Final Fantasy IV

• 1. A Kingdom's Dark Knight

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  Final Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own elite air force unit, attack the city of Mysidia and steal its Water Crystal on orders from the king. When Cecil dares to question that order, the king strips him of his rank and sends him on a different errand. That quiet act of conscience is where everything begins.

  By the time the game reached North American players, it carried a different name on the box. Square released it as Final Fantasy II, because the actual second and third installments of the series had never left Japan. The renaming persisted until Final Fantasy VII arrived with a worldwide release, after which all later ports reverted to the original title. The original game for the Super Nintendo was the fourth main installment of the series, and it introduced systems and storytelling ambitions that would define the franchise for years.

  The development team numbered just 14 people, and they completed the game in roughly one year. What they built in that time wound up selling more than four million copies across its various releases worldwide.

• 2. The Active Time Battle System

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  Hiroyuki Ito was watching a Formula One race when the idea struck him. Seeing cars pass each other at different speeds, he conceived a battle system in which individual characters would each have their own speed values, acting independently rather than waiting for a shared turn. That observation became the Active Time Battle system, which Ito developed alongside Kazuhiko Aoki and Akihiko Matsui.

  Before Final Fantasy IV, role-playing games ran on strictly turn-based combat. The ATB system replaced that with real-time pressure. Characters and monsters each had gauges that filled at their own pace, and once a gauge filled, that unit could act. Players had to issue commands quickly. As one reviewer at the time noted, "enemies don't wait for you to make up your mind." The system appeared in five subsequent Final Fantasy games after its debut here.

  Final Fantasy IV also introduced fixed character classes, a departure from the job-swapping system of Final Fantasy III. Each of the twelve playable characters had an unchangeable vocation: Cecil begins as a dark knight, Rydia as a summoner, Rosa as a white mage and archer. The game was also the first in the series to let players control up to five characters simultaneously. Previous games had capped the party at four.

• 3. A Script Cut to a Quarter

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  Lead designer Takashi Tokita came to Square wanting to be a theater actor. Working on Final Fantasy IV changed that. He wrote the game's scenario, contributed pixel art, and later said there was enormous pressure on the project. He credits the final result to diligent work rather than comfort.

  The script Tokita wrote had to be cut to one quarter of its original length. Cartridge storage limits were the constraint. He made sure the cuts removed only what he called "unnecessary dialogue" and left story elements intact. Tokita believed the reduction actually improved pacing, in part because character designer Yoshitaka Amano's more elaborate designs for the Super Famicom already communicated personality visually. He acknowledges, though, that some story elements remained "unclear" in the original and were not addressed until later ports and remakes.

  One sequence that never made it into the original game was a dungeon near the end where each character would have to advance alone. That dungeon only appeared later, in the Game Boy Advance version, as the Lunar Ruins. Tokita designed Final Fantasy IV with the best parts of the three prior games in mind: the job system of Final Fantasy III, the story focus of the second, and the four elemental bosses as structural anchors from the first. Dragon Quest II also influenced the game's design.

• 4. Nobuo Uematsu's Score

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  Nobuo Uematsu composed the entire score for Final Fantasy IV, and he did not find the process easy. His liner notes for the soundtrack were humorously dated at 1:30 AM, written "in the office, naturally." He and the sound staff spent several nights in sleeping bags at Square's headquarters. The late-stage release of ActRaiser, with its soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro, pushed the team to reassess and rework the game's sound design near the end of development. They aimed for a more orchestral feel than originally planned.

  The track "Theme of Love" became part of the Japanese school music curriculum, taught to children as a standard piece. Uematsu has continued performing pieces from Final Fantasy IV in his concert series.

  Three soundtrack albums were released in Japan. The first, Final Fantasy IV: Original Sound Version, came out on the 14th of June 1991 and collected 44 tracks. The second, Final Fantasy IV: Celtic Moon, followed on the 24th of October 1991 and featured arrangements performed by Celtic musician Maire Breatnach. The third, Final Fantasy IV Piano Collections, released on the 21st of April 1992, presented solo piano arrangements performed by Toshiyuki Mori. That Piano Collections release began a trend: every subsequent mainline Final Fantasy game received a similar piano album.

• 5. Reception and Legacy

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  Famitsu's panel of four reviewers scored Final Fantasy IV a 36 out of 40 in 1991, making it one of the highest scores the magazine awarded that year, second only to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Nintendo Power declared in its November 1991 issue that the game set "a new standard of excellence" for role-playing games. GamePro gave it a perfect 5.0 out of 5 in all five categories in its March 1992 issue.

  Reviewers in Dragon magazine compared the game's storytelling to The Lord of the Rings and Man in the Iron Mask. The comparison rested on something specific: unlike most RPGs of the era, party members in Final Fantasy IV have their own reasons for joining and leaving. One character even betrays the group. A 1997 retrospective in GamePro credited it as "the first game where a turn-based combat system allowed you to change weapons, cast spells, and use items during a battle."

  Nintendo Power ranked it ninth in its 1997 list of the 100 greatest Nintendo games, then twenty-eighth in the 2005 update. IGN placed it ninth in its 2003 top 100 games list, the highest-ranked RPG on that list. Famitsu published a reader poll in 2006 ranking it sixth among all games ever made. The sequel, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, is set seventeen years after the original and centers on Ceodore, the son of Cecil and Rosa.

• 6. Ports and the Translation Problem

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  The English localization of 1991 was not a straight translation. Square, concerned that western players had missed the two prior games, reduced the difficulty considerably. The developers also removed overt religious references. The magic spell "Holy" became "White"; all references to prayer were eliminated; the Tower of Prayers in Mysidia became the Tower of Wishes. Nintendo of America's censorship policies, in place before the ESRB rating system existed, guided other changes as well.

  One translated line that survived all revisions was the phrase "You spoony bard!" Kaoru Moriyama, a former publicist and translator for Squaresoft, produced that early localization. Later versions judged certain of Moriyama's lines charming enough to keep even as the overall translation was overhauled.

  The Game Boy Advance version, released in North America on the 12th of December 2005, revised the English translation substantially. Abilities stripped from the original North American version were restored. Spells were renamed to match Japanese conventions, changing "Bolt2" to "Thundara" for instance. The 3D Nintendo DS remake followed in Japan on the 20th of December 2007, adding voice acting, minigames, and gameplay changes; it was developed by Matrix Software, the studio that had also remade Final Fantasy III for the DS. By May 2009, that DS version alone had sold 1.1 million copies worldwide.