Over the past 15 weeks, I’ve been streaming the Final Fantasy IV Ultima romhack on my YouTube channel. Final Fantasy IV has always been my favorite game in the series — the original US SNES release was one of the first JRPGs I beat, and I’ve played the game in almost every port, rerelease, and remake out there.
It’s been a blast revisiting Final Fantasy IV through a new lens and sharing the game with my viewers. I haven’t completed the game yet — I’m in the endgame wrapping up sidequests before I finish up — but I can confidently say it’s the best version of Final Fantasy IV I’ve ever played.
Watch my Final Fantasy IV Ultima playthrough playlist on YouTube!
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy IV Ultima v2022rev25 — I didn’t actually realize until most of the way through my playthrough that there is actually a NEW version of the romhack released in January, called Final Fantasy IV Ultima Plus. From what I can tell, the new version is largely the same, with a revised script and a bunch of new quality of life changes (like being able to individually pick which characters are in the front or back row).
As for v2022rev25, the game’s storyline is basically unchanged, although there are a couple of minor script tweaks here and there. That’s about the only part of the game that isn’t changed, though. The romhack boasts:
- 58 new weapons, many of which deal status effects or have a chance to cast spells when attacking.
- 62 new spells and summons
- 38 new bosses, many with customized AI. These bosses are scattered throughout the world at various points — some are mandatory fights during the storyline, while others are entirely optional.
- The addition of a bestiary to track enemies you’ve encountered.
- Boss Rush and New Game+ modes unlocked in late game
- The ability to choose your endgame party from (most) of the playable characters in the game
- New skills and equipment choices for most playable characters and buffs to some of the game’s more lackluster characters
- Tons of new areas and side quests to explore
- A brand new enemy item drop system — most enemies have four potential item drop tiers: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic.
- and more!
Characters Have New Life in Final Fantasy IV Ultima
The biggest change to Final Fantasy IV Ultima’s gameplay comes through its changes to the characters.
- Cecil has new abilities in both his Dark Knight and Paladin forms. The Dark Knight ability, Bane, does huge single-target damage at the cost of some HP, while the Paladin ability, Fortify, heals Cecil and buffs his physical and magical defense. The Dark Knight can dual-wield weapons and cast a limited selection of Black magic spells. Late in the game, you can unlock the ability to swap Cecil between his Dark Knight and Paladin forms.
- Kain adds a limited selection of wind-based spells, as well as the ability Leap, which allows you to decide when he returns from a Jump attack — especially useful for timed avoidance of some of the new bosses’ powerful attacks. Most notably, the base game only has Kain do extra damage when he uses Jump with a spear equipped, even though he can equip swords and axes. Final Fantasy IV Ultima removes this restriction, opening up a wider range of viable builds for Kain.
- Rydia has a selection of new summons, including the powerful Phoenix which deals heavy fire damage and revives your slain party members. Once you acquire the Odin summon, she also has a fairly high chance to use it at the beginning of combat, which helps with those grindy random encounters.
- Rosa is largely unchanged, but her Pray ability gives your whole party a regen effect and her Aim ability now gives a free blink effect on Rosa, which helps somewhat with her defense. She can also use a wider range of gear and gains a few additional offensive spells.
- Yang’s Focus and Brace abilities from later incarnations of FF4 are present — Brace gets an upgrade in late game that temporarily makes Yang immune to physical damage. He also seems to have a huge multiplier to elemental damage — Yang is a beast if you hit an enemy weak to an element when he has the right claws equipped.
- Cid can equip a wider selection of gear, but his biggest benefit comes from his brand new Tools skill. This kit is reminiscent of Edgar’s Tools skill from Final Fantasy 6 and gives Cid some much-needed versatility. He can deliver a wide range of status effects,
- Palom and Porom have the Boast and Cry abilities, which buff the party’s magic damage and decrease enemy magic defense, respectively. Both abilities can stack multiple times.
- Fusoya has the powerful Blue ability, which cases a random spell from a limited list. If you luck out and it casts Tornado, it can event drop bosses to critical HP. The ability takes a long time to cast, though.
- Edge’s Ninja spells have been buffed considerably and he learns several new ones, including the evocatively named F.Bomb. He can also Steal Common items from enemies, but keep an eye out for a special accessory that will let him steal up to Rare tier items.
- Edward’s Sing ability gets a buff, with chances to deal status effects or relatively high damage to all enemies. Late in the game, his Hide ability gets upgraded to give you better control over when he uses it (useful for avoiding mega attacks from the game’s powerful bosses). He also has Salve — initially, this is just a full party heal, but late in the game, it gets upgraded to buff combat items. Salve double’s the item’s power and makes it affect all enemies or all party members, which allows for some massive damage from the already-powerful new combat items or revive your entire party with a Salved Life potion. More on Edward in a future article.
Quality of Life Changes in Final Fantasy IV Ultima
The romhack adds a ton of great quality of life features to the game.
Built in Sprint + Airship Slowdown
It’s fairly common for romhacks to include a sprint function to speed up moving through the game. Final Fantasy IV Ultima is no different, but with some fun additions — the sprint even works on the overworld, and the same button allows you to slow down your airships to more carefully target your landing spot. A few of the added dungeons have very few nearby valid landing spots, so this is useful feature.
Big Chocobo from menu
Most notably, the game adds a menu item that allows you to access the Big Chocobo’s item storage from anywhere in the world. With Final Fantasy IV’s limited inventory and the addition of tons of new items, this is an absolute necessity.
You’ll also be swapping gear often, as elemental resistances are much more important in this version of the game, so it’s worth keeping old gear around.
Toggleable Random Encounters
You can disable Random Encounters from the config menu if you find them tedious, although this isn’t a feature I’ve used much in my playthrough — the romhack’s bosses are challenging enough that you’ll need every bit of experience you can get. I really only used it in one spot to escape a dungeon and resupply when my healers were dead and I was out of Life potions.
Gold Ring + Thief Glove
Two accessories can make farming items a lot easier. The Gold Ring is available early on and gives you 1.5x gold earned after battle — gold drops seem to already be buffed in the romhack, so I never found myself in situations where I needed to grind battles just to save up gold for an equipment upgrade.
The Thief Glove allows characters equipped with it to steal Common items when attacking. Stick it on someone like Cecil whose primary offense is their Fight command and you’ll be rolling in items to use or sell.
Farmable Rare Items
Some of the base game’s rarest items can now be farmed from various enemies — Silver Seeds and Gold Seeds (which permanently increase a character’s Max HP by 50 or 100, respectively) can be farmed from Centaurs in the Giant of Babil and a new area that unlocks after you finish the giant. Soma Drops (which increase MP in the same way) can be farmed from a dragon on the moon.
You can even farm the Spoon from Eurkaryot and Prokryot enemies on the lunar surface.
New Challenges in Final Fantasy IV Ultima
Final Fantasy IV Ultima Has Powerful New Bosses
The new bosses are where Final Fantasy IV Ultima really shines. Most of these use sprites (and names) from other 2D Final Fantasy games, but that’s often where the similarities end.
Some, like Warmech and the Magma Giant, you’ll have to fight as you progress through the game, although most are optional. Gamma, found in the Eblan Cave, can simply be walked around, while many others are sequestered in the game’s new optional dungeons. Some, like the Storm Dragon in Mt. Ordeals, will even require you to trek back to completed dungeons later in the game.
These new bosses are wickedly fast and sometimes downright vicious — they often act several times in a single combat round, pounding your party with status effects, full party attacks that deal thousands of points of damage, or unblockable instant death attacks.
That said, I haven’t encountered any bosses that were unfair. All bosses are susceptible to the Slow spell, which stacks twice and greatly takes off the pressure. Many bosses require strategic thinking — sometimes you’ll need to change up your gear, reverting to equipment that may have less raw power, but provides vital elemental resistances or allows you to exploit the boss’s weakness.
Some bosses are easier if you take your time and build up your team with Protect, Shell, Fast, and Berzerk, while others require you to go ham and try to blast them down as quickly as possible.
Buffed Base Game Bosses and Enemies
Many of the base game’s bosses have also received buffs, mostly in their action speed and hit points. While I would have liked to see some additional AI changes or combat phases for them, the buffs help them hold up somewhat against the new bosses.
Many of the game’s base enemies are more challenging as well, primarily through increased damage, HP, and status effects — you’ll be making frequent use of Heal and Abilify items.
Some enemies, like the Mec. Dragon in the Giant of Babil are practically minibosses when you first encounter them, dealing heavy physical damage and dishing out party-wrecking spells, but many such enemies have exploitable weaknesses. Mec. Dragons are susceptible to Gale spells, which nullifies their huge HP pool and makes them a quick kill (big thanks to one of my viewers, Michael the Healer, for that tip).
The Few Downsides of Final Fantasy IV Ultima
The Final Fantasy IV Ultima romhack is the most fun I’ve had with FF4 in a really long time, but I do have a few minor gripes with the game:
- Base game bosses pale in comparison to the new bosses added to the game. Despite their buffed speed and HP, they end up considerably easy to beat compared to the new bosses. This is most noticeable in the Giant of Babil, where you fight the base game CPU and 4 Fiends bosses immediately after the challenging new Warmech boss. By comparison, the CPU and Fiends are a cakewalk.
- There’s not great signaling about when the player should venture into the new areas. In my playthrough, I didn’t end up in some of the optional areas until I hit the endgame, which made me massively overleveled for the encounters and gear available there. In other areas, I fought relatively normal areas in a new dungeon, only to get wrecked by a super boss at the end.
- Inventory management was a pain in the base game, and it’s even worse in Final Fantasy IV Ultima because of the increased enemy drop rates and the huge number of new items, even with the addition of the Big Chocobo menu button. I don’t think this is really an issue with the romhack, since I think it’s probably a hardcoded limitation of the game. My best tip: use or sell the tons of consumable combat items you get — there’s no reason to hoard them.
- For whatever reason, Edward doesn’t level automatically with the rest of the party when you get him back at endgame. In my case, he was level 15 when everyone else was in the 50s-60s. And when you drop him from your party, he removes all his gear and gets re-equipped with his starting equipment. Note: this has apparently been fixed in the new Ultima Plus version of the romhack.
- The Bestiary is super useful for learning enemy resistances and weakness and their potential drops, but it doesn’t work like most JRPGs — simply encountering the enemy isn’t enough to add them to your bestiary. You have to use the Scan spell on each and every enemy in the game to add them. This is mostly an issue with bosses, where I sometimes felt like I didn’t have a spare round to “waste” on using Scan. Granted, you can pick them up later during New Game+ if you miss them the first time around.
Even with those limitations, the game is an absolute freaking blast and Final Fantasy IV Ultima is by far my new favorite version of the game.
How to Play Final Fantasy IV Ultima
To play this version of the game, you’ll need a few things:
- An SNES emulator. I use SNES9x, but I think any of them should work. One of my viewers said they were even able to get the game to work on their SNES Classic.
- A valid copy of the Final Fantasy IV SNES rom. You’ll have to find this on your own.
- Upload the rom to the Final Fantasy IV Ultima Plus patcher, which you can find here. (Although my playthrough is on an older version, you might as well grab the most recent — it has better QoL features and the site includes optional graphics and font patches.
- Load up your patched rom in the emulator and away you go!
- Finally, be sure to check out the playlist of my Final Fantasy IV Ultima playthrough on YouTube!
