Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster
The turning point in Final Fantasy
Here’s Have You Played’s second guest post, by Bijan Stephen! Bijan is a writer, editor, and fledgling narrative designer, with a recent piece for The New Yorker on games preservation and a YouTube essay I keep thinking about on why video games really are harder now.
PC, OS, Android, PlayStation, Switch
$17.99
21 hours long
Final Fantasy IV is the fourth mainline game in the legendary Final Fantasy series of role-playing games. It’s a classic role-playing game, in the manner of earlier tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons; you control a party of characters with different but complementary abilities, and you work together using those (and a host of fun items) to defeat whatever enemies come your way. Like other instalments in the series, it shares aspects of its world and characters with the games that came before it, but it is fundamentally a self-contained story.
It also features a gameplay system that’s more similar to its successors than its predecessors. FFIV pioneered Square Enix’s iconic Active Time Battle system, which requires the player to input semi-real time commands to their party of characters to make them take actions in fights. It gives the battles a real sense of tension; if you input the wrong commands, your party dies. Which means the fights are all turn-based — kind of. If you don’t make your characters do anything, the enemies will take their turns and eventually kill you. There are tons of different enemies with really fun designs, and they each have their own stats, weaknesses, and abilities.
And, I will say, you’ll be fighting a lot. Outside of the battles that advance the main story, the game throws random encounters at you every few steps. Which can sometimes get annoying, if all you’re doing is trying to reach a chest on the other side of a room in a dungeon. But there’s a logic to it. According to a 2011 Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) interview with Takashi Tokita, the game’s designer, FFIV was the first Final Fantasy game where the growth of your abilities was tied to fighting. The other thing FFIV did differently than its predecessors was lock characters into their classes instead of allowing them to change their classes (“jobs,” in the other games) at will. Anyway, on to our story.
In FFIV, you play as the charmingly-named Cecil, who begins the game as a dark knight commander who’s conflicted about carrying out his king’s orders. The game opens on an airship on the way back from a brutal mission: the king ordered you and your soldiers to attack a peaceful town in order to steal a crystal. You, understandably, have some qualms about how it all went down.
I have to confess — it got me immediately. In the first five minutes of the game you get a real sense of Cecil’s character and the opening to a mysterious conflict, which you can’t help but feel might be ongoing. And then, a minute later, there are stakes: Cecil expresses his reservations about the king’s motivations to the king’s face, and as a consequence he’s stripped of his command and sent on another, more dangerous mission. Cecil’s given an ominously named ring, and he and his friend Kain are sent to a small village called Mist to deliver it.
Things go awry again, of course, when bomb monsters explode out of the ring and destroy the entire village. Cecil and Kain are astonished; the king hadn’t mentioned this. Nevertheless, our two heroes see a girl, Rydia, who survived and try to save her. She’s grieving the rather sudden death of her mother, and in her grief, attacks Cecil and Kain. Turns out Rydia’s a summoner, and she summons a giant Titan that seals the village off and separates Kain and Cecil. Cecil takes Rydia to an inn to recover — and there, he’s confronted with soldiers from his own kingdom who have orders to kill her. Cecil deletes them instead, and vows to protect Rydia. End scene.
I relate all this because I find the game’s commitment to narrative and character development impressive. And, according Tokita, that was the team’s main focus while they were creating the game. In that same Game Developer interview, Tokita said “we focused on the characters' stories first, and laid those down initially and then, after we had that finalised, added the variety on top.”
That focus on character drives the game. And there are more than a few in this game, who all manage to be memorable no matter how little screen time they actually have. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that Final Fantasy IV came out in 1991 on the Super Nintendo. According to Tokita, the original story was so big it couldn’t fit into an SNES cart’s memory. “[S]o we had to cut it down to about a fourth of what we had created,” he said. “It was really, really painful cutting down everything so that it would fit, but, because we did that, we kept all of the key and most important elements; and that's what created a great game.”
FFIV also features a semi-open world. Once you get an airship — in this game you get a few! — you can travel across the entire overworld (and eventually, the underworld). That said, there aren’t that many sidequests to do, owing to the game’s focus on its main story. I found that aspect of FFIV incredibly refreshing, just because I feel like I play a lot of more modern games where the worlds are stuffed with things to do but that almost feel perfunctory. Like there are sidequests just for the sake of placating the hypothetical player who’s going to complain there aren’t enough sidequests.
On a separate note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention just how gorgeous the pixel remaster of FFIV is. It also adds some quality of life features that don’t really change the gameplay or story much, but manage to remove a bit of retro cruft. (Think things like upping the drop rate of a rare item that only matters for completionists, or new pixel animations for spells and attacks.) There’s a new soundtrack, too, and more language options.
In any case, let’s get back to the main plot. Cecil finds out that an evil guy named Golbez has been attacking the various kingdoms of the world in order to steal their crystals, for mysterious reasons. Eventually those become clear, and eventually it’s revealed that all isn’t exactly as our boy Cecil thought it was. There’s a grand plot! And you travel to the moon. Things are revealed about Cecil’s ancestry, and enemies become allies and become enemies again. (And then, in the end, allies. Again.)
But one of the game’s more affecting scenes takes place in Mysidia, that town Cecil spent the introduction destroying for its crystal. You travel there again, washing up on its shores after a disaster at sea. It’s been built back up, and all of the residents hate Cecil. Walking through the town and talking to people was a trip; not only because of the guilt by extension I felt for having destroyed their town (yeah yeah I know), but also because the residents are wizards and some of them would just turn him into a literal pig if he tried to talk with them. Eventually, you talk to the village elder, who advises you to renounce your dark ways and climb the aptly named Mt. Ordeals — because it’s only there that one can become a paladin. You can’t defeat evil with darkness.
When you return to the village as a newly-minted paladin, the people are awed that you actually did it. (I mean, in the game’s lore, it’s a ~legendary~ thing, but it’s also nice to see the gameplay reinforcing the narrative and vice versa.) I found it a fascinating meditation on what it takes to actually change, and what it means when you manage to do it. On a macro level, the game is kind of about the will to change — but also, more importantly, what it takes to forgive someone afterward.
At the end of the game — and god help me, I’m going to tag a spoiler for a 32 year old game — it’s revealed that Golbez is actually your brother. After the final battle, he realizes he can’t atone for what he’s done, so he’s going away for good. As he’s leaving, Cecil can’t bring himself to speak until the moment before he’s gone. And it’s not forgiveness, not really, but you can feel Cecil soften when he says goodbye.
That this subtlety of feeling was all communicated in text boxes and pixel art was astonishing. And there are moments like that peppered all throughout the game. A very smart game writer pal told me once that tone is the hardest thing to nail in a video game. Mood is hard to conjure, let alone capture. And I think probably FFIV’s greatest triumph is nailing that. Once you’re in the world, you’re in. It’s a story of loss, death, and grief, and what those feelings drive people to do. And then the game tries to answer what happens afterward. The ending — like all good endings — is bittersweet. Much is gained, but many have been lost. And isn’t that the essence of a good fantasy?
It’s no wonder that this is the Final Fantasy game that’s been ported to the most platforms. It’s a beautiful story, gorgeously told. What’s better than getting to submerge yourself in that other world, with its many moons and its different problems? I can’t think of much.
Bijan Stephen is a writer, editor, and fledgling narrative designer. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He’s currently a contract writer at Valve. You can find him on Bluesky and Instagram, and here’s his website.