Collection essentials #186: Final Fantasy II (SNES)

As I stated in a previous post, Final Fantasy I arrived in America rather late, not until after the third game had already been released in Japan. As a result, Square decided to skip the second and third games of the series and make Final Fantasy IV the second game to be localized in English. And they decided to change the title to “Final Fantasy II” in an attempt to not confuse people. As you can see, I have a Japanese cartridge in the photo with the proper numbering, though I don’t consider that a collection essential. For the rest of this post, I’ll be calling the game “IV” instead of “II”. 

Final Fantasy IV was one of the very first RPGs on the Super Nintendo, and set a new standard for the genre. The new level of power provided by the console was very welcome, especially in the audio department. Great music is a staple of RPGs, and legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu started to show the world such possibilities wielding the powerful (for the time) Super Nintendo sound chip, with a wide variety of songs tailored to every setting and mood the player comes across. 

Just as importantly, Final Fantasy IV is much more narrative-focused than most prior RPGs, with lots of well-established characters and a coherent story full of twists and turns. You play as a dark knight named Cecil who is captain of an air force called the Red Wings and begins to question the motives of the king after his squad’s missions start harming innocent people, which quickly causes his life to turn upside-down. The game actually ditches the “job system” from the previous Final Fantasy which had let you customize what your characters could do in battle. In Final Fantasy IV, each character has their own clearly-defined class, locked into a certain set of skills, and this was likely done to emphasize each character’s identity. (It would be weird, for example, if the mage apprentices Palom and Porom suddenly ditched their magical abilities to try and wield heavy armor and swords).

A big innovation of this game is the “active time battle system”. In most turn-based RPGs, a player takes as much time as they like choosing their actions in battle. But in this game, each character gains the ability to act after a set amount of real-world time has passed since their last action. When a character’s time comes, the player ought not to waste too much time thinking about what to do, because if you stand there idle, the enemy will attack over and over again. This helps make battles feel a little more fast-paced and exciting. Many future Final Fantasy games would also use this system, as well as Chrono Trigger.

Final Fantasy IV’s original release in Japan was very difficult. So tough, in fact, that they gave it a second release called “Final Fantasy IV Easy Type”. American gamers were probably not ready for a big RPG challenge at this point, so the U.S. release is based on the Easy Type (with some further changes too). And so, this particular version of the game is REALLY easy, for better or worse. I also have to note that the English localization for this game was not very good. A lot of awkward word choices were used (like the famous line, “You spoony bard!”), and some dialogue is straight-up grammatically incorrect (like “You noble looking!”) 

As for my personal experience with the game, I knew that it existed as a kid, but knew nothing about it for a long time. It wasn’t until I got the internet that I actually started to find out more about it. And my first time playing through it was a port of the game on a different console, one of the hard versions, and I wasn’t able to finish it due to the high difficulty. I later got and played this Super Nintendo release, and beat it when I was about 16 or 17. It’s actually still the only time I’ve actually beaten any version of this game.

Final Fantasy IV, in my opinion, is quite good, but I do feel like it was well surpassed by many future games in the series. It’s still worth playing in modern times, but this original Super Nintendo release is not the version to play. There are MANY options, as the game has been remade or ported to many platforms, so many that it’s kind of unclear which version is the best version. Still, even though it’s not the one I’d want to play to revisit FFIV, I still consider this old release a collection essential. There is something amusing about bad localizations, after all!