TheGreatDirector
Banned
Final Fantasy IV is one of the most fascinating Final Fantasy titles to me. It is easily seen as one of the most iconic Jrpgs in gaming, being one of the defining SNES titles and entry for Square in the 16-bit era. However for me, I've found a hard time deciding whether I truly appreciate it for what it is or what it is regarded as.
My experience with Final Fantasy IV is limited to the DS version. I bought it years ago along with Final Fantasy III for the DS as a way of tring to dive into the Final Fantasy franchise's past. I ended up playing and completing III before IV and had high expectations after falling in love with III's world and gameplay(both from the difficulty and the simple job system).
After putting in a good amount of hours into the game however, I began to notice I had several problems with FFIV. The first of which happened to come from the glaring issue of its linearity.
Final Fantasy IV is a deceptively linear Jrpg. I say deceptive because unlike games like Final Fantasy X and XIII, IV makes use of an overworld display for your party traveling across the world. While this gives your adventure a feeling of grandness, traveling from dungeon to town, it also gives an unwanted feeling of feeling closeted. The game is focused on its narrative, Cecil the main character chasing after the Crystals of the world in order to protect them from the hands of Golbez..It is because of this that you as the player are funneled through the world going from A to B to reach the next Crystal in hopes of saving the world. This presents problems because the game is trying to convey a sense of majesty when in reality you are doing nothing more than walking along a guided path.
This is more evident when vehicles are introduced into the game more specifially airships. At this point you can freely travel around the entire world, across seas and mountains. You can even go underground into the underworld and up into Red Moon. However despite this means of exploration there are almost no rewards to using it. Yes, there are the occasional summons such as Bahamut to find and challenge but otehrwise there is nothing else.
The actual gameplay of Final Fantasy IV is also something I find heavily critical. Playing the DS version I knew ahead of time that the difficulty had been upped from the original. However my problems were less of what was updated and more of what had been retained. Final Fantasy IV gives every character a unique and unchangeable class from which they have guided route of growth. Outside of items and equips there are virtually know ways to customize your party in any unique ways. This leads the game designing every dungeon and boss around what your party is able to do based on who's in it at the time.
Now before I go too far into this discussion I would like to point out I very much enjoyed FFIV's bosses. They actually contain some of the most brilliantly designed enemies in the series and there are some very challenging fights that remain iconic to this day. Many of them even throw in unique gimmicks such as the Demon Wall that add greater pressure to fights. Yet my issue is less around the bosses and more the inbetween or the spaces betwen them. Traveling through dungeons and going through random battles in Final Fantasy IV is among the most boring pieces of gaming I've ever played. It's boring because the excitement has been taken away from the player because you know you'll never encounter something truly out of your league(at least up until the final dungeon). The game designs nearly every random encounter in a way that requires the minimum strategy necessary. While one may say that for grinding this is the best possible scenario, I find it uneventful to never use my characters in completely different ways. Rosa can never be the main attacker, Kain can never be a support, and Rydia(through character development) can never be a healer. Even the Active Time Battle system, revolutionary to the franchise, is unfortunately a detriment in the end. Rather than your party being able to fly through random encounters fast and easy you end up having to constantly wait during every encounter for each individual's gauge to fill up. While the ATB system should make the player more involved in the fight, the speed of the slow speed of the system combined with the relative simplicity of most random encounters goes completely against that idea. You're constrained to fight the battles in the most specific way possible and that ends up taking away from that adventurous atmosphere when it becomes less your journey and more the developer's intended journey for the characters.
The plot of Final Fantasy IV also is something I cannot ignore when looking back at the game. I understand that at its time Final Fantasy IV was revolutionary for Jrpgs in terms of storytelling. I realize the iconic moments of the game, from Cecil's transformation from Dark Knight to Paladin to Rydia's reappearance, were genuinely mindblowing experiences when the original game came out. However taking the game in a modern context I can't help but feel disappointed in what IV ended up doing. The narrative, much like Final Fantasy 2, introduces the concept of drop in and drop out characters. That is to say many characters will join your party for a specific span of the game only to either be killed off or separated. Unlike Final Fantasy 2 however, Cecil is the only permanent character that the player has throughout the entirety of the game. Now while this strengthens the player's connection to Cecil it severely weakens the connection one has for the rest of Final Fantasy IV's characters. If there's one thing I specifically appreciate in the DS remake it is allowing the player to view internal monologue of the party character's on the pause screen, giving even just the slightest bit of extra development and player connection to the cast. Outside of that however, the lack of substantial change for the cast outside of cosmetic and class changes and the absence of character to character dialogue scenes makes Final Fantasy IV lean much too far into exposition taking away from a personal investment into the lives of the characters.
There is a lack of development for characters such as Rosa, who end up little more than plot devices to trigger the player's movements across the world. For Rosa in particular the player in the beginning may see her nothing more than the damsel in distress being constantly kidnapped by Golbez's forces. Yet when she finally becomes a permanent member of your party in the latter half of the game, there is little to show her romantic relationship with Cecil which is paramount ot Kain's development from his jealousy throughout the game. She becomes nothing more than your party's white mage and in the end her marriage with Cecil seems nothing more than an last minute gift to players rather than a well earned reward through seeing them develop. Edge is even more glaring in that his first appearance is well pas the halfpoint moment of the game and yet he becomes not only your final permanent party member but also one your most useful attackers. Yet storywise he is only given development in a single dungeon and for the rest of the game feels like he's simply tagging along. I point this out because it almost feels insulting that you would have this randomly new character become part of the final party when characters such as Cid, Yang, Edward, and Palom and Porom all end up able and willing to fight and the end of the game yet are sidelined after what the player is led to belive were originally heroic sacrifices to the death. It undermines the connections the player has with the cast in the game, making the drive they might have had from one character's supposed demise feel completely fake.
Golbez is also a character I find issue with. Though widely regarded as another iconic antagoinst in gaming I ultimately feel completely cheated as player from the direction they took him. Throughout most of the game the player is led to believe Goblez is the ultimate evil, a being so powerful he controls the Archfiends themselves. It is the mystique of his character, the shadowy visage of his motivations that define him. It is the boss battle with Golbez and his Shadow Dragon that truly feeling the well earned climax of the game as you finally are able to face the man himself and defeat him while reuiniting with one of the few truly player connected characters from the past. Yet ultimately all these feelings of wonder you get from Golbez become undermined when he is revealed not only to be Cecil's brother but also being mentally controlled the entire time by an even greater evil. Right in that moment the game take away all the awe one had for Golbez as a villain by making him nohting more than a puppet. Him being related to Cecil offers almost no real character devlopment and is litle more than shock value to the players. Yes, his relation makes Cecil feel conflicted about his feelings toward Golbez. Yet the fact that immediately Golbez turns good and fights against the evil rather than for it takes away any conflict that could have been derived had Golbez been a willing servant for the evil Zemus. It is the same lack of conflict that makes Kain's story less interesting than it would have been had Kain not been under mind control as well but rather betraying the party because of his lust for Rosa and envy of Cecil. The game essentially created two characters that when are fully revealed are nothing more than devices to create extra uneeeded drama that takes away from the main narrative. Even Zemus himself becomes underwhelming as the party never actually directly confronts or interacts with him as a character but instead watches as he gets killed only to return as an entity of pure hatred and evil making his entire character nothing more then the game's means of having the player and the characters go through one final trial in order to be seen as worthy heroes who won in the end.
Looking through all I've written it definitely gives the appearnace that I have a completely negative view of Final Fantasy IV. The truth though, is that I really do enjoy several aspects of the game though it leaves a lot to be desired by me. The atmosphere in Final Fantasy IV, for one thing, is one of the most impressive atmosphere's I've ever found in a game. This is created by two parts, the setting and the music. The world of Final Fantasy IV is a true of marvel of gaming. The Tower of Babel and Zot, the Underworld and Red Moon, the airships and the crystal shrines all envoke a very precise aspect of fantasy that remains haunting and notable despite the limitations of the graphics. Indeed it is specifically the design of these locations, in that the player needs to fill in some of the blanks themselves in their imagination to truly get the full picture, which makes the locations larger than life and unforgettable.The music in turn adds to that by providing flavor through letimotifs and ambient exploration music. The dungeon theme, Into the Darkness, I find in particular to be a particularly perfect piece in givng off a sense of lost and mystery, making the very first cave in which Cecil and Kain explore particularly iconic when you first hear this piece. Letimotifs such as the Red Wing Theme craft a foreboding mood for the player while something like the underutilized Love Theme give players a feeling of comfort and security. Goblez, Clad in Darkness is one of my all time favorite villain themes. The immediate sensation of a wicked force is brought about from the organ like synth from the intro. The rapid organ playing halfway through the piece taken from Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor lifts the listener into a gothic state before falling back in an even heavier darkness.
It is the music surrounding the battles that I find most intriuging however. Nobuo Uematsu purposefully seems to incorporate a heavy amount of classical rock themes into his composition. This allows him to create starkingly different tracks depending on how influenced they are. The Battle 1 theme for example has an ever present bass line that constantly keeps the players engaged in the fight. Battle 2 offers a sort of fusion mix betwen rock in the beginning ending in a symphonic punch as if to signify the rising tension of the fight. Battle of the Four Fiends, an especially iconic piece to Final Fantasy considering it the first unique boss music outside of reguarl and final bosses to the series, completely ditches the rock aesthetic and goes for a full a full blown orchestra like composition, giving the player's an increased intensity knowing that this song signals an even tougher and more important boss fight than normal. The Final Battle theme however does something especially unique. Putting the synths to a more rock styled composition while adding in a few orchestral soudning instrumentation all while pairing it with a powerful enemy giving the player the notion that goal is within in their reach like the normal encounter and regular bosses and yet the opponent isn't more alien than anything you have fought before.
Even more, I love the character designs in this game. More so than the other FInal Fantasy titles(with the exception of V), the cast truly feels like an Amano painting come to life with stylized armor and robes that never go too far into uncomfortable territory. The age of the cast is nice having them all more as young adults then simply teenagers. I also found myself enjoying the humor of the game. The animosity between some party members and the wackiness of some of the antagonists made for a very whimsical journey.
My feelings Final Fantasy IV are definitely strange when you summarize them all. It's less of a love hate relationship and more of a grey understanding. I can see both the light in the game, the iconic and memorable cast and world, and the dark, the too linear and undeveloped gameplay and character development. Perhaps if I had played this game at earlier time, right at its release, I would see something different of this game. As of now however, I feel that appreciate Final Fantasy IV more as the game it is then the landmark title it is known as.
