Version Confusion pt. 2: Final Fantasy IV

By now, I'm guessing you've mostly got the numbering system down. Two and three are Japanese-only, four is two, five is Japanese only and six is three. Bam, handled. So now that you've figured that out, I've got some more craziness to throw your way. There are actually three different versions of Final Fantasy IV. You mean ports? No, I mean whole different versions. Oh, you mean the sequels? No, I mean whole different versions of the same game. Got that? Let's go over this really quickly, shall we?

Final Fantasy IV originally came out in Japan in July of 1991. Now remember, Square decided to skip over two and three in order to bring four over the US around the same time. If you doubt the importance of this, take a look at the Tales series where Japan is about two games ahead of NA and is popping out another one early next year! Anyway, in November of 1991, the game was brought over to America. Or was it?

Japanese gamers have had three games to perfect their role-playing skills. Final Fantasy was tough as nails but it was the only one we had and it hadn't sold quite as well in NA as it did in Japan, which is really saying something considering the population difference. So when they decided to bring four over to the US, they decided that American gamers weren't ready for that level of difficulty yet so they dumbed the game down for us. At least, that's all the popular theory. I think Japan just thinks we're a bunch of idiots over here. But hey, that's just me.

Final Fantasy II in the US is now regarded as the easy version of the game and wow, yeah, it really is. Enemies have nearly no health and dish out almost no damage. I'm still in the early game but Cecil hasn't taken more than 20 points of damage from any enemy, including bosses despite having about 350 maximum health. Most enemies only do 1 damage to him. There are a few other version differences too, besides just the difficulty. Some of the storyline was actually cut from American cartridges. This is attributed to space limitations but I don't buy that. Don't the SNES and the Super Famicom have the same abilities? Why could story fit on the Super Famicom but not on the SNES? Not only this but standard Nintendo censorship took place in the US version as well.

To give a quick lesson about this, the ESRB didn't exist at this point in time and Nintendo personally approved each and every game that was published on their console (they still give the Nintendo stamp of approval on every game released on a Nintendo console.) Because of the wild west situation at the time, Nintendo employed self-policing on their games. This meant any religious references and references to death had to be removed. I could go into a whole blog series about this but let's leave it at that for now.

Finally, they decided that secret passages were way too intense for us American gamers so they decided to show us where they all are.

Yes, this is a direct, unedited screenshot.

To be fair, this kind of makes sense since secret passages were first introduced in three but since we didn't have three, American gamers hadn't seen these before and wouldn't know to look for them. People were more likely to think they were glitches. There is still one secret passage near the end which isn't colored in for you, leading to Cecil's ultimate weapon.

But wait, I've only mentioned two versions, right? Yeah, there's another one. Final Fantasy IV Easytype. That's right, it's literally called Easytype. This one was released only in Japan but was designed to be even easier than the US version. Oddly enough, though, I've heard other reports from players saying certain aspects of the game are actually harder than the US version.

So what does this mean for all the ports of the game, huh? Well, Easytype added some basic game engine upgrades, fixing some bugs and whatnot. These were added into every port but otherwise, every port is based on the original Japanese version. That means those of you playing on your Android or iOS devices are going to have a much harder time than I will getting through. In fact, a friend of mine told me the Android version in particular is brutally difficult.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, there are also two sequels to Final Fantasy IV: Interlude and The After Years. Both of these come included in the PSP version, the only version to have them both included. Also, in case you didn't pick up on this before, since I am playing as close to the original English-releases as possible, I am playing the SNES version of Final Fantasy IV.

Game on!