Review of Final Fantasy IV

I really love this game, I think it may have retroactively become my favourite one, because I never played it as a kid, the first Final Fantasy I played was 7 and I gradually worked my way backwards through the series via compilations and ports and such.. I mainly love it for the incredible storytelling and strongly realised characters, the cast of heroes have real arcs and you really cared about what might happen to them next, and it had some really sad and moving moments where characters sacrificed themselves. This relatively early game in the series being so well received must have been a factor for the subsequent success of the games, seeing as it was the chapter that introduced several notable elements and mechanics that would become staples of the latter titles, like the active battle system that made the battles feel like they were in constant motion and imbued them with a sense of urgency, especially during critical boss fights! It also introduced the fixed class designations for all of the main characters, which helped to make them feel more like characters with a certain level of depth, which was something that until this point, the game's hadn't truly bothered to experiment with. Like I said some of the characters have real fleshed out story arcs, such as a troubled young knight named Cecil, who feels as if he's lost his humanity after following genocidal orders from his king, and who sets off on a quest for redemption and to undo the evil he had a hand in causing. And when you've been playing already for a decent amount of time and it gets to the scene where Cecil conquers his inner demon and is reborn as a glorious paladin of light, it feels like the real story begins in earnest and I'd really be finding it hard to put the game down! It wasn't a perfect one but was a very accessible story and wasn't a super overly-complex one where your character was a dream from the future or anything too weird like that! It was a story of darkness and light and redemption and had a lot of heart and lore and pathos to it and I just really connected with this one and loved it. The tone was quite expansive, at the start it's all wizards and castles but by the end you have a highly advanced spaceship that takes you to the moon! Golbez was such a perfectly awesome wrathful dark lord, he was the biggest, baddest, most all powerful hulking overlord in the game and as soon as you see his character sprite and hear his menacing theme music, you knew he was the big bad villain of the story. His fearsome design and grandiose bearing really made him feel like the Darth Vader of Final Fantasy! And just as with Darth he had a close connection with the main hero, and that's something else I greatly appreciated about "Lord Golbez", was that as his tragic story was fully uncovered you discover that he was in fact never the true villain that he appeared to be at all and was in fact a man ensnared by a much greater celestial evil that was controlling his mind and using him like a puppet. I also totally loved Golbez' squad of four elemental archfiends who try to destroy your team throughout the adventure, particularly the devilish looking Rubicante, the fiend of fire, who was quite an honourable sort for a demon and treated the warriors with a level of respect and even restores them to full power before the fight against him! My favourite version of this game was the DS remake because I thought the voice acting and cutscenes enriched the story and experience even more, not to mention the battle difficulty was restored to how it was originally intended! So there were heroic warriors that you loved, epic villains that could seriously dig and overall it was just a great magical adventure that was a huge step up from its predecessors and opened up the series for new ideas and directions to come. It's one of those games that I have a special place for and one that I respect very much and feel holds up amazingly well and I will always love a whole lot! Happy gaming X