Death (and life) doesn't matter in Final Fantasy IV

FF grows up, with one glaring issue

(I’m currently playing through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series and tracking my thoughts on the evolution of the games. Here are my pieces on FFI, FFII, and FFIII.)

I can tell you the exact moment I check out of Final Fantasy IV’s story. Your party’s climbing the Tower of Babel to try to stop bad guy Golbez’s evil schemes, and you come upon a security room with a malfunctioning computer that seems like it’s about to blow up. With zero hesitation (and zero discussion as to what is even happening), Yang, your trusty monk (who has never been shown to interact with technology), says “Leave this to me! Go! Get out of here!” The game ejects Yang from your party and he sacrifices himself to save the rest of you.

Then, not five minutes later, while being pursued by Golbez’s airships, Cid, your trusty engineer, blows himself up (?) with bombs to stop the bad guys’ goons, and the game ejects him from your party as well.

If you’re like, hey wait, this doesn’t make any sense, surely you’re not explaining something correctly — nope, I’m giving you as much as the game does, and you’re right, it doesn’t make any sense.

Here’s my biggest issue with Final Fantasy IV: Square hadn’t figured out how to allow you to switch between party members on your own yet, so they needed excuses to write characters out of your party. All they could come up with, I guess, is that a bunch of people have to die. Yang and Cid’s sacrifices follow a long line of playable characters who give up their lives to ensure the continued safety of the party, but having two come back-to-back so quickly, for such thin reasons, really puts a point on how ridiculous it all is. As my friend Ben said to me yesterday, “How could they do this? Didn’t they know they were going to make Final Fantasy VI in a few years?”

And here’s the thing: none of these characters are actually dead. In true anime fashion, they all make last-second escapes you don’t see, then come back to pray their power to you when you’re facing off against the final boss (it’s kind of a cool moment, not going to lie). So not only does the story give the barest of reasons for all these sacrifices, but then they’re not even sacrifices! Life and death mean nothing. Your characters are just puppets of the cruel Gamers of planet Earth, playacting one-dimensional trauma and tragedy for our stupid enjoyment.

The last time I played Final Fantasy IV, in 2021, this really bothered me — so much so that I ended up ranking the game as one of the worst Final Fantasies I’d played to that point. But then, two years ago I played IV after V, VI, and VII. This time, playing IV in its original placement in the series — well, I still thought the Yang/Cid episode sucked, but I have to say, I was kind of here for the rest.

Final Fantasy grows up

The leap between the first three Final Fantasies and the fourth is really something. Originally, this happened because of the switch from the 8-bit NES to the 16-bit SNES; suddenly Square could pack so much more complexity into these cartridges. But even playing them all with updated/standardized graphics and soundtracks via the Pixel Remasters, the gigantic leap between III and IV is super apparent.

See those little gray and orange bars on the lower right hand side of the screen? That’s Active Time Battle in action, baby.

The big innovation of the 16-bit era is the Active Time Battle system, which removes one of the last vestiges of the series’ tabletop roots. Formerly, combat would be divided into rounds like in a tabletop RPG; at the top of each round, you’d select each of your party members’ actions, and then they’d act in an order determined by an invisible initiative roll. Now, each character has their own readiness bar that tracks when they can act, independently of everyone else in the combat. These bars fill faster or slower depending on characters’ speed scores, and status effects change it even more. That leads to a situation where you’re pretty often doing something besides just watching, and the motion of the battle feels like it never stops. It’s honestly pretty exciting. I loved the feeling of searching through menus looking for the right spell or action for a situation, knowing that the battle counter was still going so I’d better pick quickly. Final Fantasy IV was the first game in the series I played growing up, so Active Time Battle just felt like the default system to me — but now having played three entries in a row where it was gone, man, this rocks.

The innovation of Active Time Battle leads me to maybe my biggest positive of Final Fantasy IV — this game is smooth, and it is fun. This is the best-feeling Final Fantasy game in the series yet; I found it to be a real joy to play around in. In lieu of a manipulable job system, party members represent a single job and come preloaded with the unique abilities you’d expect that job to have — i.e., Kain is your dragoon and can use the Jump command from the start. This is a cool way to spotlight a rich, differentiated cast of characters without the manic, uncentered energy of FFIII, and it makes battles really fun and tactical, trying to work with the strengths and limitations of your crew at the time to overcome some tough bad guys.

Speaking of tough bad guys, story goals and key objectives are always clear but very little in this game is a cakewalk. There are some tough difficulty spikes, especially when you get to the moon (lol), and especially especially on the final boss, but I honestly didn’t care too much. I though this game’s characters were so neat, and its battle system so engaging, that I actually didn’t mind grinding a little bit, and it felt fulfilling as hell to overcome the final boss after buffing myself up in his stupid lunar dungeon. Generally speaking, FFIV delivered an incredibly fluid, satisfying play experience, even when its bosses were frustrating the heck out of me.

Okay, so, the story isn’t all bad…

So yeah, I think it’s fair to say the whole “I’m going to sacrifice myself needlessly but not really” trope of FFIV’s script blows. But on this playthrough, I was able to look past that to see some pretty neat stuff the game’s story is doing. For instance, after three games of your party members being player cyphers or just absurdly one-dimensional, it really struck me how complexly the game was able to present its cast. Most of your party members have conflicting goals and complicated emotions. I think Kain is my favorite here — someone who’s madly in love with his best friend’s girl, a dark secret that allows the game’s bad guy to sneak into his brain and control him (there’s some nice metaphor here about what it means to harbor that kind of resentful secret towards a person you care about). And then even after Kain comes back to his own free will, he can’t bring himself to embrace Cecil and Rosa’s relationship, deciding at the game’s end to continue his training instead of going to their wedding! This is a powerful and unexpected choice in a game from 1991. It resists giving us the easiest, cleanest answers and instead lets us sit with some discomforts about its core cast.

That discomfort is maybe my favorite thing about the story of Final Fantasy IV. This is the first FF game that questions whether the characters you’re playing are really “the good guys” on both a personal and social scale. The game is premised on main character Cecil’s country growing brutally militaristic in its attempts to bring “peace” to the world, and Cecil is complicit in some of these horrible acts. This sounds bad, but I love it as setup. I love that Final Fantasy IV is the first game in the series that wants you to question whether the structures of power we grow up in and support are any good. In a way, that becomes the key political message of the entire series, and it all starts here, in a game where your party members are ready to throw themselves at the first danger they see to escape. Hey man, I get it, growing up into an imperialistic colonizing society sucks. Too bad we can’t explain away the horrible actions of our real-life leaders with “evil alien mind control”… or can we….

The Grades So Far

(n.b.: I’ll be traveling for the next seven(!) weeks so it’ll be a good while before I can continue my gaming and thus this series of posts. I’ll still have stuff to publish during that time, but it won’t be reviews like this. But hey, if you’re someone I know in Denver, Los Angeles, New York, or Providence, RI(?), maybe I’ll see you soon!)

~~The Plugs Section~~

• The Kickstarter pre-launch page for my next big TTRPG publishing adventure, Rock & Roll Greatest Hits, is live now. It would really help me with the algorithms if you “followed” it (even if you don’t want to back the thing! This is a no-commitment follow!)

• Mortified Chicago, the live lit/comedy show I coproduce (in association with WBEZ!), has its next show at the historic Studebaker Theater on Saturday, September 23 and it’s gonna be cool. Tickets are available now.