Let's play Final Fantasy IV: Unprecedented Crisis!

Hello! Welcome to my Let's Play of Final Fantasy IV: Unprecedented Crisis!

First, a little bit of background. This romhack (which I'll just call UC) was made by Pinkpuff, released in June of 2015. About three years prior, they made an editor for the SNES version of FF2 called 'ff4kster'. I'm about 70% sure that UC was meant as a sort of flagship project for a new edition of ff4kster, to show off what it can do, but I can't really confirm that, to be honest.

Now, what does UC do? Some of its additions include new dungeons, new spells and skills, new bosses, a rudimentary party-switching mechanic near the end, and even multiple endings! The changed plot is...well, it's no worse than FF4's original plot, if we're being honest. at the very least, the text doesn't have noticeably bad grammar like most romhacks... The game doesn't feature romhack-level difficulty, either; it's about the same as in the original game; maybe even a little easier.

I can't think of anything else to add for introduction, so here's a table of contents to be filled!

EDIT: I should've put this to start with, but here's the link to the patch if you want to play through this yourself! I can't exactly link you to the ROM, of course, but I hear Google might help you if you say the magic word, which is '23084FCD'.

Table of Contents:

• Chapter 1: Just Get To The Good Part Already
• Chapter 2: Just A Little Off...
• Chapter 3: This Is Snow. So Is This.
• Chapter 4: How Deep Are We Talking, Exactly?
• Chapter 5: Freedom To Go Nowhere
• Chapter 6: Love Is Blind
• Chapter 7: Oh Right, This Is A Let's Play
• Chapter 8: This Is Also Snow. So Is This As Well.
• Chapter 9: What Are The Tenets Of Bahamut's Faith, Anyway?
• Chapter 10: Hubris Is Smite-Targeted
• Chapter 11: A Shocking Twist
• Chapter 12: Ticket To The Moon
• Chapter 13: This Was Easier In FFIV Advance
• Chapter 14: The Crystals Shed Their Light
• Chapter 15: The Fantastic Five
• Chapter 16: And Then There Was One
• Chapter 17: I Was Expecting Astos
• Chapter 18: Do Dark Knights Dream Of Black Sheep?

Bonus Chapter: Sequence Breaking Is Bad
Bonus Chapter: The Training Room
Bonus Chapter: The Serpent Road
Bonus Chapter: ff4kster

Chapter 1: Just Get To The Good Part Already

Much of the early game is the same as in the base game, so I'm just gonna fast-forward through a lot of it.



Cecil and his crew contemplate monsters...



We become delivery boys...



Crystal sheds its light...



Goblins are murdere--wait what's that?

This is probably the first point where you could actually prove you're not playing the base game; Cecil has Black Magic. (Also his Dark Wave skill is back.)



Right now, he's got Poisn (which does direct damage along with inflicting status) and Blind, neither of which are too useful when compared with his dark sword. As he levels, Cecil will pick up all of the debilitating black magics, culminating with Break at level 66 (Death was learned nearly 20 levels earlier, at 48).

Of course, like we'll ever get Dark Knight Cecil that far; surely he'll class change to Paladin long before then. Probably.

What does Kain get? Well...



In addition to Jump, he has "Lance", which lets him attack and drain health as he does. I think it might be slightly weaker than a normal attack, but I'm not actually sure. I don't really have much reason to use it, honestly, but we'll see.

That's about all that changes for now.

Before we continue, I've got one tiny thing to do. Much like how GoggleBob's LPs are on a mission from God and, hey look at that, when did he get 99 of everything, I'm not really wanting to grind for gil every five minutes.



So let's not. There's also a couple of other changes for the observant, like how only Cecil's sword is dark, while the rest of his equipment is mundane, but I'm not gonna get into that too much right now.

Now then! *presses fast-forward again*



Slay a dragon...



Destroy a town...



Kidnap one of the survivors...

Aaaaand pause. Rydia's changed a bit.



She has no White or Black magic, only Summon magic. She starts with the Imp spell, which is far more useful here than if you grinded for it in the base game (in a version where it's not dummied out, anyway). Almost all of Rydia's summons are learned via level, up to and including Bahamut at level 65.



As our first mage character, Rydia also shows off rings, which are essentially shields but for the people who don't use shields. This is a change I can approve of. (If you're curious, Cecil can't use rings.)



Rosa's in the corner...



And there's an old man in the way! Tellah's also changed a good bit.



He starts with quite a few more spells, as well as some spells new to UC. For now, I'm just going to highlight Brsrk, which is Black magic here. He also loses the 'Recall' ability, because he hasn't forgotten any spells. What you see here is everything he has learned.

also yes he has even less mp than usual



Tellah no longer points out that Rydia could learn more than just summoning magic. The strange comparison to Anna was in the original game too, but it doesn't really fit here, I think...unless Anna was also a summoner??? At least in the original, you could argue he was just saying that Anna was also magically-gifted.

Onward!

Oh, I just realized I forgot to mention another ability Rydia has.



Rydia's "Help!", much like Tellah's old Recall, has her summon a random Eidolon. Options include Mist, Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, Titan, Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut. They still cost MP. (It's not really worth it.)

The rest of the Underground Waterway is largely the same, except instead of Hades armor for Cecil, it's now Mythril armor...which has essentially the same effect.

Finally we get to...



This hack takes the approach of slapping ellipses on names that are longer than allowed. I'm not sure how much I like that approach over the truncated names. Oh well.

This battle is even more of a joke than in the original; as a reminder, Tellah has Brsrk; slap that on Cecil, and...

Before Berserk:

After Berserk:

At one point he even crit for over 700 damage. Four hits like that and the Octomammoth was down. Aside from that, the boss doesn't lose tentacles as it's damaged here. *shrug*

We'll stop here. Next time, I'll cover the Antlion Den, Mt. Hobs, and the Fabul attack, finishing out the 'largely unchanged' portion of the game. Please look forward to it!

Did you edit your inventory or did you use the item duplication trick/bug?

I used a duplication trick, but not the standard one.

Setup: A character with both hands full, the top two inventory slots empty.
Step 1: Enter a battle, get to above character's turn, open menu.
Step 2: Select the second empty slot, then select the character's left hand item. The item will move to the first empty slot.
Step 3: Select the character's right hand item, then select the empty slot (which should be the same position that you first selected).
Step 4: Run from battle.
Step 5: Reequip your right-hand item, then unequip it again. You will have 'nothing' there.
Step 6: Go to sell this 'nothing'. You'll find that you are, instead, selling 65536 of the item in question.
Step 6a: If you don't want to sell the item, reequip the 'nothing'. You'll have 1 of the weapon in your hand, and 255 of the weapon in the slot.

This works on the base SNES game, too.

Do I want to know how they managed to code things such that a 2-byte variable (read, 0-255 values) managed to underflow to a 4-byte?

If you ever figure it out, I'd love to know.

It's strange, though. If you sell the whole stack of 'nothing', it's 65K of them, but if you take one out, there's only 255 left.

look i'm just going to take my 3 million gil and run

it's what a dark knight would do

Chapter 2: Just A Little Off...

Last time, we razed a village, kidnapped a little girl, and forced an old man to wade through shoulder-deep water for some calamari. But that's nothing new.



Sometime around killing Octomammoth, Rydia hit level 10 and picked up Shiva. At 20 MP, it's not really spammable, but it'll still be nice for big groups that I just don't want to deal with.

Anyway!



Damcyan's blown up...



The bard is spoony...



And he pushes the old man out of our party!

Edward's changed a good bit since his base game days; he's almost usable now! He can technically equip rings, like I mentioned before with Rydia, but all of his harps are two-handed, so he won't tend to get much use out of them.



In-battle, none of his skills look particularly new. Hide still hides, and Split divides a potion among the party (I believe the effect is undiminished, but I'd have to test it), and Sing is--



--wait this is new.

UC treats the Bard kind of like its FF5 and 3D FF4 incarnations, with a small set of strange, but useful, effects that you can choose between. Dfnse and Speed are like a party-wide Protect and Haste, but not quite as effective as the White spells. Dirge, meanwhile, is FFV's Requiem, doing severe damage to undead.

The rate at which he learns songs is a bit odd compared to the others. See, Cecil gets a new Black spell every 6th level (12, 18, 24...) and Rydia a new Summon every 5th. Edward, however, gets a new song on each level that's square. He'll learn a new song at level 9, then 16, 25, all the way to 64. (Even if you level all the way to 81, there's no tenth song at that point.)

Anyway, that's enough for now. Antlions!



The Antlion is essentially the same as always (I wasn't paying attention and Rydia is silenced here), except now even Cecil can contribute without provoking a counter, via Poisn.



I...didn't say he could contribute much.

Now, I could cure Rydia of her silence and freeze the Antlion solid with Shiva.



Ooooooooor I could just have Cecil swing at it anyway and take the 20-damage counters.

Either way.



Go wake up Rosa...



Rydia is not a black mage, so instead of asking her to cast Fire, Rosa asks her to summon a bomb.

As in, literally what destroyed her village, far more directly than what the base game used. I like it.



We rest, and...



Good morning! What's that? Something that happened last night...? I don't know what you're talking about.

Anyway, let's talk about Rosa, the Archer! As in, "not a White Mage". Now, don't get me wrong, she still has White magic. It's just, her selection is a little...



...trimmed down. (Some would argue, trimmed to the only spells she ever needs.)

Much like how Dark Knight Cecil gets the Black spells that don't directly concern themselves with damage, Rosa gets the White spells that don't directly concern themselves with healing. In a couple of levels, she'll pick up Warp, get Float far too late to be useful, and finally end with learning...actually, we'll keep that as a surprise.

Despite being specifically an "Archer", Rosa can still use staves. Bows are pretty good though (arrows are a hell of a lot easier to manage), so I'll keep her with them for now.



In-battle (please ignore the garbage rows, they're fixed as soon as the battle ends), Rosa trades Aim and Pray for 'Chrge', which does what you might expect: delays her next attack while making it stronger. Bows are accurate enough now that Aim isn't needed anymore; instead, Rosa monopolizes them. No one else can equip bows.

At Mt. Hobs, the text is, of course, changed to push Rydia into summoning a Bomb instead of casting Fire.



Don't say that like it's not your fault, Cecil!



Anyway, traumatizing the little girl continues as normal, and we ascend the mountain. This remains the first and last time Rydia ever casts this spell.



Up near the summit, we find this Mythril Sword. I haven't been pointing out every treasure chest change because that would quickly get tedious, but this one I want to call attention to. This is not a Dark Blade; Cecil is free to slash up all manner of zombies or other undead while using it. We could have gotten a Broad Sword back in the Kaipo weapon shop to do this as well, but I forgot, and it wasn't really needed.

Notably, while using one of these Knightswords, Cecil can't use Dark Wave. Not that I've ever gotten much use out of that, anyway... For now, though, we're keeping my Darkness Sword on, because its Dark property is gonna be useful real soon...



jesus christ rosa, the girl has a legitimate fear, lay off

Anyway, it's Mom Bomb, and we've got a Karate with us! The Mom Bomb is weak to Dark (this is in the base game too), which is why I didn't equip the Mythril Sword just yet. As for our Karate Man...



Kick does the same thing as always, while Chakra heals Yang based on his current HP. So if he has more HP, it heals more. This might sound a bit...pointless, but the idea is that you use it regularly to patch up minor scrapes, but if you're already almost dead, a little breathing exercises or whatever isn't gonna help with that.

Anyway, after 800 damage, Mom Bomb expands, and I can go on the defensive and wait for her to explode into babies.



Mmm, sweet sweet AoE damage~ (Also pictured: Me being an idiot and not hiding Edward before the explosion, but he survived anyway.)

Once we get to a menu...



...we find that Yang doesn't have claws! There are no claws anywhere, in fact; Yang doesn't get to punch for elemental damage, nor does he get better than the base 50% unarmed accuracy.



This leads him to being a good bit weaker than you'd expect. Honestly, Yang seems to have gotten the short end of the stick here. At least he still gets HP after level 60?

And now we go to Fabul and offer our aid to the King!



healing magic what's that



Hey Kain, ol' buddy, how's it goi--



ow

Golbez comes in, steals the crystal and Rosa, knocks everyone down...



rydia you can't just use those willy-nilly

do you know how expensive those things are

just because i stole earned 3 million gil doesn't mean we can just buy whatever

Anyway, she gives the men a pep talk, and we go to rest. Note: As soon as you go to rest, you leave Fabul, so do all your looting first.

Once you do...



Doesn't even kill everything in one hit, 1/5



Title drop! From what I understand, this was in the original game and it was just used for the hack because...*shrug*



To Baron! It sure would be terrible if something were to happen on the way there, though, like the King of the Sea rising up to break our ship.



Good thing that didn't happen!

Next time, we're off to look for Cid! Surely he'll be able to help us find Golbez. Please look forward to it!

This looks neat. And I'm guessing where you currently left off is where the story starts to diverge? It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

(I also very much appreciate that this is not 'romhack hard'.)

But... why?

Re-casting Rosa as an Archer is super interesting. I would think that would make Kain's Lance and Yang's Chakra way more useful.

? Garbage rows? Is this a joke, or am I missing something obvious? This screenshot looks fine to me.

Huh. My urge to stop reading right now and go play this for myself is rising sharply...

ETA: I seem to recall thinking when you first posted about this hack that I'd rather read about it than play it, though, so I'm going to continue to trust past-JBear for now.

He put Rosa in the front

LIKE A CRIMINAL

I figure he means having an archer on the front row, aka Front Rowsa.

The character backstories from whatever supplemental materials were Japan-only say that Rosa was an archer in the Baron army until she met Cecil, whereupon she jobchanged into White Mage out of worry for his well-being. So accenting Rosa's bow over her magic makes sense, but swapping her magic into buff-only instead of taking out the buffs and leaving her with just Cure/ Raise/Safe and Shell and Reflect is a puzzler.

Ah. Yeah, that's fair. I guess the fact that this is a ROM-hack led me to expect, like, glitched text/sprites or something when he said "garbage".

All glitched text/sprites are good.

This intrigues me!

Yeah, I'd meant Rosa being in front; I don't think there's any sprite glitching here.

I can't be sure, but if I had to take a guess, it could be because there's a limited number of 'reaction' scripts in the game, and some had to be taken out to be used for the new bosses.

Fake edit: This is what happened. Some of the reaction scripts were repurposed, so I guess the hacker just took out the whole thing from Octomammoth. Personally, I probably would've just reworked it a bit to go by pairs of tentacles, instead of each individual tentacle reaction (only two of the six original reactions were reused), but either way, I guess.

Bonus Chapter: Sequence Breaking Is Bad

We're gonna have a short intermission here to go over one of the things the hack adds. And to do that, I'm going to use the Mist Skip.


There is no Mist Hop or Mist Jump, though.

The Mist Skip, for those who don't know, is basically taking advantage of a glitch that shifts your map detection to walk to the other side of Mist without entering. The Package only opens once you go to the left entrance of Mist, so you can enter from the right and explore a bit. There's more you can do with the glitch, going all the way to Damcyan with Kain still in your party (but without Tellah, curiously), but we're not worried with that here.

Here's a video where you can see it performed.



And here's me on the other side of Mist. Excellent.

Now, let's just go back in there and...



Huh. Bit of a remodel, okay. Anyway, to looting with our 3 million gi--



--wait why did everything go black.


Zeromus's Final Battle theme is playing when he talks to you.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

*inhales*

...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So, yeah. If you try to do the Mist Skip, then a few steps after you enter Mist (it does not matter where these steps go, there's no specific spiked tile), you get carted off to the Lunar Subterrane. Cecil and Kain are currently standing on a save point, not a warp pad, so even if there were a Lunar Whale outside to take us home, we couldn't get to it.

Obviously, you're expected to die here, then go and play the game normally. How insane would you have to be to try to beat Zeromus from this state, anyway?

Tonight, we'll actually go visit Cid; updates will probably come once a day (the first two were an exception because I wanted to get to the diverging point sooner), though I might throw extra things like this in every now and then. Please look forward to it!

Oh, that is rich.

I would blame Nasir but apparently he didn't work on FF4.

Yes, but is it 3 million gil rich?

I played this hack up until fighting Rubicante for the first time, once turtle mentioned it in the FF thread. I was initially a little disappointed how easy it was, but basically once you get back to Baron the game kicks it up into high gear. I almost died several times, and I remember Cagnazzo being an exercise in "holy shit why won't this thing die yet?" Although I blame some of that difficulty on not having an actual healer at all. The Healing Staff can only take you so far!

Chapter 3: This Is Snow. So Is This.

Welcome back! Last time, we took a boat from Fabul to Baron.



See? Made it in one piece. Cid's possibly at his home; if not, maybe his daughter knows where he is.

(From now on, since the dialogue is new, I'll be putting it in quote tags)

Hmm. Guess he's at the castle, then.



B-but I'm the former captain of the Red Wings!

Back in town, there's some commotion at the Inn, so we go check it out.



It's a fight! And apparently Cecil's traitorous? guys i think the item shop owner tattled on me



Rydia sobers them up real fast with a Cold Dust.



And they're so grateful for it, they left their key behind!

We check out the weapon and armor shops, which has a full set of Shadow armor for Cecil, and a Wooden Hammer and Hand Axe that no one can use... Behind the counter is a Healing Staff, which will be great for chip damage; Rydia can use it, so I hand it off to her.

But no, with this key, we can also go to the old waterway; with the guards in front of the castle, it's our only way inside to talk to Cid. The king will probably understand, right...?



Sure he will! And with that, in we go!

Now, a bit of a mechanical observation. In the base game, you're here with Paladin Cecil, twin mages Palom and Porom, old sage Tellah, and Yang. Here...



We still have Cecil, even if he hasn't gotten a makeover yet. Yang's still here too, but without Lit or Ice Claws, he's not gonna be as handy here. Instead of the three mages, we have Rydia, who can only summon (she'll pick up Ramuh next level, which will be real helpful). And as a wildcard, we have Edward; at level 9 (which was way back in Mt. Hobs), he got the Alure song, which confuses the enemy party, though it takes a bit of time to sing.

The Healing Staff gets more than a little workout as I travel through the waterway. Fortunately, most enemies only use physical attacks, so with enough applications of Dfnse Song, I only take 1 damage per hit, letting me heal to full. At level 16, Edward picks up the Life Song, which heals everyone for 20% of their max HP. Yang loves this, of course, and Cecil doesn't mind it either. Sadly, neither Rydia nor Edward get a lot of healing from it, but they're in the back row, so it's enough.

The save point near the end of the waterway, which normally has the Ancient Sword in a hidden side-room, now has the Coral Sword, which is a knightsword that deals Bolt damage. It's equal in power to the Ancient Sword we got from Fabul, but it's going to be very useful very soon, and I'm sure you can all guess why.

We get to the Castle, and the first place we check out is the Jail. Call it a hunch.



Fortunately, the guard's asleep, and is that who I think it is over there?



It is! Hi, Cid!

It then prompts for an item. It's a nice touch how the Baron Key works for the jails, too. We get him out, and then...



So, somehow, despite not having some weird detour to Mysidia and Mount Ordeals, Cid confronted the King before we got here and got himself locked up (recall in the base game, he's barging in to confront the King just as you wipe up Cagnazzo).

Cid joins here (of course), and I outfit him with Cecil's old Mythril armor. He comes with a Wooden Hammer already (two-handed, so no shield), and it packs a punch.



For comparison, Cecil's got 49 attack with his Coral Sword, and Yang has 41 with his fists.



In-battle, he no longer has the Peep command (that exactly 0 people ever used). Instead, he has Rage, which casts Berserk on himself (casts, as in, "can be Reflected"), and Dash, which lets him ram an enemy for damage equal to his current HP; in exchange, his HP is then set to 1.

Let's go talk to the King now.



The hallways are eerily silent... sounds like the perfect time for looting while no one notices! Unfortunately it's all consumables, but that's fine. The east tower basement's sealed off, so I can't get to it...

Okay, now let's go talk to the King.



We can see Cecil's a little more aggressive than you might expect.



Gasp! You mean, the Fiend of Water was the one who stole the Water Crystal?!



Time to fight! Some of you may have noticed, however...

...who's going to break his water barrier with Lit? Ramuh doesn't work, and neither does evoking the Thunder Rod. The answer is, you don't. Kill him fast before his Waves do the same to you.

Of course, Ramuh's still worth casting; he's also weak to Ice, so Shiva would be functionally equivalent. Edward is best used singing Speed and Life Song, while our three meatheads bonk the turtle.



...and then the first Wave kills Edward straight out. Unfortunate. Right now, my goal is to DPS him down into his shell, at which point I can revive Edward, then finish the job.

...Then he casts Haste and puts the barrier down himself. I don't recall if that's part of his standard script or not, but either way, it's not unwelcome.

His second Wave does less than 100 damage to everyone; I suspect it's tied to his current HP. I pick Edward up after that and Cagnazzo retreats into his shell in short order.



Before he can act again, Cid and Yang bludgeon him to death.



Huh. I got the Water Crystal back from him. Maybe I should go bring this back to Mysidia...

Before I can do anything else, however, Baigan rushes into the room.



As Baigan looks around (his sprite actually turns left and right, it's cute), Cecil finishes his sentence.



Aaand scene! There's a lot to unpack here. Let's start with the elephant in the room: Baigan's not a monster. He's just either prudent or a coward, depending on how you want to see it. The Crystals and Fiends are given a more direct link; they're much stronger with the Crystal in question. As in the base game, we're set to go to Toroia, but this time instead of having to be threatened to go, we're a bit more proactive. The Enterprise isn't finished yet, so we don't get an airship this early; however, there's apparently a footpath? Through the 'Misty Mountains'??? I feel like I've seen this mentioned in bad fanfic before... well, I'm sure it won't be as bad as that.

Next time, we'll go through Mist, across the Misty Mountains, to Toroia! Please look foward to it!

Also, if there's anything I could be doing better, do let me know. And feel free to ask any questions you have.

If there's a dungeon with a new tileset, I will lose my shit.

ETA: Ahaha, I just got the joke for the name of this update. I'm slow.

Please explain it to this poor stupid idiot

Look at my avatar.

*Slaps forehead!*

Cecil: Baigan! Are you saying you were just following orders you knew were wrong?!

Baigan:

Cecil: oh ya lol nvm

I played an earlier version of this romhack (when there were still some bugs in the party-changing at the end, among other things), and thought it was very well done, so I'm very excited to see what's changed since then. Thanks for doing this, Turtle!

(Also, I've played pretty much every version of this game, many of them multiple times, since it first came out. How is this the first time I've ever heard of the Mist skip?)

This is great stuff, turtle, keep it up!

Would you recommend this hack to others? If someone were to start playing along ahead of your LP, what are the things that are worth knowing beforehand?