I’ve been slowly trying to gather as much info about the re-introduced rumor of a Final Fantasy IV for the Famicom (see here) by picking up old Japanese gaming magazines and doing tons of Internet sleuthing.
While doing some more searching, I recently came upon an interesting interview from a few years back, when Final Fantasy III was being remade for the Nintendo DS. It’s a really long interview and it’s all in Japanese, but if you’re interested, check it out here! The part that really interests me is where Hiromichi Tanaka discusses some of FFIV’s early development:
From FFI and on, we would always look at the previous games for things we felt could have been better. FFI had an orthodox design, while II featured a narrative story plus a brand new growth system that didn’t use experience points. FFIII had jobs you could switch between while you fought, the ability to cast multi-target spells, and other such gameplay tempo improvements, as well as more fully-refined experience and battle systems.
After we finished FFIII, we started FFIV with the idea of a slightly more action-based, dynamic overworld rather than keep combat as a completely separate thing. But, at some point, it would up not being IV anymore… Instead, it was eventually released as “Seiken Densetsu 2″ (Secret of Mana), but during development it was actually referred to as “Chrono Trigger”. (laugh)
At the time, just after FFIII, we were working with Mr. Toriyama on a game with a seamless, side-view system. A CD-ROM attachment for the Super Famicom was scheduled to be released, you see. So we had this enormous game planned out for the CD-ROM attachment, but ultimately we were never able to release it.
So we had the Chrono Trigger project changed to a new game, and this other game we had been working on was condensed down into Seiken Densetsu 2. Because of this, Seiken 2 always felt like a sequel to FFIII to me.
No prob. He linked to this site's article on the Famicom version of FF4 a while back and has been doing some research on it of his own. Thought you guys might be interested.
Joined: 03 Sep 2003 Posts: 610 Location: st. petersburg, florida
Posted: Sat Jun 29, 2013 3:15 pm Post subject:
Wow, that's pretty neat if FFIV did actually get to about 80% in development. I doubt we'll ever learn much more of it, but you never know what might still be buried in those Japanese magazines.
Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 576 Location: confirmed
Posted: Sat Jul 13, 2013 9:55 am Post subject:
If memory serves me right, Swedish goldmine LEVEL had some mentions of this stuff in both their Secret of Mana article and the Chrono Trigger article in their two SNES themed Retro Issues from a few years back too. (Those Retro issues of LEVEL are sooooo gooooood. The Seiken Densetsu 3 article was also a pretty good read, mostly 'cause of the way it was written.)
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum