Final Fantasy IV (2007 video game)

• 1. A Twenty-Year Homecoming

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  Final Fantasy IV (2007 video game) arrived on the Nintendo DS on the 20th of December 2007 in Japan, timed precisely to the Final Fantasy series' 20th anniversary. The game being celebrated was not a new entry but a rebuilt one: a full three-dimensional remake of a Super Nintendo classic that had first reached North American players under the name Final Fantasy II. The anniversary framing was deliberate. Square Enix wanted players to see how far the series had traveled, and Matrix Software was given the job of showing them.

  Matrix Software had already done this once. The studio had rebuilt Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS, turning a Japan-only Famicom title into a polygonal adventure that found audiences worldwide. Producer Tomoya Asano had shepherded that project, and when it wrapped, he went looking for his next challenge. He found it in Final Fantasy IV, a game widely considered one of the defining entries in the series. North America would receive the remake on the 22nd of July 2008, and Europe on September 5 of that year.

• 2. The Team Behind the Rebuild

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  Takashi Tokita, the scenario writer and lead game designer of the original Super Famicom release, returned as executive producer and director. His involvement gave the project a direct line to the intentions of the 1991 game. Tomoya Asano produced, reprising the role he held on the Final Fantasy III DS remake. Hiroyuki Ito, another veteran of the series, came aboard as battle designer. Animator Yoshinori Kanada wrote the new cutscenes that had not existed in any prior version.

  Tokita had reservations at the outset. Final Fantasy IV had been released on the Game Boy Advance not long before Asano approached him, and Tokita worried that two remakes in close succession might feel redundant. What changed his mind was the Final Fantasy III DS remake itself. Tokita described it as impressive, and that assessment convinced him that IV deserved the same treatment. His condition, implicitly, was that the remake had to make the case for the original game's lasting place in the series.

• 3. What the Script Could Not Hold

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  Tokita revealed something remarkable during a Q&A session on the official Square Enix Members page. Three quarters of the original script for Final Fantasy IV had never made it into the Super Famicom release. The game's text had been revised down to a quarter of its intended size because the hardware simply could not hold it all. The DS remake restored what had been left behind, weaving previously missing material into the game as flashbacks. Players could now see Golbez becoming Zemus's pawn, and witness the childhoods of Cecil, Kain, and Rosa, scenes that existed in the original vision but never reached players in 1991.

  The story expansion was not the only technical achievement. The main programmer noted that the DS game was significantly larger than the Final Fantasy III remake from a data standpoint. Fitting everything onto a 1 GB ROM was difficult, with voice data being the primary culprit. The modeling team reduced the polygon count per character to allow more figures on screen during battle than Final Fantasy III had managed.

• 4. The Augment System

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  At the center of the DS remake's new gameplay was a mechanic called the Augment System, known in Japan by a different term. The system addressed a problem the developers saw in Final Fantasy IV Advance, the Game Boy Advance release, where characters who were temporary in the original game became playable again later. The developers felt that change had pushed the game too far from its original shape.

  The Augment System offered a different solution. Players could transfer up to three character-specific abilities to temporary party members. When those characters left the party, they yielded abilities of their own, with the number depending on how many they had received. Some abilities were scattered across the world; others unlocked after story events. The system extended into command menu customization: any slot in a character's battle menu except the Items command could be replaced with an augment. A spell like Curaga could appear directly in Rosa's command list rather than buried inside the White Magic sub-menu.

• 5. Minigames and New Game Plus

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  Rydia's personal Eidolon, a figure who takes her place in battle and acts under computer control, sits at the heart of the DS version's minigames. Unlike the main game, the minigames required stylus control exclusively. They could be played alone or with others via a local wireless connection, though not online. Their purpose was to increase the Eidolon's power, with the player assigning abilities that shaped how the creature fought.

  The DS version also introduced New Game Plus. Players who completed the game could carry rare items and equipment into a fresh run. Certain content, including hidden bosses on the face of the moon and at the summit of Mt. Ordeals, appeared only in a New Game Plus file. A supporting character named Namingway, who had changed player character names in the original, lost that function in the remake because voice acting locked the characters' names in place. Aware of his obsolescence, Namingway traveled the world reinventing himself, taking names like Mappingway, Campingway, and Weddingway depending on the job he had taken up. Following his journey was a sidequest with rewards.

• 6. The Difficulty Question

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  Tokita made a deliberate choice to increase the difficulty above the original release. The remake featured harder boss attacks and counterattacks, calibrated to challenge players who already knew the original game well. The intent was to give veterans something to push against rather than an easy revisit.

  When the game moved to smartphones and PCs, the difficulty was reorganized. A new setting called Normal was introduced, tuned down from the DS experience. The DS version's difficulty level was renamed Hard and remained available. The iOS version launched in 2012, Android followed in 2013, and Windows via Steam arrived in 2014 for western markets and in 2020 in Japan. The game later appeared on GOG.com on the 29th of January 2026.

• 7. A Song for Japan Only

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  Square Enix held an open casting call for a vocalist to record a new arrangement of "Theme of Love," a piece composed by Nobuo Uematsu for the original Final Fantasy IV. Approximately 800 applicants competed. Megumi Ida was selected. The arrangement was handled by Kenichiro Fukui, and the lyrics were written by Tokita himself, connecting the scenario writer's role across both the original game and its remake.

  The song appeared only in the Japanese release, playing over the ending credits. International versions removed it entirely, replacing it with an instrumental track from the game's existing score. That decision meant most players outside Japan never encountered Ida's performance. The DS version received a Metacritic score of 85/100 based on 52 reviews; the iOS version scored 89/100 from 6 reviews. As of July 2008, the game had sold 612,044 copies in Japan, with worldwide sales reaching 1.1 million copies. GameSpot gave it a 9/10, calling it sometimes more poignant than the original.

• 8. What the Remake Left Behind

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  The Final Fantasy IV DS remake produced two significant downstream projects. The first was Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, a direct sequel using two-dimensional sprites in the style of the original, which Tokita wanted players to experience after finishing the remake. The second legacy was less direct but arguably more far-reaching.

  Asano described the Nintendo DS titles, beginning with the Final Fantasy III and IV remakes, as the foundation for everything that followed in his career. He called those experiences the basis for his HD-2D works, a visual style that later became one of Square Enix's most recognizable production signatures. More immediately, he credited the remake series with culminating in Bravely Default, his original Nintendo 3DS title, which he called the pinnacle of DS gaming. The art direction choices made under the constraints of a 1 GB ROM, including the Middle-Eastern textures applied to Damcyan and the Chinese visual language given to Fabul, shaped how the team thought about communicating place and culture through limited polygons, lessons that carried forward into those later projects.