I wasn’t expecting to get through my first New Year’s Resolution this early, relatively speaking – this is going up partway through January, but I was close enough to the end of Final Fantasy IV that I was able to finish the game before the full the first full week of the month. This is a game that I had been trying to beat off and on since I was in Middle School. So, I’m glad that I’ve finally gotten to beat the game – so now the question becomes, was it worth the wait.

Final Fantasy IV, in a few respects, feels like an actual outlier in terms of the series as a whole. Not in terms of the game’s linearity – most of the games of the series have been very linear in their stories. It’s more different in terms of control of aspects of your play style. The first 3 games in the series game the player real control in terms of your “build”. The first game let you pick your class at the start, and the third game took that to the next level by letting you level up multiple Jobs, and shift between them over the course of the game, along with letting you choose an ability you’d picked up from those levels in one job and and equip them as a secondary ability on your active job. Final Fantasy 2 would take this in a radically different direction, by having you control how your characters level through your actions – characters who do a lot of melee damage will get physically stronger, and characters who focus on spellcasting will do more damage with spells and will accumulate more MP.

In Final Fantasy IV, on the other hand, your party makeup, and with it what abilities you have at your disposal, are set by the game’s story – which determines what spellcasters you have in the party, what secondary abilities they have, and what spells they have. On the one hand, this means that the designers have created a situation where you always have the tools at your disposal – if not right away then after a little grinding to purchase weapon upgrades or to get additional levels – to overcome whatever challenge is put in front of you. On the other hand, it makes it harder to come up with weird combinations to go through the game a different way.

It’s not that there aren’t side-quests or optional content to find in the game. When Rydia rejoins the party later on, there are optional summons you can find. There are optional weapons you can get hidden behind side bosses (which can potentially be harder than the actual final boss of the game). However, when you take on the final boss, that final boss is going to be with Cecil, Rydia, Anna, Kain, and Edge. You can’t swap any of them out (at least not in the Pixel Remaster version), and they will always level up the same way with the same spell progression every time.

This does put the impression that there’s more focus on the story, but every Final Fantasy game has had a strong narrative focus. What it does it put more focus on moving the story forward, by changing bosses from puzzles with multiple answers to solve to ones with a single solution. It also puts more focus on spectacle – with what would have been Mode 7 scrolling on the original SNES version, along with when – later in the game, you have these impressive transitions between the Earth and the Moon (and with it the game’s final dungeon).

The final fight against Zeromus is a perfect example of this – he’s an enemy who nullifies any spells cast against him – or worse, gets a massive heal from them. This leaves the player with just doing attacks with Cecil, Kain, Edge, and maybe Rydia, and then healing with Rosa (with Rydia pitching in with items). That’s the strategy. Rydia’s contribution to this dungeon is being able to do massive damage to groups of enemies on the way to the final boss, and once she’s at the final boss there isn’t much she can do to contribute. Considering the size of the game’s cast, it would have been nice to be have been able to swap in some other party members – ones which the player could have gotten more invested in over the course of the game (like Yang). However, that would entail coming up with Ultimate Weapons for each of the alternate characters to include in the party, so I understand the decision. If I have a complaint about it, it’s that Edge doesn’t have as much time to build up a connection with the player the same way that, for example, Yang does. He feels like he’s there to fill a spot in the party, and wield the obligatory Ultimate Weapon Katana.

Otherwise, finally getting through Final Fantasy IV was a tremendously enjoyable experience. I had fun with the game, and several of the bosses were real challenges – even when I used the money and experience multipliers (not any higher than 2x) to reduce grinding. I was happy to get past some of the bosses that gave me a hard time in my earlier attempts to take on the game. That said, now that I’ve finally knocked this one out, I feel like I’m less likely to replay this game, as there isn’t really anything different to see the next time around the same way there might be in terms of changes in build or tactics in Final Fantasy V or VI.

Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster is available on PC and on most consoles, and you can pick up a copy through the Humble Store or Amazon.com (Affiliate Links for both).

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