GB Preview: Final Fantasy IV (DS)

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GB Preview: Final Fantasy IV (DS)Posted 10:08pm Thu Dec 06, 2007 by Eric Jonathan Smith Tags: Final Fantasy IV, Nintendo DS, Preview, Square Enix

With new consoles come the promise of new experiences - or at least, that's the assumption one can make with the coming of the latest and greatest technology. More power - or a disruptive peripheral - can be exploited to make a familiar experience better and the old (seemingly) irrelevant. One of the first generations where this was truly evident was the advent of the Super NES. Games like Pilotwings and F-Zero exploited the newfound strength of the Super NES (notably its Mode 7 scaling effect) to truly show us that hey, technology (in this case, the ubiquity of the NES) does wither in obsolescence.

But while those games dazzled and impressed with their graphical effects, where was the truly epic game that was able to build on the previous generation's cornerstone without relying on technology's unfortunate excesses? Final Fantasy IV's crew of Cecil, Kain and co. had something to say about that. Square released Final Fantasy IV in 1991 and to this date it remains a dividing line between the simplistic console RPGs of the Dragon Quest vein and the more modern (some would say mired in an eternal rut), flashy approach taken by most Japanese RPGs since Final Fantasy VII.

For its time, Final Fantasy IV was truly epic. The battles were fast and featured huge monsters, forerunning the Active Time Battle system that served Final Fantasy titles throughout the 90's. You could have up to five characters in your party, a feat still unmatched by any other Final Fantasy title. The music was fuller than ever (in stereo!) and better than ever - Final Fantasy IV is one of famed composer Nobuo Uematsu's greatest works. The character-driven plot, while spoonily translated at times, was nonetheless helped by the greater capacity for text and addition of better animated and more expressive sprites. The quest even reached as far as traversing the moon!

Age has been fairly kind to the title as an effect of the mass of players it affected viewing it through that old rose-tint. New players will get a chance to play it soon, not in the form of the most cutting edge technology it once represented but on one that nonetheless represents an unforeseen broadening of the gaming market: the Nintendo DS. The logical follow-up to 2006's 3D remake of Final Fantasy III, this remake of Final Fantasy IV is likely to be easier to swallow than the obtuseness of its immediate predecessor, if its source material is adhered to with any skill.

The plot of course remains centered on the Dark Knight Cecil and his questioning of authority and the whirlwind of events that follow. Square Enix has promised however that all new scenes will be added to the story that were written out for its original release but were either technically or logistically unfeasible at the time. Early screens have shown that the game looks to improve over FFIII's exploitation of the DS hardware, as more characters can be displayed on the 3D battlefields. The original version's battles, as mentioned previously, loaded quickly and were over quickly - FFIII DS suffered slight load times that were made all the worse due to the high encounter rate. Whether FFIV will suffer the same remains to be seen. Another addition is that characters are now able to use skills inherited from other characters, the details on which are still scarce.

This of course isn't the first time FFIV will see release on another console. Subsequent re-releases on the PS1, Wonderswan (a Japanese-only handheld), and Game Boy Advance have seen minor additions to the game. But never before has the game been completely remade, so the hope for new content built from the ground up is there. The original game is short but some standards - an experienced player can breeze through the quest in about 10 hours. Let me repeat - experienced, on the original US version's toned down difficulty. Someone playing the game for the first time should see more than 20 hours from the game, which is a solid length for its now portable status.

Final Fantasy IV sees its DS release on December 20 in Japan. There is still no word on a release to the West; however, that gamble is about as safe as betting that Cecil will have to come to terms with himself and save the world from a villain that pops up for the first time in the story's latter act. In other words, yeah, it'll happen.