Trivia / Final Fantasy IV

• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Japanese 3D Remake version of Final Fantasy IV, Cecil is voiced by stage actor Shizuma Hodoshima and Golbez is played by veteran actor Takeshi Kaga, best known for his performance in Iron Chef.
• Development Gag: An obscure one for Edward's English name — it was borrowed from the name given to Richard (incidentally a Highwind) in the NES prototype of Final Fantasy II.
• Dummied Out: Many commands, status-ailment-healing items, and one-use spell-casting items were removed from the original North American version of the game and the Easy Type Japanese release. The status-healing items were replaced with a Remedy item that healed every status instead.
  • One was Cecil's Darkness ability, but his mirror inner darkness can cast that without a problem. This led to a lot of confusion and a bit of resentment on the part of SNES players when their shadow-self attacked exclusively with a power they themselves never had access to. It also made the resulting puzzle (i.e., letting him attack with the HP-depleting spell and defeat himself without you attacking) more difficult to figure out. The most frustrating part, mechanically? That attack is the only fast and easy way to take out hordes of low-level enemies in the early game. Sacrifice a little health but skip dealing with a pack of goblins one by one? Yes please! But sorry, no ability for you. Ironically, while intended to make the game easier and less confusing on those versions, it had the exact opposite effect.
  • Cid has a dummied out skill in the original version of the game, named "Airship." Presumably, had the skill been finished, it would have allowed him to call down an airstrike similar to the Invincible's volley attack from Final Fantasy III. This, along with quite a few aspects of the character, gets a Call-Back in Final Fantasy VII through the character of Cid Highwind.
    • Cid's weapons also do quadruple damage against machine-type enemies but you don't encounter machine-type enemies while he is in your party, which leads to the belief that he was supposed to be in your party longer.
  • The Dev-room Easter Egg was dummied out from the initial US SNES release of the game (i.e. Final Fantasy II SNES). It was made accessible again in the subsequent US re-releases and ports.
  • Final Fantasy IV Settei Shiryou Hen has a screenshot of Kain using White magic. Data miners have found a chant animation for Kain and an empty spell list that would correspond to him in the game data.
  • Two weapons that exist but can never be found are the Hand Axe and the Assassin's Dagger, they're even mentioned in the Final Fantasy II (US) manual.
• Fan Translation: There's a few for the original SNES version with...varying results. Here's the three most well known.
  • First is the J2E project for the Japanese version, which claims to be "more faithful" than the original English translation. In practice, while there are a handful of corrections, most of what it does either copies the original script or is an outright Gag Dub— adding excessive cursing, pop culture references that weren't in either version of the script, or adding lines that break character entirely. Legends of Localization argued that it's a worse translation than the very one it was meant to supplant in their comparison of the different translations, and it's so bad that there's been addendum updates by various hackers to remove the spiced up parts.
  • Next is Project II for the English release, which uses a script that takes elements from all the translations of the game, boosts the enemy stats back to what they are in the Japanese version, restored the dummied out battle commands and items, fixes bugs/glitches, and implements 10 other QoL mods.
  • Finally is the Namingway Edition for the English release, an updated version of Project II that replaces certain names and terms with their modern official versions. This translation is the one most heavily favored by the folks at Legends of Localization, owing to it having the greatest amount of improvements over the original SNES release.
• Market-Based Title: The game was originally released as Final Fantasy II in North America, as the real Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III were initially skipped over for localization. All re-releases of the game except for the Virtual Console version use the proper number.
• No Export for You: For some strange reason, the Steam version isn't available in Asia. Thankfully, the other versions of the 3D remake (iOS, Android and DS) are.
  • As with the other Final Fantasy titles, the original Super Nintendo version skipped over Europe, and Europe only got to play the game when it was ported to the PlayStation.
• Port Overdosed: The game was originally released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and then given an Updated Re-release on the PlayStation and WonderSwan Color, then another re-release with graphical and gameplay updates alongside a new Bonus Dungeon for Game Boy Advance and FOMA phones; the Game Boy Advance version was then ported to the PlayStation Portable with The After Years, getting a major graphics overhaul but leaving gameplay intact. The Nintendo DS hosts a full 3D remake version of the game with considerably altered gameplay and story, and this version was ported to iOS and Android, and then to Steam and Windows. The original SNES version and the PlayStation versions are available on the Wii Virtual Console and PlayStation Network, and both the SNES and the GBA versions are on the Wii U Virtual Console. Finally, the Pixel Remaster port based on the original SNES version was announced for mobile phones and Steam in 2021 and PlayStation 4 and Switch in 2023. In short, if you own any Sony or Nintendo console manufactured in the last 10-15 years, own a cell phone, or own a computer, you can play a version of this game on it.
• Sophomore Slump: According to Square's then-resident translator Ted Woolsey, "I think that Final Fantasy 8-bit did pretty well, II and III started to slip. If IV didn't really hit then [Hironobu Sakaguchi] was going to have to come up with a different sort of scenario. Final Fantasy IV was a home run in Japan."
• Urban Legend of Zelda: A couple over the years.
  • It was rumored that in the original (i.e. Japanese) version of the game, it was possible for Cecil to de-petrify Palom and Porom himself, by following some convoluted method which, depending to who you heard it from, may involve the very real Developer's Room Easter Egg. You can't. It doesn't help that the game teases you by giving you an option to choose an item to use on them if you interact with their petrified form; no matter what you use, nothing will happen. (This is a holdover from the Japanese version, where you still couldn't actually accomplish anything but where there was at least a special message if you tried to use a Golden Needle to help them in an acknowledgement of the usual headscratcher of using curative items to reverse a Plotline Death. Since the Golden Needle was Dummied Out in the American/Easytype release, even that bare message is unavailable.)^note It is possible that this rumor was spread thanks to a troll walkthrough, ie a walkthrough that contains fake info just to mess with the player. See, at that time, there were troll walkthroughs from some bloke who goes by the name of Eggnog, and those walkthrough does mix these rumors with legitimate information to give it an air of credibility. Also, his name is similar to Mynock, who was a really prolific walkthrough writer at that time. And well, Eggnog did publish one of his "guides" for Final Fantasy IV. This urban legend could've spread when some players managed to confuse Mynock's walkthrough with Eggnog's.
  • Managing to obtain Dark Matter before using the Crystal on the Final Boss (or during any phase in the iOS version) does not blunt the power of Zeromus's Big Bang, contrary to popular belief.^note  It is, in fact, using a spell or spell effect on Zeromus in the brief window between him shaking and Big Bang going out that heavily "nerfs" the next outgoing BB, in the SNES versions. At the start of the battle, though, using a spell on him at any point between the initial transformation and Big Bang #1 will nerf that Big Bang, and what triggered the rumor was almost certainly players opening with Edge stealing Dark Matter and then having Rydia use an attack spell or Rosa use Slow or somesuch on Zeromus, with players then thinking that stealing the special item had to be the trigger for the damage change, since of course it couldn't be as simple as using a spell on him, right? Using the item has no effect, but the rumor persists regardless, even on This Very Wiki. In a likely nod, Dark Matter does serve a purpose in the 3D remakes: if the player has the item in their inventory during New Game Plus, landing the Lunar Whale on the surface of the Red Moon and using the item when prompted leads to an encounter with one of the game's superbosses, the Proto-Babil.
  • A rumor persisted that gear purchased in the town of Mythril could be safely equipped inside of the Lodestone Cavern, with the justification that mythril (or silver, as the original localization called it) isn't a ferrous metal. Every version of the game flags those items as metallic, subject to the cavern's rules.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Supposedly, three quarters of the original script had been left out of the SNES version. The 3D remake (initially released on the Nintendo DS in 2007) went on to expand the script (which, it turns out, is largely to the benefit of fleshing out Golbez, which is why he serves as the remake's logo). While the expanded script isn't near three quarters bigger according to what was apparently cut, Takashi Tokita, the scenario writer of the original version and the director of the remake, explains that what he meant was that the original story script was never cut, but during the development of the original version, the game's text could not fit in the cartridge and had to be revised to a quarter of the intended size.
  • There's also the unreleased Family Computer version of the game (allegedly an entirely different game, with this Super Famicom concept initially "Final Fantasy V"), which, despite original projections, was apparently 80% complete before it had to be shelved. From the sound of things, certain ideas were reused for the released Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V, but Hironobu Sakaguchi still regretted that he had to let it go.
  • Disney originally commissioned a comic series based off of Final Fantasy IV back in 1991 which never materialized. This became Hilarious in Hindsight over a decade later with the advent of Kingdom Hearts.

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