Final Fantasy IV — Rough Sailing For The Red Wings

North Americans were lucky.  Back in the early 90’s, after the debut of the SNES, and not long after the original Final Fantasy was finally brought over the Pacific, the official translation of Final Fantasy II was canceled, in favour of an official translation of Final Fantasy IV.  The good news is, we dodged a pretty horrible bullet and got a decent game out of it, too.  The bad news is, we ended up with a not-as-horrible bullet instead.

There’s a Visine for that.

Final Fantasy IV, the version that was originally presented to North America, had its flaws.  The version we got was stripped of much of its personality and was instead a bland and uninteresting experience.  Not to say that it wasn’t an improvement over the NES iterations, but that judgment can only really be said about the aesthetics.

For instance, the SNES could produce better sound than the NES, and so the aural quality of Nobuo Uematsu’s tunes improved significantly.  One of the downsides to the NES was that, when you went to a menu or selected something that made a noise, the sound effect would often interrupt one of the sound channels that was trying to play the music.  It made for a weird listening experience.  The SNES, just being the SNES, improved upon this muchly, and it made listening to games a much more pleasant experience.  Nobuo’s compositions didn’t suddenly get better, but they were much more listenable.

A better colour palette was also present on the SNES, capable of showing more colours than the NES, and so the graphics in Final Fantasy IV looked a lot better just by being on the SNES.  Final Fantasy III may have had an awesome-looking ending, but Final Fantasy IV had an awesome-looking everything.  By today’s standards, and even by Final Fantasy VI’s standards, IV is on the less impressive side of the spectrum, but when it was released, it was one of the better looking games out there.

North Americans got to skip over two Final Fantasies, so for them, the jump from I to IV brought with it a significant jump in quality, and was their first exposure to a more linear narrative in an RPG.  Whereas you could still explore around in Dragon Warrior IV and hunt down the story yourself, Final Fantasy IV chose to have your characters conform to a more rigid story, and often they would enter and leave your party quite suddenly and at seemingly random times, depending on the requirements of the plot and the number of characters still waiting in the wings.  Unfortunately, justification for these departures seemed a little on the thin side, at least for the North American release.  For the Japanese playing the original version (and North Americans playing later versions of the game), the story made more sense.

Hi, I’m a Mac

One example that caused me to initially hate the game was when the walls of Baron Castle were about to close in on the party and crush them.  The twins, Porom and Palom quickly get into position to hold the walls back and turn themselves into stone statues.  This serves to effectively stop the walls from moving any further.  In the original North American translation, this is considered a permanent sacrifice.  In other words, they’re never coming back, they’re dead, they’ve become solid stone forever.  Except they did come back.  Apparently it’s only permanent until their mentor comes along and turns them back.  By then, the wall trap was probably disarmed or something.

The rapid way that characters would depart from your party was a source of frustration for me.  Hey look, it’s a mage who has amnesia, and he’s just cured it!  Now he’s an effective caster of spells for your party… except now he’s dead.  Okay.  Hey look, it’s a mage who can use both black and white spells, and who can also summon chocobos!  Oh, wait, she just fell overboard, and I just lost another party member because he dove after her to try to save her, and a third is missing.  At least my best friend is dependable in a pinch… and there he goes, betraying me and taking my white mage with him.  No, wait, he’s back.  No, wait, he’s betrayed me again.  Hey, let’s forgive him one more time, even though he’s going to betray me again.  Yep, he did it again.

So they all dropped their pants.

Game play in Final Fantasy IV was very different on the SNES than it was on the NES.  In all three games on the NES, you had to buy all your spells.  In IV, you learned spells and skills at certain levels.  All of a sudden, leveling up was useful for more than just a gain in HP and MP and an extra random point in something else.  As such, you could theoretically, if you were patient enough, obtain the most powerful spells early on in the game.  It removed an element of strategy from the game, although the revolving door your party members kept on entering and exiting would cause you to develop strategies to compensate for who and what you do and don’t have at any particular moment.  It was like the simplified skill-learning system compensated for the unreliability of your party members.

As for the battle system, Square got a little creative and chose to add an action element to the turn-based battle system they liked using on the NES.  IV was the debut of the Active Time Battle, where time flowed normally, and characters would be able to take commands at certain times determined by a hidden meter.  Depending on the speed of the character, it would fill quickly for some and more slowly for others.  Enemies also had their own meters, although some of them possessed meters that were so slow, you could wipe out entire groups of early-level monsters without taking a single point of damage from any of them.  It was supposed to make battles feel a little more frantic and give the player a rush that straight turn-based battles couldn’t.  For the most part, it worked.  Suddenly, that character who was just knocked down to 1 HP was more of a priority for healing…

The King is living large and stepping easy! He has a new big spring of confidence and a generous swelling of pride. And the one thing every man deserves: A little well-earned respect from the neighborhood.

One thing that IV introduced was the ability to save your game in special designated save spots in dungeons, a convenience that the first three games in the series didn’t have.  Although this served to make the game easier, it helped to improve the overall pace of the game.  You were no longer frantically rushing back to town for more items because you were out of healing spells and potions, since you could simply use a tent about halfway throu
gh the dungeon and restore your HP and MP (and despite how horrible II was, the single MP stat that II tried out was brought back in IV, and was back for good, permanently replacing the multi-tiered magic system in I and III).  Speaking of items, the Chubby Chocobo was back, although you didn’t really need him as long as you sold off all the weapons you no longer needed.  Most weapons were restricted in use, and could only be given to one or two characters, and when better equipment came along, you could simply sell off the older stuff.  Inventory space was still limited, but there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on carrying around many different sets of equipment as there was in III.

I don’t know whether it was done on purpose or if it was just an error in programming, but you could buy more than 99 of any particular item, and any overflow would carry over to the next item slot.  You could suddenly fill your inventory with thousands of Potions or Ethers if you needed to venture into a very hard dungeon at any time during the game.  Of course, you could easily afford it by the end of the game.

In the end, it’s a good thing that this game was ported to another system and retranslated, because a game like this deserves to be experienced in as close to its original form as possible.  Originally, I may have hated it, but I’m glad I gave it another chance.  If you’ve not played it yet, there are at least three different versions that should still be available for purchase, including a straight port with a better translation, a retooled port with an even better translation, and a complete remake with the best translation yet (although all three manage to keep the immortal line, “You spoony bard!”).  Fortunately, the days of poor translations are long over.

Oh, wait…

Chocobo porn!

Also available on:

PlayStation – Final Fantasy IV, 1997; Final Fantasy Collection (with Final Fantasy V & Final Fantasy VI), 1999; Final Fantasy Chronicles (with Chrono Trigger), 2001

Lavos is Weak Against Girls With Glasses

There were only really three new features to this port.  The first was that it came with a brand new translation that brought it closer to the Japanese version than the SNES translation was.  It also restored the “hardtype” version rather than use an easier version developed for North Americans who seemed to be seen as being inferior to Japanese gamers, for some reason.  The second was that it included some kind of basic-looking FMV, which looked about on par with the FMV used in Final Fantasy VII.  The third is that the North American release came bundled with Chrono Trigger, which itself received a plethora of bonus features, all of which were overshadowed by its poorly executed port.  Unfortunately, Chrono Trigger on the PlayStation suffered from a massive loading time issue that most of the other games didn’t have, which rendered the game very frustrating to play.  Final Fantasy IV’s port fared better, but it’s probably not worth buying if you just want to play the one game.  You’re better off buying the DS or GBA versions if you want to do that.  As for Chrono Trigger, there’s a better version out for the DS, too.

Game Boy Advance – Final Fantasy IV Advance, 2005

Hey, I Have An Idea!  Let’s Add A Dungeon To This Old Game and Release It As A Brand New Game!

When Final Fantasy IV came out again for the GBA in 2005, it was given its own separate release, without having Chrono Trigger tag along and drag it down.  It could stand on its own again and shine, and… it didn’t quite shine.  The translation was even better than the one on the PS1, but it was the battle system where the GBA version dropped the ball.  An ATB bar was added so you could see what was going on, which brought the game more in line with the sixth game in the series.  This was, however, a bad thing, since it clearly showed the battle system’s horrible glitch.  Sometimes a character’s turn would be skipped entirely, sometimes a character would be given up to three turns right after each other.  It was an ATB system gone completely insane.  Whether this was because the GBA couldn’t handle a five character battle system, or whether this was because of bad programming, I do not know.  All I know is, it was a detriment to an otherwise well executed port.

One added element to the GBA port was a series of bonus dungeons meant to allow the “second half” of your party to gain the weapons and armour they would’ve had if they were part of the original storyline’s ending sequence.  Due to the way the system was originally set up, only five of the characters in the game were supposed to be available to fight against the final boss, but in the GBA version, you could take any character who was still alive with you.  Thus, those other characters were given their own dungeon and set of special final equipment.  Also, another bonus dungeon was created for the game to give the veteran Final Fantasy player even more to enjoy.  Otherwise, if you’ve played the game already, this version is only good if you don’t already own a copy of the game on another system.

DS – Final Fantasy IV DS, 2007

Speak, Boy!

Have you ever wanted to hear the characters from Final Fantasy IV talk?  Well, now you can!  Final Fantasy IV on the DS, released just two years after the GBA version (honestly, did we need another version of the game so soon?) includes voice acting, among other things.  In fact, the DS version acts like a full blown remake instead of just a straight port.  This version deserves its own review, as the game was changed so much that it could count as an entirely new game, except for the story of course.

Everything was overhauled.  The graphics, the sound, the battle system, everything.  Even a character’s experience table was messed around with.  Nothing was sacred (except for the spoony bard line).  Some things… came out a little embarrassing.  The in-game sprites for Dark Knight Cecil and Dragoon Kain both look like gay ballet dancers in tights.  It’s no wonder they were best friends.  And yet Kain still betrays Cecil in order to take Rosa for himself at one point in the game.  Ouch.  One can bet Cecil started a lot of Internet drama over that one…

Other releases:
Wonderswan Color – Final Fantasy IV, 2002
Wii Virtual Console – 2009

The adventure continues:
Japanese cell phones – Final Fantasy IV: The After, 2008
WiiWare – Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, 2009