Final Fantasy 4 or as it was know at the time Final Fantasy 2, was the first Final Fantasy for the Super Nintendo and the second to be released in the US. Given that is was quite popular I had a little bit of exposure to it via pop culture but had never actually put more than a few minutes into playing it and this was the final of the 2D games that I hadn't really played. It's quite interesting trying to look at it from how a US SNES player would. The series has clearly seen a big jump since Final Fantasy but there's so much context between that would have been region locked.
Like I noted before I feel like Final Fantasy 3 is the real sequel the US never had but 4 certainly builds on it. But a bit to my surprise it builds on top of Final Fantasy 2 as well. The first glaring difference is that we are now squarely back to a character-driven narrative rather than the generic heroes of light tale. But this time there is some actual character development going on. Dialog and scripted "cut-scenes" (as rudimentary as they are) are starting to get more complex but still pretty simplistic by modern standards. We follow the story of Cecil, the Dark Knight as he goes from disgraced soldier for an evil empire to a hero. But it still manages to work in the crystal theme as they are being stolen by the empire and antagonist Golbez. In fact it even goes so far as to bring back the dark crystals seen in the final dungeon of Final Fantasy 3 as a plot point which I was not expecting.
Gameplay-wise this the first game to introduce the Active Time Battle system (ATB). Here, instead of passing turns to each party (and given priority to a confusing combination of actions) a meter fills up for each character and when it's full that character can act. This added a more engaging and pressuring element as you can no longer take your time to plan your next move as even when you are in a menu, time still passes and enemies can still attack forcing you to be quick. This mechanic would be so successful that it would be featured in the next 5 games.
Along with that one of the major gimmicks, perhaps to show off how the SNES allowed it to be bigger was the addition of a 5th party member. While this is interesting since it's the only Final Fantasy that allows for so many, the combination of that and the ATB can actually be overwhelming. Not only do you now have to make quick decisions, you must do so managing 5 party members. This was a problem because I didn't find out until playing Final Fantasy 5 that there is a sort option for items. Without knowing this, you might need a phoenix down and will struggle to find them in the list as quickly as you want, in fact the placement tends to jump around between characters for some reason causing all sorts of frustration during critical moments.
The character classes are nearly identical to those in Final Fantasy 3 though each character is assigned a particular job that cannot be changed or modified. Much like Final Fantasy 2 character will enter and leave the party fairly frequently meaning it's never fully clear how much effort you should put it at any point because that character might just leave and be replaced. Dungeons are also what you'd expect post Final Fantasy 3. They have critical paths with some branches for loot. But a big change is the addition of save points. Usually about half-way or before a boss you get the option to save and use items like tents and cottages to heal the whole party. This is very helpful as it means dungeons can be a little more difficult while still giving the player a backstop.
Its certainly not without its problems though. A particularly bad anecdote for me was about 2 3rds of the way through the game. There is some side content to explore but I found it just a little bit too difficult for where I was. I instead decided to proceed along the main story dungeon a little further to level up. I turns out a character leaves at the end of the dungeon and you are left with 4 members. Due to this I decided to push further ahead until I got my next character but once you get the next character several events happen and you effectively get trapped in a dungeon with no option to return to the overworld. This left me fairly under-leveled but also because I had saved I was trapped with a bad save. Thankfully, I think the game developers realized this problem and they give you a shop next to a save point that sells cottages which let you heal. So as long as you can beak one pack of enemies you can gain enough gil to fight their in perpetuity, which I did. For a long time. The bosses at the end of this dungeon I found to be quite difficult though at least part of that was due to forgetting that I could change the party order to have 2 in the front, 3 in the back (in this game there are slots rather than a per-character switch). There was a lot of frustration had but I was happy when I finally got myself unstuck. In the end this trivialized the content I had been wanting to do because I was now very overpowered.
There are other minor changes. Spells are learned by leveling up but you learn them very fast and so you get a big long list of spells to scroll through trying to find the one you want. Attack "hits" are no longer presented in the battle but still function under-the-hood. Enemy sprites also have little animations, sometimes bobbing up and down to look like they are floating or certain bosses will switch between 2 sprites, not really animated, but give you extra visual clues about patterns. The patterns too are also new. Enemies will sometimes counter-attack or require special strategies so it's not always about pure "how much damage can I do in a single turn" but sometimes waiting for a boss to change stance. This is also the first time scripting can happen inside of battle, to play out dramatic fight scenes, but it also means this is the origin of the dreaded "fight you must lose" trope that confuse players everywhere.
We also finally get some of the streamlines we come to expect from the later series entries. The revival mechanism is finally killed so you can just rest at an inn to heal HP, MP, status and KO, though outside battle the tent still doesn't heal HP or revive, leaving that to the cottage item instead. Prices overall for inns and items like tent and phoenix downs are cheaper, as is the level and MP cost of spells like life to rebalance for getting KO'd a little more often. Esuna also replaces bespoke magic for each status effect and it's not stupidly expensive.
It very cool just watching how the series progressed at this point. Which things were kept and which were changed. Though while I can see why people would get nostalgic for it, it's not my favorite and I felt Final Fantasy 3 was the better game. But Final Fantasy 4 is where the narrative and character-centric writing starts to pick up, it's not surprising they chose it for a direct sequel a few decades later on Wiiware because it does have interesting characters. I had to do significant grinding 2 other times, both in the final dungeon. One to beat Dark Bahamut who can on-shot KO your entire party before you can even act and another to beat the final boss who also has very strong attacks on the whole party. Generally, if more than one party member gets KO'd you basically lose slowly because low HP revived members will always get re-KO'd the next turn. I got myself up to level 70 to make sure the whole party could tank a big shot.
So I finally got to experience this beloved entry for myself. Now we start moving into the entries I've played before and I'm interested to know if I view them differently now that I have 1 - 4 under my belt.
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