (except not really)), Kain gets mind-controlled a second time, they recruit an edgy ninja named Edge whose parents have been turned into monsters by a mad scientist, they go inside a giant robot (and hear the best song in the game), we find out that Golbez was also mind-controlled so he’s a good guy and he’s Cecil’s brother and their dad was an alien, and one of the aliens has been behind everything from the very beginning so they take a spaceship to the moon to kill him (if you squint, you might notice that almost all of these points made their way into Final Fantasy VII in some form or another).
The tonal whiplash of fighting aliens with Cecil, the man who burned down a village, rescued an orphan, and spent the first quarter of Final Fantasy IV paying recompense for war crimes and becoming a holy knight, never left me. In fact, the sheer strangeness of later events got me to start poking holes in earlier bits of the story. What’s the point of Rydia’s mother’s soul being connected to the Mist Dragon? Cecil incinerated the entire village, I could’ve believed that she’d burned to death. How did Rosa reach Kaipo on foot? Couldn’t Cid have just taken her there on an airship? How did Edward end up all the way in Troia if he drowned in the ocean? Why does Leviathan attack the party if he’s actually a sapient, moral being? Why does Cecil sleep in his armor? How did Yang get captured and mind-controlled if he drowned in the ocean? I'm being deliberately facetious here, but the point stands. The magic began to evaporate as soon as I realized that SquareSoft had no interest in developing the premise that got me invested.
But in its place, something different bubbled into being. In spite of all I’ve said, I’ll admit that the longer I spent with Final Fantasy IV, the more appreciation and affection I developed for its bizarre, freewheeling narrative approach. It may not hold together on a literary level, but, strange as it might sound, there’s something endearing about that. The way its theatrical setup and dramatic cast dissolves further and further into incoherent chaos brings to mind a late-night tabletop campaign gone horribly wrong in all the right ways. The Dark Crystals exist because you and your buddies are having too much fun, the contrived reveals and sacrifices and even the fake-outs feel epic when the group is coming up with them on the fly around an empty pizza box, and, even as I was picking it apart with a scalpel, I couldn’t deny that familiar energy. While one half of me was laughing at the stupid alien spaceship, the other was laughing with it. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy IV is a videogame. It’s a digital monument to the joys of role-playing. If the first Final Fantasy is the manual, the fourth is the first to demonstrate its potential. There’s a reason why nearly all subsequent entries (in the entire genre) look to it for inspiration — it represents the unfiltered imaginative spirit of a team wading into their first generational leap. Final Fantasy IV is absolutely bursting with ideas, and it’s easy to get swept up in the fun of its exquisite corpse of an adventure.
And yet, it was just as easy for me to become detached from its increasingly preposterous twists and turns, and my inability to reconcile these two perspectives on my initial playthrough became exhausting. Time and reflection and revisits have tempered my judgement, but even if I never found it in my heart to forgive Cid’s idiotic sacrifice, I’d have more than enough reason to see it through.
Because I kept at it anyway, all the way to the end. I even decided to complete a handful of optional side-quests to add Odin, Leviathan and Asura to Rydia’s summons. I conquered the PSP’s Cave of Trials to get Yang, Palom, Porom, and Cid back up to speed (c’mon, I couldn’t keep Edge in the party). I had a rough go of it too, this was my first Final Fantasy. I did a frustrating amount of grinding before the Tower of Zot, a whole lot more before I could survive encounters on the moon, and had yet another sprawling session before I could give Zeromus so much as a sidelong glance without instant annihilation. Definitely a far cry from Chrono Trigger, where a rearrangement of equipment and a bit of tactical reconsideration was preparation enough, but something kept me going. Maybe it was a feeling of obligation, maybe it was the awesome ludo-narrative characterization, or maybe I’d come to appreciate the dissonant story in all of its Silver Age comic book-ish glory. I’d like to say it was the music, and I’ll get to that, but Uematsu couldn’t have done it alone. No, I think it was because, despite it all, Sakaguchi and co. had succeeded at making exactly what they’d envisioned. The game was kicking my ass, but settings and level designs were varied, enemy strategies kept me on my toes, I always felt like I had to discover and conquer whatever came next, no matter how stupid the narrative justification. I wanted to find treasure, see what was on the other side of that door, explore dungeons and vanquish monsters. Something clicked.
This wasn’t technically my first brush with Hirouki Ito’s Active Time Battle system, but it was dramatically different from the one I’d become used to. My first thought was that I preferred Chrono Trigger’s iteration of the concept, with its dynamically wandering enemies and tech system, but there is something to be said for this heavier, more direct style. You know how it goes, you’ve gotta think fast or you’ll get clobbered. Some enemies and bosses make use of it by requiring the player to bolt in during a rare opening in their defenses or wait until they let their guard down to avoid a massive counterattack. In one weird, memorable battle, a demonic wall (with a Xenomorph stuck inside?) creeps closer to the party in real time in an attempt to crush them. If it closes in, it’ll annihilate all five party members at once. Yeah, five.
This remains the only RPG I’ve played to use a five character setup, and if the ATB didn’t make things tense enough, managing five different characters at once took a bit of getting used to for a novice like me (especially after Chrono Trigger’s three character format). Still, I insisted on using “active” mode instead of “wait,” which essentially pauses the game while the player cycles through spell books and darts through their inventory, because I really came to enjoy the momentum it brought. You’d think that five characters would make things easier, but battles can get pretty frantic. If your experience was anything like mine, you found that the FFIV crew isn’t a particularly durable bunch. There’s not much the player can do to shape them, so they’ve gotta learn to deal with each character’s weaknesses by figuring out how to juggle their skills in the heat of the moment. Powerful abilities take time to perform, adding another layer of strategy to their use, and retaining the weaker abilities’ utility. Learning when and how to arrange characters in either the front or back row (and knowing who to select to strike which enemies, who abide by a similar system) according to their strengths is essential to minimizing damage taken and maximizing output (the dreaded “back attacks” made that all too clear).
With time, my appreciation for FFIV’s combat design has deepened. It may not be as solid as Dragon Quest, but they certainly hit on something here. It's energetic and nerve-wracking, patient and explosive in equal measure. FFIV is still absorbing on replays, still able to generate a brand of momentum that effortlessly carries me through its various setpieces, dungeons, and boss encounters. With better planning and more decisive strategy, I’ve never had to spend as much time grinding levels as I did on that first attempt. It’s edging toward that prolific marriage of action game design and RPG mechanics that Chrono Trigger would eventually master, and what’s here is still blood-pumping when all of its ingredients gel. No doubt Uematsu’s contributions have more than a little to do with that.
I’ve made no secret of my love for Final Fantasy IV’s soundtrack, and it’d be criminal not to dedicate even a small paragraph to it. When I emerged onto the overworld for the first time and heard the Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV, I was still for at least a minute. I’d already been exposed to Nobuo Uematsu’s work intermittently throughout Chrono Trigger and had heard some of his stuff out of context (the classic victory fanfare, Final Fantasy VII’s battle and boss themes, etc.), but not until playing FFIV had I been hit with the full force of his talent. Final Fantasy IV’s overworld track might just be my favorite in the series, maybe because of that staggering first impression, and it continues to impress me now. Like a rising shepherd tone, it’s a melody that only seems to ascend with every loop. When I finally did move, that classic bass line (the very best in video games) ushered me into Fight 1, and I was blown away all over again.
Where most RPGs use their battle themes to heighten the dread of combat and the threat of the enemy (and the boss themes certainly accomplish that), Final Fantasy IV’s always sounded to me like an expression of hope that the heroes will overcome this trial and prevail against any obstacle. The airship theme lasts only twenty two seconds, but beautifully elicits the feeling of soaring through the mode seven skies, an exclamation of joy for the party’s newly-earned freedom. Even when I was rolling my eyes as the story reached the peak of its lunacy, I couldn’t deny the power of The Lunar Whale. Without voice acting, Uematsu’s music serves as something of a narrator for the adventure, managing to make even the story’s worst contrivances sound incredible. That the last dungeon features the triple whammy of Fight 2 during every enemy encounter, Within the Giant, and The Final Battle almost makes up for everything I’d groaned about.
Notice the past tense.
My first playthrough of Final Fantasy IV left me torn and unsure how to feel about the game as a whole, but time has been kind to it. On every revisit, especially since becoming more seasoned in the conventions of the genre, I find more to love. FFIV is a daring game, and even where it fails, it fails with passion. It’s easy to sneer at the fake-out sacrifices (and god knows I do) but I feel that the consequence of each sacrifice, whether the character lives or not, belies a little something about the game’s philosophy. That so many of the character deaths are fake-outs draws attention to the party members who truly die. The one who does.
Tellah destroys himself failing to avenge his daughter Anna, a moment during which he’s completely overcome with hatred. Palom, Porom, Yang, and Cid all survive (and succeed) in their sacrifices because all of them are concerned with keeping others alive. Edward lives after Leviathan’s attack because he was able to grow beyond his cowardice, honoring Anna’s memory by helping those in need. Rydia has to overcome her fear of fire because, tragically, she can’t do anything about those she’s lost, and that frightening power can still be leveraged for the benefit of humankind. FFIV spends its entirety teaching the player the same lesson Cecil had to learn in that chamber on the peak of Mount Ordeals: one should not fight for the purpose of bringing death, but to nurture and cherish those whom we can still protect. Maybe the team picked up this idea as they went along, but Sakaguchi ’n pals would spend the rest of their careers zeroing in on and more deeply exploring this concept.
I have to admit, wild though it was, I did feel something triumphant when Edward revealed that all of those dead party members were still alive. However idiotic the instruments of their demise, they all deserved to live.