After completing
Final Fantasy III in 1990, Square planned to develop two
Final Fantasy games—one for the
Famicom and the other for the forthcoming
Super Famicom, to be known as
Final Fantasy IV and
V respectively. Due to financial and scheduling constraints, Square dropped plans for the Famicom game and continued development of the Super Famicom version, retitled
Final Fantasy IV. A mock-up screenshot of the cancelled title was produced for a Japanese magazine, but little other information exists about it. Kaoru Moriyama, a former public relations publicist and translator for Squaresoft, affirms that no actual coding for the game was done and that "It was only on paperwork".
Final Fantasy IV was lead designer
Takashi Tokita's first project at Square as a full-time employee. Before this, Tokita wanted a career as a theater actor, but working on the game made him decide to become a "great creator" of video games. Initially
Hiromichi Tanaka, the main designer of
Final Fantasy III, was also involved in the development of the game. However, Tanaka wanted to create a seamless battle system that had no separate battle screen and was not menu-driven, and since
Final Fantasy IV was not going in that direction, he changed development teams to work on the
action RPG Secret of Mana instead. According to Tanaka, he originally wanted the title to have a "more action-based, dynamic overworld" but it "wound up not being"
Final Fantasy IV anymore, instead becoming a separate project that eventually became
Seiken Densetsu 2 (
Secret of Mana), which was codenamed "
Chrono Trigger" during development. The development team of
Final Fantasy IV contained 14 people in total, and the game was completed in roughly one year. Initial ideas were contributed by Sakaguchi, including the entire story and the name of Baron's royal air force, the "Red Wings". The Active Time Battle (ATB) system was conceived and designed by
Hiroyuki Ito when he was inspired while watching a
Formula One race and seeing racers pass each other at different speeds. This gave him the idea of different speed values for the individual characters. The system was developed by
Kazuhiko Aoki, Ito and
Akihiko Matsui. As the game's lead designer, Tokita wrote the scenario and contributed pixel art. He said that there was a lot of pressure and that the project would not have been completed if he did not work diligently on it. According to Tokita,
Final Fantasy IV was designed with the best parts of the previous three installments in mind: the job system of
Final Fantasy III, the focus on story of
the second game, and the four elemental bosses acting as "symbols for the game" as in the
first installment. The themes of the game were to go "from darkness to light" with Cecil, a focus on family and friendship among the large and diverse cast, and the idea that "brute strength alone isn't power". The game's script had to be reduced to one fourth of its original length due to cartridge storage limits, but Tokita made sure only "unnecessary dialogue" was cut, rather than actual story elements. As the graphical capacities of the Super Famicom allowed regular series character designer
Yoshitaka Amano to make more elaborate character designs than in the previous installments, with the characters' personalities already evident from the images, Tokita felt the reduced script length improved the pacing of the game. Still, he acknowledges that some parts of the story were "unclear" or were not "looked at in depth" until later ports and remakes. One of the ideas not included, due to time and space constraints, was a dungeon near the end of the game where each character would have to progress on their own—this dungeon would only be included in the Game Boy Advance version of the game, as the Lunar Ruins. Additionally, the release of
ActRaiser and its soundtrack by
Yuzo Koshiro heavily inspired the team to completely reassess and rework the game's sound design at the eleventh hour of development to give a more
orchestral feel. The score was well received; reviewers have praised the quality of the composition despite the limited medium. Uematsu continues to perform certain pieces in his
Final Fantasy concert series. Three albums of music from
Final Fantasy IV have been released in Japan. The first album,
Final Fantasy IV: Original Sound Version, was released on June 14, 1991, and contains 44 tracks from the game. The second album,
Final Fantasy IV: Celtic Moon, was released on October 24 the same year, and contains a selection of tracks from the game,
arranged and performed by
Celtic musician
Máire Breatnach. Lastly,
Final Fantasy IV Piano Collections, an arrangement of tracks for solo piano performed by Toshiyuki Mori, was released on April 21, 1992, and began the
Piano Collections trend for each successive
Final Fantasy game. Several tracks have appeared on
Final Fantasy compilation albums produced by Square, including
The Black Mages and
Final Fantasy: Pray. Independent but officially licensed releases of
Final Fantasy IV music have been orchestrated by such groups as Project Majestic Mix, which focuses on arranging video game music. Selections also appear on Japanese remix albums, called
dōjin music, and on English remixing websites such as
OverClocked ReMix.
North American localization Because the previous two installments of the
Final Fantasy series had not been localized and released in North America at the time,
Final Fantasy IV was distributed as
Final Fantasy II to maintain naming continuity. This remained the norm until the release of
Final Fantasy VII in North America (after the release of
Final Fantasy VI under the title of
Final Fantasy III) and subsequent releases of the original
Final Fantasy II and
III on various platforms. The game has since gone under the title
Final Fantasy IV in all subsequent ports (sans the Wii Virtual Console). The English localization of
Final Fantasy IV retains the storyline, graphics, and sound of the original, but the developers significantly reduced the difficulty for beginning gamers. Other changes include the removal of overt
Judeo-Christian religious references and certain potentially objectionable graphics. For example, the magic spell "Holy" was renamed "White", and all references to
prayer were eliminated; the Tower of Prayers in Mysidia was renamed the Tower of Wishes. Direct references to death were also omitted, although several characters clearly die during the course of the game. ==Re-releases==