Development
After completing Final Fantasy III in 1990, Square planned to develop two Final Fantasy games—one for the Nintendo Famicom and the other for the forthcoming Super Famicom, to be known as Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V respectively. Due to financial and scheduling constraints, Square dropped plans for the Nintendo 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. According to some Hirobonu Sakaguchi interviews, the Famicom version was approximately 80% complete and certain ideas were reused for the Super Famicom version.
Final Fantasy IV was lead designer Takashi Tokita's first project at Square as a full-time employee. Before this, Tokita wanted to make 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. 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 to by the game's director, Hironobu 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 giving him the idea of different speed values for the individual characters. It was developed by Kazuhiko Aoki, Hiroyuki Ito and Akihiko Matsui for the game. As the game's lead designer, Tokita wrote the scenario and contributed pixel art. He stated that there was a lot of pressure and that the project would not have been completed if he did not work directly 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 Final Fantasy II, and the four elemental bosses acting as "symbols for the game" as in the first installment. Other influences include Dragon Quest II. The themes of Final Fantasy IV were to go "from darkness to light" with Cecil, a focus on family and friendship bonds with the large and diverse cast, and the idea that "brute strength alone isn't power". Tokita feels that Final Fantasy IV is the first game in the series to really pick up on drama, and the first Japanese RPG to feature "such deep characters and plot".
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 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 of the game. 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.
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