What's So Great About Final Fantasy IV, Anyway?

Next week's Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection for PSP marks the fifth remake or rerelease of the game in the past decade. While this version offers plenty of new content to entice die-hard fans, the frequency with which Square Enix has been reissuing the same game strikes many as overkill. Does the world really need so many renditions of a single RPG? At what point is enough enough?

Far be it from us to make a definitive statement on such a subjective question (at least outside the confines of a review). However, even if five Final Fantasy IVs in the space of 10 years is more than enough, you can certainly understand why Square would keep returning to the same well time and again: It's a very deep and content-rich well. Final Fantasy IV was a groundbreaking work, and it remains one of the most influential RPGs ever made. It's nearly as significant to Square's history (and the genre's) as The Legend of Zelda is to Nintendo and action adventure games. Granted, there's something to be said for moderation, which is why Nintendo has only reissued Zelda a few times over the years... nevertheless, no matter how tired you may be of seeing FFIV variants, its ubiquity in no way diminishes the impact and importance of the original Super NES game.

While FFIV may seem like a fairly common RPG at this point, it was unlike any other RPG that had preceded it at its debut. The first 16-bit Final Fantasy game, it launched 20 years ago (July 19, 1991 in Japan and November 23, 1991 in the U.S.) and marked a radical shift in how Japanese developers would approach role-playing games in the coming years. Before FFIV, there was no clear demarcation between "Western RPGs" and "Japanese RPGs," or between "console RPGs" and "PC RPGs." Japan's console-based role-playing games were generally little more than variants on the standards set down by American PC games, albeit simplified and streamlined by necessity. Final Fantasy IV codified the Japanese console RPG as its own entity, distinct and separate from the likes of Ultima and The Bard's Tale.

"My personal take on this," muses FFIV director Takashi Tokita, "is that there were games like Ultima and Wizardry, and then Dragon Quest took those and added a Japanese manga-ish taste to them. And Final Fantasy added an animation taste, and that's where it kind of falls in the line of history."

Tokita, who has been largely responsible for FFIV's frequent reissues in recent years, is one of the primary reasons the game stood out from its peers. Tokita entered gaming almost incidentally as a way to support his primary love, the theatre, and ultimately his background in the performing arts helped bring a fresh, new sensibility to FFIV.

"But our idea was if we approached it from a movie editing point of view, perhaps we could create a more dramatic story-driven game," he says. "Up until then, we had one musical theme per map, per se. [For FFIV], we focused on how to create emotions -- to have the music play at the right time.

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