This was the first
Final Fantasy game for the
Super Nintendo. It was released in
america as "
Final Fantasy II". It was really cool. You control Cecil, the ex-
commander of the Red Wings, a fleet of
airships controlled by the empire of
Baron, which is quickly becoming an
Evil Empire. The empire's first
evil act is to send
Cecil to steal one of the
four crystals from a totally innocent, peaceful city of magicians. Cecil is disturbed by this. The
Emperor relieves Cecil of his command because he suspects Cecil may not be totally happy with doing evil things, and then tells Cecil to go to
the village Mist with either a
ring or a
package (depending on whether you're playing the japanese or english version) which turns out to be a
bomb that sets loose a bunch of
fire snake things that destroy the city. At this point Cecil resolves to fight the growing evil in Baron, and everything just kind of goes all to
hell from there.
I think Final Fantasy IV is probably the second best of them all, behind the one that was III in US. It's definitely better than any of the PSX versions. But if you're going to play it at all, play the japanese version. Square did a pretty dodgy job with the translation-- they messed up anything resembling prose, and cut out any references to suicide or homosexuality or obscenity ("you spoony bard!"). You can find the rom of the japanese version online, and if you look some more you can find a very good re-translation in which all original meaning has been held intact. The retranslation is distributed as an IPS file, which you patch in using an IPS patcher.