0212 AM... going back for more heroic sacrifice

This landmark Japanese RPG receives a new or updated translation very often: approximately every 40 months.

Clyde Mandelin, Legends of Localization

There truly are so many ways to play Final Fantasy IV. That's not my excuse for having buried it in the backlog for as long as I have. My first encounter with the series was the Final Fantasy III (3D remake), a game that felt extraordinarily unfriendly to the merely JRPG curious, having only dabbled with Pokémon and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I loved the music, the goofy chibi characters, and I maintain that the Nintendo DS is the best form factor for JRPGs, but complexity of the job system didn't interface well with my adolescent brain, a to me puzzling degree of freedom with the limitation of required abilities for certain dungeons. It still left a positive enough impression that I'd try again with the Final Fantasy IV (3D Remake), finding some relief in having to play the party the narrative dealt, only to be crushed by mid-game bosses. Almost two decades later, and with considerably more JRPG experience under my belt, I felt it was a good time to revisit the original version, or rather the closest to the original version that wouldn't be compromised by translation errors.

Full disclosure, I did not play the vanilla release on actual hardware, but rather a ROM patched to bring the colours and music closer to the SNES original on the Miyoo Mini+. As with a lot of post-launch lineup GBA games, TOSE opted for a more garish palette to compensate for the dim LCD of base model, and lacking a dedicated sound chip of its own there was no way the music would match up to the S-SMP. Unless you are playing on that delightful blobject of a system I would say the former patch is a no-brainer, and the latter does get a lot closer to the SNES sound, even if replacing epilogue music with a orchestrated version is of questionable enough taste to prevent a full-throated recommendation. Playing it on the Miyoo was a surprisingly comfortable experience, the mismatch of aspect ratio handled tastefully by the Perfect GBA overlay and the quick-resume function of Onion OS certainly made the gruelling floor-is-lava Sylph Cave a more tolerable experience.

All these conveniences do raise questions of authenticity. Save points within dungeons bring palpable relief, but less so if one has an automatic save-state to fall back on. The final area in particular is a brutal test of resources, a seemingly endless descent that taunts the loot-goblin gamer brain with armour and weaponry guarded by boss-tier enemies, a gamble that simply doesn't work with an added safety net. It calls to mind a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe that stuck in my craw in university:

The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.

As a Novel Enjoyer I can't say I fully agree, but the concept of totality is something that gnaws at my brain- I prefer movies to television for that reason, to be at the mercy of the creator, and it's almost certainly why I predominantly write short fiction, to put others at that same mercy. This finds its way into the games I play too- I love arcade games, stages and missions instead of open worlds, fixed camera friction over Player Freedom and Expression. But I'm not interested in a No True Scotsman argument either- when I play Doom I bristle at the thought of saving mid level, but I still play it in UZDoom with a mouse, autosaves and no pistol-starts. That it's taken me thirty odd years to get around to Final Fantasy IV, that it took some compromises to get to the end probably shouldn't irk me, but I'm going to try and let life get less in the way of whichever next one I play, and go with the flow the staff intended.

So no, was probably not the best way to play Final Fantasy IV. The screen crunch of the GBA edition makes navigating some dungeons way more annoying than it should be. The music, even patched, isn't quite as sumptuous as the Super Nintendo, and the Namingway edition received a 2.0 update while I was playing, so that might be the best way to play it? I gather people like the Pixel Remaster and PSP version, but the aesthetics of both and the weird judder of the former don't interest me much. If nothing else the experience has taught me to stress less about the perfect version of something, and any victory against the gamer brain has to be good.

Oh yeah and the game is pretty good. Five outta seven.