Past Meets Present: Final Fantasy IV (2007)

Final Fantasy IV is getting a "pixel remaster" in 2021, so let's look at the classic's conversion to 3D.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Is there a definitive edition of Square Enix’s classic JRPG, Final Fantasy IV, yet? The original North American version on the Super Nintendo, which was named Final Fantasy II at the time owing to how that series was releasing its games outside of Japan, is certainly great even with its flaws. The Game Boy Advance release of Final Fantasy IV addressed some of the localization issues that were inherent in every Square game of a certain age, but it did not fix the weird difficulty balance of the SNES title: Square, fearing the game was too difficult for North American audiences, had essentially removed the game’s challenge and nuance in battles so that you could kind of sleepwalk through it to experience the story.

Granted, the story is worth sleepwalking through battle for, as it was, even in 1991, even with a subpar localization and script that had to be condensed to fit into a cartridge, a wonderful character-driven plot with depth in both the cast and the narrative itself. On the other hand, I used to challenge myself to complete the SNES edition of Final Fantasy II by running away from any battle that wasn’t required, meaning I’d finish the game about 35-40 levels shy of where your characters were supposed to be by then: sleepwalking might be too generous a term there.

There is basically no moment in the original North American release of the game where you need to utilize spells like Slow or Haste or, really, anything that buffs or debuffs your party or their opponents, even though half of your spell list is buffs and debuffs. Some of the character abilities present in the original Japanese release are not in the North American release — if you’ve ever wondered why Cecil’s Dark Knight doppelganger has a power that the Cecil you control does not, well, there you go. Some enemies have greatly reduced hit points, or just won’t react to the presence of your party at all, so you can take your time playing whack-an-imp or whatever while they just sit there and take it. The GBA release helped bring clarity to character dialogue and improve a story that was already great even in its messier form, but nothing was done about how the game itself played outside of Japan, other than adding the abilities back into a game that didn’t really need them, given its ease.

Image credit: Square Enix

That is, until the full-on remake of Final Fantasy IV released for the North American Nintendo DS in 2008. From the moment this version of the game began, you knew things were different than in previous North American releases of FFIV. Rather than imps with six hit points at the start of the game, sitting there waiting for you to slaughter them when it fit into your schedule, you had ones you needed to attack twice to kill, flanked by aggravating birds that would now attempt to turn you into stone, and would succeed if you didn’t clear the screen of enemies fast enough. A party of characters turned to stone is a defeated one, meaning a game that, previously, you could complete without fighting anything but required battles was now one where you could catch a Game Over screen within its opening minutes if you weren’t paying attention.

Final Fantasy IV 3D, DS, 2007, whatever you want to call it (it released in Japan in 2007, a year before it hit North America) didn’t just finally bring difficulty and challenge to a game that had already existed for nearly 20 years, but it also expanded upon its concepts, to try to modernize it a little bit while still retaining its classic JRPG elements. That’s fitting, really, since FFIV itself was revolutionary: the Active Battle System, utilized in so many Final Fantasy games, was introduced in FFIV. No longer would you have all the time in the world to act, to make a decision about what you were doing in a turn-based RPG, but instead, everyone had a gauge that would fill over time, and when it was full, they could go. This let you switch between your own characters to put your spells or attacks or what have you in a specific order if you wanted to, but it also let your enemies attack you twice before you attacked once, if you took too long to figure things out. Active battling, it was right there in the name!

As for the 2007 release of the game, Augments were the significant, strategic addition to FFIV’s core concepts. Augments are essentially character abilities, that you are given as rewards or find out in the wild, that change how battling works for you. In the original FFIV, Cecil the Paladin has these abilities and only these abilities: Fight, Protect, White Magic, and Item. In the remake, he can have not only more powers than that, but he can also replace certain ones. In my latest playthrough, Cecil had an Augment that counters enemy attacks, which is useful on its own, but especially so if you happen to be having Cecil cast a healing spell at that moment, since you can have your cake and eat it, too, in that moment. He also had one that increased the speed at which party members would level up. Kain, the Dragoon, had the Jump ability in the original: in the same playthrough I mentioned, I also gave him the ability to Bless the rest of the party, so they’d slowly regain magic points each turn.

Image credit: IGN Southeast Asia

There are some pretty basic Augments that you might think aren’t worth equipping, or you might be concerned about equipping them on characters who are just temporarily in your party, but it’s worth it to do so. Equip the temporary party member mage twins Palom and Porom with enough Augments, for instance, and the Elder of Mysidia will then grant you the Dualcast Augment, which lets you cast consecutive spells: put that absolute treasure on Rydia so she can obliterate whatever is on screen with two high-level Black Magic attacks, or give it to White Mage Rosa so she can revive multiple fallen party members at once, or revive one then cast a high-level healing spell on the entire party at the same time.

The Augments add a whole bunch of strategy to a game that, if it needed anything, needed that, and do so in an environment of significant challenge. It’s difficult to be overleveled in the 2007 release of Final Fantasy IV, given how challenging your opponents can be, and how many of them have some real turn-the-tables abilities and spells at their disposal. You might feel you’re doing well, but then you face a group of enemies who can all use Scorch, and they take turns burning the life out of four of your five party members. Since the game still uses save points, and at their original, not-very-regular locations, that kind of thing can be a real terrifying moment for you. There is no shame in running in Final Fantasy IV DS: it sometimes might be what you need to do in order to survive.

All of the other modernization in the game, similarly, fits in with the Final Fantasy IV you already knew and loved. It’s no longer a 2D, pixelated adventure, but is instead in 3D. This means the game’s story is now told through dramatic cutscenes, with some voice acting, even, and the script is, presumably, what it was first envisioned to be before the cartridge limitations of the early SNES days forced Square to condense the in-game text. There are flashbacks that help flesh out the relationship between presumed antagonist Golbez and protagonist Cecil, that add depth to the one part of the story you could accuse Square of not having spent quite enough time on back in the original release.

The voice acting works well, too, as essentially everyone sounds like the voice you had in your head for years before you ever actually heard them. And for the most part, the transition to 3D works well: FFIV was old enough that you could tell it was an early SNES title whenever you were on the overworld map, with smaller sprites that lacked a ton of detail. So, the switch to 3D models here works great on the overworld map and while walking around a dungeon or mountain or what have you. In battle, though, the spritework of the original was glorious, with beautifully drawn enemies and detailed party members. The switch to 3D suffers a bit more here, since nothing quite pops offscreen the way it used to. There’s nothing wrong with it, exactly, but I have a preference for the design of the original battle sprites, despite their relative lack of animation. Spells, especially, suffer in the transition to 3D: the effects were just more impressive in their original 2D element.

That being said, the good outweighs the bad here, in that regard. If you aren’t as familiar with the way it used to look, then the 3D in battle likely won’t bother you, and it’s really great in other areas of the game. The design of Rosa, for instance, looks so much more like her concept art than her sprite did, and characters like Yang and Rydia made for wonderful 3D art. Tellah’s beard and glasses just work, the way Cid’s mouth works in 3D, combined with his booming voice, matches well with the character I thought was being silently portrayed in 2D all those years. It doesn’t always work — Edge is significantly worse looking in 3D than in 2D, for instance — but on the whole, the transition to 3D worked well.

The only real downside to the 3D is the style they chose for it. The game opens with a full motion video that mostly makes you wish the entire game got that kind of treatment and look. They would have needed a system besides the DS for that, though: it’s the kind of massive change in look that like, Final Fantasy VII remake is currently undergoing. Still, though, what could have been, give me an entire game of this shit now that we have the technology:

Instead, we got a more cutesy 3D, the same kind utilized in the DS version of Final Fantasy III, that was also utilized in The 4 Heroes of Light, that has made its way to Bravely Default, and so on. It is… not my favorite. Part of that is surely that I feel that Square Enix does not respect its pre-Final Fantasy VII history enough, so making cutesy 3D renditions of Final Fantasy IV, or smoothed-to-hell, ugly-as-sin mobile ports of Final Fantasy VI does not convince me otherwise, not when FFVII gets endless spinoffs and a remake that will span multiple releases and consoles. FFVII wasn’t the first mature story with depth the company attempted — nor was it the first successful one — but the way Square has separated their 16-bit past from their 32-bit past is like WWE-level madness in its denials and reshaping of company history. Stop treating IV and VI with less respect than they deserve!

Luckily, oddly chosen cutesiness or not, it’s still Final Fantasy IV we’re talking about here, and its story is presented the best it’s ever been, with difficulty and challenge never before seen in North America or elsewhere. Final Fantasy, before IV, was not particularly expansive with its cast. The original game had you create your party at the game’s start, with whatever classes you felt like. The second gave you more specific characters, but you mostly kept just those under control. The third introduced a job system that let you change classes, but this just kind of reemphasized that you were playing with dolls and not characters with their own feelings and stories and pasts and futures and so on. Final Fantasy IV changed that in a such a monumental way that’s hard to comprehend now, when we’re so used to the future it helped bring about: it still looked, in many ways, like its predecessors on the NES, but everything else was a quantum leap forward.

The game opens with Cecil, Captain of the Red Wings and Dark Knight of Baron, being stripped of his position and sent off on an errand by the king due to his questioning the necessity of his last mission. Cecil had stolen the crystal from Mysidia, by order of the king, and attacked mages who didn’t even put up resistance against this act. Cecil might be trained as a Dark Knight, but he fears that its sword, and his king, are going to make him into something he does not want to be. His girlfriend, Rosa, clearly loves him, much to the chagrin of Cecil’s best friend and rival, the Dragoon Kain. Every character has a personal story that unfolds, be it Kain’s struggle with mind control and how his true feelings made him particularly susceptible to it, Cecil’s questioning of who he is and what it means to fight for something you don’t believe in, Rosa’s devotion to Cecil that does not at all get in the way of her own belief in herself and her own abilities and desires, Rydia’s struggle with being orphaned and the power she has inherited, the lost love of Edward, the fallen kingdoms of Yang and Edge, Tellah’s thirst for revenge… the cast is deep, it’s varied, and everyone gets a turn in the spotlight, or maybe even two.

It’s an impressive, layered, character-driven affair that holds up exceptionally well, to the point that its late-life, “retro” sequels could not help but fail to live up to the quality of its writing and intrigue. While everything about the game’s story is deeply personal, it of course scales upward and outward, as well, getting to the point where it’s not just a simple swords and magic fantasy tale. This is all as well done as the more character-focused parts, especially since the game never loses sight of its characters and how the events of the game unfolding impact them within this much larger story. It’s all so tightly told, too: Square couldn’t fit the game they wanted to on the cartridge in the first place, so there is no wasted space here. Everything feels vital, necessary, like it is pushing you toward your goal, even when you don’t yet know what that goal is.

The game’s music is iconic, as well, and the DS release retains that feeling even as it shifts from the SNES’ audio capabilities to those of the DS. The dramatic opening, with the theme of the Red Wings playing as the fleet of airships Cecil is in command of are shown flying back home from their mission, is unforgettable, and used to great effect multiple times throughout the game:

“Battle with the Four Fiends” is one of the great pieces of boss music from the history of Final Fantasy. Here’s the Black Mages’ rendition of it:

The Black Mages, if you did not already know, are Final Fantasy I-X composer Nobuo Uematsu’s band that plays his songs from those games. Of course, you do not need to have written Final Fantasy IV’s songs to be able to play them in a band. Power Glove’s medley for FFIV is a great piece of music:

The metal rendition of the battle against Zeromus gets me every time (medley transition begins at 5:47). What a track. The whole thing is exceptional, though, even if it is, comparatively, a short soundtrack that was just figuring out how the SNES worked. As Dia Lacina put it while ranking Final Fantasy soundtracks for Paste:

Final Fantasy IV’s soundtrack unfolds more like a stage production’s musical accompaniment than a cinematic or even traditional game score. There’s a sense of drama and punctuation to both individual pieces and the work as a whole. Uematsu hasn’t yet moved to tone pieces that flit throughout the emotional beats, and can be repurposed as necessary, but his character and place theme work is also less fixed, more flexible. And every one of them is a near masterpiece.

Sadly, the North American version of FFIV DS did not receive the vocalized cover of “Theme of Love” that Japan did — it plays over the game’s end credits — but the internet exists, so you can watch the music video for it all the same if you want to:

What a beautiful theme for Rosa, and for the game itself.

No longer have a working DS, or don’t want to find a secondhand copy of this gem? Final Fantasy IV (2007) is also available on iOS, Android, and PC. It’s the closest thing to a definitive edition we’ve got of the game, given its improvements over the original in script, in localization, in challenge, even if it doesn’t look exactly the way I want it to. There still isn’t a release of this gem that marries the best of its 2D and 3D iterations, and there might never be, given how, again, FFIV isn’t FFVII by Square’s standards. But in the meantime, this certainly does the trick, and is worth considering if the whole “pixel remaster” thing is annoying you more than it’s exciting you.

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