Our FF4 sequel was better. (part four)

…and today, part four in my three part series about some fan game that never got made. Don’t worry, this one won’t take long. See, here’s the deep, dark secret about collaborative RPGMaker projects: they always die.

Always.

What generally happens is a bunch of guys with hyper-inflated egos get together and talk about some game they want to make, how freaking amazingly rad their game is going to be, blame everyone else for every little thing that goes wrong, and have amazingly heated arguments about the tiniest details. Honestly, at one point I got into it with our programmer guy about whether to list the statistic that governed your magic power as “Intelligence” or “Magic” for something like five hours. Names were called. Mothers were insulted. Both of us swore off the project forever (but changed our minds later, of course). And here’s the really crazy thing — I don’t even remember now which side of the argument I was on.

As a result, the sum total of what we actually have to show for all our “work” on FF4:CS is a bunch of design notes and, well, not much else. I have to say, though, what we do have is pretty cool.

First up is the game’s logo, which I’ve always liked. I can’t remember for the life of me who we tapped to knock this up; I think I just showed up on IRC one day and someone dropped it unexpectedly into my lap. Let’s be frank here: it’s not amazing artwork. The hair looks like it’s glued into place, she kind of looks like a hunchback, who knows what that left arm is doing, and for some reason the hilt of the sword is a spider. But who cares? It’s awesome and I love it. And hey, if you ever want to link to this blog post for some reason, we’ve got you covered there, too:

Whichever one of us darling geniuses hacked this together out of the big logo was clever enough to stick the Japanese text in there — just like a real Final Fantasy game! Clearly at this phase of development shit was starting to come together.

Of course a logo is one thing, actual in-game artwork is another. 80% of the graphics could be lifted directly from FF4 and FF5, and we figured most of the rest could be stitched together Frankenstein-style from what was left over to look like new stuff. This is actually a fairly common practice in RPGMaker circles, and its done to varying degrees of success. Whether to go with the squat, square map sprites from FF4 or the nicer-looking tall ones from FF6 was a discussion I think we had probably fifty times, and we apparently never reached a consensus because no map sprites ever materialized. One of us started the process of putting together battle sprites, though:

From left to right we have Agate (a recolored FF3 Scholar), Crystal (recolored from Lenna’s Magic Knight sprite), Picathera (Cid with orange dreadlocks) and Jet. If Jet looks nicer than the others, that’s because he’s an original piece, drawn by my good buddy Jon who can do magical things with pixels. Jon wasn’t available to draw absolutely everything in the game, of course (which is why Jet looks awesome and Pica looks like a tangerine with goggles and pants), but he did agree to do the one thing we absolutely could not divine from thin air: the status screen portraits.

In order we have: Crystal, Boko, Lark, Jet, Picathera, Agate and Golbez. (I think it was Dan who decided female dwarfs should have beards.) I can’t recall whether we specifically asked Jon to draw these seven characters, or if we just handed him the notes and said “go crazy”. Actually, thinking about it now, we probably handed him our first three Frankensprites as something to work off of, threw Boko and Golbez (whose likenesses already existed) in next because they were the easiest, and then worked on Lark and Jet because of their elevated status as members of the final party. Which means Cicero would have been next.

The weird thing is that to this day I still have no idea what Cicero looks like.

Oh yeah, Jon also agreed to do the spritework for whatever bosses we couldn’t cornhoggle together from our FF4/5 rips. The only one that was actually finished was the final boss, Arcus:

He tells me Arcus went into his online portfolio, which helped him land a job drawing video game sprites. Or ruling the world, I forget. At one point he did an animated version of Arcus, but it was to frightening to continue to exist. The world is safer with it having been purged.

The project went through several different RPGMaker engines. At the time the only real option was 2000, which is what everyone used. Then one of my friends convinced me to go with a more powerful scripting engine like Sphere, offering to do all the heavy lifting for me since I couldn’t code my way out of a paper bag (his words, not mine). That kind of fell through, but RPGMaker 2003 was on the horizon so things got retooled for that, at which point the same friend came back and pitched the same deal, except this time in ika instead of Sphere, and then that fell through, but by that point RPGMaker XP was only a few months away, so…

Bottom line is I don’t remember if this naming screen was a mock-up or if it was actually programmed to work at one point. Perhaps we’ll never know.

On the flip side of the resource coin is music, and our pal Sean had us covered. Only two songs were actually completed, but several more were started, and what’s done is actually pretty incredible. Here they are in increased order of awesomeness:

FF4-2: Cedric’s Theme: This one is just a couple notes, but it would have been eventually become the theme music of one of the main bad guys.

FF4-2: Factory: One of the dungeons in the story was an airship factory, which would have sported this spiffy tune.

FF4-2: Damcyan Market: One of the cool things we were looking forward to was visiting parts of the world we didn’t really get to explore in the original game. Damcyan, for example, is just a smoldering wreck in FF4. In CS, however, it was a thriving kingdom which, like Baron and Troia and Fabul and Mysidia, we believed deserved its own unique music. At one point I had a completed version of this song, but it has since been sadly lost to the ravages of time.

FF4-2: Battle Theme: I don’t remember the order in which Sean composed these songs, but I do remember this battle music getting incredibly high praise. I bet if you put this alongside the actual FF4 battle music and put them both in front of someone who wasn’t familiar with the source they wouldn’t be able to tell which was real and which was fan-made.

FF4-2: Main Theme: And then he had to go and top it with this stunning overworld music. What I love most about this song is that it is so reminiscent of FF4’s overworld while at the same time being very distinct, similar to how Crystal shares the same soul as Cecil did, but is a much different kind of hero. During the RM2k3 phase of CS’s development I actually mapped out the whole overworld complete with the changes we needed, and I would spend a lot of time just running around it with this tune looping. What a thrilling experience that was.

FF4-2: Golbez’s Theme: The two biggest challenges we had for Sean, I think, were the two characters who were coming back from the original but playing almost completely reversed roles. The idea was we wanted Golbez and Rydia to keep their original music, but be remixed for their new roles. What he came back with for Golbez is this slower version of his original theme that has been married to the Lunarian’s music. You’re only going to hear the first couple bars of Golbez’s actual theme here, but I swear I can hear the whole thing. It’s my favorite piece out of what we have.

Sadly, we never got to hear Sean’s take on what the climactic battle with Rydia would sound like. I imagine translating Rydia’s sorrowful, melodic theme music into something suitable for high-end combat would be no easy task, but if you clicked on any of those links you know our man was up to it.

And that about does it for our FF4 sequel and how awesome it was going to be. Look on the bright side: even if we had been disciplined and mature enough to make it happen, Square would have just knocked us with a cease-and-desist at the 98% mark anyway. So maybe it all worked out for the best after all.