confidentialmisanthropy

I wrapped up DQVIII (sort of) about a week ago, clocking in at 80 blissful hours. Impeccably timed, 'cause FFIV Advance is out.

I called it... twice. And now it's in my hands. Again.

Final Fantasy IV had more of an effect on the genre than any other RPG... ever. It's not an opinion, or a childhood bias. It's a fact. Alot of people aren't abreast of this, considering the genre didn't take off 'til the series' seventh installment but the truth is every Japanese RPG made, post-1990, owes a little bit to FFIV.

When I got my hands on the game in 1992, under the guise of Final Fantasy II, I was in fifth-grade, and impressionable. I genuinely thought that FFII was the second game in the series. Growing up on Nintendo Power does that to you. Anyway. The first ten minutes of the game alone was more than any RPG aspired to at the time. It's hard to paint the picture now that all the things FFIV does are so commonplace, but at the time, the game was damn near peerless. The only game even conceptually in the same ballpark was Reiko Kodama's Phantasy Star II, which, in all fairness, predates FFIV by about a year. Still. Nothing against Reiko, but she didn't have two things Sakaguchi had going for him: Nobuo Uematsu and Yoshitaka Amano. And when it comes to 16-bit RPGs, they make all the difference in the world.

Square-Enix is a bit late porting this one. Not to mention packing it with another game, say Chrono Trigger or FFV would have been too much like right I guess. They added some content. Needless content from where I'm sitting. Among them, being able to "pick" party members later in the game; a freedom I don't really approve of. Also, there's apparently a new dungeon boasting 50 floors. They added a cutscene at the beginning that I was digging at first but it's pretty pointless. FFIV is a focused game. It doesn't need Playstation-era trappings to be relevant. The way the game used to open up, with Cecil's Red Wings heading back to Baron fresh from... well, you know... is all the "intro" the game ever needs, and the new cutscene shows events that supposedly lead up to that and it sort of steals that thunder.



Final Fantasy IV marked the point when Sakaguchi went from making... Dragon Quest interpretations to making videogames. It was their coming of age. Releasing the game again now, the way I've wanted it for so long is a bit bittersweet, with all that's happened with Square in the last 4 years. Everyone that had anything to do with the game has spread like the four winds and Tetsuya Nomura (who I really love to hate these days) is perverting the FF mindshare with absolute drivel at 7770 yen a pop. Pretty sad state of affairs.

FFIV Advance is like a time capsule from 1991. It's a reminder to everyone that there was a time when the world was, in fact, SQUARE.