Final Fantasy IV/YMMV

""The bard was spoony. We checked!" - Tom (Retran)Slattery, the guy who retranslated the game."
 * Awesome Music: Plenty! This page will give you the examples.
 * Complete Monster: Dr. Lugae and Zemus both fit the bill.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Kain Highwind, and to a lesser degree Rydia. They evolved into Breakout Characters thanks to The After Years where they play much larger roles in the story than Cecil or Rosa. Though his fanbase isn't as large as Kefka or Sephiroth, Golbez is pretty popular too. Being what is basically the Final Fantasy equivalent of Darth Vader will do that for you.
 * Evil Is Sexy: Barbariccia.
 * Game Breaker: In the GBA version, the enemies move at a much slower pace, and the battle system will occasionally give you extra turns. In addition, some of the items from the bonus dungeon (Kain's lance, for one, which randomly casts an unresistable version of Tornado and reduces a target's HP to single digits) are beyond overpowered. Anyone else want to defeat the Bonus Boss in two hits? Some of the battle system bugs were apparently fixed or at least toned down for the European release and/or later versions in general.
 * Goddamned Bats:
 * Literal bats. They can come in groups up to six, are fast, all act at the same time on their turns, and use only one move: Bloodfeast. An attack that inflicts Sap, drains HP, and takes two seconds to complete the animation for. An omega-class annoyance, they are.
 * Also the Tiny Toads in the Sylph Cave that just cast Toad over and over again. The DS release makes them even worse by resetting the character's ATB bar when you get turned into or back from being a Toad, thus causing half your party on average to miss their turn as they transform. However, Draw Attacks can rectify that for you.
 * Good Bad Bugs:
 * The original American release had one regarding the Sylph summon: if Rydia's hit points were full, the recovery portion of the spell would restore her magic points instead. This became a go-to attack spell, as it would heal allies, damage enemies, and restore her magic all in one shot. This was corrected in later releases.
 * Additionally, using the Warp spell to get back into the Dwarf Kingdom's Crystal Room, and claim the Dark Crystal there, would let you skip the Sealed Cave entirely (though you'd probably have to make up for the missed Exp and loot elsewhere). The "Crystal Room Warp Trick" was also removed from subsequent releases.
 * The item duplication trick was among the most infamous examples of all time.
 * Good Bad Translation:
 * "You spoony bard!" appears in every English version of the game. Technically, it's not wrong ("spoony" means "foolish and/or lovesick"), but... yeah. Thanks to language marching on, it feels this way.


 * Rydia is almost certainly a mistranslation of Lydia... not that anyone complains!
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: FuSoYa's name sounds an awful lot like a particular incantation in another RPG...
 * It Was His Sled:
 * Cecil becomes a Paladin. Heck, the remakes incorporate his transformation into their openings!
 * To a lesser extent, . Dissidia Final Fantasy makes it the central plot point of Cecil's story arc, and The After Years of course brings it up too.
 * Memetic Mutation:
 * Tellah's crushing insult, "You spoony bard!". It has become so popular that subsequent translations have kept the line, and other games in the series (and even a different series altogether!) have included references to it as well.
 * There's also some Fridge Brilliance: "Spoony" actually isn't a completely nonsensical word, it's just a rather archaic word describing being enamored with something silly, or being foolishly in love.... and that actually fits how Tellah sees Edward!
 * To quote Word of God: "We checked and he really was Spoony" when questioned about why they put Spoony Back in after taking it out.
 * On the other side of the ocean, Japanese fans have clung to Golbez's "Iidesutomo!", said as he . It was a bonus voice for his EX Burst in Dissidia.
 * Misblamed:
 * While "You spoony bard!" and the other quirks of the original SNES translation are often attributed to Ted Woolsey, in reality, he had nothing to do with the game's English translation. Square's policy at the time was that all localizations had to be done by either the original development team or someone at Square Japan's offices, as they felt that relying on foreign translators would hurt the integrity of the localization. Ironically though, the bad reception of this game's translation led to Woolsey being hired to localize the remainder of Square's SNES-era games.
 * And likewise, many things that were added to the script in later remakes (like the DS version) weren't new additions: they were actually just restoring cut-content (the SNES version had roughly 25% of the script written for the game, due to text size constraints).
 * Never Live It Down: No, people who've only skimmed the wiki, Kain is not the poster boy for Heel Face Revolving Door. Stop making the jokes.
 * Only the Author Can Save Them Now: Oh Crap, seems like Cecil and party just got their asses kicked by Zemus. That means the world is DOOMED! Oh, wait, no... the secondary characters managed to revive them by prayer.
 * The Scrappy: Rosa. She suffers from Never Live It Down in regards to being a Damsel in Distress. She spent the second half of the game in the main party and is an invaluable healer, but for the second and third dungeons, she's sick, then after being cured goes through a single dungeon with the party before being kidnapped. There's also Overshadowed by Awesome: Rydia is generally a far more popular character and is the focus of several sidequests with her Eidolons, while Rosa's importance to the overarcing plot of the game decreases greatly once she's rescued from the Tower of Zot. The After Years didn't help by making Rydia and the Eidolons central plot points while letting Rosa get kidnapped and saved again.
 * Seinfeld Is Unfunny: The game was a huge departure from the previous games at the time. The cast of playable characters is vast, their personalities developed and unique, it was the introduction of the Active Time Battle system, and the story is far deeper, the gameplay being driven by the plot instead of the player being free to wander the world. In short, this is when Final Fantasy truly began to develop its own profile as a game series. Of course, the series has since surpassed the original game in story, character and gameplay complexity, and the game is commonly criticized today for a simple and straightforward story, shallow characters and little gameplay flexibility.
 * That One Attack:
 * has an attack called Big Bang, dealing huge damage and causing continuous HP loss for any party member that manages to survive. It's the majority of his offense, but it's all he needs.
 * Bad Breath inflicts several disabling status effects on its victims at once. Getting hit by it can leave the party helpless.
 * They Just Didn't Care: The Complete Collection rather blatantly reuses sprites from the PSP releases of Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II. Not so bad in some cases, but the Alligator-type enemies used to be significantly larger than others, but with the usage of their Final Fantasy II sprites their sprite is the same size and thus they look out-of-proportion.
 * The game also attempts badly to incorporate all previous art styles of the characters, which has varied Depending on the Artist. In battle as a Dark Knight, Cecil has bright blue armor with a helmet that exposes his mouth with a red jewel on the forehead, while his portrait is dark blue, cover his mouth and has no jewel. As a Paladin, his sprite has a silver jeweled headband over his hair, green eyes and spiked silver hair, while his portrait has flowing silver hair, a gold headband with no jewel under his hair, and blue eyes.
 * Unwinnable by Insanity: The SNES version has a horrible bug that can cause this if you save during it. If you pass through the same door a lot (at least 64 times in a circular town), sometimes the game will forget or reset your game flags and start playing cutscenes from earlier in the game.
 * Values Dissonance: "Gawd, Edward, how dare you cry over the deaths of everyone you've ever loved? Can't you be like the rest of the incredibly stoic and manly and not-at-all-wangsty leading cast? You such a bitch."
 * Wangst: Cecil and Edward, Up to Eleven if you care to read their thoughts in the DS version.
 * What an Idiot!: Cecil borrows a world crystal (which are pretty damn important, and which are being gathered for unknown nefarious reasons) to give to Golbez in exchange for Rosa. He doesn't try to create a fake or trick Golbez or even make sure Golbez gives Rosa back first, he just hands it over. Guess what happens next. And hell... the entire party in the Tower of Zot, especially when you read Yang's thoughts in the DS version: he rightly thinks that Kain's offered deal is fishy as hell and doesn't say a damn word.
 * What Measure Is a Non-Badass?: Edward and Rosa.