In FFXIV there's a similar system later on, but in FFXIV your character is the Warrior of Light, and everyone else's are just, uh, not that; the game very much treats your character specifically as the one who's done all the stuff, not a big team of guys dressed in mismatched pyjamas as is mechanically the case. Or a bunch of guys in exquisitely well-co-ordinated pyjamas, as is mechanically the case for a lot of endgame stuff.
B. The amusing image of one dude splitting into various amounts of times-wimey variations of themselves, beating up various beings, then reforming into a single being at the end like a Doctor Who on steroids.
Desert strider apparently, given the background. Like bird-dinofied elephants from Aladdin, even if carpeted gazebos on elephants is completely impractical in the desert.
Also know this is late but for whatever reason no update notices. More stuff to read!
edit: Coming at the end of the read with the bahamut branded steel chair. lol. This makes me remember the fact I actually had the ds version of the game and stalled out in it as a kid. (I'm currently playing FFX since the switch has a pack version of the two, plus the Enix sale on it and another.)
Oh boy, FFIV. My first proper FF and along V the one I have the best memories of (except quadzerker run. Fuck quadzerker run, i am never trying that shit again).
Yeah, get ready for a lot of story. I will be waiting to post Hyadain's masterpiece and scar your opinion of some of the characters in the most hilarious way.
Final Fantasy IV is next, that's gonna be great! It's definitely one of my favourites, and it'll be nice to get a new take on it. Obviously the eventual coverage of 6 should be awesome too, but everyone and their mom's seen someone gush about that one.
Final Fantasy IV is next, that's gonna be great! It's definitely one of my favourites, and it'll be nice to get a new take on it. Obviously the eventual coverage of 6 should be awesome too, but everyone and their mom's seen someone gush about that one.
I know nothing of anything that's not FF5, 7, the theatre kids one which I believe to be 9 and 15. So this is really interesting both for playing vicariously without losing my life for weeks and for the actual reaction (actually, I believe I watched the gameplay of another one, but I remember absolutely nothing, so I guess it doesn't count?)
I hold the firm belief that FFIII quality is what cemented the series as a classic, and ensured it was worth to keep going.
As I've said before, FFIII set up a lot of aspects that became central to the series' identity: it introduced Summoners and the idea of confronting these creatures/being tested by them to earn the power to summon them in battle, cemented which elements from the two previous (and very different) games were going to become series mainstay while also greatly expanding their relevance and lore (crystals and chocobos, as well as the return of Cid the airship engineer, Bahamut the dragon king and Leviathan the sea serpent in new guises), added new traditions that would become iconic of their own (moogles, jumping dragoons, Odin as the third member of the big three Summons with Leviathan and Bahamut to match the Ifrit/Shiva/Ramuh trio of lower summons), featuring a world full of things to explore and discover and constantly expanding in scope and scale as you go through the game (compare that with FFII singular continent with no exploration to be had anywhere), and generally made it clear that the series was all about ambition and each title topping its predecessors in any conceivable way.
Also, it made the job system (which was technically introduced in FFI) actually mechanically interesting for the first time, adding a more flexible strategic element to the game mechanics to go along with the tactical elements of "what do I do in battle"; that's extremely important, because that mix of "out of battle strategy to decide the character's skills" with "in battle tactics to decide what ability to use" is the most important aspect of RPG. Unlike FFI and FFII, where it was limited to equipment (spells are equipment in all three of the NES games, they're found in shops and chests and each character can only carry a limited amount), in FFIII it extended to the characters' abilities and looks and could be changed as you were playing (FFI at least allowed you to make the choice at the start of the game, which was deeply flawed but better than FFII absolute lack of any choice), which is probably the largest mechanical step forward between games in the series - as in, no other game added as much mechanical depth to what the preceding title in the series did as FFIII did when compared to FFII. And, of course, FFIII is actually fun to play, in a way FFI managed to be only sporadically, and which FFII failed at spectacularly. And that too, I think, is worth recognizing as something which marked the rest of the series going forward; not all of the Final Fantasy titles after III are good games, but almost all of them are fun to play in a way many other titles in this genre very often aren't.
So, yeah, my take is that FFIII is a great game, and truly the kind of game that makes you want to see what the series will evolve into next. If I was ranking the first thirteen Final Fantasy, it'd probably be ahead of several titles that came out later than itself, in addition to obviously crushing FFII and FFI in terms of sheer quality. It could be better, of course, and it can't really compare to some of what the series did later, but it's still the kind of game that justify the reputation the Final Fantasy series had for a long time. At least, this is my opinion on it.
Hey, so, I wasn't expecting to take that long getting back to this, but the writing projects (and 'play something else for a bit to get some refresh before going back into FF gameplay' plans, but those mattered less) I wanted to take a week or two off for turned out slower and more painstaking than expected. I'm hoping to start the FFIV LP early next week come hell or high water, though, so pour one out for any hypothetical unfinished one-shot fic that died on the altar of the smoldering urge to play more FF that's been at the back of my mind this whole time.
Hey, so, I wasn't expecting to take that long getting back to this, but the writing projects (and 'play something else for a bit to get some refresh before going back into FF gameplay' plans, but those mattered less) I wanted to take a week or two off for turned out slower and more painstaking than expected. I'm hoping to start the FFIV LP early next week come hell or high water, though, so pour one out for any hypothetical unfinished one-shot fic that died on the altar of the smoldering urge to play more FF that's been at the back of my mind this whole time.
I got impatient enough at realizing I'd reached the end of the available content that I literally started my own thread of this ilk, inspired by yours. I've been thinking for years of doing something with my own nostalgia-bait, and I suppose you gave me the opening.
Hopefully you'll get to FF4 soon - it's one of my faves, as mentioned, so it'll be an extra dose of pleasant nostalgia!
...puts thread on watch. Sits back. Grabs popcorn.
This thread has been a wild ride to binge. Well done @Omicron, and I look forward to seeing the takes you and your wonderfully XIV poisoned brain has on the rest of the series.
At some point I will remember to swap the Steam interface to English.
(If you like my work and want to support it, you can still donate to my ko-fi or Patreon!)
I'm so excited for this, you guys.
Final Fantasy IV is the first game in the series to be released for the SNES, opening a brand new world of technical possibilities to supplement the increasingly elaborate storytelling of the series. Of course, we're playing the Pixel Remaster, so such a sharp change in hardware capability has been diluted in the retelling - but incremental improvements in the games' design were still visible in the jumps between each NES-era game, so I'm curious what we will see here.
We are beginning to tread in true Nostalgia Territory here. NES nostalgia exists, to be sure, but in my admittedly limited experience, people tend to treat games like the original Legend of Zelda more as historical artifacts to studied and learned about as distant origins of the medium, while it's SNES-era games like A Link to the Past that get all the remakes, 00s GBA ports, and so on?
This feels weird to say, but FFIV is the first Final Fantasy game I can remember hearing good things about. I've heard all three NES-era games talked about in games media before, but usually in historical terms, about what they meant for the emergence of the JRPG genre, how they innovated technically, how their storytelling was limited but still novel… FFIV is the first game where I remember reading or hearing people saying, "this was a great story that I enjoyed."
I am intrigued to see what it's all about.
First off, though, let me list what I can remember knowing about the game off the top of my head:
The protagonist, Cecil, is a Dark Knight who, despite being a decent person, is working for an Evil Kingdom. His initial arc in the story is coming to acknowledge that he's working for the bad guys, and changing sides. There is a guy called Golbez, who is a big dude in armor, and whom I can only assume is Cecil's evil king that he turns against. At some point, Golbez involves the Four Fiends of this game, who all have weirdly Italian names. Partway through the game, Cecil turns from a Dark Knight into a Paladin. Also, they go to the moon, which I didn't know and accidentally spoiled myself on trying to look up something unrelated during the writing of this review, so.
Depending on the density of writing in this game, this foreknowledge is either going to be "most of the plot" or "a merely superficial knowledge of the very start of the story." Let's find out!
As seems appropriate to a new era in Final Fantasy, I am going to try and change the format of this Let's Play. Provisionally, my goal is to only post screenshots that illustrate the start of or an important point in a given scene, and summarize the rest, with the goal of keeping each update under 50 images. We'll see how that works out!
The first thing I notice about the game is the old 'naming screen', the one in which you'd meet and name your party (and pick classes in F1), is gone. When we press 'new game,' we instead see the screen fade to white, and out of this white…
A fleet of airships, flying across the land!
This is immediately striking. While airships have increased in prominence over the course of the past three games, they were always shown individually, or in confrontation like with the Dreadnought capturing the Enterprise. This is the first time we see several airships flying together in formation, immediately suggesting a powerful kingdom and/or a more advanced, interconnected world.
Then we zoom in…
This is our first player character, Cecil, and wow straight off the bat we are playing with a whole new set of cards. Cecil isn't an orphaned youth or mysterious prophesized hero showing up out of nowhere to begin an adventure. Cecil is a knight, captain of an airship, servant of the kingdom of Baron, with an entire crew of soldiers answering to him. He's a Big Fucking Deal. And we're not even five minutes into the game that we are introduced to an emotional conflict: one soldier asks why Cecil "seems kinda down," and another answers that "after what we did, who wouldn't be? Orders are orders, but killing innocent to get the Crystals isn't right." Which leads directly into a flashback…
This scene has no dialogue, but what happens in it is obvious. As the soldiers close in on these mages - who are using the very same sprites as the Black and White Mages from FFI and FFIII, ie our own player characters, the mages face them, and their sprites flicker one by one - killed by the soldiers until only that old man remains, whom Cecil shoves aside to get to his goal:
As we come back to thee present, talk by the crewmen is getting heated, as one of them says that "the Red Wings are supposed to protect innocents, not harm them!" Finally deciding that such seditious talk cannot be abided, Cecil orders his men to stop discussing this, to which one of the crewmen actually challenges him, asking him if he "condones what we've done."
Cecil's answer is bullshit, and I'm not sure to which extent he believes it:
"The raid on Mysidia was imperative for Baron's prosperity. The Mysidians know too much about the Crystals - their very possession of one is a threat to Baron. His Majesty ordered we obtain the Crystal, and as soldiers of the Royal Air Force, we are sworn to obey."
But before we can find out if this is convincing to the crew, one of the men warns that monsters are attacking and we shift to battle.
Okay.
Wow.
I mean, wow.
This is already a sea change in storytelling and characterization.
Cecil has barely been introduced and we already know that he is a living character, rooted in his world, with established relationships, duties, beliefs, loyalties. We know he has a moral sense (he feels bad about what he did) and we know it's compromised (he did in fact do it). He has the respect and loyalty of his men, but these men also have define themselves on terms separate from his - they believe the Red Wings stand for something, and their captain is leading them astray from those principles, and now they are having doubts. We know Cecil did some bad shit, killing innocents in the name of a naked power grab, and that he justifies himself using his duty to the King as well as the alleged threat of Mysidia (hey, fancy seeing that name again!) and its knowledge of the power of the Crystals, which is obviously bullshit. Baron used the imaginary threat of a potential danger Mysidia might hypothetically have caused them to justify invading a nation of scholars and mages and taking their powerful magic crystal.
It's literally "They may become a threat." I love it.
The degree of complexity that's being thrown at us is wildly out of league with any previous characterization, not merely of player characters (RIP Leon, you wish you had half that much depth) but of any character in the games period. We're the bad guy! That's the twist! And we're five minutes in!
And then the game builds up on that with its 'first encounter.'
Cecil has 200 HP, takes single-digit damage per attack from enemies, and uses something called 'Red Fang' to annihilate them all at once with fire.
Cecil is powerful. He is a knight, an established elite warrior of Baron, and the game acts like it. Ordinary monsters attacking his ship are simply no match for him. He tears through them as through paper. He's also not a 'Warrior' or an 'Onion Knight', he has a cool, unique armor, very similar aesthetically to the Dragoons of previous games, and he has his own class with his own special abilities.
Slight demerit for having Cecil play himself during this encounter instead of handing the reins to the player for them to discover that power for themselves, but overall, absolutely stellar upgrade in presentation and content.
One of the men is wounded in the attack and Cecil immediately rushes to protect him and ask if he's alright, (showing us that Cecil is also a good commander who cares about his men), and another monster attacks (a Zu, a big bird) that is similarly trivially dealt with using a 'Blue Fang' attack that makes lightning erupt all over the screen. After this fight, Cecil asks if everyone is okay, and the men tell him everyone is accounted for. They also note that they've been encountering more monsters lately, and Cecil wonders if this could be an omen.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's linked directly to the Crystal thing.
Which, incidentally, the Crystals have been an object of contention between the forces of light and darkness in both I and III, but this is the first time they're fought over by mortal powers - treated not as cosmic foundations but as resources to be waged war over and claimed by kingdoms and rulers. I wonder if that will also translate into making the Crystals more 'mundane' or common, rather than there being four, one for each element.
And now, Cecil's men warn them that they have arrived in Baron…
I don't like the look of this Baigan dude. Cecil tells him that "The Mysidians put up no resistance. In fact, they were completely defenseless," which even more strongly suggests they essentially did a deadly smash-and-grab on a peaceful nation of scholars. Baigan admonishes him - "Is this pity I perceive? Hmph!" and tells him to follow him to an audience with the King of Baron.
Yeah, Baigan is a snake.
I mean, he's right - it's clear that Cecil is struggling with his loyalty to the King in the face of orders he feels are wrong - but Baigan is definitely totally on board with any unprovoked war of aggression that Baron might engage in, and is backstabbing Cecil to keep him from interfering.
The King of Baron… I don't know quite what to make of him yet. He has a very generic 'ruler' sprite and appears to be just Some Bearded Dude, and his name is simply 'King of Baron.' He takes Baigan's word uncritically - "He does?! Your counsel is well heeded, Baigan. But as long as I obtain the Crystals, Cecil's transgressions matter little." Is he a fool easily manipulated by others, or a more sinister figure? When Cecil enters, the King greets him, and immediately asks to see the Crystal, which…
Yeah, this dude isn't just in it for a naked power grab, there is some kind of obsession or fascination going on. And if this is the 'Water Crystal,' then presumably we are dealing with an FFI/FFIII situation, and the King of Baron just claimed one of the four elemental crystals which serve to keep the world from disaster.
This is going places. Bad places.
And Cecil goes to leave the room at first. But, just as he reaches the door, he turns around anddoes… I was going to say 'something stupid' but actually, he's behaving completely appropriately - or he would be, if he was in a non-evil military; after having defended the king's authority and the righteousness of their orders to his men, Cecil brings up the issues he harbors in a private meeting, at the same time reporting on a genuine military concern, asking for clarification on Baron's strategic goals and current war crime status, while avoiding undermining the King's authority in public:
These are completely reasonable concerns to raise. Unfortunately, Cecil's mistake here is not realizing that the King has already drank the Evil-Aid and does not take being questioned lightly. Not only does he accuse Cecil of 'treachery,' he strips him of the command of the Red Wings! Essentially demoting him to 'cool sword person' rather than the commander of an actual fighting force… And thereby making him much more convenient to use as a player character who doesn't have to justify dragging a dozen of dudes everywhere he goes.
(Side note: A touch I liked in FFII was that when you get the ship, you do so by recruiting Leila and her entire crew of pirates, and explicitly have all these background dudes running the ship for you and a party member who's been specifically designated as captain - I missed that in FFIII. Of course, FFII also didn't really do anything with that idea besides its initial intro cutscene, so…)
But Cecil is only demoted - not put under arrest or anything. And, in fact, the King has new orders for him.
Note how the two knights guarding the throne stepped forward to block the way to the King when Cecil tried to step forward in shock upon the King's pronouncement, and how he was forced backwards a few step. This is the kind of very simple touch that seem obvious but really help make sprite-based cutscenes feel vibrant.
I have no idea what a 'Bomb Ring' is, and I am hella suspicious of it. That said, I'm also being asked to kill a monster that is hurting the locals, so presumably I'm doing some good… right?
But then! A friendly face appears!
Or, well, friendly helmet.
Another dude with a cool name in a badass armor that resembles Cecil's own but in a different color scheme? Damn, I am into this.
As they are forcibly escorted out of the throne room, Kain and Cecil have a conversation - Cecil apologizes for getting Kain into trouble with him, but Kain reassures him that as soon as they've completed their mission, the King is sure to see wisdom and reinstate Cecil as commander of the Red Wings, and tells him to just get some rest and leave preparations for their journey to him.
Yeah, these characters definitely suffer from a surfeit of loyalty. They're trapped by the belief that their King is fundamentally a reasonable, righteous person who may err at times, instead of a man growing mad with power, lust for the Crystals, and paranoid distrust in those who question his dubious orders and goals. Things are worse than either of them realize - but as elite warriors, they have a vested interest in failing to grasp the crumbling of the system.
This was one huge intro cutscene. There mere have been a couple of walkable segments that I don't remember connecting one dialogue to the next, but mostly this is just one continuous scene establishing Cecil's character, skills, motives and driving conflict. We only really take control at the end of it, after several long minutes - the story density in FFIV is already tremendously higher than any of the previous games. FFII's action-intro had absolutely nothing on this. It's also very efficient, we already understand what makes Cecil a conflicted and complex character, and we can already guess that the mission we're about to complete is probably a bad idea, but our character doesn't know it. This kind of separation between what the player knows and what the characters know may seem like the most basic storytelling, but that's never happened in the series before. So far, the games have always been 1-to-1 on the players knowing what we know. If they're wrong about something, being tricked or what not, we don't know until it's revealed. Now, though, there is a sword of Damocles looming over the narrative, the shadowy knowledge that what we're about to do is probably a bad idea but that we're going to do it anyway because Cecil doesn't know any better.
Talking to people around the castle is interesting. Knights (at least that's what I'm calling the high-ranking guys who share a palette swap of Baigan's sprite) say sinister things like "If you value your life, you'd best put king and country before anything else," or "the king is most displeased," showing they've fully bought into the king's shiny new jackboot pair; soldiers sharing the Red Wing sprite say things like "With you and commander Kain joining forces, nothing will be able to stop you," showing that the pair is popular, respected, perhaps even beloved by the rank-and-file - which, of course, would make a would-be tyrant afraid of them as the potential source of a palace coup. It also serves to build up heat for the main character.
Final Fantasy IV's protagonists are cool and badass, and the game wants to make sure you feel the hype before playing them.
We also have this very interesting discussion:
Cecil isn't just a knight, he is a Dark Knight, and this is a special status that required special training, which he was personally ordered to undergo by the king. Kain is a Dragoon, which is also a special elite status requiring special training, but less prestigious than the Dark Knight. Kain pursued the path of the Dragoon to try and find a connection to his father (shades of the kid in Deist in FFII, tbh). Now the two are fast friends, and both gigaknights of two different special orders. This is a great dynamic.
Also, one thing of note that's not going to be in screenshots as I try to save space - Cecil makes a lot of use of ellipses, which is new to this game. What I mean is, he has dialogue boxes that just read "...," signaling that he is silent but in, like, a meaningful way. That he's thinking, or in doubt, or doesn't know what to say. Which is a really useful character writing trick in voiceless games and is, of course, completely old hat to us, but was never used to such an extent in previous FF games - this really shows that Cecil is a man plagued with doubts and struggling to express his thoughts and feelings.
Cecil and Kain also have battle-brotherly banter, with Kain saying that he doesn't want to be the only one pulling his weight and Cecil reassuring him he'll fight just as hard as him, which pleases Kain, who was clearly trying to tease Cecil out of his funk. These two like each other, it's pretty clear.
Also, there's a really interesting bit of world-building in two rooms labeled Black and White Magic research labs.
Now the first thing that's interesting to me is… Well, magic has always been part of the world of Final Fantasy, every town has a magic shop, there are magic towns like Mysidia or Doga's Village, and Minwu served as a court magician. But there is something newly grounded in the way FFIV portrays Baron as having research teams of wizards of both magic schools, with their own barracks, their own corps, working on refining their spells. The only times we've seen mages being treated as an integrated component of a warmaking force was…
Well, Palamecia. Who were the bad guys.
Also interestingly, this posits that only weak magic is commonplace in Baron. Our ravenous, expansionist, crystal-raiding nation might not be as strong as they dream themselves to be, is Fire and Blizzard are the only spells their magical corps know. At the same time, this does also help sell the magical corps as only one component of an army, not an overwhelming force. Yet even so, it portrays magic as a living science, being actively worked upon and advanced by its practitioners. The old excuse for Ultima being bugged is now canon!
And the White Mages have something interesting to tell us…
Wonder what that's about.
One of the White Mages - who presumably also act as royal physicians - muses that the King is "full of vigor," which she finds "somewhat out of character." Further evidence something is going on with him beyond mere ambition, hm.
Okay, so Rosa is definitely a love interest of some sort. She clearly wants to talk to Cecil, but for whatever reason the middle of a corridor isn't it, so she promises to see him later and leaves again.
Man, there's really so much going on in there to make Baron feel like a massive apparatus of war, with multiple soldier corps, conflicting loyalties, wizard labs, and now prisoners with PoWs. The Mysidians don't have much to say, other than to beg us to return the Crystal even if their lives are forfeit because we can't imagine its importance.
Having thoroughly explored this corner of the castle, we exit, and are surprised by another named face!
It's a Cid!
This game really is throwing a whole cast of character at us right off the gate, isn't it? It's almost like it's showing off, telling us 'this time things are gonna be different.' Like, we're still in the prologue - we haven't even headed into the otherworld yet, and we already have the King, Baigan, Kain, Rosa and Cid, all of whom have some kind of tie to Cecil and have known him for years.
Cid is cheerful, trying to do some verbal jousting with Cecil, but Cecil is unresponsive - when Cid learns that it's because he's been demoted, he's baffled… But shares his own doubt:
"Come to think of it, the king's been acting peculiar for some time. His Majesty ordered me to build an airship for killing people! Everyone's worried about him…"
Then Cid enjoins Cecil to stay safe and come back from his mission in one piece, then hurries off before his daughter yells at him for being late.
It's really clear that everyone understands that something is rotten in the kingdom of Baron, but only Cecil, who's been at the tip of the spear and has innocent blood on his hand, truly grasps the scope of it. Everyone else thinks the King is acting odd, or showing some peculiar traits, or asking questionable things, but none of them is willing, or able, to look into the face of what has already started to become a bloody-handed tyranny. The only one who does, Cecil, is both too loyal and now complicit in these actions, and so can only stew in doubt and guilt.
But it's finally time for Cecil to tuck himself in.
I realize that this just a game conceit, but the idea of Cecil sleeping in his full Dark Knight get up is hilarious.
Okay, now it's getting juicy. Cecil is so loyal not just because he's a good knight, but because the King is effectively his surrogate father - and Kain his foster brother, which is a vibe I was already getting from them. He's got shades of Garland there; a noble knight, admired by all, who's been turned twisted and evil. That explains a lot.
Barging into someone's room in the middle of the night, with the lights low? How daring.
Cecil confesses to Rosa that he's killed innocents in Mysidia, and that "This is the fate of the dark knight. Soon, he won't even feel remorse for his actions," which brings up some interestingly sinister vibes about his job. But Rosa tells him that's bullshit, his job isn't going to magic away his feelings because he's got actual morals. Cecil tells her he can't defy the king because he is a "hopeless coward," to which she calls bullshit:
Ooooh yeah baby, it's that good character drama. The way this is framed, it's pretty obvious this isn't some spur-of-the-moment confession, these two know their feelings towards each other, but for whatever reason something is keeping them apart. They do this bit where Cecil gets out of bed and they look away from each other torn by whatever anguish stands between them:
It's a pretty solid use of limited sprites. That 'mournful/conflicted' sprite of Cecil's is getting a lot of work. And now, Rosa leaves, Cecil thanks her, and…
Huh. So I guess Dark Knights are sworn to a vow of celibacy?
Either that, or it's because the powers they wield make them too dangerous to be around, or too tormented, or in some manner unsafe to be around.
I wonder if we're actually going to get an in-depth exploration of what it means to be a Dark Knight and why it's surrounded by all these ominous caveats, or if it's just going to stay in the domain of vibes. We're definitely seeing a version of the 'dark knight' as a concept that is far more solidified and concrete than FFII's Leon or the Dark Knight/Magic Knight/Warpriest of FFIII, with the sinisters undertone of the job fully present just as much as its fearsome power.
Then morning comes, and Cecil and Kain meet up together in the castle's hall. "So, you're ready for some real combat?" Kain asks. "Always," Cecil answers.
The bro energies on these two are overwhelming.
And with this, we cut - finally - to the opening scroll.
That's right, you forgot those were a thing, did you?
If you will look closely at the sky, you will note that this world has two moons.
Wow.
Okay, so, I wasn't expecting this, but - I think that's gonna be it for the first update.
All in all, I just spent 4k words describing just under twenty minutes of gameplay. The density of information and characterization in FFIV's opening is in a wholly different league from any game prior. We haven't even started the 'gameplay' proper - we haven't had an actual playable encounter - but I think for a first update, focusing on the massive advances in writing and presentation will suffice.
And note: We don't have a proper four-people party yet, nor even FFIII's core three roster. We spend much of the intro with Cecil, and at the end, join up with Kain in a two-man team. This is a very interesting way of emphasizing each individual character's introduction and presentation, rather than dumping four people on you at once, and it also serves to reinforce the feeling that these are already powerful warriors - Cecil and Kain alone believe they're enough to face whatever is coming their way, and they're probably right. I seriously doubt I'm going to be having any trouble with goblins in the first minutes of setting foot in the overworld.
So, yeah. That's Final Fantasy IV started. Really excited to see where this is going.
One of the Sakaguchi stories (ie along the lines of Sakaguchi talking about Gebelli messing with the Ultima spell in FFII) is how he really, really started putting narratives about the Meaning Of Life and What Death Means and such starting in FFIV, because during the development of FFIII there was a fire at his house where his mother died, and so he started really thinking about those themes and feeling that they can be portrayed in game narratives.
Cecil has 200 HP, takes single-digit damage per attack from enemies, and uses something called 'Red Fang' to annihilate them all at once with fire.
Cecil is powerful. He is a knight, an established elite warrior of Baron, and the game acts like it. Ordinary monsters attacking his ship are simply no match for him. He tears through them as through paper. He's also not a 'Warrior' or an 'Onion Knight', he has a cool, unique armor, very similar aesthetically to the Dragoons of previous games, and he has his own class with his own special abilities.
FF4 has a lot of moments of genuine, timeless ludokino and the stuff it does with characters' stats and levels is a low-key yet ever-present example of that. Cecil and Kain start level 10 because, well, they're veteran knights and they've been at this for a long while. Later party members will vary quite a bit depending on their backgrounds. Just something to keep an eye out for!
Dragoons may have been introduced as a concept in FF2 and as a job in FF3, but none of that changes the fact that Kain is The OG. The man who Estinien (HE'S THE AZURE DRAGOON~) stole his fit and most of his personality from.
Cecil: "And not just the men... but the women... and the children... they were like pure magic users... it was so easy to chop through their robes and their frail little nerd bodies!"
Rosa: "Aww Cecil, sometimes genocide makes us feel all icky inside..."
... I'm not sure if this is ever brought up in game - to my knowledge, it isn't - but part of Cecil's issues with his Dark Knight status is that apparently his armor is forcibly bonded to his skin Dr. Doom style.
... I'm not sure if this is ever brought up in game - to my knowledge, it isn't - but part of Cecil's issues with his Dark Knight status is that apparently his armor is forcibly bonded to his skin Dr. Doom style.
I'm honestly not sure whether it counts as being reflected mechanically or not - on the one hand, you can change and remove Cecil's armor-slot items, just like the rest of the party. On the other, he has to use an entirely different *type* of armor-slot items, which nobody else, including other heavy-armor users, can equip.
Oh yay! FF IV my very first final fantasy game, very much still enjoy it but I will say eventually you should try the 3d remake, since it adds new gameplay systems, changes the difficulty and adds voice acting and the way they use the models help change how the story is told.
I'll echo what others have said, but FFIV's sense of Ludonarrative Harmony is impeccable. The DS remake kept much of that, but you can tell that this is an order of magnitude beyond the already ambitious III.
And here we go. FF4 is definitely an interesting ride, though I can only imagine what it must've been like back in 1991 when narratives as in-depth and complicated as the one it presents were almost exclusively found in adventure games.
This scene has no dialogue, but what happens in it is obvious. As the soldiers close in on these mages - who are using the very same sprites as the Black and White Mages from FFI and FFIII, ie our own player characters, the mages face them, and their sprites flicker one by one - killed by the soldiers until only that old man remains, whom Cecil shoves aside to get to his goal:
One thing about the original English release of this game (whose localization is infamous for, uh, a lot of issues) is that they added dialogue for this scene. It's nothing that wouldn't be obvious, but it's interesting to think about what Square US considered at the time to not be clear just from what was being shown.
... I'm not sure if this is ever brought up in game - to my knowledge, it isn't - but part of Cecil's issues with his Dark Knight status is that apparently his armor is forcibly bonded to his skin Dr. Doom style.
It's still a shame about that one last detail though - being surprised by the game when it pulls out that particular trick on you is one of those things like the FFIII flood that is way more impressive when you don't know it's coming.
