Nintendic has been keeping you up-to-date on the latest happenings on the 3D remake of Square Enix’s NES classic role-playing game ‘Final Fantasy IV’ for the Nintendo DS thanks to the official Japanese developer blog and now the latest updates have arrived, bringing us up to the news of the game actually being finished now.

For those that wish to recap, the first Nintendic overview can be found here, whilst the second is here. Now, on with the show:

Blog Update No.5: I have received your strength! Introduction of new system!

In this latest update, the blog announces that Square Enix is adding a new system to the remake, whereby it is possible to receive the special abilities of other characters. In the original game, as well as subsequent remakes on the WonderSwan Colour, PSone and Game Boy Advance, it was not possible to combine abilities but now you can play with them however you desire. It is duly noted that in Final Fantasy IV, the story is at many times propelled forward by the self-sacrifice of the characters. However, seemingly contradictory to this theme, whenever they died off, their abilities perished with them. Therefore, now when a character is dying they will pass over a special item to you, a gift that is basically them entrusting you with their powers and allowing any other character to learn whatever abilities they had before passing away.

This ingenius new system was devised by one of the main planners at Matrix Software, the team that continues to work hard after completing the Final Fantasy III remake on DS and helped out with the port of Dragon Quest IV from PSone to Nintendo DS (the game has just been released in Japan and sold over 360,000 units on its first day alone, which equates to a massive 70% of the initial stock sent out!).

To give a little explanation as to how the team came up with this idea, the blog states that it should be understood that the most important aspect of Final Fantasy IV is the scenarios and events, and how the current team would like to maintain the flow of the Super Famicom (SNES) edition wherever possible. The party replacement system in the Game Boy Advance edition was rather strange, allowing you to change up the last party members with those that had previously died. However, altering the story in such a way should be much more of a delicate matter. As a result, Square Enix and Matrix have tried to give players the same freedom by changing the party member replacement option to this new system. In other words, there were repeated disagreements within the team, and to resolve matters as quickly as possible, the birth of this new system came about.

About the balance of FF4…

Due to Final Fantasy IV having such a strong following around the world and currently existing in two versions: Easy and Hard, the new team had to make some difficulty adjustments to balance things out somewhat and bridge the gap. In battles, especially those against main boss characters, players would need to hunt for the key weak areas and then repeatedly attack them without too much hassle. In this remake, though, the original development members consulted with one another and have now added the ‘Boss AI Arrangement’ as the previous versions of Final Fantasy IV were beginning to show their age terribly. The feeling was that if the ‘new’ game failed to present any sort of ‘new’ challenge, then long-term fans would feel cheated and disappointed.

An example given on the blog is the Ant Lion that was shown in the Tokyo Games Show demonstration version of the remake. His eyes change colour during battle to indicate that his counter-attack type move is on its way. So, at least now those who know Final Fantasy IV off by heart can still enjoy it with a fresh feeling now!

Blog Update No.6: The Feeling of Travelling the World!

This update introduces the art director, Airi Yoshioka. As the art director, other than doing image illustration, one must also take charge of background work. Yoshioka has worked on SaGa Frontier 2, Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy XII, as well as Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana in the US), in which she did monster design for the first time, as well as illustrations.

Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork presents an image that is apparently “as clear as the blue sky” and the team is very happy to remain true to his ideas, so take them into consideration when continuing with the work on this remake. The fact that players will be travelling the world must also be represented in the design work. In the not so distant past, the world of game production commonly took shortcuts, using the same tile patterns due to issues when it came down to storage capacity on either cartridges or even early CD media. Therefore, it did not matter where the gamer went in the fantasy world, everything had the same atmosphere. Due to this fact, the team has taken towns and castles as settings and made them all unique, so whilst a gamer may step into the world expecting them to all look alike, the emphasis has been put on making everything as fresh as possible.

For example, the commercial nation of Damcyan is located in a desert, and thus has adopted the feeling and style of a Middle Eastern flair. Meanwhile, Eblan has a basic Asian feel, with the colour and material styles used alone giving off an air of a Ninja’s habitat. The development team definitely had a nagging thought it their heads that players would simply walk through the various in-game locations and, despite the new 3D appearance, would not feel ‘moved’ thanks to that all-too-familiar sense of recognition. So the only answer was to start from the ground up and adjust every last detail. That being the case, and using the lessons learned during the development of Final Fantasy III, the team is beavering away at creating the maps and having fun doing it at the same time.

Blog Update No.7: Large number of unreleased images! Introducting Character Designer!

When a game reaches the final stages of development, it is hard to predict what is going to happen next as the team is busy tackling various bugs…however, at the time of this update, it also seems they are tackling bugs of a different sort - people coming down with strong bouts of cold! However, soldiering on, the blog gets its seventh update and, following on from the introduction of the art director in the last update, this time the focus is on character designs.

Two characters were largely responsible for how the team would represent body types in the game, as well as trying to include some influence from Amano’s original illustrations. Rydia starts as a child but becomes an adult during the game, so consideration had to be given to ensure the proper height differences were represented between the two stages. And, as a result, it was also determined what the height would be for all of the other characters. An example shown, and seen in the images in this story, is that of Kain in his polygon model state and the illustration drawing as well, plus Kain’s ponytail in the game. Thought had to go into the fact that if both Dark Knight Cecil and Kain were to appear in the same scene, then having them appear too similar would be strange. People need to be able to easily recognise which is which and this is why so much effort has been put into express as much as possible through colour and height. In the example of Rosa’s facial expressions, the blog tells how focus was given to the integral characters in the story first and foremost, in order to establish a particular style.

The blog continues by talking about the concept of depicting the back of the Dark Knight’s armour, somethign that will be recreated for the numerous computer graphics video clips that will be strewn across the large adventure. The team has now actually amended the basic concept of what makes a “Dark Knight” and actual Dark Knight when compared to previous versions of Final Fantasy IV, mainly because there has not actually been any reference to one since the release of Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V, meaning the team felt it could very easily mix things up a bit and basically get away with it!

The idea of the Dark Knight’s suit is that the armour itself is rammed down to the skin directly, which is clearly something that would be very painful indeed. The blog then goes on to share some thoughts from the character designer…

“To better communicate the drama of Final Fantasy IV, we decided that it would be best to lift the overall height of the characters from Final Fantasy III just a little, rather than trying to go the more realistic route (which would be different, but…) Keeping this style in mind from the very start, it works, but we had to do a lot of trial and error to land on the perfect spot.

“The most important part of this work is that we at the Matrix team exercise a fine degree of control so that we do not change things too little or too much - a challenge which has pushed us to the very limit! Pretty soon the official site can release some event scenes for the fans.”

Blog Update No.8: Is the DS coming up short? Introduction of main programmer!

This particular update introduces Takayanagi, the main programmer who worked so hard at Matrix on the remake of Final Fantasy III. Starting things off, the blog talks about the in-game battles, with one of the common topics of discussion being how to get five main characters on-screen along with six enemies. It was thought that the limit of what could be done with the DS was achieved with Final Fantasy III’s release, yet each element (enemy, friend, background, effect, and so on) has to be displayed in battle, meaning limitations in what the team wanted to do, meaning it had to display fewer enemies than would have been preferable.

The problem had to be resolved for Final Fantasy IV, though, by any means necessary. So, the team’s task was to reduce the number of polygons per unit, whilst not reducing overall aesthetic quality, meaning the modelling group had a hard slog ahead of them. With the ATB (Active Time Battle) system, there is less restriction as to what is done and when during a battle.

Asano: “Control is very important when you have summons, and players can take advantage of optional timing such as skipping to another character, and pausing is also possible…”

Takayanagi: “Once we started debugging, there were almost no problems with the battle system. After all, the first design was good, don’t you think? It should be okay. About the events that follow, though, this is serious business. Usually events occur mid-battle. Designing them within the DS’s specifications requires that we conform to its limitations. We saw some problems with the continuity between battles and events. Trying to conform to one specification was impossible given all the variables. There are simple events, the ones that show a detailed performance, those that show lively action, and so on. Each solution was unique, solved on a case-by-case basis.”

Asano: “From the beginning of development, the voice acting was a major concern. Could you respond a little about that? This game is going to be a 1GB ROM, but just making room for all of that data was difficult, right?”

Takayanagi: “There was an enormous amount of animation used in the events, which takes up a big chunk of space. Then there’s the voice data…including something like that means we need more space because we already have tons of data related to the maps and such, not to mention the songs that are being recorded. We finally managed to compress all of it down, even some of the stuff that wasn’t easily compressed.”

Moving on, the questions head off in the direction of discussing the size of the DS card being used for this extensive remake of Final Fantasy IV, as well as how it feels to finally be getting close to wrapping everything up in time for the game’s 20th December Japanese release date:

Asano: “Up to about a month ago we still hadn’t fit the game onto its ROM, right?”

Takayanagi: “With all of the changes, I’m not surprised if it took us longer than Final Fantasy III! But if you take into consideration when we first started development, and the experience and know-how we gained from Final Fantasy III, if you think about it now, I believe we’re moving faster.”

Asano: “You don’t sound too concerned about meeting the December deadline at all! What about the events and battles? I think we’d like to see the events shape up a bit, and the battles, being related to the game’s tempo, is important too don’t you think?”

Takayanagi: “With the end in sight come feelings of relief *smiles* We’d love to show everyone all the hard work, from the monster models, the event production, the voice overs, the battle background production, etc…but as expected you’ll have to wait until the game goes on sale to appreciate all of this hard work!”

And that is it for the moment in terms of Final Fantasy IV updates. That brings us up to the eighth blog update and is a nice place to round off for the time being. Be sure to stick with Nintendic for even more coverage on this highly anticipated 3D remake of the classic NES game, with Blog Updates #9 through to #12 set to be summarised here in the next few days…

As a side-note, in addition to all of this FFIV madness, Square Enix has also stated that it will be once again be attending the Jump Festa show this year in Japan, launching a specific web-page for coverage of its presence there. No doubt more will be revealed in due course!