Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 89: Final Fantasy IV, redux

Episode Date: March 6, 2017

We continue our Final Fantasy deep-dive series by doing like Square did back in the day and jumping ahead from FFI to FFIV. Chris Kohler and Kat Bailey join to share their thoughts on this most influential of 16-bit role-playing games.

This week in Retronauts, we're Rudy Tutti Fresh and Spoonie. Hello, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this week we're going to talk about Final Fantasy 4. But you might know it as Final Fantasy 2 because you haven't been keeping up to date. It's also dokey-dokey panic in Japan. I'm sorry, I use that joke too much. I'm Bob Mackie, and this is an HD remake of Final Fantasy 4 episode we did in 2012. I don't remember that one.

Was I on that one? You were on it, yeah. It was your grand return to Retronauts. Oh, my God. I think that would be important or something after the Sonic episode. Yes, yes, actually, I think it was. Is there anything new to say about retronauts after that? About Retronauts?

Or about Final Fantasy 4? I forgot all of it. Nope, close it all up. And these two folks were probably not on it. Should we just based this episode into that? What's that? Should we just like stop talking now and paste that episode and be like, yeah, wow, it seems really familiar for some reason. That was back when I was young and hopeful, so I don't think so.

I think it'll be too much. Now you're old and listless. Yeah. Who else is here with us? Hi, I am Chris Kohler, EasyType. That's not what I've heard, Chris. And I've been Cat Bailey and I've been ported to the Wonder Swan. Woo! Congratulations.

No one will ever buy you. Sorry. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Knife to the heart, man. Jeez. It's not my fault that you're on Wonder Swan. It's not your fault that Wonder Swan is a disaster.

Don't feel bad about it. It's just how it goes. So anyway, yes, we're talking about the fourth Final Fantasy game. as part of our extensive series of deep dives into the Final Fantasy franchise. We did Final Fantasy 1 last summer, and we're not doing Final Fantasy 2 or 3 because it's just hard to say that much about them. We will talk about Final Fantasy 3 this episode. Although, have you guys seen that Hero Novosakuchi has been live streaming Final Fantasy 3 on the Famicom on Nico Nico? No way.

He has been, I think it's part of like, it's some sort of a Fami-to, like, tie up kind of promotion. thing, but Sakaguchi has been playing through Final Fantasy 3 on what I'm guessing is probably a Famicom Mini, and live streaming it. How cool is that? Pretty rad. I thought we did talk about two when I, was it like one and two? We talked about one and then briefly about two, but it was really mostly focused on one. And that's what we're going to kind of do here is talk briefly about three and then mostly

focused on four. Because I do think that Final Fantasy 3, like understanding that game is important to understanding Final Fantasy 4 because Final Fantasy 4 really builds on three a lot of the concepts, if not the systems. If you look at some of the early Final Fantasy games, it really feels like each one was kind of a reaction to the last and tried to sort of push the series in a different direction. Final Fantasy 2 took the original game and went with more of a story format, more of an open-ended format gave you named characters and a more guided plot.

Three went more back to the first game style where you had four generic characters and the idea of class graduation basically like moving from one job class to another became integral to the plot instead of like a side quest. Final Fantasy 4 then takes all those jobs and classes that Final Fantasy 3 invented and turns them into characters. It gives them definition and gives them a role in a story to play. So Final Fantasy 3 came out in 1990 for the Nintendo Famicom and never came to America, well, until many years later in a different format.

But it was kind of, I sort of see it as Final Fantasy's attempt to do Dragon Quest 3. You know, Dragon Quest 3 was really all about the job systems or classes or whatever you want to call it. And three was much more, you know, like the sort of Final Fantasy adaptation of that concept. Chris, you probably know three best of anyone here. That would be my guess, my assumption. You know, I know about three. I've done research about three, but I've never actually sat down and played through through. I mean, I played the DS remake of that.

But that's not Final Fantasy 3, right? It's totally different. Yeah, Final Fantasy 3, Famicom fans will have you believe that Final Fantasy 3 for DS is a very, very different. game, a completely different game that happens to share the same plot beats. I know of Final Fantasy 3 that it's considered very difficult, especially towards the end. Yeah, the Final Dungeon is ridiculous. It is, yeah, even in the DS version. But, I mean, I love the music from Final Fantasy 3, and I know a lot about the jobs that you have.

Like, I'm really into the idea of Final Fantasy 3. Well, that's really the most important part. Maybe so. Yeah, maybe they should. Now that it's on Famicom Mini, assuming you can find one of those. I would probably honestly just play the fan-translated ROM so it wasn't sitting there like trying to read Hira Gana which is like really difficult.

Yeah, fair enough. It's a good choice. So has anyone played Final Fantasy 3 on Famicom? I played the fan translation whenever it came out like in 2009 or whatever. And I mean... 2009. And it comes out in the future and I've been there. No, the year 2001, 1999, and it is a difficult game.

I believe I save stated my way through some tough parts. And I think I finished it. I was a teenager. I played a lot of these, so I can't remember all the details. But I did play through the DS version as well when that came out. And that was also the first Retronauts episode, too. I played the DS version. And I think I was living in Japan.

It was like 2006 or something. And I was like, oh, man, this is really dry, like the story-wise. Even with kind of the broader story, even than the Famicom version, because they added a whole bunch of it. And at the time, I was like, whoa, they have cutscenes and DS games? That's crazy. Whole motion video. And they had a job system, but honestly, I don't remember it very well because it bored me like crazy. And I could only get about halfway through it.

And frankly, I don't remember a thing about it. It like just totally washed over me. So that goes to show like how much of an impression Final Fantasy 3 left on me, which is to say it didn't really leave one at all. The impression left on me was this dungeon needs a save point. The last dungeon, they didn't add one. So if you die to one of the several bosses in that dungeon, you lose all of your progress. You go back to before you enter the dungeon,

if you save it before you enter the dungeon. So after dying that dungeon, I was like, no, I beat this game. I consider it beaten. Goodbye. Go back to Gamefly from once you came, yeah. Here's the thing that I find interesting is that Final Fantasy 3 came out in Japan in 1990. That was the same year that Final Fantasy 1 came out in the U.S. That's true.

That is true. And they planned. I mean, Square, basically they were going to do the handoff, like where Nintendo published Final Fantasy. Fantasy in the U.S. And then Square was going to do the rest of them. And Square's initial... Yeah, there's marketing materials out there.

There's marketing materials for two and three. Yeah. And so they were really going to do it. And then they were like, oh, look, the bottom just is like falling out. Yeah. Let's just make this Game Boy game. Let's call it Final Fantasy. Actually, you can't...

Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy came out in America after their third games came out in Japan. So we kind of missed the... That's right. Indeed. I feel like Final Fantasy held up a little bit better than Dragon Warrior. Maybe that's why it was a little more popular in the U.S. when it first came out.

Well, yeah, I mean, it had better graphics and better music and... Yeah, both of them were pretty unpopular. Final Fantasy did pretty well. It felt like I... Final Fantasy One did pretty well, considering. I actually knew what Final Fantasy was versus, like, Dragon Warrior. Like, I was kind of peripherally aware of Dragon Warrior. I assume they were both a big deal because Nintendo Power wrote about them a lot.

Yeah, but that was my metric. With Final Fantasy One, Nintendo Power did do a, like, colossal... Yeah, and the guy. The contest, like, win a Palantier, basically. Yep. And so I was not, so when Final Fantasy One came out, they sent me that guide because that had to have been, let's see, my first issue of Nintendo Power was the Mario 3 guide, which means that my fifth issue of Nintendo Power was the Final Fantasy guide. I definitely was like, oh, I totally want to play this game. It sounds so interesting. And we got Final Fantasy one at like a yard sale or something like that, and I started playing it, and I got to the Marsh Cave, and I was like, this game is, what is up with this game being so hard? I didn't get grinding you know

I was like what nobody ever explained to me that that was a thing you had to do so I just thought this game was just like stupidly difficult and I put it down so my recollection of the

of the kind of the legacy of Final Fantasy 3 was that like a lot of people said that it kind of pushed the NES to the limits like that was like kind of the best expression of the series on the NES

from a mechanical standpoint yeah and you know what they originally when the Wonderswan came out they were like oh we're going to do Final Fantasy 3 on the Wonder Swan. They got as far as mocked up screenshots and things like that. And I was like, oh, great, because I played Final Fantasy

1 on the Wonder Swan. I was like, I'll finally get to play Final Fantasy 3. And it was too big for the Wonder Swan. I've been told that they lost the source code to Final Fantasy 3. That's why we never got a proper original remake. What I had heard was that it was just way too, there was just too much data. There was just they couldn't put it on a Wonder Swan cartridge.

I find that hard to believe, honestly. I mean, this was a cartridge 10 years later. I feel like memory capacity had increased quite a bit. They got Final Fantasy 4 on there. But did they save the source code for Final Fantasy 1 and 2 and 4, and they lost 3? Is that what they're saying? I mean, is 3 really a bigger game than 4? I don't think they have the source for anything.

I don't know. This is what I've been told. Anyway, I would say that Final Fantasy 3 has two legacies that kind of really matter for this series and its evolution. The first is the job system. And, you know, there was a rudimentary job system in Final Fantasy 1. You had, you know, you picked your four classes and midway through the game. You could go meet up with Bahamut and become a better class, like a better version of that class. But that was not that different from other RPGs where you had character games.

Whereas Final Fantasy 3 had like free class swapping like Dragon Quest 3 did. Job change. Yeah, job change. It was even more baked into the concept of the game. There were prestige classes. It was very involved. And the second element, I think, that is kind of important, is the idea of a big plot twist that involves the nature of the world.

Because at the beginning of Final Fantasy 3, you're like living in this tiny island and that's all there is. And then you discover that the world has been like hidden away behind like this mist wall or something. So all of a sudden the world becomes much bigger. And that's something you really see in Final Fantasy 4 when all of a sudden you go underground. Oh, and then you're on the moon. And Final Fantasy 5, where you have, like, you know, the void or whatever that sucks away the world and starts to change it. You have the world of light and balance and darkness and

whatever in Final Fantasy 6 and so forth. That's just, like, a very integral. Yeah, kind of, more or less. Three also gave us Chocobos, I think? No, it was in two, wasn't it? Chocobos were in two. Three gave us Mughal. Moogles were three. Okay, I thought they had five. They were, well, yeah. So five was, five was like the big debut for Mughals where they became like really part of the whole thing and they started, I think they started saying Kupo and five, but like three, they were just in one scene. Okay, yeah, I believe it.

So, yeah, those are kind of like the big stepping stones for Final Fantasy 3 from which Final Fantasy 4 launched itself. But Final Fantasy 4 was a much bigger game, and we'll talk about that now. a year later. A year later, but also eight bits later. That's right. Oh, snap. Yes.

It went from being on NES to SuperNus. Back in the day. A lot of people like look at the Super and Famicom games soon. These days and they're like, can you believe this game was made in the year? And it's like, most games were made out of year. It was really weird that the legend of Zelda

a link to the past took two years. Right, right. That's considered crazy. Wasn't Mario World two years as well? They spent a long time on that as well. Yeah. I'm willing to. give that a little bit of a benefit of a doubt because

that was being developed in parallel with the hardware. But Final Fantasy 4 was coming out for brand new hardware. I mean, it was really early in the Super Famicom's life and Super NES. It's like, I guess it was like six months after, six or seven months after the Super Famicom launch, but just like

three months after the Super NES launch. So that's pretty early. Like RPGs are big complicated games and they take a while to put together and they need a certain mastery of the system and the hardware, and you would not...

I mean, maybe visually, you could look at Final Fantasy 4's sprites, like the character sprites on the map, and think, oh, that's pretty early, like, it's barely a step above NES. But, like, the music and the systems and everything, like, they're really, really intricate and really thoughtful.

Like, it's a huge reinvention of the Final Fantasy series that goes hand in hand with the new hardware. I mean, the idea of Super NES was, like, it's all the games you love, but way bigger and better. And this was one that really, really embodied that. It was like Final Fantasy, but everything was just blown up and huge and cool looking

and fast-paced and whoa, what's going on? This was the part where Sakaguchi, like he was talking a little bit about this time period in Matt Leon's Final Fantasy 7 oral history. He was talking about how the Square Soft space at that time was almost like this kind of communal, like everybody's just kind of working together and throwing together their interesting ideas, not really caring too much about like sales or anything and the Final Fantasy 4 was definitely part of that kind of era. Like it was

you could argue that it was kind of Square's creative peak. You know, Square was this like small company. Like it wasn't like a huge publisher. I mean like, you know, like Enix, right, was like working with all these different outside developers and doing all these different projects. And Square

was just like, you know, putting out a game or two here and there was privately held. You know, they were just sort of doing their own thing. It was almost like a co-working space. Like, anybody who wanted to come in could, like, totally work there. It was kind of interesting, actually. Yeah, there's some very familiar names attached to Final Fantasy 4. Obviously, Hironobusakuchi, who had kind of had the original vision for Final Fantasy.

And at this point, it started to move from, like, director to producer role. So he was starting to be more, like, oversight as opposed to the lead designer on it. The more sort of hands-on people were Takashi Tokita. I don't know what he had really worked. He worked on Final Fantasy 3 because he was in charge of the Final Fantasy 3 remake. But, you know, he was

kind of like the story director and then there was Hiroyuki Ito who was very much the system designer. He was like the systems designer for Final Fantasy three's job system. He was really the mind behind Final Fantasy 5's massive overhaul of the job system.

And then Ken Narito was the programmer and Tetsu Yanomura helped debug the game. That's how he got hired. Cookie weird start for the guy. It really is. Because he then went on to become an artist. And then he went on to become like the creative lead for Squarer.

They hired him as an artist. But they were like, oh, we have nothing for you to do. So debug Final Fantasy for. Right. Yeah. I mean, teams are tiny. I'm sure a lot of people wore a lot of different hats. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. And he was like, you know, just starting out. So it was kind of a grunt, actually. I mean, we probably just literally listed half the people who made this game. Probably. Yeah. Not a big team. Right.

But they did. great work. And let's talk about what the 16-bit hardware brought to Final Fantasy because it really did feel like just a huge leap forward in a lot of ways. I mean, the visuals. Yeah, like when you look at the maps and the, you know, the characters walking around dungeons, it's barely a step above super NES or standard NES. It's not that great looking. It's nice, but tiny sprites and pretty, you know, tile-based plain backgrounds, maybe with some like effects or some parallax scrolling. But then you get into battles, and whoa, everything gets really crazy. Yeah, the effects are a lot nicer than anything that you would have seen on the NES.

Yeah, spell effects. Summons are really cool to look at. Giant sprites, like especially Goldbez. Yeah. Huge sprites. And, you know, like flying enemies had this kind of like floating effect where they were like, you know, step. They felt separate from the background for the first time. Also, there were backgrounds behind the characters.

It wasn't just fighting on a field of black. Yeah, that's true. There was a background that resembled the area you were in. a cave or a crazy techno tower or whatever. Your party wasn't in another window. Right. And then you'd have like, you know, this kind of weird lizard bird thing floating. And it was still a static sprite, but it was kind of bobbing up and down and there was a shadow

underneath it. And all of a sudden, yeah, like I can kind of see the visual, like the physical space this is taking place in. But your character still lined up on the right side. But they also had little shadows under them. And when you, like, shot an arrow, it went over from your character to the bad guy. And it hit. And you were like, okay.

Like, it started to take this abstract RPG lineup and take a turn concept and give it some physical presence, which you really didn't see in RPGs before that. I can't think of any RPGs that had that. Aside from, like, Ultima was... Any turn-based RPGs? Yeah, like Ultima had like the top-down map, but that was, you know, more like a tactical view. Whereas this was like, you know, the lineup and take turns style, but almost as like a, like a, you know, a shadow box or something. Like here's a little shoebox diorama of a combat zone. Literally the first thing you see is almost like a technical demonstration because you see the red wings flying across the world map and it's kind of tilted.

It's almost it's using the mode seven, which was very exciting at the time. Yeah, yep. And then you cut to the people on the ship and then it's like, oh no, monsters are attacking. And then you get to see Cecil doing really like cool attacks to take out these monsters. Yeah, he uses like rare items. that cause spell effects to blast over them. He uses abilities that for some reason don't actually exist in the game. What happened there? That's weird.

It opens with a non-interactive segment, which is the first for this series too. Yeah. Yeah, a lengthy, you know, non-interactive segment for sure. And on top of that, it's a direct fade in. It's like in Medius Res. You press start and it fades down and then fades up the dun, da-da-da-da-da-dan. Yeah, with the ships going out of the slave. It was different.

It was very different. It's like, yeah, I mean, they just, they had extra memory, they had extra things that they can do. And I gotta say, I mean, that use of Mode 7, that very restrained use of Mode 7 in this game to just when the airship is flying over the world and so the world appears curved. I mean, that, not only was it, not only is it really smart

and really, you know, they really held back. They didn't, like, you know, bombard you with Super Nintendo, you know, graphical, you know, tricks. Right. But that, you, shoo, shoo, shoo, no. But that, that, feeling of power, like whenever you get the airship in a Final Fantasy game, it's like, oh snap, I got the

airship, this is the best, you feel awesome because you can fly everywhere you want. Right. When you get the airship in a Super Nintendo Final Fantasy game and the world literally bends underneath you, like, of the way it kind of tilts backward as the music kicks in. And it visually

says, I can go anywhere. Nothing can block me now. Like that's such a great feeling. And the fact that the game begins with you in an airship, which is something you get always late in the game as like a tool of empowerment. Yeah. Like the idea here is you're, you know, like a level eight dark night.

You're, you know, high-ranking official or warrior in the kingdom. Like, this is not just a couple of kids who wander into some place they don't belong and get involved in a huge adventure. Like, you're already in the thick of things. Yeah. And I think a lot of this. You're already level 10 or something like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of this has to do with Takashi Tokita, who had been a, like, I think, like a theater major. He'd spent time with theater and thought about this in terms of staging and production and storytelling. And this goes into

Final Fantasy 4's use of RPG tropes that people understood to tell a story. Like you start with the airship. You start with Cecil. He's already level 10. It's like, oh, okay, he's already seen some shit, you know? When you see this kind of stuff, and then you see, oh, he's a dark

night and Kane is a dragoon. You know, you start to put together, and it's really important for video games of this time because they can't spend too much time on expository sequences. They can't show you people's body language. Like even Final Fantasy 5 had a whole lot of different like

character behaviors with the field icons on the screen, you know, like hearts appearing above their heads and all that kind of stuff. Final Fantasy 4 they really couldn't do much. You have like characters who look down. They could look down or lift their hand up. Yeah. Flip their hand up right. Or like they jump and spin around. Right. Oh yeah. Which is not even that's not even an extra sprite.

You would jump out of bed and go, let's go. Yeah. So what they can do is they can let you fill in so many details about these characters simply by saying they are, they're this level. They have, they're already equipped with it. When you get Palom and Porum, the twins, the kids, like they, you can see how many magic spells they've already learned. And you can see, oh, okay, well, that's how far along they are in their training. You know, it's that kind of stuff. More to the point when Cecil becomes a paladin, he goes back to level one.

Yeah, he does. He does. And it's all so smart, yeah. Using the limited, you know, resources to tell that story through gameplay mechanics, especially super smart. How mechanics inform characters, I've been replaying it, too, and I noticed, like, Cecil's a dark night, he's super overpowered up to a certain point, and then you really need to rely on your friends who use magic. Yeah, you get to a cave where his dark attacks are fighting against undead characters, and you can't do anything. Like, you're doing no damage to them as this powerful dark knight because he is a dark knight. So you have to use, like, you know, Rydia's magic spells or something.

Another example is Tella. Like, he is this extremely, you know, experienced mage. He has, you know, this huge list of spells, even though he's forgotten a lot of them, it's still like, whoa, I can't believe I've got all these spells right away. Some of them are really powerful. Like, within the first hour. But he only has 90 magic points. That's right.

And that's the most he'll ever have. Because he's old. He's old. He's lost his stamina. Yeah. So he can cast some of these spells, but they exhaust him very quickly. and you have to use them as a super limited resource, which is smart in terms of gameplay

because you can't just, you know, spam the Octomammoth battle with, like, you know, Lightning 3 because you don't have that ability. And it's really, it's a beautiful breakaway from this idea that an RPG must, you must level up linearly. Like, you have to, you know, you start this powerful and you end that powerful

and it's a straight line. Well, it's also a change of pace from the idea that a role-playing game is a game where you play, yourself in the role that you define and create the party and the characters you want because you don't do that

in Final Fantasy 4. You are playing a role that has been prescribed for you from beginning to end. There's a little bit of freedom to wander around to do some side quests at the very end of the game.

But up until then, everything from the, you know, point A to point B to point C is determined, everything along the lines of which characters you have in your party, which skills you have available

for your party All of these things are set in stone, and you are really playing out, like, someone else's D&D campaign, not creating your own. So it really kind of changes up the role of the game developer as the dungeon master. Like, you don't have a lot of choice in the campaign you're playing. Yeah. But because of that, it allows so much more flexibility. I'm glad you hit on this. I'm not going to be here for the entire show, but I've been playing this game.

Like, as I said, playing a lot of other Final Fantasy Games, modern games. I feel like this has a very modern structure in that it's very linear. You basically go to the only next place you could possibly go. And there are maybe three points in the game where it's like, okay, go do side quests. But that's it. It has this really interesting structure to me that I see like Final Fantasy 15. It's just like everything is open and then it's just the narrow corridor to the end. And Final Fantasy 4, it's like narrow corridor, big space, narrow corridor, big space, narrow corridor, big space.

It's good at giving you the illusion of freedom to go places. Yeah. But then you can really only go one place. like at some point you have to get on a black chocobo and fly around and you're like oh I can go anywhere within this world but actually there's just one forest that you have to go to and there's like a few little places that are kind of off to the side where you can do a side quest or something but again

it's really pretty fixed pretty rigid in terms of what you can do and you don't get to define how your characters develop like you don't get to put you know points into learning the skill or ability like when your character hits this level they're going to get that spell Yeah, Bob. I'm actually replaying it as well. You should go check it out on U.S. Gamer Final Fantasy 4 Let's Play. But it made me really rethink my kind of reaction to Final Fantasy 13 because when Final Fantasy 13 came out, everybody's like, oh, it's so linear and rigid and they're deciding the party for you and everything.

And then you go back and you're like, oh, my God, it's totally baked into the franchise's freaking DNA. It's been a part of the franchise for a long time. Final Fantasy 4 doesn't give you one battle option for three hours, though. It lets you. There are some other issues with Final Fantasy 13. I'm not saying... Final Fantasy 4 is linear in a metaphorical sense. Final Fantasy 13 is literally a straight line that you run down.

But Final Fantasy 4, it works because it's so fast. Because so much happens in four hours. You can get scuttled along. But like the Final Fantasy 4, you do always have the option to like say, maybe I want to level up a little bit. Maybe I want to go try something else. You know, like there are more... But the similarity is in the way.

that the encounters are specifically tuned to the way that your party is composed by the developers. That's the beauty of the design. I would totally agree with you in that. I feel this has the cleanest design because you can grind your ass off in this game, but the developers know you will have these members with these abilities and these will be the enemies you'll be fighting. So in every instance, they can kind of design every encounter for the party you'll have. And I'm really looking forward to our Final Fantasy 5 episode

because that game is the opposite of this every possible way. There's so many ways you can screw yourself over. right but but it's still great but yeah and like grinding in final fantasy five is not really a something that helps you yeah yeah but in final fantasy four it's not something that really helps you either because the game is is so pretty well tuned the funny thing about final fantasy four is that your first time through it um you're probably not you might grind with certain party members then they leave and they come back and you know we have to grind with other party members but once you realize a couple of things about final fantasy four like once you realize how the

system works and also once you realize what your final five characters will be in your party, you can then take advantage of that. And so what people do is, when you go to Mount Ordeals, you have Cecil, you have Palimporum and Tella, right? You kill everybody except for Cecil.

And then once you're the Paladin, you can wipe out everything in Mount Ordeals very easily as the paladin. But since it's only Cecil, he gets many, many, many more experience points. because he's fighting alone, because you get multiple of experience points. But also, at that point, Rosa, Cain, and Rydia have all been in your party.

And any character that has been in your party before and comes back later, they, behind the scenes, get all of the experience that you get so that they're appropriately leveled. So you can get Cecil up, so you can get, I didn't know this either until I literally read about this strategy. You get Cecil up to level 45 on Mount Ordeals in like, in like an hour or two. You can grind them up to level 45 really fast if you do that and you kill everybody else. And then when Rosa comes back, she's level 45. When Kane comes back, he's level 45. When Rydia comes back, she's level 45.

And then Edge is a useless nobody. And then Edge is a useless nobody no matter what that dude sucks. I dislike Edge. He is a, he is an album. His Edge, what do you expect? He is, I mean, if not for the existence of Edward in this game, Edge would be like the worst Gomer in the history of Final Fantasy. He does have the spoon.

He does have the spoon. Yeah. My life hack is not as good. I'm just going to say, if you're fighting a boss, just cast Berserk on Cecil, and it's like, great. It works out great. Yeah, I was throwing. He's a paladin.

He's supposed to be protecting the other character. No, you go against the teachings of the game. You cast berserk on that guy. My boss fight with Zerreras was literally just like, have edge throw things until he dies. And then it's like, do I want to revive Edge so we can throw one more thing? Or do I just want to leave him?

Let Edge die on the moon. Worst. Let's talk about the combat system because it's a revolution in video game design. Even though it's a turn-based system, it's not. It's a real-time turn-based system. How does that make any sense? My goodness, that seems like a contradiction in terms. Well, it's turn-based, but everybody's turn is on the role.

one clock. Right. Right. And the clocks play out at real time. Yeah. And, yeah, like each character has a, you know, an agility stat. And all of a sudden, that means something. It's not like, I get to take X number of actions for this turn.

It means I get to act again at this, you know, at this rate, at this speed. Yeah. And it's such a simple idea, but I'd never seen anything like that in an older game. I don't think it existed. I think this game innovated that. And it's brilliant. That turn clock is invisible until six. though, right?

It is. But if you play the modern ports, you'll see that turn. It really threw me for a loop because I was like, wait a minute. Active Time Battle was totally invented for this game. I'm not seeing any gauges. Oh, no, five has a gauge. It does? Okay, I thought it was six that brought the gauges, but yeah.

Yeah, I was like really confused for a while. And then I was like, oh, no, no, they're totally moving. Okay, yeah, I better keep attacking them. Yeah. Yeah, this game has a different adaptation or interpretation of the ATB. It hadn't been refined yet. So it does, like, the turn element, you know, the time element plays into everything. So in other games, it's pretty much like you pick an action and your character will execute that action when their turn comes up.

In this game, the action you take has its own time attached to it as well. So if you just pick, you know, a standard attack, you're going to move really quickly. But if you have a character like Rydia, who is very slow and also casts, you know, like really powerful spells, Those spells take a long time to build up. So there becomes this element of like, do I want to take the time to cast, you know, fire three against this monster? Or should I go, you know, more quickly and try to do something different? Should I summon here? What should I do?

So it creates this entirely new strategy. The inspiration for this, according to Tokita, was F1 racing. Because apparently he and Ito are like super into Western. sports. When I interviewed Hiro Yuki Ito, like the first 15 minutes of our interview was him asking me questions about American football. And I'm like, I'm sorry, dude. I don't care about football. I was the wrong. That should have been the one doing it. I felt like such a disappointment to him because he was like, yeah, an American

journalist is talking to him. I could talk to him about the stuff that I love and I was like, I just want to talk about RPGs. Did you ever say Farv Sama? Okay. Please don't. Oh my God. So, yeah, the idea behind the combat system was F1 racing, where you have, you know, every car in its track and, you know, they're going at different speeds. And, you know, if your car really sucks, then it's going to get lapped by a faster racer. So everyone's kind of moving and advancing at their own speeds. That was the concept here.

Like your turn is basically your lap around the track. So, you know, Edge, even though he's worthless, has a easy, he's on a quick. little car. And then Rydia is on a very, very slow car. And so this becomes a huge element in the game. And to add further to the dynamism of it, all of a sudden, the attack damage that you're doing and taking displays on the battle screen, like on the actual field. So you walk forward and you shake your sword, and yeah, you're like shaking your sword at midair. But then over here, there's a goblin who has little numbers that pop up. And I love the way they animate. Like the first number, then the second, there's like a ripple, and they kind of bounce and land on the ground.

And it's a very quick, subtle thing, but it's just such a great little detail. It's not just like a number pops up from an enemy. Most RPGs don't take the time even now to put that kind of loving detail into their numbers. It's just like numbers, numbers, like modern RPGs, like Final Fantasy 13, where you're like dishing out, you know, 10,000 damage at a time for five hits at once. It's just like the numbers mean nothing. But here there's a visceral satisfaction to watch those little numbers pop up. And all of a sudden, you just broke four digits. Oh, my God.

I am so powerful. I am so awesome. I can't believe that. I want to think that's because the enemy sprites are usually motionless. So it's adding some sort of visual interest on the screen, you know. There is that. But like when I think of it, I always think of like the zoos, the big ravenbird slizzard things that float. And then the numbers pop up about that.

And it's just like there's depth and dimension to it. And all of a sudden, like again, you know, it's the shoe. box diorama and everything feels so much more involving. And it's such a little thing, but the speed of the combat, the, you know, the real-time element. And you can set it to be, quote-unquote, wait, where, you know, like, it takes time, it kind of pauses the game while you're picking actions. But it's still, you know, really fast-paced. And there is this kind of tension of, like, when is the enemy going to act?

Am I going to act before the enemy? Like, all of this just comes together to create. You see a flash, like the enemy flashes, to let you know that something is happening. And then you go, uh-oh, what's going to happen? And then if it's a magic spell, you see the sign pop up and then some kind of effect. And you're like, hold on tight. I hope this doesn't really F up my party. Okay, 100 damage.

All right, I'm good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we should talk about the bosses because almost all of the bosses have a unique combat element to them. Sure. It's not just like go hit a guy really hard and he's going to hit. back. Like, from the very beginning. They try to make use of the individual special powers that the characters have.

Right. But also it just like always keeps you on your toes because you have, you know, the very first battle where, yeah, the idea is to use Kane's jump and jump in and also to learn to defend. So you're not attacking the mist dragon when it's in the mist form because you'll get messed up if you do that. Yeah. But then you have other battles like, you know, the Calbraina, the, the, the, the,

the dolls that, you know, you fight individually and then they all come together into the giant doll, that makes use of Yang's karate attack where he can hit all enemies on screen by doing the kick, the flying kick. There's also another boss battle that totally utilizes Cain's jump. Oh, right, the third fiend. Yeah. Yeah, because she goes into the whirlwind. You have to stop it.

And you have to stop it by using Cain. And then there's also the mega sisters who are like there are three of them. The one who's going to revive them is in the back row. and so you're having to kind of bomb them with magic as much as possible. But they're using wall to, so you have to understand that you can cast wall on your own party or you can cast a spell on your own party and reflect it back to do massive damage. And then there's combat dialogue, which is something new. During combat, you can actually, like, your characters will have conversations.

In the beginning, it's just like, you know, Sissel don't attack the Miss Dragon when it's in Miss form or you'll get messed up. But, you know, later it's the Megasisters giving basically hints to say who's about to attack and who's going to reflect at you. Or you have Dr. Lugai, which is just like comedy. You're fighting like this stupid little scientist in his terrible malfunctioning Frankenstein's monster. And there's like comedy happening over top of the screen while you're attacking him. And then Yang dies immediately afterwards. So a little totally weird. Or you have Gobez who's like, you're like, oh, well, I'm completely.

completely screwed here, and then you have the big reveal of, oh, crap, Rydia's back. Like, you have the misdragon coming and totally messing them up. Or you have battles that happen outside of your hands, like when you finally come across Edward and Tella's like, you, Spoony Bard, you little bastard, you stole my girl, my daughter. And like that battle happens, you don't have any control over it. It's like the characters attacking each other and you're just like a bystander. Or Cecil fighting, you know, his dark cell. Or arguably one of the greatest RPG moments ever when Cecil's fighting himself in the mirror and becomes a paladin.

Yeah, yeah. That was awesome and it still holds up now. Or Tella, again, like breaking out of the party control and, you know, going beyond his physical limits to cast Medio at Gouldez. Like, it's a cutscene, but it plays out as a battle and it's really dramatic. And on top of that, it uses game mechanics. to tell the story. Like, Medio is the spell that is in Tela's inventory, and you can never cast because it doesn't have enough MP.

So now he does cast it at the expense of his own life. Like, he kills himself to cast this spell for revenge. It's such a little thing, but it's really great storytelling through video game mechanics. And it is possible to have that sort of, like, subtle, nonverbal storytelling, even when there's dialogue happening. Like, if you're really paying attention to what's happening in the game, you're like, oh, okay.

Like, this has been set up all this time. There's like this, you know, basically Chekhov's Medio spell. And he finally used it. Yeah. Yeah, the idea, yeah, I mean, that is pretty wonderful. But it's like, oh, teller remembered Meteor. And you're like, oh, snap. And you go and look, and it's like you can't use it because he doesn't have enough

and he needs his spell. It's pretty good. Characters like Edward, who have an ability to hide. They're not natural fighters. And for some reason, so I've been reading a lot of Legends of Localization, our friend Clyde Mandolin. He's got a great Legend of Zelda book. He's got a great earthbound book.

I believe Final Fantasy 4 is going to be his next book. No. Oh, no, no, no. Actually, he's done a lot on the other. Mario Brothers, right? No, he said he's not doing an RPG for a while. Super Mario Brothers, I think, might be the next one. I think it is, yeah.

But the Final Fantasy 4, the joke is that everybody wants him to do it, but it would be like a thousand pages long. It would be a phone book, yeah. So if you go to Legends of Localization.com, you can read many comparisons between different versions of the game. And it's really interesting to see that the version that every newer version is based on is actually really inaccurate full of internet jokes. Like I was playing the PSP version, there's a something awful joke in there

but I'm mentioning things like this because I'm leaving halfway through the show, I'm sorry, but for some reason, they don't know why that Gilbert the Bard was named Edward and he thinks it's because that's a seven character name and there were only six but for some reason Edward is the one they stuck with forever. They never went back to Gilbert.

I don't know why, but Gilbert's his name. Yeah, right, right, right, true. Yeah, but maybe because it's too much like Golbez? I don't know. But that is one of the things that stuck from Final Fantasy 2 in the U.S. But please go to that website, read his work. It's really, really good, especially on this game if you care about it. And he compares Final Fantasy 4 to Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type, which actually did have language

differences because maybe jumping ahead a little bit, but of course they brought up Final Fantasy 4 in Japan. They made it easier for the U.S., which we can talk about the details. But then they took that easy version, also released it in Japan as Easy Type, and it was for like kids. They took a lot of the more obscure language like fanciful words and things like that and they made it easier

for children to read. And so Clyde Mandolin talks about all of those differences. He talks about the fan translation of Final Fantasy 4. He talks about the PlayStation translation. The DS one, yeah. The DS one. Everything. Yeah, it would be a phone book. But I'm glad you pointed that out, Chris, because I was under the assumption and a lot of other people that the U.S. version was EasyType. And then much later, I found out EasyType is a distinct version.

That's actually even easier. It's based on the U.S. version. Yeah. Yes, the Japanese, distinct differences. I looked in the Japanese Wikipedia page because I wanted to confirm this. And the Japanese Wikipedia page, which I mean, it's Wikipedia. But it says that it was, EasyType is like it was re-imported back into Japan, even though it came out earlier. Yeah, kind of like Final Fantasy 7 International Edition.

That's a thing. Or Final Fantasy 12 International Zubiac Job Edition. Like the international versions that they do where it's not the same as the U.S. version. Like they make big changes when they bring it back into Japan to resell it again. Yes. And EasyType has, they completely redid the sprite for Xeramus. And they made them look

like, I don't know, I don't know how you describe it. A typical Final Fantasy like en boss which is like many bodies and things glued together. Oh, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not in any other version of the game. It's less HR Geiger. Oh, it is in another version of the game.

If you... Really? Yeah, the Final Fantasy for Advance. Oh, yeah. There's that bonus dungeon. If you complete the game and find the real final ending, the Final Boss is Xeramus Easy Type. Oh, my God.

Yeah, so they took that Sprite. That's hilarious. That's amazing. The work that Tosei did on the advanced games is actually pretty great. Yeah, but Final Fantasy 5. But they really, like, said, let's think about, you know, like what these games are about and let's add some really. interesting stuff to them. I don't know if Tose did the

PSP one. It's an adaptation of the GBA one. The only problem I have with it is that I love the strange choices made between the designs and the sprites. Like in the PSP version, Cecil is all white, like as he should be. But the sprite in the SNES version, I like he's got like a yellow cape and rainbow hair. So I kind of prefer

some of the choices they made in the original version that aren't retained throughout. So the one other thing I want to talk about in the music is the music. And I feel like this is Chris's chance to wax eloquette. Oh, yeah? Because, I mean, like, even without the Celtic moon thing, I just feel like... Oh, that's very true. Before Chris goes and does Chris things, which we all know he's going to, and it's okay.

I just want to point out that we were talking about how, at the very beginning, we had that technical demonstration with the airships and the map and the battle stuff. It also has one of the best themes in the entire game, which is the Red Wing theme. And it's such a great way to open up the game because it really, like, you're really... You're certainly not going to hear anything like that on the original NES sound ship. Like you might go, oh, well, this looks kind of similar to an NES game, but you hear that soundtrack and you're like, oh, my God, yeah. So here's, let me set this. Are you the one who added this to the notes?

I did. Okay, thanks. Because I was like, I don't remember writing this. What the hell? Okay. I have one thing to add before, Chris, because I've only here for a limited time. This time playing through, I noticed that main theme is used in many different pieces. The dun, dun, dun, dun, done, done.

You can hear that in the battle theme. You can hear that in the underworld map. Four and five both. Yeah. I didn't notice until this time. Yeah. I'm going to be able to be. I don't know.

I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. ...and... ...you know... ...and... ...the... ...you... ...and...

...the... ...and... ...the... ...that... So, the Super Nintendo sound chip. Sure, we're talking about it a million times in retroknots, but the idea behind the Super Nintendo sound chip, which was designed by Ken Kuduragi and Sony,

was that rather than simply use like FM sound and triangle waves and synth and things like that, is that every single sound in the Super Famicom would be a sample. And so it would, it was like, so, I mean, everything was composed of audio samples, which could then be manipulated. And so that was why you got such amazing sound

out of the Super Nintendo is because you, if you had, like, more space on your cartridge, you could upload higher quality samples and the SNS could play them. So it was really like, the NES, no matter what, I mean, there were NES games that used separate sound chips and things like that, but essentially a lot of it sounded the same.

But the Super Famicom, you could really go nuts. The Final Fantasy 4, as they're working on Final Fantasy 4, now Dragon Quest, which of course is their main competitor, did not come out for the Super Famicom. The first version for the Super Famicom was in late 92. Yeah. So it was more than a year after Final Fantasy 4. But as they were working on Final Fantasy 4,

little game comes out by Enix called Act Razor. And that game... With music by a little guy called Yuzo Kishiro. Who was very young at the time. He was early 20s, right? And, I mean, Act Razor was one of the first games. I got Act Razor for my Super Nintendo before Final Fantasy 2, and that was one of the games where I popped that thing into the Super Nintendo,

and I was just blow. And, like, the voice samples that they used in some of the... I mean, the music and Act Razor made you freaking cry. It was so good. And it made Way Matsu very embarrassed, because not because of the compositions, but because of the sample quality. Enix had used such wonderful samples for Act Razor,

and they looked at Final Fantasy 4, and to Wei Matsu was like, this is not nearly as good. And because of Act Razor, they scrapped all the samples that they were using in Final Fantasy 4, and they put in higher quality samples. And he still wasn't quite happy at the end, but basically at the last minute,

they were just like, our samples are not high quality enough. We need to go back in. And, I mean, it made a difference. Like, Final Fantasy 4, I've talked about this before. Like, going into the Miss Cave, I just, like, had to stop and turn up the music and just be like, this is like a movie score. That was, so I said this when the Final Fantasy concert, the one that just happened at the San Francisco Symphony last year when I got invited to basically interview Sakaguchi on stage, I was like, yeah, that was my, I told him on stage. That was my final fantasy, like, music moment was the Mist Cave and that piece Into the Darkness. And then, of course, Sakaguchi was like, I don't remember that, can you hum it?

We're on stage in front of a, you know, literally the San Francisco Symphony crowd. So I had to hum it. But that absolutely the same thing happened to me. And it was a combination of, A, the beauty of that piece of music, but then also the transparency effects. of the Super NES, which had the mist floating over the dungeon. And that was the first time I'd seen something sound and vision together.

Everything. And they matched each other aesthetically so well. And also, that piece of music does not sound like dungeon music. You know, like you expect dungeon music to be do, do, do, do, do, do, do you know. But instead it's this. Yeah.

So I always had like upbeat dungeon music. Yeah. The Gold Volcano kind of music. Right. But this is like a freaking string quartet in my bedroom, you know, playing with this. That was just unbelievable. And so, yeah, Uyematsu, yes, once they finished Final Fantasy 4, decided for whatever reason that the album, he was going to have to fly to Ireland and assemble a crew of people who were actually very well known in the Irish music scene at that time to record this album.

And Celtic Moon is interesting because you can kind of hear that, like, I get the sense a lot of them are kind of sight reading. You know what I mean? There's not a lot of verve in Celtic Moon. I think they were doing a job and did it, you know, got their money for a couple of days and left. But, like, that album, I mean, that was one of the first Final Fantasy albums that I bought, and that was just incredible. Yeah, it's so different from what you expect. Like, that and Chrono Trigger Brink of Time, you're just like, what's happening here? Because the previous Final, I mean, there were two previous Final Fantasy arranged albums, and the one of them was the live concert, which makes sense.

And then the next one was the Final Fantasy 3 album with the weird English voice narrative. in the middle of it. But all of those arrangements were very straightforward, studio synthesized, you know, just high quality arrangements of the songs.

But Celtic Moon takes the Final Fantasy 4 soundtrack, gives the whole thing an artistic, you know, like... Patina. Patina, thank you.

But then also, I mean, it connects all of the music together because all the arrangements are so similar. Right. And that's something that's worth mentioning is that there's so much

diversity in the soundtrack. I mean, Nobu Umatsu at his Prague rock best. He's like pulling the full palette here. You know, you have the symphonic quality of Into the Darkness, but then the boss battles are just like these intense, heavy Prague rock style arrangements with like some strings, but also, you know, bass guitar and big drums, timpennies, bum, boom, boom. Especially the Four Feen song. Yes, oh my God. There's like a little section of this music that's like triumphant before it gets back into like terrifying.

I'm gonna'a. ...you know, ...and... ...and... ...and... ...and... ...the... ...as...

...and... ...and... ...the... Like, so it's kind of predicting the flow of battle, I think. I want to make a couple observations. First, Final Fantasy 4 has my favorite boss battle theme in the series, mostly because, I mean, it's not overly complicated, but it always gets me really into the mood of the actual battle. And even though it, like, loops back and kind of starts over, it's fine because, like, you're so focused on the battle and it's like that perfect background theme. I think it starts off with the same baseline as the regular battle music.

But then it goes. But it starts off. No, it's worse. But when it starts, it's kind of an octave up from the normal, like, random battle music. And then it's like faster. And then it starts in on the actual anthem. And you're like, all right, this is it. Like, I'm actually, I'm in a big fight now. And then the greatness of the Four Fiends battle theme, of course, is the first time you encounter the four themes, which is one of my favorite.

moments in the game is like you you're fighting you know this guy who's like oh that wasn't so hard like I bought some zombies I killed them yeah regular boss battle theme you're like you're fine and then no then the four fiend theme starts yeah and you're not prepped yeah maybe you didn't heal because you're like oh I'm done with that that's fine and then yeah it's a different theme yeah so great for sure The other The other observation I wanted to make, It was, for 1991, it was really like a film score.

Like, one really great example is like Palom and Porum and they make their big heroic sacrifice and they've turned a stone. Like, it starts off with like really intense music as like the walls are coming in. You're like, oh, like tons of tension and everything. But then they turn to stone and you get to this really like subdued kind of like a single note kind of playing. They're playing that main theme, but like a somber version of it. Yes. And you're just kind of like, oh. And like we kind of can goof on Final Fantasy 4 so much for relying so heavily on heroic sacrifices throughout.

Yeah. But it made each one kind of have a lot of punch and the score had a lot to do with it. You're right, Kat. I mean, it does score music to the action, which was kind of rare at the time. If I had ever seen it before, I don't remember. But it was like scoring appropriately. It wasn't like, here's a scene. Here's a song for the scene.

Like things were changing as the scene changed. I mean, think about the games that came out at the time, like Super Mario World comes out, I mean, it had really great music, but, you know, you're like, you're bopping along to certain music for each level, whatever. Like, this is dynamically changing. within the battles, like you're fighting Golbez and is playing a certain theme and then Rydia comes in and the music totally changes and you're like, all right, four fiends theme, time to go, all right. Like it does such a great job of manipulating, like, how you're supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Right, by setting you up for this is what this music means, to bring that music back in and immediately has that emotion.

And it would also bring like a sense of dread. You'd be like, the screen would kind of turn purple and the music would change. You go, oh, crap, now what's going to come at me? Did I save? Am I, like, healed up? Oh, no. Right. And, you know, the, what you said, Bob, about the kind of the light motif of the main theme being used throughout the game. Like, that evokes so many different moods, not just, you know, like the sort of solemn, oh, no, palim and porum. But then you get to the moon, and it's taking those notes and turning them into like this echoey, dissonant, almost a tonal, like, boop, burp, burp, burp.

Yeah, and then it brings this... You're like, whoa, I'm way out of my depth here. Like, what is happening? Yeah. I like how I'm not in Kansas anymore. And then the springs come up, and it's just like, well, it's a little bit of familiarity. Yeah. Yeah, just a great, great soundtrack.

I mean, it's one of those memorable moments in the movie Scott Pilgrim versus the world where he just, like, brings out. his bass guitar and he just kind of goofs around and plays like the introductory riff to the Final Fantasy for the battle scene. Yeah, like, okay, like that's kind of a deep cut for most people but it really does speak to, you know, for certain people like whoever wrote that, that music, that soundtrack

made an impact. It left an impression. Maybe it's just because I played this game so much in its original form, but I always turn on the original music in the PSP version or whatever version I'm playing, or I wish it was the original music, because even if the samples are better or it's more technologically sound or whatever, I still love how that Super Nintendo sounds because nothing sounds like it, and all my memories are associated with those instruments in that way. Yeah, and that was one of the things they brought back for, you know, with Final Fantasy

9, which was that first attempt to like, oh, you know, sorry we got off on this crazy path with the Final Fantasy games, we're going to do something that really feels like the Super Nintendo games again. One of the major things that they, you know, brought back alongside, like Mughals and, you know, Black Mages was, as soon as you got into a battle, you heard doda, da, da, da, da. And then they just kept doing it for the entire battle. Like, that was the last stage. It was because the

low times were really bad. Yeah. So I'm going to make it. Oh, yeah. So I'm going to make an admission. And that's that I didn't play Final Fantasy 4 until like 2000. And so it was pretty late. Uh, it had been out for a long time. What did you play it on? Super Nintendo. Oh, so you played the American Super Nintendo version.

Yeah, I played Final Fantasy 2. Somebody loaned it to me. At that time, like, Final Fantasy games, they were still really quite expensive and kind of hard to find, like, you could maybe find them at your local Funkland or whatever. But I was kind of getting into it, and Final Fantasy 6 was the first one that I played. I went back to Final Fantasy 4, and I was like, oh, wow, this is like a way huge step down from Final Fantasy 6. This almost looks like an NES game, but then that soundtrack kicked in, and I was like,

all right, I can go with this. Okay, all right, Final Fantasy 2. Yeah, I played Final Fantasy 4 or 2 in 1992 when it was. was still pretty new, but I didn't beat it until 1999. I rented it, and for like three days, I got to the very end, and I lost against

Xeramus or Zemus or whatever, and then I had to take the game back. I'd beat it. I'm never going to finish this game, oh well. But then later, I was like, ah, I can do this. I actually got into RPGs through Final Fantasy 2 slash 4 in that I would tinker with them in the past, but they were too complex for me.

When this game came out, my stepdad is a huge nerd, and he was playing video games like this at the time, and I basically, he'd come from home from work every day, and I'd watch him play through a little more of this game. And I was, like, obsessed with the story, all the cliffhangers. I mean, it's a really childish storybook story, but if you're nine, it's like, oh, my God, people are dying and what's going to happen next? But watching him play through the entire game gave me the confidence to do it myself, and from then on, I could play RPGs. So this has really set me down the path of being a horrible nerd. And they did, I mean, you know, for as much as it's like, oh, yeah, you know, Squaresoft back in the day, they thought Americans were stupid and, you know, couldn't play RPGs. It's like, well, I mean, I did really get into Final Fantasy, too, when I was, you know, young.

And so clearly, you know, they did. You're smart. Yay. You know, them dumbing the game down, you know, and making it easier for us. Like, it probably did actually get some people. That was fine. Mystic Quest, not so much. No.

Yeah, I said, no. And on that note, I think we'll take a break. And Bob, I guess this is where we say goodbye. That's me. I'm sorry, everybody. I have other obligations, but I love you all. Thanks for stopping in. Where can we find you on the internet?

Oh, Bob Server on Twitter. My other podcast is Talking Simpsons, Talking Simpsons.com every day, every week. Sorry, every week is the new episode of The Simpsons. We talk about it. Look for it in your podcast machine. Goodbye, everybody. All right. We'll be right back.

And we're back. Hi, everyone. It's the second half of this episode. Probably more like the second one-third of it. I don't know. I don't think the second half, the second portion is going to be as long. I'm not good at numbers. I studied graphic design.

Don't ask me. Let's see what happens. All right. So something that I had talked about earlier was the way Final Fantasy 3 or Final Fantasy 4 takes the job system of Final Fantasy 3 and applies it to a fixed cast. We talked about kind of how that breaks down

in terms of like the game flow and the sort of predetermined, you know, party makeup for each battle. So it can be very like boutique combat. Like every battle is custom tailored to your party makeup. But I think it's interesting to look at sort of the jobs that came over from Final Fantasy 3 and what they applied to, like where they kind of landed on the characters. It's also interesting that there were a couple of jobs that didn't show up in any real sense that I can think of.

But it's only a couple. Only a couple. Geomancer and Viking. Yeah. Like Geomancer, you know, is about using, like, the environment, the current environment to use special effects and cast magic. It's a very situational skill, very difficult to use. And that didn't really show up even at all. Although the...

No, Final Fantasy 5 has it. No. Yeah, I mean, in Final Fantasy 4, like, it didn't even show up even a non-playable character or any kind of situation. Yeah, I mean, you'll still see, like, Red Mages. and stuff in Final Fantasy 4 but not but the Vikings look a lot like the dwarves in Final Fantasy 4. Yeah that's true that's true. They have

dark faces and glowing eyes and pointy eyes. They look kind of like black mages and they make axes but Vikings like the actual skill in Final Fantasy 3 was basically to draw agro from enemies like that

was kind of your main purpose and Cecil kind of does that as a paladin but instead of drawing agro, he can cover enemies. Which is not quite the same thing, or cover allies. Which is not quite the same thing because basically you turn on cover and then you block attacks from other enemies. It's not a, you know, with the Viking, enemies don't always attack you. It just like increases the appeal of your character as a target.

So it's a little different. Cessel will do, you don't have to turn on cover because he will cover characters that are... Critical character he'll always cover, but you can choose to turn on cover anytime. And that's taken directly from the knight class in Final Fantasy 3. Even though it's called Paladin here, it's a knight.

Gotcha. But he starts out as a dark knight, which is actually more of a prestige class in Final Fantasy 3. It's like a later skill that you get. And the idea in I think in Final Fantasy 3, if I'm remembering right, is that you basically have special dark element attacks that you use like

a tenth of your hit points to cast and that's what Cecil does. And that's something they took away in Final Fantasy 2. Yeah, because they took with Final Fantasy 2 in the dumbification of Final Fantasy 4 they basically, I mean they did

a lot of changes, right? A lot of changes. You know, Final fantasy, they took out like half the items right? Because they gave you like remedy as the cure-all, the panacea, basically. Right, and it was super cheap. And it was called heal. It was called heel, and it healed everything.

But you had cure and heal. And you're like, this is not, this is confusing. Right. But in, yeah, the Japanese version, you had. It's kind of reversed because you heal a wound, a wound heals, and you cure an illness. Yeah. So, whoops. But yeah, in the Japanese version, you had different items for each status.

Yes. You had, you know, golden needle for stone. You had Maiden's Kiss for Frog. You had, was it just a cure potion? Echo screen for, yeah. And then whatever for antidote for poison. Everything for everything. And there were a whole bunch different satisfactions.

They all had their own thing. And it made item management really difficult because you had a very limited inventory. And you could only carry, I believe, 48 unique items. And you can carry 99 of those items, right? But, you know. So, of course, it made items. management and the fat, you know, they have the fat chocobo. Yeah, especially once you get Rosa in your party, and she's an archer and she has different

kinds of arrows. And, like, maybe you need an ice arrow to go up against the fire enemies, but you don't want to have ice arrows equipped when an ice enemy shows up. Yep. So, yeah, it becomes like an inventory juggling situation. You do have to, it's almost earthboundesque as far as, like, you know, having to really, really manage your inventory, for sure. A couple observations on just the abilities that got changed. First, oh, you didn't even get to that.

When you take out the fact that they took out the Dark Knight's ability, the Dark Wave ability, that still shows up, actually, when you're fighting the mirror version. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. The Mirror version does it. Which, like, I'm like going, what the heck is that? Why is he doing this? Yeah, exactly. That's his ability. But it's like, if I'm fighting myself, why is he doing this thing that I can't do?

Right. And that makes sense in the Mirror Battle that the Dark Knight would eventually defeat itself by using its hit point. to cast dark wave. But you don't know that in the American version because you don't have the ability to do that as a dark night. The American version, right, so they take out half the items and they sort of like reduce it down to like heal, right?

And they take out all the attack items because there's attack items that can do thunder but then also thunder, thunder, thunderra. You know, there's an attack item that can do that too. You know, there's tons of them. There's an attack item that can cause death. They take out any item that wasn't necessary and they take out any ability

that was not necessary. to complete battle. So, like, Cain still has jump, but, man, I got to tell you, I almost feel like if jump wasn't, like, an important part of the Valvalus fight, they would have taken that right out, too. Probably. And they would have just made you fight with Keynes. And you would have been like, what's a dragoon? It's a knight that fights with a land. But Sid keeps his peep ability.

Oh, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. So you can still scan enemies. Rosa loses prayer. She does. Which is actually kind of annoying. Probably because of a religious thing.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but they could have just retitled that something. They could have. Well, it's kind of annoying because you lose cheap heel. You do, yeah. She's actually not great without it. No. Yeah.

No. Not in the early part of the game, certainly. No. It's been a long time since I played Final Fantasy, too. Yeah. I can't remember what else was lost. That's a huge list. Okay.

They took that out. Okay. Yep. And remember it's worth explaining what that is. Oh, remember is Tella, because when he starts out with only, me a few of his spells. He can use remember and then he can randomly use one of the spells that he had forgotten. And so like you, you actually, I mean, you can remember like something crazy against a water enemy or something like that. It's accidentally, but it's very unlikely. It's unlikely.

Sometimes he can't remember anything and it's a waste of a turn in that case. Sometimes he remembers a fire spell and uses it on a fire enemy and it heals them, you know. Yeah, it almost feels like, that was kind of inspired by the goof-off in Dragon Quest 3, where you have a random ability and maybe it's going to be awesome, but maybe it's not. Yeah. They also took out Shell and Protect. They did. Which are actually fairly important because obviously they can help.

But also, in doing that, they made the game easier also. So it's not a big deal. So I didn't actually need to use Protect and Shell. But yeah, but they basically just wanted to make it as simple as possible for you to get through the game. right so so you have cecil who is the paladin and dark night or reverse of that dark night and then paladin which is a knight um Rosa is there an archer class in Final Fantasy 3 I can't remember is that like Ranger it's in five yeah but I don't know if it's in three trying to remember I should have looked that up but she's a white mage but her attack ability is she can use staves but she can also use bows which is actually pretty unusual like I can't think of any other white mage characters who have that option and it's actually, it makes her somewhat more useful in battle. Like, when you're

going, ding, ding, with a little staff, who cares? Especially because you can use the arrows to attack while you're in the back run and it doesn't have the damage. Yeah. Yeah, so that's nice. Kane, of course, is a dragon knight or dragoon which basically means he can jump and that takes him out of battle for a little while. He's no longer a targetable

character, which can be really helpful if an enemy has targeted him. Because it doesn't work like that? Do enemy turns take time to play out like a... No, I don't think they do. The thing is it's a risk-reward thing. So, no, the enemy doesn't target you first. They just, they target whoever's on the battlefield.

So if Kane jumps, that means that if you have lower defense characters that are down there, it means it's they take the damage that Kane might have absorbed. And it also tends to take him out of battle for a while because the execution time on jumping is much longer than a standard attack. You lose having a tank down there absorbing damage. Right. But when you're fighting Gobez, you want to jump because he will take out a good chunk of your party. He'll take out the whole party.

Except for Cessel. Except for Cessel, but if Cain's in the air, he doesn't get him. He doesn't get him. He comes back down with full HP. Yeah, that was, I think I've, I think every time I've won that battle, it's because I got to jump off with Cain before he did that attack, for sure. Yep. By the way, so I played the PSP version of this game in preparation for this podcast.

and I had never actually played that version before. And it's already a lot faster to kind of run through that game, but what I did not realize until much later is that there's an auto battle setting for the PSP version. I don't know if they have it in the Game Boy version, but man, PSP version, there's an auto battle. You press select in battle. And if you have, you know how you can change the cursor mode

in Final Fantasy games to either just always be on fight or beyond whatever you left it on. If you just set the cursors to what you want characters to do and then just press select, they will start auto-battling, but it's twice the speed of the battles. So these battles are already a lot faster in the PSP version if you want to increase the speed.

But the auto-battle, it's so quick. And so for leveling up, I was just using auto-battle, and it went so fast. And then one of the other level-up tricks is in the, when you go to the land of summoned monsters, where you fight like Leviathan and Ashura, there is a summoner enemy that summons more monsters, right, into the battle with them.

If you get to the point where, and of course I read about doing this, then I'm like, okay, I really got to try this. There's a summoner that summons Arachne, which is Spider-Lady, and all Arakne does is earthquake. So you cast float to everybody so nothing can hit you. And then I went in, I had Cecil at the Icebrand, which killed Arakne in one hit at that point. And I turned on, I had everybody else defend, and I turned on auto battle. And it was perfectly timed so that the summoner would summon Arachne, Cecil would kill Arachne,

and then in the time it took for Cecil to take another turn, summoner would bring out another arachny because the summoner only summons the same enemy. So literally, if you watch this, a battle like this taking place, it was like, dead,

dead, dead. And it was like 5,000 experience. 5,000 experience. I left it, and I was on the plane, I was on the plane to the switch event. I put it on my tray table and I just watched it run for like 15 minutes. Then after like 15 minutes of this,

I stopped it. I went up seven levels. I went from, Level 45 to 51. Jeez. It was insane. It was completely insane. Kohler's O.P.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, the downside of that is that you have to press the select button on the PSP, which is one of the worst button designs ever. So I use the Vita. Yeah. Oh, okay. That's not as bad. No.

It's the best thing you can play Final Fantasy for, the complete collection, on the Vita or on the PSTV. Yeah, that's, oh, that's right. That's true. Yeah, the best way to play it on PSTV? I have not, but I know you can do it. I bet it looks pretty good. I bet it does. Probably so.

I know PS1 games look pretty nice on PSTV. I've only ever used my PSTV to play Parasite Eve. But it looked nice. It was like, oh, really crisp, clean Parasite Eve. Horray. Interesting. Anyway. So, yeah, going back through the characters,

Rydia is actually the most diverse character because she is a black mage, and she starts out as an evoker, which is basically like a low-level summoner, and then she disappears and she comes back, and she's like a total... Actually, she's just an evoker at first. No, she can cast magic.

But she's like greatly white magic and summons it. Oh, that's right. And then she loses the ability to do white magic. That's right. She comes back as a summoner slash black mage. But she starts out as a red mage slash evoker. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to point out, by the way, we were talking earlier about how mechanics used to express storytelling. Early on, Rydia can't use fire for obvious reasons. And then there's a big moment when they finally get her to use fire. We can say the spoiler. It's okay. It's early in the game. It's fine. I mean, we just spoiled a heck of a lot.

We spoiled a heck of a lot. We spoiled Yang dying. He came out in 1999. Yang doesn't really die. Oh, I spoiled that too. Well, this is a deep die. There's going to be spoilers. Sorry.

But anyway, Cecil at the beginning of the game and Kane, unwittingly, unwittingly destroy Rydia's village with fire. And she's like, I hate fire. You killed my mom with fire, so I don't want to use the fires smoke. I mean, yeah, in the first, like. And you notice in her inventory, she doesn't have fire in there. It's kind of weird. Yeah.

But there's a big moment where she has to use fire, and she gets up the courage to do so. And then it says, Rydia alert fire. Yay. And then she becomes evil and forgets how to do white magic. She doesn't become evil. I'm kidding.

A little evil. Leviatan. Leviatan. I'm replaying it on the S&S, as I may have mentioned. Leviatan. The localization is just incredible. Like, when you go and meet the dwarves, and they're like,

You know, they're like Rally Ho, but they're like Lally, and I'm like Lally. Oh, Rally, of course. Of course. On and on and on. And that was another thing, you know, that stuck essentially through the series. I'm coming down from the Mount Ordeals. And I'm like, the Mount Ordeals, okay. Right, right, right.

Not up to ordeals. Yes. But many, many. I mean, my favorite is dwarf armors are hard. Can you move in it? They tried by God. By they mean one Japanese person with an English dictionary tried. And you know what?

But they came up with Spoonie. That's memorable. They tried. They did. Yeah. They did a pretty good job and it needed a second pass. Yep. Yep.

But as a starting localization, it's fine. It's just it wasn't finished. Yeah. But so it goes. It needed a native English speaker to look at it and say, nope, that stupid would never say that. And Square would hire native English speakers to do localizations in the future. Yeah. I mean, literally right after Final Fantasy 2.

This was back in the day when they still said Fire 1, Fire 2. They did, yeah. And at the time, actually, when they changed it for Final Fantasy 8 to, like, Faraga and all that, I was actually annoyed because I'm like, well, Fire 3. I mean, it's so self-explanatory, like, very powerful. But now I'm like, oh, yeah, fire, oh, man, that's really basic, okay. And this one goes up to, like, Ferraja? It goes up to Ja.

Jha. It does. Yeah. It doesn't go up to Faraja. It goes up to Furaja. but that's it. Okay. Yeah.

Or cure four. Cure four. And that's something they brought to Easy Type as well. They renamed the spells. So Faya I won. Faya, two. Anyway, so yeah, under the characters, Yang, you have basically straight black belt. Edge is a ninja and a thief because he has the steel command, right?

But also useless. But also useless. But the steel command can be helpful sometimes, maybe, if you're a cheap skate. Do you feel like Shadow was like another? an attempt to make amends for Edge by making Shadow like such a badass? No, that was designed by Nomura. Yeah.

Yeah. That's just Nomura working in Nomura mode. Yeah. Let's make him badass. Yep. But he had a dog and he was awesome. He did have a dog. So the game has two sages, which I think is interesting.

Tella dies off. And he is definitely a sage, which is like the prestige class mage. You can do anything. Yep. And then later you get Fusoia, who is in the party a very brief amount of time. Yes.

What was the deal? deal with that dude. It's weird. Like when he dies, he melts or something? It was because Kane disappears for a little while, yeah. And then Fusoia joins for a little while, and Kane comes back. And then they, like, Kane or Fusoya and Gobes go off to find the mood or something. I don't know why they bothered putting Fusoya in the party. Like, it doesn't make any sense. I don't know. He's just there for a little while, and you're like, oh, I've got this guy who melts. Yeah, he does melt. He does. Getting back to Tela really quickly. Oh, yeah. So, By like modern kind of gaming vocabulary, you would think, oh, he's totally a tutorial character.

And he does function in that regard early on because he's like super powerful. Like he can nuke a lot of enemies. You're like, great. And then he comes back much later. He's a liability. But no, when he learns all those spells, he's actually still quite strong. I mean, yeah, like you have to manage his MP and everything. But it's actually really kind of interesting that they had this almost tutorial-like character.

but then that he is in for such a large chunk of the game. Right, but he becomes a liability in another sense because his physical stats don't really improve. In fact, he can sometimes lose hit points when he levels up. Like, that's, that's... He's dying. He's dying slowly. It's terrible. Like, he becomes weaker as he levels up sometimes.

There's actually an equivalent in firearm. And he never gains more hit points or magic points, ever. There's actually an equivalent in firearm. It's the Jagan, which is you have this, character who's like a prestige class, he's like a top knight or whatever. In the original game, he was jagging. And you can use him a lot, but you got to be

careful because he's strong in the early going, but he doesn't like improve at all. He actually and pretty quickly, eventually just gets passed by everybody. And if you use him as an endgame unit, you're in trouble. It's like a trap. It's a trap. But in Final Fantasy 4, it doesn't matter

because it controls your party for you. Well, yeah, because also Tella dies. And he's the only Tella is the only one of your of your playable characters who actually dies. They, but, but. Everyone else dies for a little while and then they come back. But they actually do, I mean, but, but is it any less impactful at that moment? It's not.

It's like when Palom and Porham turn themselves as stone, you, that's heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking. And you think that they're, when Yang sacrifices himself, or when Yang sacrifices himself, Then when Sid sacrifices himself, like, it's all like, oh, my God. Yeah, but then Sid comes back like five minutes later. He does. Literally, like, that's the point of what you're like, well, okay. Yeah.

But when Tella dies, his body disappears. Yes. So that you don't have to deal with the fact that they just go, well, he's dead. And then they just leave him to Roth on the floor of the Tower of Zat. And I love that in with Palom and Porum, when you click on them, it opens up your little item dialogue box and you can use a golden needle on them. And it says that doesn't work because they turn themselves to stone of their own volition. And, of course, in Final Fantasy 2, where there is no Golden Needle, you can click on them to do nothing. You can bring up your item box and then there's nothing you can do.

It's like, what's happening? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. So some of the other characters, the last few characters, a little more obscure. Like, I guess Sid would be a scholar. There was no engineer class of Final Fantasy 3, but scholars could, like, see enemy attacks.

But they also, like, attacked with books. So it's not. Smarter to make him like a working man, you know, but make him an engineer. Right. Yeah. But he, like, throws wrenches of bad guys. Or, no, he just hits him with a wrench. He whacks him with a wrench.

Yeah. And hammers, too. Hammers and rinses. I always had him equipped with hammers. Okay. I just gave him a silver wrench. Maybe I'm thinking of... I gave him a silver wrench.

Oh. Okay, yeah. I was thinking that's right. Maybe I'm getting mistaken for Monty Mole. I think that the icon for the hammer looks like a wrench. Okay. Well, I was confused. I'm like, oh, that.

That must be a wrench. It does look like a wrench. Because it just says, it has a thing. It says silver. Yeah. I think that's a hammer. Probably. But I don't, yeah.

Is he still it from Maxwell? Yes. Also, everything that was quote-unquote silver in Final Fantasy 2 was Mithril. Yeah. Another thing they changed because they were like American kids won't know what Mithril is. Mithril. No one's ever read Lord of the Rings in America. Right.

Yeah. And then finally, Palim and Porum are a devout and Amagus, which are character classes that I think got bumped out of the remake of Final Fantasy region. They just, like, wiped out. Yep. They're like the lower level mage classes. Yep. So each of them can only cast a school of magic,

white or black magic. Which I guess in any other game would be white mage, black mage. But Final Fantasy 3 called them devout and megas. Which one is the girl? I can never remember. I literally just replayed this game. Porum is the girl.

Yeah. And she had cry. Right. She could cry. And what did Palom have? It was like boast or something? I think so. Yeah.

But in the SNS version, there's also a twin? Oh, yeah. Yes, there's a twin cast. And that's in Final Fantasy, too, as well. How does twin cast work? They both start casting. Yeah, and if one of them gets killed, then, oops. But sometimes they would say, the first time I got a really powerful spell on it, I'm like, oh, sweet.

But after that, it was just like nothing happened. It's random. Yeah, it's kind of like remember. Kind of annoying and not worth it. So, like, sometimes it's something okay. And sometimes it's like it's comet, which is like baby meteor. Yeah. So I think that's about all I have to say about Final Fantasy 4 itself.

Is there more that needs to be discussed, do you think? Well, I mean, we could spend a lot of time on Final Fantasy 4, but nothing that's jumping to mind. It was a, I mean, I think people forget, like, what a, how it really set the stage for JRP's to come in terms of the way that it's story tropes, how it handled. focus on story. I would say that was a turning point at which JRP's stopped trying to be like Dragon Quest and suddenly started trying to be like this other game. The JRP that we know, like that people kind of goof on, that is Final Fantasy 4. Yeah, yeah, yep.

But the funny thing is you look back on it and people are like, oh, well, Final Fantasy 4, you know, we kind of goof on it. It's like cheesy and everything. But it really holds up. Yeah. I've been replaying it. first of all, man, that game moves at such a clip. Like within like five hours, so much has happened, but it doesn't feel rushed. Like, I feel like it does such an expert job of establishing these relationships really quickly, like keeping the plot moving so you're never really getting bored.

But at the same time, like, it all feels really natural. So like when you, like you meet Palom and Porum and like less than an hour later, they're turning into, you know, statues. And you feel like heartbroken, and you feel like you've been with him forever, you know, and stuff like that. It's a really lean video game. There's no fat in terms of the story or in terms of the gameplay. Like, you can blast through this game in 12 hours. Although I have to say, I mean, you know,

could, would, might this game have been better had they had, had this game been like a 50-hour game instead of a 30-hour game, had they put more dungeons in to let you spend more time with those characters and not cycled about in and out so fast? I like a good 20-hour RPG. I think it's briskness works in its favor. There's not a whole lot of 20-hour RPGs. Yeah, I mean, yeah, potentially, yeah.

I mean, Swikoden is a 20-hour RPG, and it gives you 108 characters to play with. I mean, among other things, like, we were talking about how wonderfully balanced and how interesting each of the boss battles are, and there's a lot of them. Like, when you're going through a lot of the dungeons, you're probably going to fight a minimum of at least two bosses,

and they're treated as, like, you know, legit bosses, and it's almost like a puzzle and like figuring out, it's like, okay, well, I got this party mix and I need to figure out like what exactly I'm supposed to be doing with them. And in the SNS version, not so hard, right? Like I've been like kind of going, oh, well, this is actually surprisingly easy. I already killed you. Okay. Whereas like once you get to the PSP version, like the remake, it starts, you know, kind of kicking up the difficulty just a little bit. And then of course, once you get to the moon, the game's like, oh, you're going to kick your ass, no.

Yeah. Another thing that I remember, like, when I went back to Final Fantasy 2, back in, like, 2000 or whatever, after playing six, my first thought was, oh, this is really, like, fantasy. Okay, this is like much more fantasy, like medieval. Right. But then you get a hovercraft. And then by the end, you're on a space whale. You're fighting through a giant robot.

Right. Yeah, you're fighting through a giant robot. The Tower of Zod is, like, really technological. Yeah. And, like, so much of what I associate with Final Fantasy. like really was codified in Final Fantasy 4. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, Final Fantasy, I mean, ever since Final Fantasy won and running into Warmec, you know, has been about, like, medieval. Fantasy had time travel for God's sake. Right. It was medieval fantasy with a little injection of sci-fi. Like, that was always there. And, of course, I mean, geez, the first Ultima game, I mean, you get in a spaceship, right? Ultima 2 has, like, a shooter section.

Yeah. So, I mean, that's always been kind of a part of. like the computer RPG in general has just had that little sci-fi twist to it because it was the Wild West and you can do whatever you want. Right. But yeah. Yeah, I think Final Fantasy 4 works as a brief game.

I think there is a tendency among video game fans to say, oh, I like this. I wish there were more of it. And that's precisely the attitude that got us Final Fantasy for the after years, which I don't think anyone really wanted. We asked for it and then we regretted it. I didn't. I never asked for this.

Do we even want to talk about this game? Well, I mean, let's talk about the sort of the ports of Final Fantasy 40. Yes, let's talk about the ports. Yeah, so there are a lot of distinct versions of this game, maybe more so than any other RPG I can think of. Oh, there's a lot. Yeah, because, you know, you have the Super Famicom release. The American Super NES release, which is a substantially different game in terms of balance and content. And then Easy Type.

And then Easy Type, which has also changed. And then a few years later, you had the PlayStation version, which basically took Final Fantasy. for the Japanese game and added load times but it's not too bad like this one wasn't as bad as five five and six especially six was really bad no four was the worst of those three was it

really especially in the original PlayStation version the load times and the time it took to save your game were absolutely so that's why I think they put the memo oh you know maybe I okay they cleaned it up for the US version when they finally brought out Final Fantasy 4 for the PlayStation

in the US they actually went back and they fixed a lot of the load times. Okay. The original Japanese version, which I did actually play a big chunk of, saving your game took so long. They actually created little Pac-Man style sequences where the characters would come out and run around with each other

that you could watch while the game was saving. I'm pretty sure I'm not making that out. Well, and that came out in the U.S. in Final Fantasy Chronicles, right? Yes. Which came packaged with Chrono Trigger. That was the worst.

The U.S. version of that. That game was absolutely the worst battle times, even for battles. It was just... That was because of the way they had to translate it. They injected, like, the U.S. script into it. They're code running on top of code. Yeah. So Final Fantasy 4 was Tose for the PlayStation.

Yes. And so Tosei has done good jobs and they have done bad jobs. And Final Fantasy 4 on PlayStation was bad job. But then they remade the game for Wonder Swan. They did. Yeah. What was your quick digression? Well, I've told this story before, but in 2000, we were doing a cross-country trip, and we, I would, to, like, Wyoming or whatever.

And, you know, because there's, like, freaking nothing between Minnesota and Wyoming, we installed, like, a TV in the car that ran off the battery and with a PlayStation. And I was playing games on the PlayStation, watching movies on the PlayStation, because, you know, whatever. And, well, I was playing Final Fantasy anthology, and I was playing Final Fantasy Five. And funny thing, when you turned off the TV, it also turned off the PlayStation. And so I'm like, my dad, like, parked. He's like, you've got to stop now. I'm like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm going to save.

I'm going to save. I'm going to save. I'm like saving. And he's like, screw this. Turns off the car. Memory file corrupted. Oh, no. That was the furthest I ever got in Final Fantasy 5.

Oh, no. Yeah. So sorry you hear that. Well, that's what I get for playing a freaking PlayStation in a car, off the car battery. All right. So the WonderSwan color version is... Oh, because they were originally going to do it on the WonderSwan black and white. Oh, were they? Oh, that's right.

They showed off WonderSwan black and white Final Fantasy 4 before they even did Final Fantasy 1 and 2 for the color. That's right. And that was such a, like, Final Fantasy 1, 2, and 4 on WonderSwan were such a kind of moment because that system didn't come to the U.S. It did not. And Square was in arrears with Nintendo at the time. so there was no way those games were ever coming to a Nintendo system, no, sir. And portable Final Fantasy? Oh, my God. What a dream.

We totally lost out. Well, that was why Square wanted back in with Nintendo. It wasn't because they wanted them in a GameCube games. It was because they realized they could port the Final Fantasy. They're like, man, this WonderSwan thing is going nowhere. Yep. So that's what happens. So then we got Final Fantasy 4 advance.

And do Nintendo publish that? In the U.S. In the U.S. In the U.S. Yeah. And published all of them. The first one I beat. So I played Final Fantasy 2, but continuing on my save game woes,

halfway through the game, the battery of Final Fantasy 2 on the cartridge died. Wow. So I was like, oh, okay. So I put it away for quite a while. But then FF4 Advance came out on the GBA and I got it. And I played it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course, Final Fantasy 4 Advanced, like as we were already discussing, had, well, it was like a return to kind of the classic version.

It was almost a definitive version, but it also had some real. problems with the ATB system. Yeah, so there was a bug in the American version, fixed for the European version, where the timing was off. And sometimes the game would just not register your command inputs, but it also sometimes wouldn't register enemy command inputs. So it actually balanced out, but it did create kind of a hiccup. But besides that, that version was really, really good.

Like they really, it wasn't just a port of the game. It was a comprehensive, expanded. port. I have really fond memories of this game because that was just after I had really become a real member of the video games press. I'd been, you know, went up for like a year, but I'd gone from being graphic designer guy to editor who was allowed to play video games. And now I could even do reviews for EGM. So they gave me a GBA lockbox with this game. Which they used to have. Yeah, I took it home over Thanksgiving break, which apparently you weren't supposed to do with lockboxes, but I didn't realize that.

that because no one told me. And so I remember like going to Mark McDonald's Thanksgiving party and like playing the game on the way over there and playing it and like everyone was kind of gathered around watching me play this old Final Fantasy game. But everyone was like, oh, that's really great. And yeah, it has all this extra content. So first of all, the biggest change at the beginning like, you know, initially is one, it's the Japanese version of the game with an English script, a comprehensively overhauled English script that, is coherent and even has in jokes in it. It's great.

But it restores all the content that was missing from Final Fantasy 2. And then when you get to the end of the game, all of a sudden you have the ability to choose your party. You can go up to the Tower of Prayer in Mycidia and all the characters who are

not dead, so everyone but Tella is there hanging out. And you can switch them in and out of your party so you can go into the final dungeon with whatever party you want as long as Cecil's there. And so that changes everything, like you suddenly have this flexibility to play through the end of the game in a different way. Once you beat the game, then there are extra dungeons, and each character has his or her own dungeon that is specifically built around that character's abilities. And some of them are fairly standard, but then you have SIDS dungeon where you're actually like playing crazy taxi with an airship.

And like you're flying all around the world map and people are saying, I need to get to this place. in X amount of time, and so you take off and you have to fly across the world map in a limited amount of time. It's ridiculous, but just like there's all this different stuff you can do. And then there is kind of the ultimate final dungeon, which is really, really just like it just keeps going and going. And when you get to the end, then you fight zero miss easy type. And it's just like this. So did you do all of the extra content? I did all this stuff.

On the lockbox. I didn't even get to save it. I didn't get to keep it. It was on the review rom, but I loved it so much. I was like, this is great. I love this. And I don't think all the other versions of the game have had that extra content.

PSG does. Does it? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because I kind of burned out on the game with that playthrough because I like plumbed the depths of that game. The PSP version has pretty much everything that the GBA version does

as well as after year. Plus it fixes the bugs. Ah, yes. So that would be the version to play. That's the definitive version. The Game Boy version, sometimes characters, would skip a turn, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like playing Final Fantasy 5 on the Game Boy, I'd get an extra turn, but I don't know if I'm misremembering that or not. The GBA one. I got FF5 on the GBA, which is a total digression, but that's kind of the definitive one as well. It is. It has some slowdown and some audio issues, but other than that, it's good.

Oh, so you did play through Final Fantasy 5 on GBA. Yeah. Yeah. That was the furthest I got on the anthology. The anthology. Because load screens are so horrible. I'm sorry. Yeah, you missed out on Wyburn.

Good times. But then it kept coming out for stuff even after the PSP. And salsa. Well, we can talk about that in the Final Fantasy 5 episode. Because it came out on iOS. Or no, it came on DS. Final Fantasy 4? Yeah.

Yeah, but the DS game is a completely different Final Fantasy 4. It is. And I didn't expect that at all. It's a head-to-to-toe reinvention, and it is hard as hell. Yeah. It is a game that will. chew you up, spit you out, and then kick your ass for good measure. And it had

additional mechanics as well. It did. It had a really crazy system where you would get these skills that you could permanently assign to a character. Right. And once you use that skill, it was stuck to that character forever. And that was important because you could

do New Game Plus twice. And so only twice though, like the third time you were done. That was it. But every time you replayed it, those characters would carry through those skills or something. There was something along those lines. So you could have like the ultimate party at the end if you built the

characters right. It was yeah, like it was all 3D graphics. It had voiced cutscenes. They gave it in graphics. But you know, for DS, it's what... It looked good on DS. When I played it, when it was brand new, I imported it. And I was like, this looks nice. This is good.

Not so much now, but I mean, you know, for the time. On the platform. But it had like an Ivelis style localization, much more serious and sort of archaic English. No more something awful references, basically? I don't think so. No, it was much more, like the Japanese script was expanded too.

It was not just, you know, like liberties taken in localization. Like it was a, you know, the Japanese version was different too. It was like sort of the definitive version by Takashi Tokut. This is why we have so many versions of Final Fantasy for because it's just, it's a small, simple game. You know, it's like, oh, okay, you can do a WonderSwan version. You can take it, tear it all apart and put it back together and, like, build a new game out of it for the Nintendo DS.

You know, you can easily put it on PSP and whatever else. Yep. Yeah, so that version is pretty crazy. And like I said, some of the boss battles are just, what is happening. And even the standard battles, like, you get into a new tower or something and things just tear you apart. So, importantly, that is just, that is a different game. Like, when we're talking about Final Fantasy 4, we are not.

talking about the D.S. game Final Fantasy 4 is a different. That is a new game built on the bones of the old. Right. Right. Not to say it's bad. It's just different. No, I think it's great. It's really good if you, say, like me, had burned yourself out on Final Fantasy 4 through the years. This was a chance to revisit it and really take a fresh start to it. And I wish they had done this with more of the Final Fantasy games. But, you know, I asked them about that. And Tokita said, like, well, you know, I worked on Final Fantasy 3. Final Fantasy 4, those were originally my games, but I'm not comfortable going into five and six and changing those up because those were not my creations. I don't feel like I have the right to do that.

So that's ultimately why we never saw remakes of those games, even though it made perfect sense, because like the people who, you know, I guess Hirogu Ito or Yoshinori Kitase didn't want to do them. Whereas if they had been Tokita games, he would have been like, let's go for it.

Someone said he made the after years in Final Fantasy dimensions. Oh my God. So, okay. The freaking after year. So first of all, the after years was a mobile game. It was a Japanese feature phone game originally. And so, of course, you looked at it, because I remember seeing a Tokyo game show and, like, playing a little bit of it on a Japanese feature phone.

And I was like, well, I'll never, ever, ever play this game because, of course, Japanese phones and U.S. phones at that point, never the Twain shall mean. But then they brought it to Wiiware. And then they brought it, yeah, they brought it to Wiiware. That happened. Yes, it did. So on Wiiware, they just used the graphics from the SNS Final Fantasy games.

So, I mean, it looked like, oh, my God, they created a sequel to Final Fantasy 4 using the original graphics and music and everything. And oh, my God, this is incredible. Then you find out a couple of things. One, they split it all up into chapters. So it doesn't really feel like an RPG. It feels like all these little mini sort of things using, yeah, you know, based on the fact that it kind of came. If any Final Fantasy could afford to be broken up like that, it would be Final Fantasy 4. True.

Very true, because the original game, yep. But it was still kind of a mess, and I tried to play it on Wiiware, but I got through a couple of chapters, and I was just like, oh, God, I cannot do this. None of it stuck with me, except I just remember, like, the game balance felt really off. It is. Like, did they, did they playtest this at all? Maybe not. That's possible. Because it's a mobile game, who cares.

And so that was kind of, that was like a really just sort of a sad, like. like, you know, dragging the game's corpse out, you know, for, and, and, and, I avoided it like the plague because I have, I have so many fond memories of Final Fantasy Four, and I just, I really didn't need, like, a cheap, as you said, dragging the corpse out, uh, rehash that was originally designed for mobile and eventually got put on Wiiware. I just, I did not need that in my life. And I remember back in the day, there was talk about Final Fantasy Six, two, and people were like, oh, well, I wonder if they would make Final Fantasy sequels.

And then we kind of discovered what that world is like. Maybe you don't want that. Oh, Dirds of Cerberus, the after years. Let's not have any more sequels. And then we realized that it was a lot like Disney sequels. Like, Little Made returned to the C. That's Final Fantasy 4 after years. Right, right, right.

Yes. I wish Final Fantasy 4, the after years, would return to the sea. One more note on ports. It also came out on iOS and Steam, and it was more or less based on the DS version. but they also had their own choices that included like a side quest like the search for the eight idylons and yeah yeah you can play final fantasy four a lot if you want you can play final fantasy four on pretty much any platform you want yeah yeah yeah like any modern platform you play it on play it on playstation because you can get on PSN you can get it on the Wii like you can download it because you get six yeah and you can play Wii on Wii you yeah if I were so what version would you recommend because I would tell people if they were playing it for the very first time. If you... Yeah, I think if you have a place that you should feed us.

Because it's not... The sprites are redrawn, but they're redrawn with pixels. They're not redrawn as like really gross blobby-ins. I mean, it looks good. Yeah, it does look good. The auto battle is nice. It's really, you know, there's a few, you know, extra sort of... It's kind of the purest version that you're going to get.

It is very pure. If you play the original SNEST, if you play the SNEST North American version, not only it's a localization horrible, but... It's not good. Yeah, there's just like, it's so different from the original Japanese version. It's like, like I said, playing it for the let's play. I'm like, this is a really fascinating experience. I'm learning so much about Final Fantasy 4 that I didn't know.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anybody here. So here's a listener Here's a listener mail section, letter from Andrew Ryan that interjects an interesting opinion. He says, man, the after years is hot garbage, but that interlude chapter is actually pretty solid. I wanted to say my piece and defend the nice, if not perfect, add-on episode that was better than expected.

Do you guys play the interlude? I played some of the interlude. I don't know if it's as good as all that. I mean, I played it, and I'm like, oh, okay, it's reusing Final Fantasy sprites to, you know, tell another little sort of story again. It's not because it's not all broken up like

the after years. I guess it's better. But I guess by the time I started playing the interlude, I just finished playing Final Fantasy 4 and I was a little burned out. Yeah. I can see that. Duclin Fair says, ports and versions aside,

I feel like Final Fantasy 4 really represented a turning point for the series, as this is where the series really started pushing technological limits and focusing on narrative presentation with its heavy focus on characters and indeed romance, which were rarely touched on in games at that point. I suppose that actually began with two, but four had the technology to bring that to the forefront, and its more traditional leveling system combined with more refined combat, kept people more engaged in both a story and game. It really is

impressive to look at four and compare it to other console RPGs that came out around the same time, as they seem rather simple in comparison, although it would soon be close by other games, including its immediate successor. A couple things. I was reflecting on the fact that Final Fantasy 4 holds up so well, like, so many games from that time were actually quite primitive and RPGs especially, so because RPGs were like, you know, the kind of purest expression of game mechanics that you were going to find that at that time and they were like kind of almost put together by engineers and they didn't necessarily care about a wonderful user experience. So Final Fantasy 4, by that context, was like actually really accessible and

really wonderful in that respect. That's why it's still fun to play. Another thing is, like, back in those days, I can't stress enough what how different Final Fantasy before was compared to all of the other fare that was coming out at that time. We differentiated especially on console RPGs

from other games by the fact that it had a story. Having a story, having any kind of drama whatsoever was a big freaking deal on consoles back at that time because everything was shoot-em-up, puzzle game, maybe a simulation,

maybe platformers. Platformers dominated everything. And you just didn't have a story outside of like a nice little opening introductory cutscene. And so Final Fantasy 4 comes out and is telling you a full-blown, dramatic story, how ever simple it is. And to your average console player, that was a big freaking deal. Yeah, Final Fantasy 4 was not the first Super NES RPG, but what the hell was even happening in Dracan? Like that game, I do not get it like you're walking around and then a giant doghead appears from the ground and kills you.

What? No, Final Fantasy 4 was like solid. It was really, really well made and it made sense. I can't say that for Dracan. Which maybe was cool in the original PC version that came out in Europe. But the Super Nias version is just like, what? For me, Final Fantasy 4, like in my real experience, Final Fantasy 4 is the beginning of the Final Fantasy series.

You know? Like, I played some Final Fantasy 1 and then abandoned it. We never got Final Fantasy 2. We never got Final Fantasy 3. So for me, Final Fantasy 4 was like the first Final Fantasy game that I played all the way through. And to play the games that are any earlier than that, it does not capture, that doesn't feel to me like playing a Final Fantasy game. Like this really set down what a modern Final Fantasy game is.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and even compared to other RPGs that came out at that time, like Fantasy Star 2, great games, but a lot of people would say, well, these games are kind of esoteric and, like, you have to be really a fan to be able to appreciate them now. Yeah, Fantasy Star 2 is patted out a lot with big, confusing dungeons. Final Fantasy 4 just cuts the fat. That's what's really a great thing about it.

I have one more letter from Juan from Bogota who says, Hello, Retronaut's crew. Here's an unusual take on Final Fantasy 4. The game probably helped me learn English and eventually become a professional translator. Yes, I really mean that, despite having an infamously sloppy localization that felt a little odd,

even in the eyes of a second-language student. The bulk of the game's narrative was surprisingly readable. More importantly, its dramatic story full of theatrics and colorful character development maintained my interest and awakened to my curiosity about unfamiliar terms, which can be extremely helpful for young boys who want to put their growing English skills

into practice outside of a boring old classroom. Looking through the manual and rereading the game's coverage in Nintendo publications over the years also had a positive influence. So there you go. We can slam the game for its terrible localization, and indeed it was terrible, but it was serviceable,

and I guess, you know, maybe it's like a good sort of starting point for someone who, is still learning the language themselves. Right. It's cool. He got kids to read. It did.

It was kind of the baseline back then. Before Pokemon, there was Final Fantasy 4. I think what the market research that Square was probably looking at at that time that led them towards Mystic Quest and things like that was that, was that like the average age of the person who owned and always, and like, you know, regularly played the Super Nintendo was probably younger than it was in Japan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Could be. Yeah. All right. Any other thoughts on Final Fantasy 4 before we call it a day? One of the best RPGs ever made. It felt bigger when I was younger. It felt like it was this massive, expansive thing. But now to replay it as an adult, it's like,

ooh, that's a fast game. It's a fast, short game. It's funny. But, I mean, it's one of those situations where, you know, like everything that has come since builds on that. And so, yeah, of course it seems a little slight in retrospect. But it was such a, like it hits. so hard at the time.

Foundational is a good word for it. Yeah. Though I was just looking through release dates and I realized that Fantasy Star 2 actually came out like a couple years earlier than Final Fantasy 4. So in that respect... I think that was 89. Yeah, Fantasy Star 2 like had that sprawling narrative on console long before Final Fantasy 4. But I feel like maybe Final Fantasy 4 ultimately stuck more in the popular imagination.

You can blame Sega for that, whatever. But in terms of, yeah, foundational is the way that I would put Final Fantasy 4. And I think the fact that it holds up so well and it's so fun to play, almost no matter what platform you play it on, really speaks to just how well they utilize the mechanics, how, like, engaging the battle system really is, despite the fact that by RPG standards, extremely limited, extremely linear. It's just, I really appreciate it playing through.

it again. And it's almost one of those RPGs that I could just go back to it any time. And it really helps, of course, that it goes by so fast. But as I already said, it didn't feel rushed. Like, it establishes so much. It lays so much groundwork. And yet, like, I look back and I'm like, wow, man, all that happened in five hours. But at the same time, I'm like, but that's okay. Yeah. All right. So thanks, Kat. Thanks Chris and Bob for coming in. And Bob. Bob. Bob's not here. So where can we find you guys on the internet? You can find me at US Gamer where I am the editor-in-chief or something.

How about that? How about that? And probably right now I'm like flying around like in Europe or something. I don't know when this episode is going to be released. But yeah, you should check out my, if you like me talking about RPGs, you should check out my RPG podcast, Axe the Blood God, which is US Gamer's official RPG podcast every week, Nadia Oxford. and I talk about all of the relevant RPG news, whatever is coming out. And I think that this would be very relevant to Retronauts fans

because we talk a lot about Japanese games. I mean, we talk about we love all RPGs. I think the Blood God loves all RPGs, but we especially tend to cover Japanese games. Yeah, note that that's the official U.S. gamer RPG podcast. Don't listen to the unofficial U.S. gamer RPG podcast. That's what got me fired. You can come and find me on Twitter.

My Twitter handle is Kobunheat, K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T, if you want to find out what I am up to at any given moment. And as for myself, I'm doing Retronauts. So thanks for listening to my work. Retronauts, of course, is supported through hopefully advertisement. And also Patreon. You can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts and slash

GameSpite. One is podcasts, one is videos. I work on both, and that's how I'm investing my time. So please feed me and my wife. It'll be great. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find Retronauts on Twitter as Retronauts, also on Facebook, Tumblr, I don't know what else.

We're around. So check us out. Get our podcast as a subscription on iTunes. That would be cool. Leave a review for us on iTunes. That would also be cool. especially if it's not one star. And yeah, thanks for listening. Please continue listening and tell your friends about us because I like having food to eat. So thanks again. We'll be back next week

with another full episode because that's what we do now. And we will talk about something other than Final Fantasy 4. And so, I'm gonnae, uh, . We're going to be the Oh,

I'm going to be the Oh, and I'm going to I'm going to and I'm going and the You know,

and I'm going to be, uh, and uh, The Mueller Report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional

resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder.

I'm Ed Donahue.