GuestLog in

I wish there was a "Maybe" category for whether or not a hack is recommended, because though I certainly loved it, it is definitely not for everyone. At one point, the readme file says "this is not a difficulty hack"... THIS IS A LIE, and one that is very much to the hack's detriment. Yes, the difficulty is far from the only or the biggest thing changed, but it won't be long before it stands out even more than the interestingly rearranged story.

In the normal Final Fantasy 4, whether you are playing the Easytype/US SNES version or the Hardtype version, enemies, even bosses, don't start to get health in the five digits until the endgame. Here, almost every boss has tens of thousands of health, as do many of the later regular enemies, and they all hit harder and faster with much more dangerous patterns. The midgame in particular, from around the second to the third elemental Fiend fight, was absolutely brutal. It's an entire different game design philosophy from the unmodded game, where you are fully expected to have characters regularly die in the course of an ordinary battle, be revived just so the enemies have one more target, die again right away, get revived again at least once as you whittle down the enemies one at a time, and then get healed back to full health after the fight via the use of healing items because you just don't have enough MP to do it via heal spells. This is not better or worse than the normal game's more forgiving style... but it is rather jarring at first (and also, it does get a bit ridiculous with the hack's ridiculously high encounter rate... be willing to flee if it gets too much).

However, as extreme as the difficulty can be, it is not unfair, and it doesn't even require grinding (though it helps). By using all the tools at your disposal, and really learning and understanding the enemy's attack pattern, things become manageable. Don't have enough health to survive even one of the enemy's spells? Switch back to an older shield or a different accessory, to get the relevant resistance. Boss has way too much health? Try using Venom on them; pretty much all of them, including the final boss, are vulnerable to being poisoned, and as the fight goes on it will take out over a tenth of their health at least once. Enemy seems to be constantly spamming ridiculously dangerous abilities faster than you can keep up with revivals? It's probably a counterattack or a thing they only do when alone or something that can be prevented with Mute. After gaining so much wisdom about how to fight well in FF4's battle system, it was actually a bit of a disappointment when the final dungeon turned out to be only barely above the (hardtype) normal game (which I am assuming is just a result of the limitations of the system).

As for the rearranged and selectively altered story... as I said, utterly fascinating. The few moments when things seem to be progressing almost as in canon tend to come right before the biggest and most surprising twists. And the sequence leading up to the battle with Cagnazzo/Kainazzo was particularly cool, and something that I always kinda felt should have been in the main game. Wanting to see where things would go next was what kept me playing when Octomamm was repeatedly annihilating me, and it was worth it. Despite how relatively dark the story is in many places... in some ways, things actually end up turning out nicer than in canon.

So if you are up to the difficulty and aren't turned off by the less nice characters, give this hack a try.

Encounter rates are insane, battles are drawn out, too many huge trash mob abilities, lackluster companions. Very boring. I was excited to try the new story reorganization but I can't spend hours hitting 10min long trash mob fights every 4 steps.

This elaborate hack pretty much takes every story event you know about Final Fantasy IV and turns it on its head. What if the Elder of Mysidia raised his hands? What if that character lived instead of died? What if you went through the game more or less out of order up until the final dungeon? While I don't feel as though the new story is as resonating as the original, it does succeed at providing a thoroughly original feel to a classic game. It does get a bit morbid early on, as the very first plot point in the game involves the death of two children, but it never crosses the line into being edgy (if that sentence can be believed).

The re-balancing alone of so many enemies and areas boggles the mind; truly, it does. The original game was specifically designed to avoid requiring the player to grind, so long as they face every challenge that comes their way. Fighting enemies at different levels means strategies change to suit new party setups and enemies tuned to your level. I did feel that the balancing slipped away somewhat during the latter half of the game, where your armor just didn't seem to be caught up with the damage you're receiving, and sometimes enemies feel like damage sponges, but I was able to get through the game with only a minimum of grinding for cash. Not too much is different in battles otherwise, other than many characters having their commands swapped around, although there are still empty spaces, and commands like Pray will still bear a chance to do nothing. You also can't multi-target black magic this time around, leaving you to rely more often on summons. On the plus side, Psych (the MP-draining spell) is thankfully no longer useless, so you actually get the opportunity to use some of that Black Magic for a change of pace.

Players of this hack will still have to endure the same limitations of the original Final Fantasy IV, chiefly the limited inventory space management, although because you can call the Big Chocobo without the need of a carrot, this is primarily negated. I was able to finish the game without my Big Chocobo running out of space. You will want to keep an eye on equipment which is non-magnetic, which your upgraded equipment screen handily indicates to you. The game is decidedly tougher, but not ludicrously so, nor as wildly fluctuating and out-of-control as, say, Final Fantasy IV Ultima can be with frequency. All in all, I'd say, if you're not sold on the idea of a randomizer just yet, go ahead and give this a go for a diligently curated remix experience.

I love what was done with the story. It's about 90% brand new, and the difference starts right in the opening moments. After years of replaying this game in various forms, it was really cool to have that sense of not knowing at all what was coming next.

I wouldn't exactly call it "hard", because it's probably impossible to make an old school FF game hard without making it a miserable experience, but you are going to be mostly disappointed with the chests and shops until very late in the game, and if there are any rare enemy drops with good loot, I never once got one by the end of the game. The enemies hit hard, and many of them really love to spam their OP counter attacks. It's nothing you can't grind your way out of though. Like any other FFII/FFIV official version or hack I've played, I ended up at level 99 with all the best gear and it's just as much as a cakewalk as any other version in the end.

No story spoilers, but I figured that I would mention that the Pink Puffs are located exactly where they were in the vanilla version. Although the encounter rate seems to be similar or exactly the same as vanilla, I'm going to have to guess that the drop rate was significantly stacked in your favor. I spam save states in RPG games like this once I figure out how the drops work and it didn't take me very long to get 5 sets of adamant armor. In fact, I never had to reload a state after a battle more than once to get the Pink Tail. Without any further testing or knowing for certain, I'm going to guess that the drop rate is 50% once you manage to get the encounter. This is good news, since I never found a single Bell/Siren/Alarm item to summon them and had to just keep running around until I lucked into the battles.

I'm comparing this Tail drop to the Ultima version which I just played recently. On that version you can buy the Siren item right outside the room to fight them over and over again and it would sometimes take over 100 battles for me to get a Tail drop, and save state spamming has a very limited use in that version since some of your characters are berzerked once they start dancing. That doesn't appear to be the case in this hack.

Because of the tail drop rate and the seeming complete absense of rare and useful enemy drops, I actually completed this hack much quicker than I usually finish a game of FFII.

Thanks to the creator of this awesome hack for sharing.

Without giving away any spoilers, this hack changes the sequence of events right from the opening cutscenes. The overall plot is largely left in tact, but details along the way are reworked, and some events are witnessed from a different point of view.

The author has come up with a very creative twist on the story, and I really enjoyed going through the game, wondering what twist or turn was coming up next.

The difficultly is also a step above the vanilla version, which is a very welcome change. Most encounters will take a few rounds of combat, and the boss battles are intense. For a lot of the bosses, I ended up needing to come up with a solid strategy, and even then there were a few defeats along the way. As someone who finds the vanilla FFIV and FFVI games fun but just simply too easy, this was a breath of fresh air without being unfair.

The characters personalities have been amplified slightly through modified dialogue, and I found the changes entertaining. I think my favorite sequence may have been the lead up to the fight with the water fiend at Baron - it was simply intense what the author has created there.

Fantastic work on this hack - I really enjoyed playing through it and would recommend it to anyone who likes FFIV.

I just finished this hack and it was a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end. The way the original story was changed around pretty much kept me guessing where the next location would be, at least until the end where process of elimination kinda made it obvious. I beat the end game with character levels a little past 60 and the entire game progressed super smoothly, I didn't need to grind for XP or gold at all throughout.

One thing of note. Having the elemental attack properties of weapons nerfed made Cecil my LVP (least valuable player) in terms of damage for a good portion of the game. Or it could have, but instead it made me rethink strategy and I found a viable solution in one of his weapons that I never use in a regular playthrough of the game because it's two-handed. Once I found it I used that weapon in every battle until the end boss, except for a very few boss fights where selecting a specific target order is preferable. Most of his weapons therefore served as attack fodder for another character. :P This added a whole variant RPG challenge vibe to the game, which I loved.

Summation: A fantastic hack which was a lot of fun to play. Thanks to the maker(s) for sharing their work with us all!

Here we have The Darkness Within.

This is certainly a fresh take on a story. It's not the same way as you remember, but a journey to fight the evil and atone for your past transgressions. This is not bad and written well enough though not perfect.

The real treat is the difficulty. This is not a hard type, but it is harder. The game forces you to become more strategic. You need to make more use of spells normally not needed in the vanilla version due to more challenging situations. I found myself using mute, stone and piggy more and you need to manage your inventory too. This is crucial. Take this lightly and you will not succeed. The characters do have a change too. With the right equipment, you can dish out the pain! No spoiler, but talk to everyone. Just saying.

Only gripe: Kain's and Rydia's special are not worth it. Rosa's is great and try to pray for a miracle. Arrows no longer are used, instead buy one and unlimited stack! And no encounter music unless it's a boss or a booby trapped chest as I like fighting in the regular music. And the boss fights are challenging. They really are bosses and never take em lightly either.

Good hack with no issues. Highly recommend!

The very first JRPG I had the privilege of playing was Final Fantasy II (IV). I was 7 years old living in barren, cold South Dakota and I went to a video store called Video Mania to rent a game. This was almost an hour drive from my house, so it was a huge deal being able to play it... I can't tell you how magical it was for me when the first time I fired it up I found a game that was so rich in story, music and adventure.

Now fast forward to 2018, I am an adult, with a family, and have seen a sad decline of games where graphics and derp derp call of mcdonalds 21 is the best game evar111!!!!11 is the design philosophy of most games it seems. I recently got a MiniSNES but the problem remained that I was simply replaying games I had already beaten 1000 times. After some quick googling about FFIV romhacks (I remember hearing the term some time ago in a random article somewhere) I found this.

With some tweaking I was able to get this hacked rom installed on my MiniSNES classic under retro arch. I booted it up and for a moment was thinking (oh this is going to be the same thing, with different text in the box).. well lets just say within about 2 minutes when Cecil gets the Mysidia I was fairly confident this adventure was going to be different. Suddenly I was that kid back in South Dakota, in my basement playing FFII for the first time.

I just beat the game today 1/17/2018 and I have to really give props to the author/team that put this together. This was such a refreshing and well balanced take on the game. The RNG was a little asshattish with the random encounters (long spurt with none, then one and two steps later another consistently) but was overall very fair. I was most impressed with the difficulty, nothing was impossible, but each battle especially early on, you had to give it your all or you were dying, no just hitting A on fast forward.

Story 10/10 (beginning and ending were both stand outs from the overall good story) Music 10/10 (assuming it uses original music score, but the way it was placed was well done) Pacing 10/10 (every boss battle required making intelligent but fair choices)

The itemization of the game was interesting as well, I wish all rom hacks were done this superbly, great work!

This played like an alternate path through the game - you're going through the same areas and you have the same general plot, but you're taking a far different road through the game. The changes start with the opening cut-scene and the early game, as you go through what was the mid game as the early game.

In terms of the story, this works quite well. Characters are met in a much different order, events that happened in person in the original are shown or explained as asides, and three characters die in the freaking opening cut-scene before you even get control. You'll often find yourself wondering just what plot twist is going to happen next. My personal favorite change are the series of battles leading up to fighting the fiend of water, as it makes storming that castle much more entertaining. These kinds of changes are all over this hack, and they are a joy to play.

Crawling through the dungeons can become a bit tedious at times, though. While the enemies have been scaled up or down relative to the drastically different times you meet them, the dungeons themselves are almost unchanged - that is, the early game dungeons are much longer than they really should be, since they were originally intended for later in the game. Likewise, there's a set of dungeons you'll practically fly through later on, since they were originally early game dungeons and thus are really short. It's not a deal breaker, but it messes up the pacing of the game a little, especially early on. Still, fighting what was the first boss in the game with a mid-level party is still quite fun.

The battles, on the other hand, are much funner to engage in. Not only are the enemies quite a bit smarter, the battles use a lot more strategy than in the original game, especially boss battles. The vast majority of the boss battles in this game are challenging - you'll feel as though you need strategy to overcome them, not simple level grinding. I'd go as far as to say that fighting the bosses was my favorite part of this hack because the battles and the strategy was fun to engage in, especially with the altered abilities and move-sets of the characters. Even during the times I got stuck on a boss, it only served to make the victory over them more thrilling.

Though... I do wish bosses, and really tough enemies in general, would award more exp. It feels empty to take on one of the hardest enemies in the game and receive no more exp than facing a group of normal mooks would pay out. Minor, but something that irked me.

Ultimately this is a rather well done hack. While you ultimately enter the same final dungeon and face the same final boss, this hack isn't really about the destination, but the journey. And it's a journey well worth taking, in my opinion.

Being a long-time fan of FFIV (was my first RPG experience ever, and on my all-time favorite system to boot...) I'm always interested in stuff related to it. I own nearly every release of the game, and still enjoy firing it up 20+ years later.

Needless to say I was super happy when someone finally released hacking tools awhile back as I've long thought the game was ripe with possibilities for differing stories and viewpoints.

This hack tells an entirely different story then the classic SNES game we all know and love, and while I think the "twist" idea that the hack author came up with right from the getgo of the hack is a GREAT one and offers up a TON of potential... that potential is never realized or properly fleshed out. I kept wanting MORE lore on the Underworld, and never ended up getting it. Instead the NPC's are the same, and only the flow of the game is different.

Outsourcing a sprite artist... or at least making some alterations... to the Dwarf sprites to make them different then the stock ones would be a huge help, even if the script couldn't be altered too much due to the ROM size or something.

I could overlook that stuff as it's only a few hours worth of playing, however there was another issue: The balance is also off in places and it has caused me to cease playing.

It's clear the author wants the player to grind out levels in several places by putting enemies weak to a certain weapon/spell, and if you do not, then you'll be woefully underpowered for the next segment/area. This problem is made even worse by auto-pathing by going to certain places/talking to certain NPC's, forcing you into a new area without the ability to backtrack. And, if you haven't grinded, you're going to have a tough time.

Anyways... this isn't a terrible first attempt at hacking the game, and if the author makes more hacks or fiddles with this one some more I'll definitely be trying them out.

FF4 die-hards will still find plenty to enjoy here, just know going in that the story is fairly sparse and grinding is required.

This hack has an much better script as the original American script was messed up very badly. This hack shows that Nintendo should have been family-friendly instead of kid-friendly. I think that the story kind of ties Final Fantasy II(Not the American Final Fantasy II) with Final Fantasy IV. Nice job!