About FinalFantasyIV.net

FinalFantasyIV.net is the culmination of years of work and financial investment on the part of webmaster Paladin. Paladin is the author of all the content you will read. My name is Matthew, though I go by Paladin on the 'net.

What is Final Fantasy IV?

Final Fantasy IV is a role-playing video game, the fourth installment in the legendary Final Fantasy series. It was created in 1991 by the then Square Company (SquareSoft in the USA), which is now part of the combined RPG powerhouse Square-Enix. The game originally debuted on the Nintendo Super Famicom (Super Nintendo - USA). Within the RPG genre, Final Fantasy IV is mostly a classic Dungeons & Dragons style game. It does have the hallmark Final Fantasy elements (Cid, Chocobos, Airships, Yoshitaka Amano visually conceptualized characters, a score by Nobuo Uematsu, etc...). It defies classic sub-categorization, but is definitely early 1990's Japanese Anime or Manga type fantasy fiction, with a bit of Steam-Punk and Sci-Fi thrown in. Final Fantasy affcianados would relate Final Fantasy IV closer with Final Fantasy IX or XII than Final Fantasy VII or VIII.

The content of this site for the most part details the various North American English-language releases of the game. However much information conveyed on this site pertains to all versions of the game, and most of the in-depth information comes from Japanese source materials.

You should be aware that there are three distinct "main versions" of Final Fantasy IV. I unofficially call them "Classic", "Advance", and "DS". The Classic games are the versions available for the Super Famicom / Super Nintendo and the PlayStation. These all contain the original game code and graphics from 1991. In terms of North American releases this would be Final Fantasy II for the Super NES released in 1991 (named as such because it was at the time only the second Final Fantasy game ported outside Japan), and Final Fantasy Chronicles for the PS1 released in 2002. The Advance games are the versions available for the Bandai WonderSwan Color and the Nintendo GameBoy Advance. These versions have graphical enhancements (but are still essentially 2D 16-bit), and in some cases new game features were added. In particular this covers Final Fantasy IV Advance. Finally, the DS game is the newest game, a full 3D adaptation of Final Fantasy IV on the Nintendo DualScreen Hand Held. Not only graphics, but gameplay, strategy, and other elements have been redesigned. As well new story elements are introduced in this version. This version is simply titled as "Final Fantasy IV" without any subtitle qualifications and became available in July of 2008 in North America.

While there are notable differences between the versions, they all tell essentially the same story and contain all the same characters. With the exception of new story canon introduced in the DS game, most of the version differences pertain to game play or bonus elements which alter how you play or what the game looks like graphically but do not change the core story introduced in 1991.

Therefore the purpose of FinalFantasyIV.net is to give you detailed information about Final Fantasy IV, across its 17+ year history. At least I, Paladin, unequivocally believe it is one of the best role-playing video games around. I hope that if you are a long-time Final Fantasy IV fan that you enjoy this site and possibly learn something about the game you may not have known. Otherwise if you haven't played it yet, I hope that this site will inspire you to pick up a copy and go and do so!

In the beginning...

Where did this site come from? Well, It all started around 1999. I had first started my collegiate education as a major in Electrical Engineering. We were tasked in an introductory course with building a simple web page on one of the school's servers. I really enjoyed this experience and discovered that this activity was something that I wanted to pursue, at least at the time, on my own.

I soon learned that to build a web site you need content, indeed HTML was devised to share content across the world wide web. After some deliberation, the only thing that I had an interest in at the time which I felt suited the medium of the web was video gaming. To be precise, Final Fantasy games. Though my initial machinations were for an all encompassing Final Fantasy site, of the "Final Fantasy Online" pardigm, I soon found that task to be well beyond my talents of the time. To narrow the scope of the project I decided to focus on my favorite one of the games, which is Final Fantasy IV. Especially after doing a search on Final Fantasy IV and coming up with mostly inaccurate and poorly designed fan sites for the game. Now, one should consider the time frame; this is '98/'99. This pre-dates "MySpace", the "Blogging Revolution", and Web 2.0. The web was still a rather "wild" and "unruly" place in terms of "homepages" and web site design. Therefore I resolved to start down a path to attempt to build a truly great Final Fantasy IV site. My first feeble efforts originally went online in November of 2000 as "Paladin's Final Fantasy IV Archive".

Having being a self-taught web programmer, as many of us are, my skills slowly evolved and my Final Fantasy IV site morphed through the years getting somewhat better each time from a technical stand point. However the problem was pounding out static HTML. Even by the time of the previous incarnation of my Final Fantasy IV website (designed circa 2004) called the "Final Fantasy IV Chronicle", building static HTML sites (even using the iFrame tricks I had become adept at) had become nearly an anachronism. By this time as well, I had pointed myself away from Electrical Engineering, and electrical hardware altogether to focus primarily on Computer Software. I redirected my studies and left the school of Engineering and changed my major to Computer Science.

I knew the next Final Fantasy IV web site I built would be a server scripted site using the programming foundation I had learned in my degree. This belief sprouted late an 2005 after I graduated with my degree in Computer Science. The ink was still wet upon the diploma parchment when I landed a job in November of that year as a professional web developer. Thereupon I immediately picked up ASP.NET server scripting on the job. I am a "visual learner" and having learned much by doing and by learning from my highly skilled supervisor over the past two years, I have become proficient enough to produce the web site you are viewing now. This has also coincided with my having finished preparing and procuring much of the web site's content materials.

Thus FinalFantasyIV.net is not only your soon-to-be online Final Fantasy IV "source" but a mission of love. I am truly a fan of this video game going back to it's original North American release in 1991. Over all these years and all the incarnations of the game I still play it to this day. This web site is my tribute to this game. As my friend Aywren says "May old legends never die!"

Mission Statement

As a part of the Light-Crystal Network, Paladin's network of personal websites, the goal is Quality and Quantity. Quality web design and a comprehensive quantity of quality content are the mission of FinalFantasyIV.net. My goal is to create an intuitive, easy to use, functional, efficiently coded, creatively designed, and aesthetically pleasing web site.

Furthermore, I am committed to ensuring that the content contained herein is accurate. To that end I have spent time and a considerable amount of money to obtain as many official source materials on the game as possible and have used them as a reference for everything written on this web site about the game. While I ask for no compensation for this endeavor, I do ask that if you find anything on this website that you would like to use in the public domain you do contact me for permission to do so (or at the very least credit FinalFantasyIV.net).

Development

FinalFantasyIV.net is a dynamic server scripted web web site. Completely developed from the ground up specifically to chronicle the 15+ year history of Final Fantasy IV. It is not a pre-built portal like DotNetNuke or CommunityServer. A large portion of the back-end design and data management were developed for Klipsch.com by the Klipsch Webmaster. He is my direct supervisor at my full time job and is a friend and mentor. I borrowed the design principles and some code used on the company websites as a basis for building the Light Crystal web sites.

I believe in the KISS approach to mark-up code as well as good SEO practices. Therefore this web site will also pass W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation tests on EVERY page. Though most pages are dynamic, pulling their content off the database (you don't see request strings in the URLs because of URL rewriting), the W3C validation tag is in the global footer and each page, dynamic or not, should validate. If it doesn't I want to know about it. In case you wondered, yes ASP.NET 2.0 renders XHTML compliant markup from it's server tags.

Another common development concern is cross-browser / cross-platform display compliance. Indeed having worked on a large, global corporate web site with thousands of hits per day this is very important. Therefore I code and test my CSS and rendered markup for compatibility for both IE6 and IE7 as well as Mozilla (FireFox 2, Netscape Navigator 9, Sea Monkey), Opera 9, and Safari Beta 3 Windows.

FinalFantasyIV.net Powered By:

FinalFantasyIV.net Built With:

FinalFantasyIV.net Hosted By:

Domains

The official URL for FinalFantasyIV.net is FinalFantasyIV.net.

It was to my great surprise and delight that this domain was available at the time I looked into registering a non-hyphened domain name with some semblance to "Final Fantasy IV". Indeed FinalFantasyV.net and FinalFantasyVI.net were also available, and all three are owned by me.

None of my domains are or planned to be offered for sale or transfer to other individuals or entities.

About the Owner / Webmaster, Paladin

Name: Matthew
Age: DOB...01-NOV-1980
Gender: Man
Marital Status: Single
Location: North America, United States, Somewhere in the midwest among all the corn.
Dwelling: My own house, complete with mortgage, utility bills, a yard to mow, and property taxes.
Occupation: Professional Web Developer. No...really, I am. It has nothing to do with this website. I have a degree in Computer Science and work as a web developer for a high-end consumer/pro audio company (speakers).

Hobbies

Web Development / Programming / Graphic Design
Playing Video Games (Mostly Old-School Super NES Games)
Collecting various "Omake" associated with the Final Fantasy video game series. (Primarily FF4 of course).
Hacking / Reverse-Programming Video Games
Building / Modifying Computer Hardware
Listening to Music on High-End Home Audio Equipment
Evaluating, Researching, and Generally Spending Too Much Money on Aforementioned High-End Home Audio Gear.
Watching Movies Across Multiple Genres.
Watching Anime
Collecting DVD's of Above Media
Tasting / Drinking Fine Beers
Tasting / Drinking / Collecting Fine Aged Whiskies.
Political Studies (USA)
Historical Studies; Mostly Military and Naval History.
Modeling With LEGO bricks.
Actively Displaying LEGO Models in Layouts.
Table-Top D&D Style Role Play Gaming w/LEGO Layouts and Minifigs...
Yes, the nerd value there is squared...
Occasional Bicycling as Weather Permits.
Reading the Occasional Novel, though my reading of my library of history books is vastly uncompleted.

The Legality Discussion

FinalFantasyIV.net is an Unofficial Final Fantasy IV Fan Web Site. It is not affiliated with Square-Enix in any way. Furthermore Square-Enix does not support or endorse FinalFantasyIV.net in any way. In a legal sense, any content contained herin, especially thoughts and opinions expressed are those of Paladin and any/all FinalFantasyIV.net contributing authors / sources. Nothing on FinalFantasyIV.net represents the views or opinions of Square-Enix.

There are many registered trade marks and copyrighted materials used on FinalFantasyIV.net. Most of these works belong to Square-Enix or by contractors who have created associated materials on the behalf of Square-Enix for the Final Fantasy IV video game. In legal terms FinalFantasyIV.net is most likely violating these copyrights. However Square-Enix has, over the years, taken a laissez-faire attitude toward non-profit fan-based web sites. In short, they are not actively pursuing web sites which host or convey their trademarks and copyrights. It appears that as long as one is not profiting from Square-Enix's properties nor are they damaging the company's ability to profit from their properties, the company thus far has chosen to ignore the essentially free marketing of the fan community. In other words fan sites such as this are simply ignored with indifference by Square-Enix so long as "no one is getting hurt". A similar attitude is seen by Doujinshi artists who produce published fan manga using Square-Enix characters.

I have been running various web sites over the years that host Square-Enix copyrighted materials and have never heard anything from them. My intent is not to damage Square-Enix's copyrights. Rather to be a proponent of their properties. Therefore, until and unless I recieve cease and desist orders from legal representatives of Square-Enix, I will assume that the above holds. I will respect any official correspondance from any Square-Enix copyright holder, and will remove any objectionable content post haste.

That being said, I maintain FinalFantasyIV.net as a completely free web domain. Nothing on this site is for sale or denied to any party. All content is offered for informational value only. I do not make a profit on this web site. On the contrary, it costs about $100 USD a year to run this site.

A Note On Cartridge Game Backups, or ROM image files.

While I do have as a hobby, the "Reverse Engineering" of video game software. And I may discuss the nuances of, provide informative links or documents for, and/or publish software patches about my activities in this hobby germaine to Final Fantasy IV. These things are for legal owners of their own software backups. I DO NOT distribute copyrighted software. This includes all of the Final Fantasy video games, meaning specifically in this instance Final Fantasy IV. I have every physical copy of the software I have backed up for my own personal usage and thus am in legal possession of said software, and used specialized hardware to obtain my own backups. Legally, you cannot have backup copies of software which you do not physically own. Therefore FinalFantasyIV.net will not distribute nor will I honor private requests for copyrighted software.