So, this is one game that I wouldn't say is a bad idea to also play the DS version of as it changes a lot of stuff, including some entire boss fights and an entire augmentation system to give your characters special abilities as well as make the game much harder.
I will say this for now; Blue Fang and Red Fang aren't attacks. They're items. And you won't see them again for a long time.
You actually play out those two fights in the DS version of the game, meaning you don't actually have to use them and can save them for later.
If you want to play the DS version, let me know. If you don't, I will tell you what is changed in it.
I'll also be noting differences in a couple places - the DS had a "see what the character at the front of your party is thinking when you press the pause button" thing that provides extra characterization in a couple key locations, and among its minor added scenes is a flashback that greatly explains some important backstory that had previously only been implied.
My headcanon is that this is what all White Mages have been wearing under their big, concealing robes, this whole time.
Especially the dudes.
Anyway, ye olde traditional 'bikini armor plus some sheer scraps' is one thing, the picture that shows up at the top of Rosa's wiki page is quite another. At first I thought she had just forgotten to put on pants, but no, it's worse than that: her wrap skirt has suffered a terrible wardrobe malfunction.
What psychopath thought that was a good character design.
I mean have you seen the way Minwu was dressed? As of now this is just canon. White Mages are just the equivalent of that one meme of the dude with a tuxedo up front and lingerie in the back.
I admittedly am disliking Rosa's design immediately, having only tangential existing familiarity with FF4, because where you could tell Minwu was a white mage at a glance even if he had a unique specific design, Rosa just doesn't have an at a glance white mage design. Not just being distinct, but feels like she'd be out of place in a crowd of white mages.
I admittedly am disliking Rosa's design immediately, having only tangential existing familiarity with FF4, because where you could tell Minwu was a white mage at a glance even if he had a unique specific design, Rosa just doesn't have an at a glance white mage design. Not just being distinct, but feels like she'd be out of place in a crowd of white mages.
There is some reason for Rosa to have a nontraditional outfit for a white mage. She's also the party's premier archer and will spend a lot of time using a bow and arrow; and not just as a filler weapon, by the end of the game she's using bows named for Perseus and Yoichi. Yes at the end of the day it's leotard armor not unlike something out of Warcraft (and typing this I wonder if Metzen et al took some visual inspiration from her when making Sylvanas and the like), but visually it's a cross between healers (cloak, light/pastel colors) and pulp warrior women like Red Sonja or the Amazons. It's also why she's got a sword in that render linked above, she's intended to have some toughness to her (even though sadly the plot will mostly end up treating her as the damsel in distress).
Anyway, ye olde traditional 'bikini armor plus some sheer scraps' is one thing, the picture that shows up at the top of Rosa's wiki page is quite another. At first I thought she had just forgotten to put on pants, but no, it's worse than that: her wrap skirt has suffered a terrible wardrobe malfunction.
Between the White Mages in lingerie and the Dark Knights in skintight armor I'm starting to think the problem might just be Baron's extremely horny uniform designers.
I'm probably in the minority in not liking Yoshitaka Amano artwork (it just doesn't do anything for me), but I did notice how he not only puts female characters in leotards, he also often puts male characters in leotards.
Between the White Mages in lingerie and the Dark Knights in skintight armor I'm starting to think the problem might just be Baron's extremely horny uniform designers.
I'm probably in the minority in not liking Yoshitaka Amano artwork (it just doesn't do anything for me), but I did notice how he not only puts female characters in leotards, he also often puts male characters in leotards.
Cecil and Kain just left Castle Baron, and are about to head out on a journey to the Mist Cave.
A look at the world map. No obvious big twist like the Floating Continent, although that giant black hole in the southwest is intriguing. All in all, these landmasses are surprisingly slender.
So.
Let's talk mechanics.
I know what I said earlier, but for this I'm going to need illustrations.
First off - cool sprites. They have the 'chibi' look of every game so far but, to the extent that it's possible in this cutesy artstyle, Kain and Cecil do look absolutely badass.
Now, I'd like you to consider these blue boxes. Character name; HP number; MP number (neither Kain nor Cecil are capable of using magic); and an empty bar.
This bar is the ATB (Action Time Battle) gauge. It fills in real time during a fight, turning yellow when it's full, like so:
When a character's ATB gauge is full, their action menu pops up, and you decide their move for that 'round.'
I want to stress 'in real time,' because this change is massive. Prior to FFIV, all FF games were purely turn based, which meant that time effectively did not exist. There was never any kind of time pressure during a fight. You input your commands, the game determined who went in what order, did a full round, and then dropped you back into the input menu. You could, at any point, leave, have lunch, and come back.
Not so FFIV. For you see, opponents have their own ATB gauges, or whatever behind-the-scene mechanic replaces them. So, if your opponent hits their 'turn' while your ATB gauge is filling up, they hit you. Sure.
If your opponent reaches their turn while your ATB gauge is full, and you're picking which move to make, they hit you. While you are in the menu.
Final Fantasy veterans will be used to this, but it's hard to overstress how jarring that is coming off the three NES games. Like… enemies can't hit me while I'm deciding what my next move is. That's not allowed. That's not how it works. Except it is now!
In the hypothetical case that you freak out and have decision paralysis, these goblins above can take five turns each and kill your entire party before you've made a single move.
Now, there are two ATB modes, which you can select in the menu. 'Active' ATB means time passes in all circumstances. 'Wait' ATB makes 'time' (that is, ATB gauge gain and actions) freeze up when you're 'in a menu.'
But what 'in a menu' means is in a submenu. When you're on the top layer, where you pick 'Attack,' 'Darkness,' or 'Item' for Cecil, for instance, time still passes, ATB gauges fill up, and enemies are killing you. When you click 'attack,' ATB gain stops, and you can choose which enemy's day to ruin at your leisure. But this makes the initial phase, where you are in the 'top layer' menu deciding whether to Attack/Darkness or Attack/Jump, literally 'wasted time' during which your already-full ATB gauge isn't getting any fuller while every other enemy is gaining ATB and attacking you. So you want to minimize that time as much as possible, moving and inputting your next command as soon as the menu pops up.
For Cecil and Kain, it's not too big a deal. Cecil has two commands - Attack, which is a normal sword attack against one enemy, and Darkness, which is a slightly weaker sword attack against all enemies on the screen. Kain has Attack and Jump, which works exactly the same as it did in FF3.
He's literally doing a dark energy wave sword beam attack, he is so fucking cool.
When you get to the magic characters as I did towards the end of this update, though, the ones whose menu reads like this:
Attack
Black Magic
White Magic
Recall
Item
Hitting their turn is intensely stressful to a panicky sort like me (and by the way the game doesn't explain what Recall means to you in this specific example so you have a Mystery Command and you only see it while you're in the top layer where time still moves lmao). I typically don't plan which exact spells to use a turn in advance, I just hit my turn, go into White Magic, figure someone needs healing, or decide this turn I'll spend MP on an attack spell… And here that decision is a time-sensitive one during which enemies are gaining ground on me.
That system has some things going for it. It means the 'speed' stat is much more than turn order - it effectively determines how many actions you can perform in a fight, with faster characters acting more often. It also means that it can vary the delay on animations between you inputting a command and the character executing that command, so a character who is casting a powerful spell may be waiting for a while after the input while a character performing a physical attack will do it immediately and resume gaining ATB just as fast.
I don't know yet how this all comes together in terms of balance and fun factor, but here's what I can tell you: If the ATB system simply had one small change to it - that time freezes the moment I hit any menu, including the top layer menu where I decide to use an attack, items, or a special command - then it would be fine. I might even like it. As it is, it's stressing me the fuck out and I wish the game would just go back to turn by turn. Unfortunately, ATB is Final Fantasy's brainchild and dearest idea, and it's gonna be there for good. So I'm just gonna be dealing with panicking in combat menus for the rest of FFIV.
Alright, well. This covers the basics of the FFIV combat system, my grievances with them, and why I still think they might be interesting.
Also, let's take a look at what our character portraits look like in the menu...
I mean, we still don't have any clue what they look like under those helmets, but this is definitely helping sell that these two are ominous armored badasses of excellence and cool armor.
We head northwest, up some pretty typical overworld paths, until we reach our destination:
Mist Cave is a fairly generic mountain dungeon, with the slight touch of the mist that gave it its name. With bridges, bottomless pits, and chests, it's a familiar decor.
Which is exactly what the game is using to lure you into a false sense of familiarity and safety.
Note what the game is doing, with Kain's sprite phasing in to replace Cecil's when he is the one talking. This was beyond the capability of the previous games, which could 'unfold' the whole party but not do that kind of trick, resulting in the Red Onion Knight (Mimi) being treated as the face of the party and the one most people talked to directly.
Yeah, there is a spooky voice in the mists directly talking to us and telling us this is a bad idea.
Of course, we ignore it and delve further, only to be faced with a final challenge which calls us out directly by title: "KNIGHTS OF BARON… LEAVE NOW, OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES." Now that's not giving us a lot to work with, and we are here to kill the mist phantom beast, after all.
But here is where it gets interesting:
This is a dialogue option.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but while FF2 had this whole fancy keyword system, I don't think we've ever had one of those before. I think this is the first time the game just outright asks me: "Do you want to do this Yes/No" during a story-important dialogue (I think the Sages that teach you game mechanics did that).
And we can say no. I mean, we can't, not really, in that if we do, there's nothing else to do. We're turned around, and we have no objectives, nothing to do in the game other than just come back. But we can say no. We can refuse to play out the story. In order to progress, we have to say "Yes." We, as the player, have to hear the phantom beast's warnings, choose to ignore them, and choose to fight it.
And we know it's not a good idea. Even if we don't know why.
The mists of the cavern reveal themselves to be one single, diffuse entity, filling the entire underground complex, hence why it can watch us and speak to us. And when all that mist gathers in one place…
The mist dragon is another shift in gameplay. I have said in my FF3 LP that one of the problems with the endgame was that enemies were starting to grow stale because the game only had a very limited ability to give opponents unique abilities, so every endgame foe is drawing from the same spellbook you are. The Mist Dragon is the first boss in FFIV, and it has a unique mechanic:
It turns into mist.
Now, the thing is, we are still in the leg of the game where Kain and Cecil are badasses just plowing through all opposition (this is serving a thematic point, not just serving as a power fantasy, in fact kind of the opposite as we'll soon see), so the mist dragon is not difficult. When it is in mist form, it is immune to all our attacks, and if we do attack, it retaliates with 'Cold Wind,' dealing ~30 frost damage to both Kain and Cecil - not insignificant, but still a small chunk of their health. But it can't do anything if we don't attack, so it has to assume dragon form again in order to goad us into attacking it. In dragon form, its attacks are weak, dealing single-digit damage, and it suffers heavy damage from Jump and Cecil's attacks.
The key to the fight, then, is to use the ATB system to one's advantage - when the dragon is in mist form, let the ATB gauge fill up, let it sit at full, until the moment it assumes dragon form again - then attack immediately with both characters as quickly as possible. We eat a couple of Cold Mists when our attack orders are misaligned and hit the dragon just after its transformation, but ultimately, it can't stand up to the dynamic duo.
This is great. Stunning victory, we're on a roll, we never had to rest up like we did in the early FFI/FFII grind, this has been a straight power trip from Baron to Mist Dragon. We're on a roll, baby!
Let's find our grateful villagers.
…
It was a bomb ring.
As in, it was a ring that summoned the enemy type called Bomb, known for its ability to explosively self-destruct and set everything on fire.
Jesus christ.
…I just killed everybody in this place, didn't I?
Kain and Cecil are obviously distraught - this is a step beyond anything they did before; Cecil killed the Mysidian mages because they were in the way of the crystal, not just for the sake of killing them. Here, though, there was no apparent goal other than to kill everybody. "Why would he make us do this?" Cecil asks - but then he is interrupted by the cry of a lone survivor.
"Noo! Mommy!" shouts the voice of a little girl. They head towards it, and find a child leaning over the dead body of a woman.
Mist is the summoners' village.
The King of Baron decided that They Could Be A Threat. He decided to have them wiped out. He knew his subordinate was unreliable, harboring doubts already when it came to something as innocuous as 'killing innocents while raiding resources,' so he might balk at literal genocide, so he decided to either test him, or expend him for a gambit. Have him transport a bunch of Living War Crimes to Mist, wipe out a potential threat, and then either Cecil turns coat (which he would have done eventually) or comes back (proving that his loyalty would endure whatever else the king might demand of him, no matter how evil, because he had already committed the greatest evil).
But Mist was protected by this girl's mother's own summon, the Mist Dragon. Killing the dragon killed its summoner. Without either of those, the village was defenseless, allowing the Bombs to destroy it. And because of the enormity of what they just did, they carelessly talk themselves through this realization in front of the girl, who freaks out.
Luckily, Kain has a solution.
The calculus, as he presents it, is coldly simple. They already killed everybody. If they don't kill the girl, the king will still see it as failing in their mission, and they will be exiled or killed. If they kill just one more innocent, they will be forgiven and taken back. "It's her or us."
But this is Cecil's breaking point. This is the one atrocity too far that he can't bring himself to commit. This is his line in the sand, and he refuses.
Luckily, Kain expected him to. It was a test - Kain had made his decision already, that "I owe the king so much, but I can't disgrace the dragoons." His order could not countenance killing a child. But he says, "We'll need the support of other nations if we're to oppose the mightiest kingdom in the land. And we have to get Rosa out of Baron." Cecil thanks him, but Kain says this isn't for his sake - has this whole tragedy truly cast a pall between the two brothers, or is he deflecting because of his own conflicted feelings? Either way, they now have clear goals, and all they need to do is grab the girl to save her from the burning village and get on with their business.
This is about to go about as wrong as everything in the game so far.
The two terrifying knights who just admitted to killing her mother close in on the little girl, demanding that she come with them, pushing her back, until all this results in the most devastating battle screen in all Final Fantasy so far:
Christ.
What an absolute gut-punch.
I mean, what am I supposed to do here? Attack the little girl with all the power of the dark side? Try to stab her with a spear, but, like, non-lethally? What am I supposed to do? Well, the ATB gauge is counting up! Little girl's turn is coming up! Time to decide! Do I just decide to wait and see what she does with her action? Do I just attack and hope that this is treated as my characters 'peacefully' knocking her out? Do I-
DING DING DING
Too late! The bell is ringing!
And it's time for Final Fantasy to remind us that this is anime, and you don't fucking stand around lollygagging while a child with brightly colored hair descended from a dead village of super-wizards is angry at you!
That is fucking Titan right there.
Yeah, this is an instant kill on both characters.
Or, well, 'kill.'
A gigantic earthen mound erupts from the earth on the overworld, closing the way to Mist, and in the destruction Cecil and Kain were separated.
Well.
This was a lot.
And it's looking that this update is going to be over 50 images anyway and have lots of words, so let's take a break for a moment.
Does this version have the "you pay HP to use Darkness" mechanic, out of curiosity?
Also, this is one spot where the many translations differ notably. The original SNES translation just called the bomb ring the "package", and the DS translation called it the "carnelian signet", in both cases obfuscating both to the player and to the two heroes what exactly the "gift" was going to do far more than the literal "bomb ring" translation does.
Also also, obligatory XIV reference - this moment is what Ga Bu was almost certainly a reference to.
Yeah, it wasn't trying to be subtle in the JP version, and the Pixel Remasters are fairly faithful to the original versions. The remakes and remasters though put a bit more ambiguity into it though, even though it's a plot twist that occurs maybe ten minutes after the opening crawl and thus doesn't need to be particularly subtle.
The point of the Pixel Remasters though is to be the 'Definitive Edition' of the Original Games, with the scuff polished out and given a nice face lift, but otherwise kept as faithful to the original release as possible. There's only one real exception to this and it's because it was a scene they couldn't do justice to on the original hardware and deserved Special Love And Care. (We won't see it until FF6, though veterans of the game who haven't played the Remaster yet can probably figure out Which One I'm Talking About)
We come back to this now. Zap already beat me to the punch on how the SNES translation hid this from the player - it even went so far as to include 'the package opened on its own!' as a line when you walked into Mist. And I'm just forever irked that the original version turned out to be this blunt. It's called a bomb ring ffs. Even if Cecil were a fucking idiot - and as much as I love him, Cecil Harvey definitely picks up the Final Fantasy Himbo Protagonist Blitzball from time to time - if the menu can just up and identify it so clearly, it must be obvious what this thing is going to do when he gets to where he's going. Yeah, trapped between duty and morality and all that, but the dynamic duo have to be looking at this thing and going 'this is a trap. this is so clearly a trap. this is obviously a trap' all the way from Baron to the mountains, and it just shit me to find out that all this time that Rosenkain and Cecilstern just looked at this thing and went 'eh, sure why not' and put the thing in a pocket before marching off. It's such a small change in the overall sense but Jesus.
Final Fantasy is, as you may have noted, obsessed with moving away from turn-based combat (the best kind of RPG combat bar none) at all costs. Regardless of how appropriate, effective, or good the system is, the further it moves the game from turn-based the harder the Final Fantasy developers push it.
This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except Final Fantasy developers are absolutely atrocious at real-time combat design and literally the only game in the entire line that's had real-time combat I would describe as even 'passable' is the VII Remake. And Stranger of Paradise, but that was just Nioh with an FF skin AFAIK and was not made by the Final Fantasy teams at all.
You can see that here; the design decision to have time bars instead of turn order is alright, but the decision to have time keep moving while you're in your action menu is baffling. It certainly doesn't increase realism - you're playing an experienced, blooded knight who knows exactly what he's doing in a fight, he's not going to dither over whether he's going to Sword Everyone or Sword One Person, time passing while the menu is open is anti-diegetic in fact!
It's just such an obvious brainbug the FF staff have got and it's so consistent and I've never understood the driving desire to get rid of the thing the games are famous for and the team is good at in favour of a thing that they are terrible at and the games are not famous for.
Final Fantasy is, as you may have noted, obsessed with moving away from turn-based combat (the best kind of RPG combat bar none) at all costs. Regardless of how appropriate, effective, or good the system is, the further it moves the game from turn-based the harder the Final Fantasy developers push it.
This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except Final Fantasy developers are absolutely atrocious at real-time combat design and literally the only game in the entire line that's had real-time combat I would describe as even 'passable' is the VII Remake. And Stranger of Paradise, but that was just Nioh with an FF skin AFAIK and was not made by the Final Fantasy teams at all.
You can see that here; the design decision to have time bars instead of turn order is alright, but the decision to have time keep moving while you're in your action menu is baffling. It certainly doesn't increase realism - you're playing an experienced, blooded knight who knows exactly what he's doing in a fight, he's not going to dither over whether he's going to Sword Everyone or Sword One Person, time passing while the menu is open is anti-diegetic in fact!
It's just such an obvious brainbug the FF staff have got and it's so consistent and I've never understood the driving desire to get rid of the thing the games are famous for and the team is good at in favour of a thing that they are terrible at and the games are not famous for.
Yeah, even when RTC goes "well" like with FF7Re it still ends up feeling weird in a way that doesn't really justify why they couldn't have made a normal turn based or scrapped the RPG aspect entirely and just go with a hack n' slash like SoP and XVI.
Yeah when it comes to the battle systems... personally I'd say FFX blends up the turn based best? In that speed actually matters because you can get more turns, but also you have time to decide what you want to do and can see the upcoming turn order (and even what changes certain moves might make to said order).
ATB isn't awful but part of that is also getting used to the fact that if you ever want time to think you need to both make sure the battle is set to "wait" and then intentionally go into a menu for a breather.
In the original SNES release, there were no ATB gauges. You literally had no idea when your characters' turns were coming, unless you tried to count it out from experience. On the one hand, putting the gauges in seems like such an obvious QoL improvement for later games. On the other hand, when I first played FF4 the combat felt incredibly 'alive' compared to a turn-based system. The gauges expose the clockwork inside that system and takes away that 'living' feeling, sort of like how knowing how a dialogue tree or a morality system works can kill some of the fun in more modern RPGs.
Also, the original English release (Final Fantasy II instead of 4) removed the option for 'Wait', you were forced to play in Active mode. Good thing they turned the difficulty way down.
