By the time Final Fantasy IV came out in 1991, this franchise was a big deal… in Japan. But JRPGs were still finding their footing in America. Famously, Final Fantasy II and III did not come out in America, so for many players, Final Fantasy IV was the second game in the series. Dragon Quest I and II had been localized years after release, but hadn’t blown up here. EarthBound and Chrono Trigger were years away. For many Americans, this was the JRPG.
I’m one of them. I don’t have many memories of my childhood, but I remember the box art of this game clear as day. I remember renting it from Blockbuster. And I remember the stress of not finishing the game, saving to a cartridge, and praying that my save would still be there next time I could rent it.
It would be years before I finished Final Fantasy IV. For many of those years, I would cite it as my favorite video game of all time. But later remakes, with updated 3D graphics, didn’t grab me. It became harder and harder to legally play Final Fantasy IV. And eventually I stopped playing JRPGs altogether, thanks to the immense time commitment.
So let’s dive back in. How does Final Fantasy IV hold up? And why was this one of the games that broke through to American audiences?
Welcome back to Fantasies Revisited.
“And so the Dark Knight Cecil was stripped of his command as Captain of the Red Wings.”
Cecil is a Dark Knight, one of the elite soldiers of Baron. Leading a squadron of Baron’s air force, Cecil helps invade Mysidia, capturing their Water Crystal. But when he questions his King about what they’re doing, he’s stripped of his rank. The only way to earn his way back into the King’s favor is to deliver a package. Traveling with his best friend, a Dragoon named Kain, he delivers the package to the Village of Mist — only to discover that the King gave him a bomb. In delivering the package, Cecil has wiped out nearly the whole village.
A single girl survives: Rydia, a magically talented child. Cecil takes her to rest, fighting off soldiers of Baron to keep her safe. From there, Cecil and Rydia go on the run. They encounter bards, sages, and warriors from other kingdoms who have found themselves at the edge of a surprise attack from Baron. But in order to unite these disparate forces and stop Baron from getting the other crystals, Cecil must find redemption for his crimes and give up the power of the Dark Knight.
But will that be enough? Baron has the might of an entire army — and of Cecil’s best friend, Kain. Can Cecil stop the King and his sinister new commander, Golbez? And what do they want with the crystals anyway?
“He and the master dragoon Kain head for the foggy valley and the village of Mist.”
In my discussion of Final Fantasy Adventure, I commented on the idea of a game ‘testing’ a player. In Final Fantasy III, those tests are strategic. Can you figure out what jobs will best handle the challenge in front of you? The game gives you a wide range of tools and allows you to experiment. (This is doubly true in the Pixel Remasters, which have a Quick Save feature that makes some sections much less onerous.)
But there’s another method, and one that, if I’m being honest, I prefer. In Final Fantasy IV, you don’t really have a choice in how you build your characters. Kain is a Dragoon. Rydia is a Summoner. These are immutable gameplay elements that players can’t really change. What’s more, you don’t even really have a choice as to which characters are in your party. As you travel, characters separate, split up, even sacrifice themselves. The game always knows what your party will consist of.
Because of this, however, the game’s challenges can be much more tightly controlled — and much more narratively significant. Take one early-to-mid game storyline. Cecil wants to oppose Baron and its fearsome new commander, Golbez. He cannot do so as a Dark Knight, however. If he wants to atone for his crimes and find the power to stop Golbez, he must climb Mount Ordeals and seek redemption, giving up his dark blade and becoming a Paladin. He doesn’t have to climb alone, however. Accompanying him are two young magical prodigies, Palom and Porom, and Sage Tellah, an experienced magician.
What follows is one of my favorite sequences in Final Fantasy. Golbez realizes where Cecil is going and sends undead minions to stop him. Cecil’s Dark Blade cannot hurt these creatures. You have to climb the mountain with your strongest fighter handcuffed and three mages, each of whom will run out of MP quickly. Assuming you can defeat the enemies here without your strongest fighter — and you can, though it’s one of the tenser dungeons — you find your reward: Cecil must give up not just his sword, but all his powers. He will revert back to level one.
What follows, however, is the game essentially making an argument. Yes, Cecil is weaker — but his new weapon and powers are incredibly effective against the mountain’s foes. What’s more, Cecil levels up much faster now. By the time you climb back down the mountain, he’ll likely be almost as strong as he was going up it. But now he has a new look, a new powerset, and newer, more effective weapons. Sometimes, the game argues, you have to take a step backwards to truly progress.
The reason I find this interesting is because Final Fantasy IV simultaneously tests you (navigate this dungeon without your best fighter) and uses that test to set up the twist (that you will be reduced to level one, but ultimately become more powerful because it). Because the game knows exactly what and who you’ll have with you, it can more effectively use things like the characters’ jobs to craft a challenge that tells a story. Hell, it can even use the process of leveling itself to tell a story!
If you’ll remember, this was one of my few bits of praise for The Final Fantasy Legend, and something I wished we’d see more often. In most RPGs, levels are essentially an extra-narrative device. They sort of correspond to strength, though cut scene bloat will call even that into question. But generally speaking, level doesn’t really mean much in the world of the game itself. At best, you’ll get a clumsy form of gating, where you aren’t allowed to progress unless your ‘power level’ is so high.
By abandoning the things that made Final Fantasy III so distinctive, however, Final Fantasy IV manages to create a circumstance where things like party composition and power level are part of the overall narrative. It doesn’t always have the courage of its convictions — nearly every heroic sacrifice is eventually undone by the narrative — but I love what it is trying to do here. As RPGs become more and more enamored with player choice, characters become more of a cypher in some ways. If your character can be and do anything, none of it can be meaningful to that character’s story.
“The advent of the airship marked the realization of Baron’s dreams, but also the birth of its militarism.”
The politics of the Final Fantasy series have always been interesting. Politics barely exist in Final Fantasy I and III, beyond the ideological absolutism of monarchical rule. Even there, however, monarchies are unquestioned but also have little reach. A kingdom is a town; wander to the next town, and you may well be in another land entirely. Borders don’t really exist beyond the walls of a castle.
Final Fantasy II, inspired as it was by Star Wars, began to change that. Its story was inherently political; you were a rebel aiding an underground resistance against an expansionist empire. Final Fantasy IV personalizes that narrative. Cecil is a soldier of empire. No, he’s a commander of empire. He is one of the elites of one of the most powerful military factions in Baron. Cecil’s story kicks off when he loses everything for questioning the absolute rule of his King, and over the course of Final Fantasy IV, he is brought face-to-face with the consequences of his actions.
Unexpectedly, this is the legacy of Final Fantasy IV (and II!). II sidelines Leon for much of the game; IV recasts his story as the central one with Cecil. Shades of this arc will repeat with VI‘s tortured imperial tools Terra and Celes, VII‘s apathetic mercenary Cloud, Tactics’ fallen noble Ramza, and more.
This arc is inextricably tied with the series’ increasing fascination with technology. While we’re still firmly in the realm of high fantasy here, the series will soon shift to a more sci-fi inspired aesthetic. Final Fantasy IV lays the seeds of this shift. The air ship was one of the many recurring elements from previous Final Fantasies, but there it was nothing more than a means of travel. In Final Fantasy IV, however, the invention of airships changed the social and political landscape. Kain, the dragoon, saw his status demoted in the face of an ascendant air force. And air superiority is a key element in Baron’s increasing militarization.
What ties this theme together with Cecil’s arc is the question of power. Who wields it? What form does it take? And what is its cost, both to have and to fight against? Final Fantasy games ask variations on this question over and over again from here on out.
“With its Royal Air Force, the Red Wings, Baron soon reigned supreme.”
Thanks for reading another installment of Fantasies Revisited! We’ll be back in a couple weeks with one of the more ill-conceived experiments of the franchise, 1992’s Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.