If you’re motivated you can probably go through the FF1 club by the time we start this one. There’s another person doing that right now.
I can’t even begin to say about how excited I am to reach this point with y’all!
Although I played FF1 as a kid on the NES, FF4 is where my love for RPGs REALLY started.
I remember renting Final Fantasy II (actually IV but released as II in the US) and Chrono Trigger from the local Blockbuster (a video/video game rental store popular in the 90s-00s in the US) multiple times since I couldn’t beat them in one rental period (usually 3 days). Since I was only 6 when FF2 released in the US (November 23, 1991) I probably didn’t actually play it until a few years later (most likely around 95-97). But I still remember the major story points so well (hopefully that will lend itself to understanding the Japanese better? 希望だな〜 
)
But you know what’s really great about FF4? THE MUSIC. OH LORD THE MUSIC. I think FF4 has some of THE best arranged/remixed music releases. (It made me kind of jealous that FF6 didn’t get the same treatment.)
- Final Fantasy IV: Celtic Moon
- Irish/Celtic arrangements of the best tracks from FF4
- Final Fantasy IV: Piano Collections
- The first that started the tradition of solo piano arrangements for Final Fantasy games
And the Theme of Love is probably one of the most popular and loved Final Fantasy songs ever! I can’t wait to hear the Pixel Remaster take on it!
Really great idea!
I missed the first three play alongs, but I’ll definitely join in this one.
How does this work exactly? Do we play through at our own pace, or are we given stopping points each week to play until?
Welcome! We do it the second way - Simias tells us all how far to play each week. Sometimes people play a bit ahead or fall a week or two behind, but we mostly stick to the schedule, which at my pace usually works out to about 2-3 hours of gameplay each week.
If you want to disappoint me, you can.
Whelp, I’m going to try to warn the new guys one last time. I’m not trying to scare people away, but I think you’ve got to have a realistic idea of what we’re doing here. FF4 is a dramatic step up in language difficulty from the first three games. I’m like halfway through my preplay, and already have more new vocab added from this game than the first two combined - and it also has practically all of the vocab I added from the first three, plus its own, say, 600+ words? The amount of text in any given week is doubled, at least. If you’re used to other JRPGs it’s not so bad, but if this is your first you’re going to be pushing through slowly and doing a lot of lookups. Every FF after this only gets harder.
The amount of new vocab you’re likely to run into means I think it would behoove any new player to try, if possible, to play on a computer with something like YomiNinja to do lookups on vocab you don’t know. Otherwise, some of these cutscenes could take an ungodly long time to push through. I think some FF4 cutscenes might have more text in them than the average week of an BBC club, and definitely more than any ABBC club pick I’ve looked through. It’s also full kanji with no furigana, making the text parser even more useful. This isn’t feasible for everyone, but it’s worth the effort if you can manage it.
Example, yesterday I did a certain section in a certain castle midway through the game (no spoilers), and the game locked me into a cutscene + multiple battles with close to 130 full boxes of text before I could stop and save. Many of the full weeks we’ve done in FF3 didn’t even have 130 lines! Just because I’m nuts, I picked an intermediate book club pick that I readily have access too - SPY FAMILY. It’s first week has less than 130 panels, and each panel has fewer characters than a typical FF4 text box… and SPY FAMILY has furigana. It might be reasonable to categorize this club as intermediate, but that would scare people away, if I haven’t already…
Fortunately, you have the spreadsheet to help you*, so don’t get too scared. The possible addition of newbies to the club is exciting, because we might get some actual language discussion in this language club. On the other hand, they might just refer to the spreadsheet, have their question answered and move on… Kind of a double edged sword, this spreadsheet thing…
*Caveat: I’ve slowly stopped explaining more “beginner” concepts in the spreadsheet as we get through more games, under the assumption that you’ve seen certain grammars and words enough times just in the games so far that you don’t need constant reminders. Furthermore, I only pick out and define vocab that isn’t in WK that isn’t super crazy common. If you haven’t finished WK and you don’t have a screen parser, you’ll just have to infer the meaning from the translation in the spreadsheet or do an old fashioned search… I don’t do comprehensive vocab lists; I just translate every word of the game 
I’m never quite sure how to handle this because on one hand I think it’s good if people give the club a try even if they end up dropping out or going slower than club pace, but also it would suck for somebody to lose motivation for their studies because they set the bar too high and failed to keep up.
The first game I ever played in Japanese was FF8, which is obviously massively more complex than FF4, and while it was a struggle and took me a very long time, I learned a lot while doing it. But also I definitely couldn’t have kept up with an “FF8 club” back then and it would have been very stressful and frustrating if I had tried.
So my advice is just to give it a try if it sounds interesting, and even if you “fail” it will give you an objective to work towards. If a couple of years it will be a walk in the park if you keep studying.
And definitely try going through the FF1 club if FF4 feels too daunting, it’s much easier and a fraction of the character count, and a lot of the vocabulary will carry between games.
Is anyone using Yomininja on Linux? If so, what desktop environment are you using? I’m on GNOME 50.2, but they’ve dropped support for X11.
I will set my expectations appropriately low! It’s been a long time since I’ve played FF4, so I don’t remember how complicated the story gets. I’ve read plenty of novels (well, mostly LNs), but a game is certainly a different beast. I’ve played two games in Japanese, but both were very light on story and dialogue. (Touhou Luna Nights and Transiruby for those curious)
I did buy FF4 on PS5 because playing on PC is kind of annoying. I did this knowing that I was making it harder on myself, but it is what it is.
Something funny I’ve found in my japanese development is that so much of my reading time has been in thousands of lines of FF game text that reading weird archaic formal crap is getting easy for me, but I’ll try to read casual slang in an ABBC book club and still get hung up sometimes.
I have the same issue for the same reason. I remember discussing this regarding Dungeon Meshi and Nana specifically. According to Natively, Nana should be easier, but because DunMeshi is heavily based on an RPG setting I find it significantly easier to read overall.
Blindspots are always strange like that. I’m sure you’d have some in your native language based on what you read most/don’t read very often. Only way is through, really
Yeah, I have a lot of experience with casual language from manga and fantasy terms from 本好きの下剋上 and Silent Witch. But while 本好き also covers some medieval terms, I expect to still have a huge gap with that. Not to mention general gaming and RPG terms, which I have no experience with.
Honestly what trips me up the most in the FF games anymore are the explanations of the spells and items. If the spells don’t follow the later FF naming conventions and I have to read what it does it’s miserable.
I survived my unexpected silencing, so I’ll just say I’m excited to try this for the first time. I know there will be a lot of new vocabulary, but maybe being familiar with the game will help provide additional context. Also, I have YomiNinja working now so that will certainly help.
Yeah I found that to be the hardest part when I was starting to play games in Japanese. Some of the roughest times I ever had were getting confronted with something like big skill trees and just getting stunlocked for the next half hour or more. I think Dragon Quest 11’s suitability for beginners is pretty overstated because of all the menu stuff, doubly so when it gets sold on the basis of having furigana, which the copious menus drop.
Had been debating if I’m rejoining for FF4 but I suppose at the moment I’m leaning towards it.
Did the pixel remasters not switch to the conventions introduced in FF8 with -ra and -ga for second and third tier spells? Or is it different in the Japanese version?
Not all of them, iirc?