Listen to the Rain

My interest with Final Fantasy IV doesn't date back to playing it during my childhood. Like I've written before, my parents didn't like that the Super Nintendo wasn't backwards compatible and so refused to buy me one, leading me to become a PC gamer. Instead, like Power Blade and Shatterhand before it, I really got into FFIV by reading about it in Nintendo Power #30, where it got a cover.

The cover really has nothing to do with the game--I'm not sure who that swordsman is, and I guess the bird he's riding must be an American artist's interpretation of a black chocobo--but the article captivated me. I had already spent weeks playing through and beating Final Fantasy the previous year after borrowing it from a friend, and Super Mario Bros. 2 and especially Super Mario Bros. 3 had primed me to be hyped for sequels. With no chance of playing through through Final Fantasy II myself, I read and re-read about the Four Fiends, the Redwings, Astos the Dark Elf (who I remembered from Final Fantasy!), Rydia the Caller, the 70s fantasy novel art of the characters--I read that article over and over, since if I couldn't play the game at least I could experience it vicariously. I didn't get the chance to actually play it until much later, when I moved to Japan in 2008 and played two games on the planeride over. The first was the World Ends with You, which served me well when I left our hotel and walked from Harajuku to Shibuya, but the second was the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, with the voice acting and New Game+ and Augments. I had always heard that it was so different as to be essentially a new game, though, so once the pixel remasters came out, and with FFXIV: Endwalker taking so much inspiration from FFIV, now was the perfect time to play the original.


Final Fantasy has always tried to push the technological envelope, and FFIV might be the first game to have a real cinematic opening, beating Another World by four months. To the sounds of "Red Wings," a group of airships fly over a chain of islands as their captain Cecil ruminates on his just-completed mission--to seize the Crystal of Water from the town of Mysidia and return it to the King of Baron. The crew of the airship are disturbed by the king's order for a surprise attack and the slaughter that followed, and Cecil attempts to calm the dissent, even though he has his own doubts. After easily defeating some wandering monsters, the Red Wings land in Baron, where the scene cuts to the throne room. The king's advisor tells the king that Cecil is beginning to question the path that Baron is following, and when Cecil asks the king why the Red Wings are being used to plunder other nations, the king immediately accuses Cecil of disloyalty and strips him of his command. Along with the dragoon Kain, Cecil is ordered to take a package to the Village of Mist and hunt monsters there, and then dismissed from the castle.

This is where the strength of localization comes into play. In the original Japanese, the king gives Cecil a ボムの指輪 (bomu no yubiwa, "Bomb Ring"), which makes his horrified reaction when the bomb ring releases a horde of bombs that incinerate Mist Village and most of its population unintentionally hilarious. The SNES version localized it as "package," and the DS remake as "Carnellian Signet," which has the advantage of not making Cecil seem like a gullible buffoon. Remember--if someone tells you that a direct translation is always best, they are wrong.

As with most pioneering media, now this seems quaint, with its inflexible sprites and simple text boxes, but in the early 90s it was captivating. I never played FFIV--or FFII, as it was called--back then, but at a sleepover with a friend who did own an SNES, a group of us all sat around the TV transfixed as we watched the opening movie, Cecil and Kain's travel through the Waterfall Cavern, the destruction of Mist and the attempt at vengeance by one of the surviving children, Kain vanishing in the aftermath, Cecil bringing the child to a nearby town and defending her from a group of Baronian soldiers who attempt to kill her, and Cecil's lady-love Rosa tracking him down but coming down with an illness, forcing Cecil and the child Rydia to travel to the city of Damcyan to find a cure, only to watch in horror as the Red Wings destroy it right before they arrive.


All of this is to say that FFIV attempted to tell a fully-realized story, with character arcs, motivations, and all the other tools of traditional storytelling. Nowadays this is normal but at the time it was an innovation, with the Dragon Quest games that came before had relatively basically stories of a hero fighting evil, Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy III's cast had no personalities or characteristics beyond the jobs assigned to them by the player, and even Final Fantasy II--the only previous game to have defined characters rather than blank slates--was hampered in its storytelling by the limitations of the NES. FFII certainly could never have opened with the Palamecian army advancing on Fynn, which is why it begins with a text crawl. But FFIV opens with the flying Red Wings and that cinematic approach continues throughout the game.

That said, I think part of the reason why FFIV's story is so well-loved is that a lot of people played it when they were in elementary school and hadn't yet been exposed to a lot of stories. The story is well-told, especially when the spritework isn't advanced enough to show much emotion--Final Fantasy VI had "waggle finger" and "shock" sprites, twice as many as FFIV's "normal" and "hanging head--but there's nothing particularly complicated in it. In classic Final Fantasy fashion, the real plot isn't revealed until an infodump 90% of the way through the game, and before then Golbēza's (Eng: Golbez) motivation is "I must gather the crystals so I can destroy the world." Mind control means Kain betrays the party and then returns to the party multiple times, and if you're worried about spoilers I must point out that he's named "Kain." Cecil's moral culpability in the atrocities he committed as captain of the Red Wings is solved in the only way the game's systems allow--by a literal battle with his dark side, culminating in him becoming a paladin--much to the shock of the people of Mysidia, several of whom are astonished that someone who was committing war crimes not that long ago was found worthy on the Mountain of Ordeals.

FFIV is infamous among Final Fantasy fans for the amount of times characters are killed off and miraculously survive. One character literally lives through a suicide bombing! It's 💯 melodrama, with sudden betrayals, a love triangle, undying devotion, an evil villain and his four henchmen in the classic 四天王 shitennō style, areas that all have a single theme like Fabul the monk kingdom or Troia the priestess kingdom...it's much more straightforward than later entries in the series, but that simple characterization moves the characters closer to archetypes and makes them more memorable.


FFIV was the first game in the series to have set jobs for its cast, and the game uses that to further their characterization. Take Cecil--at the beginning of the game he's a dark knight, which in FFIII had the ability to cast white magic. Here, he has an ability called Darkness which damages all enemies at the cost of his hit points. He uses this ability in the opening to wipe out the monsters who attack the Red Wings, and it defines his character. Cecil is a man who uses the power of darkness for good, or at least, for what he though was good. Questioning the King of Baron is the first step on the path to his redemption, leading to him fighting Baron's forces to defend Rydia and to the conversation with the elder of Mysidia, who tells Cecil that he must go to the Mountain of Ordeals and face his inner darkness. The battle with darkness cannot be won normally--one's dark side cannot be overcome by trying to crush it into submission--and Cecil must endure the attacks until he shows that he is worthy, at which point he becomes a paladin. Darkness becomes Cover, and instead of using his health to fuel a damaging flood on enemies, Cecil stands between his allies and the enemy and takes damage in their place. He's also reset to level 1, because he must renounce his former prowess to full redeem himself.

Gilbert the Bard (Eng: Edward), prince of Damcyan--the game has a lot of royalty in the cast--is weak-willed and cowardly, consumed by guilt that he was unable to save his girlfriend Anna when Damcyan was attacked. In addition to his bardsong, he also has the command Hide, which makes him untargetable until his next turn. Tellah the Sage used to be a powerful wizard, but his glory days are behind him. In the beginning he only knows a few spells, and while he later remembers the ones he had forgotten, he only has 90 MP with which to cast them. On top of that, when he levels up, his Strength goes down. Palom and Porom, the young twin black and white mage prodigies from Mysidia, have an ability called Twincast that lets them combine their strength to use far more powerful spells than they could alone. Cid the engineer is famous for his ability to get the most out of airships and he has the Scan command in battle to look for enemy weaknesses. Rydia, whose hometown was burned to the ground, is a powerful black mage but refuses to cast fire spells.

While this does lead to amazing gameplay and story integration, it does mean that party composition is extremely rigid. Characters join and leave as dictated by the story, and while five is the maximum party size, that only matters at the very end and very briefly before that. Much of the game's challenge comes from dealing with the specific party composition at any given time, like returning down the mountain as Palom and Porom escort Cecil the level 1 paladin, or the beginning when Cecil and Kain are alone, or any time Cid or Gilbert are in the party. Even if Gilbert can save the world by himself in other versions, Sing is just not that useful a command.


In addition to its story innovations, FFIV also brought in major mechanical innovation by getting rid of turn-based combat in favor of the Active-Time Battle System. Rather than a strict accounting of actions, each character has a turn gauge that fills up proportional to their speed stat (invisible in the original release, made visible in the pixel remaster) and when it's full their turn is up. Similarly, different actions take different amounts of time to perform, with an attack or cure spell happening immediately after being selected but some attack spells and commands taking longer. This adds a tactical element, especially since in the pixel remaster it's possible to bounce between ready characters, so you can hold Rosa's healing until the boss's big attack hits, or set up a series of big attacks to hit all at once to beat an enemy's healing. It also means that enemies attack independently of the party's actions, and sitting there thinking about what to do results in enemy attacks grinding the party's health down to nothing. It's possible to set the ATB system to pause while you're navigating through menus, and I definitely did that--I'm slower reading Japanese than English--but "menus" means selecting specific spells or items, not merely choosing someone's battle command. While you're trying to decide whether to have Cecil cover Rosa or heal her, Rubicante the Fiend of Fire will gladly burn you alive.

FFI and FFII both had Fight, Magic, Item, and Run as the only abilities, but FFIII's job system opened up a series of extra commands based on each party member's specific job. FFIV expands on this list, with every character getting special commands. In addition to the ones I mentioned above, Kain can Jump, spending time in the air in exchange for doing more damage on finally landing; Tellah can Recall, casting a random spell as he searches through his repertoire of black and white magic; Edge the ninja, prince of Elbāna (Eng: Eblan)--whose real name is "Edward Geraldine," by the way--can use ninja arts and throw shuriken, but also gains the Steal command usually given to thieves; Yang the monk can Kick, attacking every enemy on the field, or Accumulate, storing up power to make the next attack hit harder; Rydia can summon monsters; and Rosa the white mage can Pray to provide a random small amount of healing and is also an archer, so she can Aim to increase bow damage at the cost of taking longer. The ATB system is intimately woven into these commands--commands like Aim and Accumulate might work in a pure turn-based system if they delayed the user's turn, which might be a disadvantage when fighting large groups, but against a single target there'd almost never be any reason not to use them. When they result in the user getting fewer turns than others, though, it's an actual trade-off that requires thought--but not too much thought, because that gauge is ticking and enemies are queueing up their Flare spells.


The ATB gauge wasn't displayed in the original release of FFIV, but there were a lot more changes made than that. The North American release removed a bunch of the unique battle commands--if you watch the intro video I linked above, Cecil uses a bomb to destroy the monsters rather than Darkness because Darkness doesn't exist in the SNES FFIV--and replaced them with nothing. Several items were cut out or changed as well. The most consequential, that I only learned about a couple days ago, is that it's impossible to get Alarms in the North American version. Alarms summon whatever the rarest monsters is for the location when used, making farming for rare items much easier, but Americans couldn't do that. The pink tail, a rare drop from the flan princess on the moon, thus has near-legendary status because it was a 1/64th chance you'd even see a group of flan princesses, and then a 1/64th chance that they'd drop a pink tail. Well, with Alarms back in the pixel remaster, I went to the moon with a stack of 99 of them and 35 battles later, walked away with a group of five pink tails and traded them in for five sets of adamant armor. Nothing in the game was a challenge after that.

My experience of the pixel remaster is a bit strange because like I mentioned, I never played the SNES original. Instead I played the DS remake, and that version is much different from both the SNES and the pixel remaster versions. The DS version is infamously difficult--quite a few boss mechanics are changed, and unlike the majority of Final Fantasy games, it's a near-necessity to cast status effect spells like Bio and Slow on bosses in order to weaken them enough to beat them. The SNES version, by contrast, is easier than the original Japanese release, since in addition to the ability changes, secret passages are obvious, all specific status-curing events were replaced with the universal item Remedy, and item costs were decreased.

The Pixel Remaster brings things much closer to the original Japanese Super Famicom, for good or ill. All missing abilities from the SNES version are restored, but there are a bunch of other changes as well. There's an in-game map, eight-directional movement, the abilities to sprint, faster leveling, no more inventory size limitation (making the Fat Chocobo pointless), arrows are infinite instead of limited, no gil is lost when running, various character abilities were rebalanced...the list is pretty long. It's taking bits from all the different versions put out over the years and combining them into a single version, with redrawn pixel art overseen by Shibuya Kazuko, the original artist, and reorchestrated music composed by Uematsu Nobuo, the original composer. Compare the pixel remaster's version of Red Wings with the SNES version. Unlike the mobile Dragon Quest IV, which had a muddy mess for most of its music, the pixel remaster keeps the same feeling as the original but adds depths. If this is the quality of music in the remasters, they're easily worth it for the music alone.

And yes, Uematsu did add ominous Latin chanting to the Zeromus fight. It wouldn't be a JRPG final boss without it.


Normally at this point I would say "So is the pixel remaster a worthy successor to the original game?" or something similar but the truth is...I don't know! I don't have any golden memories of my parents' living room, watching Cecil's moral conflict and Kain's betrayals, saving Rosa, or the trip to the moon. My initial memories are of the DS version and a lot of people seem to think that it's so different from the original FFIV that it should be considered nearly a different game.

But I can say the pixel remaster version is worth it. It might not having some of the content that the later versions did, like the bonus dungeons or the Complete Collection's ability to swap to all the party members who lived through their heroic sacrifices, but it has a distilled version of the original game without all the games from the Japanese Easy Type that filtered through to the SNES version. The English script is updated--though I can't speak to its quality, as you can see from the text in the screenshots--without the terseness and occasional weirdness of the original. The characterization is archetypal and easy to grasp but still has some nice twists. Final Fantasy XIV pulls a truly enormous amount of reference from it, even before Endwalker went all in. I've seen quite a few people who say FFIV is their favorite Final Fantasy game, and had I played it when I was much younger, I might be one of them.

I was extremely hyped for Endwalker when the trailer showed the Warrior of Light as a paladin on the moon, and I tried to explain it to sashagee but she didn't really understand. She's never played FFIV. Now with the pixel remaster, she can.

Once they bring it to consoles, anyway. Come on Square Enix.