🐋 Final Fantasy 4 - Week 4

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Final Fantasy 4 Beginner Club W04

Week 04 2026-07-17T15:00:00Z
Previous week 🐋 Final Fantasy 4 - Week 3
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Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

Please be extra-mindful of spoilers, as these games become more and more plot-driven it’s important to avoid revealing even minor details of future events, characters and locations. If you’re not sure if something is spoilery or not, better just throws it in a [spoiler] just in case.

Stopping point

After you acquire a new vehicle. If you want you can use it to explore the world and visit optional areas that become reachable, but stay away from ăƒˆăƒ­ă‚€ă‚ąăźç”ș, that’s for next week.

More details

Last week we found faith, now it’s time to smite the heathens. First let’s heard back to Missidia, you can pick a Chocobo in the forest South of the Mount of Ordeals if you want to make the trip back a bit faster. Once you’re there, report to the 長老.

You’ll be told a prophecy. You probably won’t understand it. Don’t worry too much about it. ăƒŻă‚·ă«ă‚‚ă‚ă‹ă‚‰ă‚“â‹Ż

Remember that you can buy Paladin gear in the local shops. When you’re ready, step inside Devil’s Way to be transported to Baron. You can talk to the townfolks around to figure out where you should go next: the inn.

Once you have the key you can open the locked doors in town (including the shop one, oddly enough). The door on the West side of town will lead to to the æ˜”æ°Žè·Ż.

There are a lot of fake wall in that area (unfortunately they didn’t give up on that after the Famicom era
). Study the layout of the levels carefully to see where they are, especially if you’re playing the original version where those paths are always invisible.

Eventually you’ll find your way back to the castle. You can return to your old bedroom to rest if you want. As you explore the castle, a cutscene will trigger eventually. After that you can explore the East side of the castle, or go to the throne room to continue the story.

Once you have the flying ship, you can explore the following optional locations if you want:

  • ミă‚čăƒȘルたç”ș (East)
  • ă‚ąă‚Źăƒ«ăƒˆăźæ‘ (South)
  • ă‚šăƒ–ăƒ©ăƒŒăƒŠćŸŽ (South-West)

Note that there are enemy encounters in some of these locations, and they may be very tough compared to what we’ve seen so far.

Do not go to ăƒˆăƒ­ă‚€ă‚ąăźç”ș (North-West, in the middle of a forest), that’s for next week.

Map

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Miscellaneous

Spoilers for this week below:

Some things old, some things new...

We acquire an airship this week, the Enterprise. Those who have played FF3 will remember that it was an airship there too, although it worked a bit differently: it started off as a simple boat (given to us by the vikings) and it was upgraded into a flying ship by Cid later. Also it could only land on water, where it turned back into a boat. Meanwhile FF4’s Enterprise functions like FF1 and 2’s flying ship. Oh and you can fly over mountains again


It’s also the first game that doesn’t feature the canoe. In fact, no mainline FF game released since FF3 lets the party control a canoe, so it’s probably gone for good. Never forget :person_rowing_boat:.

Track of the week

Battle 2 (the boss battle theme)

Participation

  • I’m playing along
  • I will catch up later
  • I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this section yet
  • I’m a filthy preplayer but I’m here for the discussion
0 voters
2

I chose the boss theme for track of the week because I feel that it’s the first FF track so far that feels distinctly prog-rock, and that’s going to become an extremely important influence going forward.

Also this track was used for an optional boss in
 Mario RPG:

Culex’s appearance contains many allusions to the Final Fantasy series; the creators of Final Fantasy, Square, also created Super Mario RPG. He is depicted in the hand-drawn pixel art style of the SNES Final Fantasy games, contrasting with the pre-rendered 3D models of the rest of the game. His overworld sprite is significantly smaller than how he appears in battle, which is another characteristic taken from Final Fantasy. The songs that play during his encounter and battle are arrangements of music from the Final Fantasy series.

3

I just looked up the Mario RPG remake version, fully expecting the song to have been replaced. But no, it was just updated! I wonder how much Nintendo had to pay Square-Enix to license a new version of the song.

4

Nothing, I assume, given Square made this game entirely.

5

I don’t think Square Enix was involved in the remake though, and I imagine they still own the rights to that song even if Nintendo owns the characters.

6

I’m not sure what the intellectual property situation looks like but I would imagine that whatever agreement Square and Nintendo have must cover all the game’s assets, including that track?

That could also be why Square actually created an original boss instead of importing Gilgamesh or something like that and go all the way with the FF crossover.

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Week 4

The waterway is
 ehh. Fake walls are just kind of annoying but it’s not as bad as FF3 if it doesn’t keep it up too much. On my first runthrough I turned around halfway through and exited because resources were dwindling. But, part of the problem is that I didn’t realize how you could hit use on equipped items (and the real purpose to those multiple option rods or whatever) and get the effect. Free ~30+ HP every turn for no cost with the healing rod! Makes a big difference. Paladin Cecil is kind of living up to my worst expectations as a æˆŠă† bot but the automatic teammate covering is nice sometimes.

That said I had a pretty nice time with the bosses in the castle so it evened it out to positivity again. Snake arm guy was fun and even killed a couple people! I got a nice laugh out of killing him and having only two arms remaining in the fight (which then self destruct). The other boss was a little easier but I still thought it was kind of cool. Might’ve helped that I coincidentally chose lightning and had it queued to learn and employ that counter gimmick immediately. Overall the numbers are getting tuned about right that the bosses are getting pretty fun for me.

More rote enemy combat
 if you aren’t grinding levels can be a little annoyingly slow. My main issue with the waterway is the teammates weren’t really working together to take those enemies out too efficiently. Cecil hits a single target for decent enough damage, but Yan’s kick isn’t really that good in a lot of situations because he doesn’t have anyone to do good multi target damage with (these enemies were resisting a lot of magic fairly well unless you pulled out the giant nukes or hit the blizzard on sharks), so maybe you want to just have Yan single target with him, but with some big groups that’s still pretty slow when you need a couple hits per enemy. The twins together can use their slow duo nuke and that’s great but it’s pretty much all or nothing so you might as well not have another party member there while you wait. Tera can nuke the whole field too but it eats like a 3rd of his MP and using weaker spells hits really low damage most of the time if not on a specific weakness so it’s not that meaningful compared to Cecil/Yan’s next hit.

Also back attacks can drive me crazy the way the enemies roughly 2 shot the former backline but especially because the ATB gauge takes ages to let you play while you watch them do it. I dunno if I just got super unlucky but I got back attacked like ~4 times in the little waterway where other FFs probably never did it more than a time or two per dungeon.

That’s a lot of complaining but it’s also more or less fine lol? The castle stuff was all enjoyable enough I still quite liked this week and the party worked better vs the bosses. I thought the shrinking room was very cool and while I’m welcoming a shakeup in members mechanically, I liked the kids so their sacrifice worked well for me. Reminds me of redacted from Final Fantasy ? later on.

Cid’s portrait is ridiculous, love it. I needed to stop the session anyway right when I got the airship acquisition. Mind if I ask if the optional locations are worth looking at yet? I know you mention some are probably not really scaled for seeing right now. I have to decide if I should boot it up again sometime and go looking, heh.

8

Oh I just didn’t see the word remake in your original post. I thought you were asking about the use of the track from FF4, but remade for RPG on the super nes. Except, I’m not sure they even changed it between FF4 and Mario RPG.Yeah, good question, but like Simias said I would just assume that Nintendo would own all IP rights for the resulting game. Maybe they did change it just slightly enough to call it an original composition
?

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Note on optional locations

There’s a section of the spreadsheet dedicated to these, but the area with enemies (Eblan castle) is only a footnote at the end because there’s no dialogue there.

My experience while playing it was that the area had good treasure, but there’s a single encounter underground, through a secret trapdoor, that ANNIHILATED me at this point in the game. Other encounters were tough but doable. I had to come back later in the game when you do the actual Eblan story content.

10

The boss track for FF4 would be an all-timer
if they didn’t manage to outdo themselves in every game after this. Battle on the Big Bridge (FF5), Decisive Battle and whatever the fight against Ultima Weapon is and
good God, Dancing Mad (FF6), Those Who Fight Further and Jenova (FF7). Final Fantasy boss themes are why I grew up liking weird video game music and not realizing I liked prog rock, and not knowing what prog rock was, while the other kids were listening to Michael Jackson


I did more research on Culex and compared them side by side. The Mario RPG version IS a different arrangement, and the remake has a total rearrangement. I don’t know what the rules are for doing a “cover” of a boss battle theme. Perhaps they just needed a license for the original score?

I also learned that you can fight a super upgraded Culex if you do new game plus in Mario RPG Remake, something that wasn’t in the original version.

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So far the game is fairly generous with save points and ethers are relatively cheap so I use my MP liberally and spam the high cost spells. Fleeing is also pretty reliable (at least compared to FF3). Add Tera has drain too, although I didn’t bother using it too much, it doesn’t seem as OP as the FF2 version.

I agree that combat is pretty monotonous however.

I don’t know how ambushes are decided but some enemies in the waterway seem extremely prone to them. In particular I think that every encounter involving those clam enemies ended up being a back attack for me.

I like that you can swap the row order all at once in this one however instead of wasting a full party turn. And it it’s automatically reset at the end of the fight


I agree. This whole sequence in the throne room and the ensuing trap was extremely well written I thought. I liked the interactions/party çŽč介 in the throne room where everybody has a distinct personality and you have some tension and banter. Then the sacrifice of the twins was quite shocking and effective, and it makes me look forward to finding a cure and coming back.

Yup
 Can’t even flee that one once you realize that you’re in the wrong part of town.

The other two towns are quite amusing but don’t seem to be particularly crucial at this point in the game. There’s some foreshadowing for things to come.

12
Week 4

This week felt surprisingly short. Going down the mountain you get a bit of exp for Cecil who easily caught up with the others pretty soon. Even at low level he basically had the same amount of HP he had as a Dark Knight at level 20 or so, which is nice so he can cover the other characters if they get low for a good while. Still have to experiment with the かばう command, I don’t remember if that specific one still only works for physical attacks or for anything.
The return to Mysidia and everyone’s reaction to being a paladin are great, you get some pretty varied reactions.
I checked the dancer again and hilariously you still get transformed into a pig.
Even more hilarious are the rest of the party’s pig character portraits, that gave me a good laugh.
I took some screenshots of the prophecy and will have to reread it more carefully later.
The waterway gave me a bit of trouble, at least until I simply started to have the twins nuke everything with their double cast, it was pretty reliable for me. I think it only failed when one of the two didn’t have enough MP (or was down, which didn’t happen much). There were some tough encounters, like those fishes or the big worms, but nothing too much unmanageable.

The two bosses this week were fun! Cagnazzo is laughably easy once you know the gimmick, you can basically keep him stunlocked without him being able to do anything. Then again, I still had the twins do the most damage with their mini flare, they were hitting for more than 1000 while a single attack of Cecil or Yang does between 150/200.

The sacrifice scene was well done, I like that the game acknowledges the obvious question of “but can’t they just heal them?” by giving a little explanation about why it doesn’t work.
Not all games (and not even all final fantasy games themselves) go out of their way to explain it like that.
It feels especially heavy because it’s two small kids doing it. (And I like the little moment of ăƒ†ăƒ© being fixated on his revenge on Golbez but still immediately lamenting the fact that they did it instead of him as he’s older)
Lots of nice character moments this week!

I’m going to miss the twins, but from a gameplay point I feel they were too strong lol. This week kinda proved that if the game let you keep them and level them too much so that their MP grow (and they already have more than ăƒ†ăƒ©, who is limited by his age), pretty much nothing would stop you to simply have them twin cast every turn for massive damage while you have three whole other characters to actually heal/apply buffs/attack.

13

I can think of one thing that could stop you - a single medium strength AOE attack. Their HP pools are laughable.

14
pacing considerations

I hesitated to include a bit more content (this week does feel shorter than the previous one) but decided to stop here for three main reasons:

  • I wanted to leave some buffer for those who want to explore the optional areas at the end of the week.
  • I thought this was a fine stopping point story-wise.
  • I’m enjoying this game quite a lot so far, so I don’t really mind if the club runs a bit longer than I first planned. For the Famicom games I always wanted to go decently fast to put them behind us and get to the “good stuff” but I feel like this is the “good stuff”, so we might as well savour it.
15

Yeah, they died plenty while I used them, but their combo attack basically doesn’t push you to use them for anything else.

16

And I’ve caught up with the rest of the club! Good ol’ FF4, it’s good to be back :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

This track was the deciding reason I picked the SFC version to play over the pixel remaster! While I love the quality of the PRs overall, something about the remastered version of this boss theme just doesn’t punch the right way, and it’s one of my favorite early game tracks. Had to have the OG playing while I get my butt kicked.

This week

pfft ăƒ™ă‚€ă‚Źăƒł joining the party with all the fanfare while we already have a full team. On one hand it’s obvious that he’s about to stab you in the back because of how he’d acted previously, on the other hand I couldn’t help feeling like a cliquey mean girl with a thought like the car is already full ăƒ™ă‚€ă‚Źăƒł! Get your own ride to the arcade!

Behold this situation which happened to me in the waterway when I got hit by a ごいうづ and didn’t focus down the guy in the back first:

What is this, a battle for ants?
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I have a tendency to be stingy with Tellah’s MP and kept thinking the enemy *has* to cast it on the same person and undo it at some point :sweat_smile:

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mage power scaling

I can’t tell if they’re doing it on purpose, but I enjoy that the game turns some JRPG tropes on their head with the Tera/Twins situation. Often those games will give as an overpowered, older character to carry us early on, then the character will leave for whatever reason and we have to continue on our own.

Here it seems to start like this, with Tera being much more powerful than Lidia when we get him, but the rest of the team catches up quickly and the Twins boost so much with every level that they completely overtake him very quickly, so it’s all upended: we lose Lidia and the Twins, and we keep the jiisan.

It’s also amusing how he has access to Meteor, the forbidden spell, but is just shy of the MP required to cast it to tease us with it. I just checked if it was possible to ever reach the 99MP required to cast the spell by grinding levels but it isn’t: he’s hardcoded to always have 90MP.

It’s really fun how far they integrate the backstory with the gameplay for this character.

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Note that the PR (at least on Switch) lets you switch back to the original music in the menu.

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By the way I forgot to mention it earlier but I was surprised when I realized that you could have 5 party members this time! I was sure that it was 4 all the way until FF7.

19

ooo cool! Luckily it’s not the only reason I picked the SFC version :joy:

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They may beat him in magical power but they will never beat him in style.

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