After dreading it and spending waaaay too much time on it, I finally finished one of the biggest humps in my Final Fantasy IV/Easy Type/II (SNES) comparison: the town of Baron.
A lot of it is picky and a lot of it is probably well-known to a lot of die-hard fans, but hopefully there’s something new in there for you to learn 
I find I’m doing this more out of my own love for the game than to show people, it’s an interesting feeling.
Future updates shouldn’t be quite as huge. I can’t wait to show off the next update, it’s got some great stuff!
Typo: Namingwhere section, you put “Easy TYpe” instead of “Easy Type”.
You know, I just read the whole article and forgot to read the alt text.
SOFHSIRIAWOEJRFDFSDAOPWKENDkfjfiaroieiksjdn
Thanks, I fixed it!
Oh, the link you put says “matotree.com/localizatoin/final-fantasy-iv/baron” instead of “matotree.com/localization/final-fantasy-iv/baron”
I wondered why it wasn’t working.
Oops, I just fixed that too!
About saves getting deleted: my LttP saves got deleted several times, a few times before I managed to beat the game for the first time. Our cartridge was used, so it had probably been mistreated by its previous owner(s).
I’ve owned a couple FF2us carts over the years and bought one for a friend, and on all of them the top or bottom save will randomly erase itself. No clue what causes it, it’s happened since the mid-90′s, so I doubt it’s the battery going (I’ve got NES carts that still save fine today, not to mention all of my other SNES carts). Something really strange about this game’s saves.
Loving the write up, by the way. This is the most comprehensive analysis of this game’s changes I’ve ever seen in English. One suggestion I have is to go over the monster and equipment/item name changes; most players are probably familiar with FF4 to FF2 since there have been so many retranslations now, but not many people know how much was changed between FF4 and Easy Type. Also when you get to the moon you have to show off the nasty new battle scripts Easy Type introduces for some of the monsters there. I swear they make the game harder than the original.
These carts are the devil!
I find myself wondering how deep to look at differences – I definitely want to look at the moon enemy behaviors but I wonder if other enemy behaviors have changed too and they’re just not as obvious. But the only way to find that out is to start hacking all three ROMs, and by that point it’s already getting way deeper than I already am…
I think I’m gonna need to live on coffee or win the lottery to get this whole game done by 2050
Well it just so happens that we’ve already dug pretty deep into these games’ guts:
http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?board=13.0
I don’t think anyone has ever done a detailed comparison of the attack sequence differences in Easy Type, though. We’re definitely all aware of them over there, but I don’t think anyone has ever gone through them byte-by-byte. That was done for FF2, though:
http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=584.0
I’m probably going to end up doing the same thing for Easy Type. I’ll shoot an email your way when/if I do.
Actually, I had completely forgotten about it when I left my last reply, but here’s a Japanese site that has detailed game data comparisons of FF4 and Easy Type:
http://s-endo.skr.jp/ff_analyzer.html#Description-FF4
Here are the attack sequences, in particular:
http://s-endo.skr.jp/ff4monact.txt
http://s-endo.skr.jp/ff4etmonact.txt
Those paired with the FF2 post I linked above should cover everything.
Ha, cool, just browsing it quickly I see that floating Imp enemy in the last dungeon has a different behavior. I assume most of this stuff is old news to you deep-digging guys though
I really don’t want to dig too crazy deep into the code myself, so if you have anything in particular I should talk about or look into myself definitely let me know sometime. As it is it’s looking like this is going to be a multi-month (if not over a year)-long project… yikes.