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The fourth entry in the face-meltingly popular Final Fantasy game series.

The main character of this tale is Cecil, a Dark Knight in the service of the King of Baron. After questioning the recent warmongering of his king, he is demoted to errand boy and sent to a village called Mist in order to deliver a package and slay a dragon menacing its borders. He is joined by his best friend and rival, a Dragoon named Kain. Once they reach the village, they discover that nothing is quite what they have been told: they have been used as disposable pawns in Baron's ongoing crusade to capture the Power Crystals that exist around the world. Cecil vows to stop the evil intentions of Baron, but first he must atone for the sins that he committed in its service and overcome his own inner darkness.

Have you noticed something strange already? Yes, this was the first Final Fantasy game to have actual plot beyond a generic "you are heroes, go save world from evil" story that was pretty much the standard for most RP Gs at the time. As difficult as it may be to believe to people whose idea of a good RPG begins with twenty hours of real-time cutscenes, this was huge at the time of release.

Since the second and third Final Fantasy games hadn't been released in the US when Final Fantasy IV came out, the US release of FFIV was titled Final Fantasy II. The US FFII was easier than the Japanese version; before the US version was released, it spawned another Japanese version, "Final Fantasy IV Easytype", whose difficulty level was scaled down even farther. (Thus the US version was less difficult than the original Japanese version, but significantly harder than Easytype.) The US Final Fantasy II also suffered from severe censorship. ("You spoony bard!", anyone?) Many of the fan favorite lines were kept in the re-translated re-releases. As was common for RP Gs of the SNES age, the game didn't make it beyond the Pacific itself, but eventually an updated version arrived in Europe as one half of the Anthology collection, with Final Fantasy V.

Currently receiving a cell phone sequel called The After Years (also available on Wii Ware in the West), which star the old cast and some of their children teaming up again from preventing the same catastrophe from happening again.

Final Fantasy IV is considered by many one of the best of the series, partly because it was first released before the series developed an Unpleasable Fanbase. However, it was panned by UK critics as the weaker half of the Anthology double. It wasn't only ported to the GBA like the other pre-PS titles, but was also the second game (after Final Fantasy III, which didn't make it over beforehand) to be remade with 3D graphics on the Nintendo DS. It's also the first remake to add voiceacting, if only for key scenes.

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This game provides examples of:

• Advancing Wall Of Doom (The Demon Wall in the Sealed Cave)
• Alien Sky (Two moons)
• All Myths Are True (The Mysidian Legend, naturally, turns out to not only be dead-on accurate, but the basis for the entire game.)
• Anti Grinding (Sort of, with the Dark Elf. If you fight him having used a cheat device to gain levels, he'll wipe the floor with you.)
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit (You can only have five people in your party. This game's method of dealing with it? Killing off the spares. Though only one stays dead, which makes it all the more obvious.)
• As Long As There Is Evil (The Trope Namer is Zeromus' Final Speech)
• The Atoner (Cecil, Kain, Golbez at the end of the game and in The After.)
• Awesome But Impractical: The Meteo/Meteor spell, as noted in that entry.
• Awesome Moment Of Crowning ( Cecil, Rosa, and Yang all become monarchs in the epilogue.)
  • Edward and Edge, already monarchs when they join the party, get to rule their kingdoms in peace.
• Badass Beard (Fusoya)
• Badass Mustache (Yang)
• Baleful Polymorph (Pig, Toad, and Mini. Some of the mages in Mysidia will use them on you when you revisit the town as a Dark Knight.)
• Beneath The Earth (the underground world of the dwarves)
• Big No (well, Big Why, in the DS remake)
• Black Magician Girl (Rydia, since she focuses on offensive spells after the Plot Relevant Age Up)
• Blind Idiot Translation (The SNES English script had many, many mistakes.)
• Boisterous Bruiser - Cid is a perfect example.
• Bonus Boss: Some of Rydia's summons, Zeromus EG and the Dark Summons in the GBA version, and two more in the DS version, accessible only on a New Game Plus.
• Boring But Practical: The game's stinginess with MP recovery items (see below) means that you'll be relying on regular weapon attacks quite a bit. Not to mention that many characters use little or no magic to begin with.
• Brainwashed And Crazy (Kain, Yang, and Golbez at different points in the game)
• Bratty Half Pint (Rydia, when you first meet her, acts a bit like this. She has a moment like this after her Plot Relevant Age Up as well. Palom, too.)
• Broken Bridge: Several, including mountain passes being blocked by fire or ice until you clear the right plot events or recruit the right party members. Also, an undergound passage leading to your next objective remains sealed until you complete a certain task.
• Cartography Sidequest - Given to you by Namingway in the remake.
• Cast From Hit Points - Can be done in this game with Cutscene Power To The Max, but doing so will make you Killed Off For Real.
• The Cavalry: Just as the Giant of Babil awakes to raze the planet, the heroes stand horrified and at a loss as to what to do. Cue the entire armed forces of the world arriving to Hold The Line.
• Convection Schmonvection: Averted, when your airships require special modification to fly over lava in the underworld. Played straight, when you're on foot in that same underworld and able to walk right next to the same lava with no ill effects.
• Cool Old Guy (Cid)
  • What, no love for Tellah?
• Cool Ship (An airship, no less)
• Creepy Doll (Calcobrena)
• Developers Room (Hidden in the Lali-Ho Pub in the Dwarven Castle. Interesting in that it includes some of the developers as random encounters in the area. It was removed from the American SNES release and restored in the GBA release. The Developer's room showed up again in the DS re-rerelease in the same place, with a completely new set of author avatars and in-jokes, because it's a different team this time around.)
• Different As Night And Day (Palom and Porom)
• Discard And Draw (Cecil and Rydia)
• Disc One Final Dungeon (The Giant of Babil)
• Drop The Hammer (Cid wields large two-handed hammers as his weapon of choice)
• Dummied Out (Many commands were removed from the Easytype version of the game)
• Elemental Embodiment (The 4 Fiends of the Elements)
• Elemental Rock Paper Scissors (A Final Fantasy staple)
• Even Evil Has Standards (Rubicante. He heals you to full strength before both battles he's involved in. He also apologizes to Edge when Lugae transforms his parents into monsters, saying Lugae had no authorization to do so, and Rubicante didn't want that in the first place.)
• Evil Is Sexy (Barbariccia)
• Fake King ( The King of Baron)
• Fighting A Shadow
• Fighting From The Inside (Edge's Parents)
• Fission Mailed (at least twice)
• Frankenstein (Balnab Barnabas)
• Game Breaker (in the GBA version, the enemies move at a much slower pace, and the battle system will occasionally give you extra turns. In addition, some of the items from the bonus dungeon (Kain's lance, for one) are beyond overpowered. Anyone else want to defeat the Bonus Boss in two hits?)
  • Some of the battle system bugs were apparently fixed or at least toned down for the European release and/or later versions in general.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man (Cecil, to Edward, after the Red Wings firebomb Damcyan into oblivion and Edward is in Heroic BSOD mode)
• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere ( Zemus/Zeromus pre-Crystal use is exactly this, right down to being giant and in space and looking a little bit like a flea.)
• Global Airship (You get a few of these throughout the course of the game.)
• Goddamned Bats (Literal bats. They can come in groups up to six, are fast, all act at the same time on their turns, and use only one move; Bloodfeast. An attack that inflicts Sap, drains HP, and takes two seconds to complete the animation for. An omega-class annoyance, they are.)
• Good Bad Bugs (The original American release had one regarding the Sylph summon - if Rydia's hit points were full, the recovery portion of the spell would restore her magic points instead. This became a go-to attack spell, as it would heal allies, damage enemies, and restore her magic all in one shot. This was corrected in later releases.)
  • Additionally, using the Warp spell to get back into the Dwarf Kingdom's Crystal Room, and claim the Dark Crystal there, would let you skip the Sealed Cave entirely (though you'd probably have to make up for the missed Exp and loot elsewhere.) The "Crystal Room Warp Trick" was also removed from subsequent releases.
• Good Bad Translation ("You spoony bard!" appears in every English version of the game.)
  • "The bard was spoony. We checked!" - one of the developers.
    • By the dictionary definition, yes. But the famous line is something a bit less imaginative in the original Japanese, on the order of "You bastard! How dare you!". That said, they were right on the other two points, and the more famous version of the line is arguably the better overall, so who are we to argue?
• Good Costume Switch (Cecil)
• Guide Dang It (The DS port never tells you that A) Augment distribution is used to unlock other augments from characters who leave the party and B) Augments will eventually affect the stat growths of the characters who have them. You'd need a guide anyway to put those growths to proper use, because there's no way guesswork alone would let you figure out how to use them to max the stats of your final party!)
• Half Human Hybrids: Cecil and Golbez are Half-Lunarian; their father, Klu Ya, was Fu So Ya's brother.
• He Who Fights Monsters (It is implied that this is what would happen to Cecil if he had stayed a Dark Knight.)
• Helpful Mook (Of the Accidentally Assisting variety. The Tricker, found in the last dungeon, only casts Scan on itself unless you use the element it's weak against. With a name like "Tricker," though, it's fairly obvious...)
• Heroic Sacrifice (So, so very many examples, though most of the characters who attempt this fail to die and come back for the Battle Royale With Cheese)
• Humongous Mecha (The Giant of Bab-Il)
• I Got Better (Everyone except for Anna and Tellah)
• Inn Security (Cecil vs. the Baron Guard in Kaipo)
• Jeigan Character (Tellah, who actually gets weaker as he levels up (he's an old man, and it's meant to simulate his aging). Specifically, His HP, Intellect and Spirit will rise, but his Speed, Strength and Stamina fall, while his MP max will never change.)
  • This seems to be a trait of the old characters in the game, because FuSoYa also never gains anything in MP, no matter how many times he levels. HP does rise, though.
    • FuSoYa Actually will start gaining MP eventually, but not until level 70, and by the time your characters get there you've long since lost him.
    • In the DS version, at least, Fusoya (they drop the AlTeRnAtInG cApS) never gains any stats at all until level 70, at which point stat gains are no longer character-specific (and at which point you probably won't have Fusoya).
  • In the SNES version, every character randomly does this at high levels (70+ or so), though their stats might increase instead or reverse the loss the next level. Whether this is a programming error or intentional is unclear.
• Joke Character (Edward)
  • Less so in the DS remake where his abilities were improved significantly, he now at least a proper musical assassin that can inflict debuff on enemies he hit as well as able to heal the entire party.
  • His sublime voice acting, extra dialogue and really nice-looking character design help in suddenly making him likable as well.
    • Even less so in the GBA version. Give him his new equipment and unleash him in the final dungeons. He tears them apart.
• Lady Land (Troia Castle)
• The Lancer (Kain, naturally)
• Laser Guided Amnesia (Yang, briefly)
• Last Of Their Kind (Thanks to Cecil and Kain, Rydia is the only summoner left alive.)
• Lets Fight Like Gentlemen (The battle against Rubicante (he heals your party fully before the fight begins))
• Luke I Am Your Father (Golbez is Cecil's brother, Theodor)
• Mac Guffin Delivery Service (More than once with the crystals)
• Mad Scientist (Dr. Lugae)
• Magical Land (the Land of Summoned Monsters)
• Magic Knight (Cecil learns white magic once he becomes a paladin)
• Magic Music (Pretty much Edward's whole purpose as the prototypical Final Fantasy Bard.)
• Meaningful Name (the four Elemental Fiends are all named after demons in Dante's Divine Comedy - Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia, and Rubicante)
  • Don't forget Calcabrina!
  • Kain also should ring a bell for anyone at least mildly familiar with The Bible. He even gets Abel's Lance in the GBA remake to drive the point home.
• Monster Town (The Land of Summoned Monsters).
• My God What Have I Done (Cecil and Kain, after the massacre at Mist.)
• Never Live It Down (Kain gets brainwashed once according to the DS version. He's under your control more of the time he's onscreen than he's not, and yet he's become the butt of Heel Face Revolving Door jokes. Not fair.)
• New Game Plus (in the DS version)
• Ninja (Edge)
• Nintendo Hard (The DS version ramps up the difficulty significantly from previous versions. Even though your characters gain levels much faster than in the original, it's still possible to get one-shotted by random encounters. Mind you, this wasn't the easiest game in the world to begin with, at least not in the original SFC and PSX versions.)
• Not So Harmless (Dr. Lugae initially appears to be a harmless nutjob with a malfunctioning Frankenstein-type robot, before turning into a fairly dangerous boss. Only after Lugae dies do you discover how monstrous he truly was, with what he did to Edge's parents)
• No One Could Survive That (Multiple examples, first starting with Scarmiglione returning immediately from Not Quite Death before Cecil reaches paladin-hood.)
• No Pronunciation Guide (many fans were... surprised... that Cecil's name is pronounced the same as "sessile")
• Parental Abandonment (A couple of playable characters lose their parents due to the villains (and one loses here because of the heroes). Death By Childbirth is added to Cecil and Golbez's background in the Nintendo DS version)
• Parental Bonus (During the new Namingway quest in the DS remake, he asks the characters for some Rainbow Pudding to give his new girlfriend. When they next see him, he complains about how, upon going to give her the pudding, he found another guy "giving her a present of his own.")
• Perverse Puppet (Calco, Brena/Brina and Calcobrena)
• Powers As Programs (The Augments from the DS version)
• Power Of Rock - Turns out the Dark Elf is weak to this. Or at least harps.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad (The Elemental Fiends. One of them has a Quirky Miniboss Squad of her own.)
• Randomly Drops (The Pink Tail. It is dropped by Pink Puff/Flan Princesses. In the room where you can find those monsters (which is a very small room with only one uninteresting treasure), you have an 1/64 chance of encountering a formation of five of those things. Each of those things have a 5/98 rate of dropping ANY items at all, and a further 1/64 chance that the dropped item will be a Pink Tail. If you just run around that room, you have a 0.006% chance of getting a pink tail (or you'll on average get 1 tail every 10056 battles). In some versions you can use an item that guarantees the encounter with five Flan Princesses, increasing the odds to 0.3% per battle, or 1 tail every 251 battles on average. Good luck, you'll need it.)
  • The Rainbow Pudding in the DS version, which is necessary for finishing the Namingway quest and earning all the augments, as a 0.4%. You can only get it from the various Flans. And the Treasure Hunter augment only boosts this drop rate to 0.8%. The DS version also adds numerous other types of Tails necessary for getting the only equipment that can be carried into New Game +. They all have the same horrible drop rate as the Pink Tail.
    • The hidden summons (Goblin, Mind Flayer, Cockatrice and Bomb) are randomly dropped items every bit as rare as the Rainbow Pudding. To add insult to injury, the Goblin summon is pretty much useless, despite being as rare as Mind Flayer (damage, sap, and paralyze), Cockatrice (Multitarget Petrification), and Bomb (Damage equal to Rydia's health, without harming her).
• Roaring Rampage Of Revenge (Tellah tried, but just didn't quite pull it off, though he did whip out the most powerful Black Magic spell known.)
• Scripted Battle: Between Golbez and the king and queen, expect lots of conversations in combat mode. Sometimes you won't take control for an entire battle.
• She Is All Grown Up (Rydia)
• Shout Out (See Meaningful Name)
  • Kain's father's name is Richard, which is similar to Ricard Highwind from Final Fantasy II, this may not be a coincidence, as Ricard found a boy named Kain.
    • It says here that Kain is the son of Richard Highwind, leader of the Dragoons.
  • Plenty of other Highwinds occur throughout the Final Fantasy series, the most famous being Cid of Final Fantasy VII.
  • During the party's first fight with Rubicante, the fiend of fire states that "the frozen winds of hell's 9th circle" couldn't penetrate his cloak.
  • Barbariccia's◊ appearance seems like an intentional shout out to Barbarella◊.
• Single Stroke Battle (Odin when summoned)
• Sinister Geometry (CPU)
• Slapstick (Yang's wife and her... unorthodox method of dealing with enemy soldiers and amnesiac husbands. All get bashed over the head with her frying pan.)
• Space Whale (Doubles as a spacecraft, capable of flying the heroes to the moon)
• Spoony Bard (Prince Edward is the Trope Namer, and Tellah the Meme Mutator)
  • This line even gets a Shout Out in the Developer's Room: "But the bard was spoony! We checked!"
• Split Personality Merge
• Squishy Wizard (Rydia. She has the worst HP out of your final party, but, my God, she can slaughter enemies in no time, even before she gets spells like Meteor, Leviathan, or Bahamut.)
• Stripperiffic (Suffice to say the female mages do not wear the concealing robes of the predecessors)
  • Rosa◊ has wardrobe problems. Never knew that underwear goes under your clothes or just simply does not like to wear a dress or skirt? You be the judge.
• Staff Chick (Rosa is the prototypical example of the staff chick personality, even though she's better off using a bow)
• Straight Arrow (Rosa can use other weapons, but is best with these)
• Stupid Sacrifice ( Cid's apparent death - there's no actual reason that he needs to jump with the bomb. He could have thrown it. It's hard to imagine he couldn't build a remote controlled bomb either considering how he has a remote control airship. And he couldn't control the speed of his descent, so carrying it wouldn't have altered anything. Then he winds up surviving anyway, so it just comes off as a transparent method to bump him from the party in favor of Edge.
  • For that matter, Yang didn't need to be in the room to stop the cannon if all he did was blow up the controls. Rydia could have set the whole room on fire or used a summon from a safe distance.
    • Going back even further - Palom and Porom's sacrifice. Not only does one of them know Teleport, they're also traveling with a mage powerful enough to bring the whole castle down.
    • ...If he can remember HOW to bring the whole castle down.
    • This is after he Recovers every spell he used to know. You'd think he'd try to blast down the door with a Firaga or something.
• Summon Magic (Rydia)
• Taken For Granite (Palom and Porom)
• Ted Baxter (Edge, he's the first ladies' man to ever appear in the series!)
• That One Boss (Demon Wall. It's given people nightmares. It's even worse the DS version, where it has four times the amount of health than it does in any other version)
  • Also in the DS version, Calcabrina, which goes from being moderately hard in the previous versions to being utterly murderous. Why? Simple - every attack you make gets countered with an attack that will kill your player in 1 or 2 hits, maximum. Oh, and the dwarves won't let you use their equipment stores at first, so if you get to the underground stage with substandard equipment and save your game, things become even more of a nightmare since there's no way to return to the surface and upgrade your equipment. Fortunately you can still avoid Calcabrina completely, by killing off the component Calca and Brina dolls before they merge.
• That One Level (The Sealed Cave.)
  • Can't sleep...doors will eat me...can't sleep...doors will eat me Every character hangs a lampshade on this in the DS version if you read their thoughts immediately after fighting the first door. Kain probably says it best, though: "Please tell me all of the doors are not like that."
  • Magnetic Cavern. The monsters are even tougher than anything you've ever fought and your physical attacks will deal significantly less damage because the nature of the dungeon forces you to not equip anything made of any form of metal.
• Sheathe Your Sword (Cecil's trial to become a Paladin)
• The Power Of Friendship (The player characters who couldn't make it to the final boss fight use this to reinvigorate your party when all seems lost)
• The Power Of Love (Several moments, such as Edward defeating the Sahagin and Kain defeating Zemus's last attempt at mind control come from their love for a certain person. In addition, giving Twincast to Cecil and Rosa yields Ultima; strongest attack in the entire game bar none.)
• This Cannot Be (Golbez's reaction to Tellah casting Meteor in the Tower of Zot.)
• Time Limit Boss: Odin, and the Demon Wall.
• Time Skip (Final Fantasy IV: The After)
• Tin Tyrant (Golbez)
• Token Loli (Rydia, at least at the start)
• Too Awesome To Use: Many healing items, especially MP recovery potions, are rare and prohibitively expensive for most of the game. Tellah and FuSoYa's advanced spells fall under this as well. Their limited MP, combined with the scarcity of MP recovery items means that you'll likely be sticking to their mid-level spells most of the time.
• Took A Shortcut (Namingway in the DS version)
  • Also Rydia when she comes back... the normal route going through a cave infested with monsters and over seas of lava that even the airship can't cross at that point in the story.
    • Given the powers that the King and Queen of the Feymarch have (as shown in the intro of The After Years, they certainly could have warped her there.
    • There is also a teleporter at the bottom floor of the monster town (SNES and GBA versions, at least) that can send the party directly outside the Cave. Having just spent years and years living there, Rydia probably knows about it.
• Trick Boss (Calcobrena, Lugae)
• Two Guys And A Girl (Cecil, Kain, and Rosa)
• Unstoppable Rage (Edge. After Dr. Lugae turned his parents into monsters and he was forced to kill them, Rubicante tells Edge that emotions hold humans back. After this, through his Unstoppable Rage, Edge learns the spells Flood and Blitz.)
• Useless Useful Spell (Averted the DS remake. While the bosses are still immune to the really bad statuses (Death, Stone, etc.), casting Slow is practically required to make some of them manageable. Additionally, the Stop and Paralyze effects are damn near required for the later dungeons, or else the random encounters will chew you up and spit you out.)
• Video Game Remake (After receiving a Game Boy Advance port, the game was reworked from the ground up in full 3D for the Nintendo DS)
• Weak Willed: Kain.
• What An Idiot (Cecil, when he hands over the Earth Crystal to Golbez in exchange for Rosa. It's been made amazingly clear by this point that Golbez is evil; the party has discovered numerous shady things he's done including killing the King of Baron and sending someone else to kill Cecil. And yet, Cecil is flabbergasted when he realizes Golbez was lying.
• What Does This Button Do (Dr. Lugae, while he's manually operating Barnabas. It turns out that it's Barnabas's self-destruct button.)
• Whip It Good (Rydia)
• White Haired Pretty Boy (Subverted with Cecil, who is The Hero.)
• Why Did It Have To Be Snakes (Rydia's initial aversion to Fire stems from Cecil and Kain "accidentally" burning down her home village and killing nearly everything in it.)
• Wonder Twin Powers (The Twincast ability. Palom and Porom have it natively, but you can use Augments in the DS version to put them on other characters, which can change the spell you might get. Giving it to Cecil and Rosa gives them the Ultima spell which, if the damage cap is raised, outdamages everything else in the game.)
• Worthy Opponent (Rubicante)
• Year Inside Hour Outside (Rydia's Plot Relevant Age Up after her journey to the Land of the Summoned Beasts)
• You Said You Would Let Them Go (Cecil's deal with Golbez: Troia's crystal for Rosa)

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