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In July, Square Enix tossed out those old mobile port versions of the classic Final Fantasy games that us PC folks have been playing and have started replacing them with fancier remasters. Fantasies Final I-III arrived in their Pixel Remaster versions at the end of July. The next party of adventurers is queued to head out next month, also with those modern niceties like new character pixel art, new menu designs, and an auto-battle function. You’ll be able to snag the adventurs of Kain and Cecil and company on September 8th when Final Fantasy IV’s remastered version arrives.
Square Enix calls FFIV a “timeless story of love and betrayal” in which airship fleet captain Cecil turns against the tyrannical Kingdom of Baron. By RPS’s reckoning, FFIV comes in seventh on the extremely correct ranking of best Final Fantasy games on PC. To that end, I’ll let Katharine tell you what’s good about it.
“Final Fantasy IV was the first one in the series to do a proper story with proper characters you actually liked and loathed, with relationships and personalities often reflected in their job class and character skills,” she says. “There’s moody old dragoon Kain and his unrequited love for white mage Rosa, Cecil’s transformation from conflicted dark knight to righteous world-saving paladin, super cool ninja Edge who disappears when he gets embarrassed,” and so on. Also, there’s mention of going to the moon on a whale. Why fly an airship when you can fly a fish, eh?
In case you’d not kept up with the feature list for the Pixel Remasters, they feature redrawn character sprites by original artist Kazuko Shibuya and rearranged soundtracks overseen by composer Nobuo Uematsu. The remasters also have updated modern interfaces, an auto-battle feature, the ability to save whenever you like, and other updates.
By the by, game designer Takashi Tokita recetly talked about memories from developing Final Fantasy IV for its 30th anniversary. Turns out that the series’ signature ATB battle system, which was first used in IV, was inspired by race cars lapping one another. During the same interview, Tokita talked about how game director Hironobu Sakaguch wanted from the beginning for Final Fantasy IV to include a romantic relationship.
You can find Final Fantasy IV over on Steam where it will be available starting on September 8th, either on its own or as part of the Pixel Remaster bundle. This will leave Final Fantasy V and VI as the last two left to launch this year.
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