The fact is, Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster needed a bit more baking in the proverbial game-making oven. Given that this was the case with most of the earlier 2D ports, I wouldn’t call attention to it if there weren’t a specific reason for doing so. Mostly, Pixel Remaster plays things safe you can rely upon the abilities your characters gain through leveling to get you through nearly anything with alarming ease.īetter font. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to reference Final Fantasy IV‘s full-blown Nintendo DS remake (or as Square Enix now calls it, Final Fantasy IV 3D Remake), but I appreciate that version’s difficulty spike. It’s not that things have changed, per se, so much as they’ve regressed. There’s also a late-game aspect that screams Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, so if you’re one of like, ten trillion people who play XIV and you’re looking for the shape of things to come, you could certainly do worse.Ĭombat is the intersection through which I can now rope in long-time Final Fantasy IV gurus on the fence as to whether or not to drop their cash into Square’s coffers. But it’s rather charming in its earnestness, and there are a handful of story moments that still hit home for me three decades later. Final Fantasy IV has a tendency to go heavy on the “Saturday morning cartoon” vibe, including numerous fake-out character deaths and increasingly incredulous plot beats. It isn’t a huge spoiler to say that Cecil embarks on a quest for redemption, putting him and his burgeoning group of allies at odds with a madman named Golbez who’s got big plans, and those plans are predictably unsavory.
(At least the DS remake had the good sense to retranslate that into Carnelian Signet.) It’s a rotten bout of luck for the Dark Knight, made all the worse when he carries something on the king’s behalf called the Bomb Ring and he’s somehow shocked when it explodes. Cecil’s beau, Rosa, hopes for the best but fears for the worst. Cecil isn’t too hot on that, nor is his close friend, Kain. The king has been acting strangely of late, you see, and that strangeness has prompted him to push Cecil into murdering innocent people. The protagonist is Cecil, a Dark Knight in the service of Baron’s king. Let’s briefly talk about the basics, because again, there’s bound to be someone out there wondering if this is the time to finally introduce themselves to a classic. This approach, he explained, is “bound to please some and detract others.” Look, I hate to mercilessly nab words from another writer’s thoughts for a review as relatively straightforward as this one, but he was spot-on then and his statement still rings true with Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster. For us, it’s important that Pixel Remaster performs its duty admirably.Īre the new sprites solid and worth the swap from the older fare? Is the newly-arranged soundtrack, overseen by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu himself, as suitably epic as it ought to be? Are the special features and quality of life improvements an acceptable replacement for missing content from prior ports like 2005’s Final Fantasy IV Advance?īack when Tony Garsow reviewed the Pixel Remasters for Final Fantasy I, II, and III, one of the lines that stood out to me the most pertained to how he described the new versions as something of a “grab bag” of features from previous releases. But there are millions of fans who are eager to return to the realms of Baron and Fabul for the second time or the third time, or - I’m not naming names here, but quietly pointing the finger toward myself - the tenth. FFIV may be one of the more well-known entries in an exceptionally well-known franchise, but there are people out there who have never touched the game. Reviewing Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster, at least in my mind, is also a matter of blending. And it has Final Fantasy III‘s obsession with airships and abrupt revelations. It has Final Fantasy II‘s attempt at rebel melodrama and a more intricate narrative. It has Final Fantasy‘s quartet of elemental bosses and their wicked mastermind. If I were to describe Final Fantasy IV to a person who has, somehow, played the first three games yet never touched the fourth, I would say that it blends the best qualities from each of its trilogy of predecessors.
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