Final Fantasy IV (SNES, 1991)

Look at any contemporary adventure game review.  Somewhere, you will see the author listing the annoying features of adventure games in their "golden age", the 90s, and deciding whether the subject of the review manages to avoid these or not.  This has become a very tired and unnecessary cliché - not only has the definition of adventure game expanded broadly to include very cinematic un-puzzly games like The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain, but even "pure" modern adventure game developers, like Dave Gilbert and his development company Wadjet Eye games, have been good at designing very clean, well-clued puzzles, and avoiding crowded inventories and the like for over a decade.  Should we be comparing the next Call of Duty iteration to Quake?

Similarly, it is a cliché in Japanese RPG reviews to claim that the genre has not freed itself from its own heyday in the 16- and 32-bit eras.  I've always found this rather befuddling - it's clear to anyone who compares Final Fantasy VII with Final Fantasy XII or XIII that the genre has changed quite a bit.  And that's not to mention the crazy things happening elsewhere in the genre, such as the Persona series, or even a critical darling like Dark Souls.  But this critical consensus remains, and gets trotted out whenever we see something like Xenoblade Chronicles and Bravely Default, games which manage to scratch a nostalgic itch while still breaking new ground in their own ways.

In this popular narrative, the pinnacle (and hints of the eventual downfall) of the JRPG can be found in the two giants sitting astride a console generation gap - Final Fantasy VI and VII.  And the clear template for those games would be the ever-underrated Final Fantasy IV.  Together these games form a "classic trilogy" in the series.

It was my goal to ignore this whole narrative and nostalgia on this most recent playthrough of FF IV.  What's left?

A nice, fun, relatively short RPG, that's what.  It's a groundbreaking game, but there's surprisingly little that's actually new in Final Fantasy IV.  The class system stays pretty close to FF III, but instead of four characters with changable class, there are twelve characters with (mostly) fixed class, and thus well-defined personalities.  This leads naturally to a stronger story, much stronger than that of FF II, with lots more dialogue.  The gameplay is simple but engaging; the newly patented Active Time Battle system keeps things artifically exciting to offset the loss of complexity.  As for the technical side of things?  Of course, there were huge advantages to working with the SNES as opposed to its predecessor, but it's proably fair to say that FF IV is a very wordy 8-bit game with lots of Mode 7.

Of course the story is the main draw.  It's easy to forget that Squaresoft was taking a risk in putting such a big emphasis on plot.  After all, FF II was not a huge success, and the Japanese public were happy to spend their paychecks on the dirt-simple Dragon Quest games.  But Square was smart enough to see an opportunity to stand apart from the competition, and perhaps, although I have no evidence of this, they even foresaw success in America through this avenue.  In any case, they found that success, despite an extremely sloppy translation and loads of NOA censorship*.  It's rare to find a game that elicits such nostalgia in spite of itself.  There are plenty of gamers who claim that every Final Fantasy after VII is garbage, but most of those gamers still have fond memories about this game, despite its many flaws.

So it's fair to say that, after lots of tweaking, Square hit the sweet spot, one that would prepare them for their later classics.  But is it comparable to Final Fantasy VI or VII?  Not really.  While I think there's a (tentative) case to be made that an early game like Link to the Past is better than an acknowledged great like Ocarina of Time, I don't think this is one of those situations.  Sure, FF VI can get a little convoluted if you're not paying attention, but the story of FF IV is still too simple to be very effective.  The writers try to make up for this by having nearly every character sacrifice themselves at some point, only to come back later on.  (This also lets the developers change the party members around.  Never has a game so demanded the ability to change the party manually, and this would become possible in later editions.)  At one point, three of your characters are simultaneously in bed, each recovering from a different "sacrifice".  Clare and I joked that the dominant theme of the game might be "Convalescence".

But despite the fact that there are (at least) two much better Final Fantasies, I still agreed with my wife when she said that if she was looking for a fun, simple 30-hour JRPG that epitomized the genre, this is what she would recommend.  This game really did set the template.

*Despite all advice to the contrary, I stuck to my stupid rules and played the game in its original U.S. incarnation.  And to be honest, it wasn't that bad.  Yes, the translation was really sloppy - lots of awkward word choices, occasional misattributed dialogue, and one very spoony bard.  But enjoying this story even with the best of translations requires a healthy sense of humor.  Yes, the North American version is easier, with many of the characters' abilities removed.  But minimalism is a principal virtue of this game anyway, and none of the Final Fantasy games are really all that hard.  What genuinely did bug me was the internal censorship.  I still can't believe that Nintendo was so afraid of conservative backlash that they wouldn't even use the word "pray".  And calling it the Tower of "Bab-il" wasn't fooling anyone.  We still call this the "Golden Age" of RPGs, but it's clear to me that Nintendo wasn't the least bit interested in selling their games as art.  Makes you really glad how far games have come (and how far they still have to go).