Final Fantasy IV has always been one of my favorite games. I recall playing it on the SNES, when it was called Final Fantasy II and featured a rather goofy translation, Nintendo-inspired censorship and a dumbed-down difficulty level from the Japanese version. At the time, I didn't care about any of that and simply found myself engrossed in a really fun game. If there is one title to blame for my love of RPGs, it would have to be Final Fantasy IV. Even now, a full 17 years after its original release, I can still pick up Final Fantasy IV and enjoy it as much as I did when I was a wee youngling. Final Fantasy IV DS is the latest in a string of re-releases of this title from Square Enix, and the most ambitious to date, with new plot elements, updated 3-D graphics and a revamped battle system. The good news is that after all of these changes, it's still Final Fantasy IV, and that means it is one of the most enjoyable RPGs on the market, no matter what the form.

Final Fantasy IV follows the story of Cecil, the captain of the Baron Airship Fleet (otherwise known as The Red Wings). In recent years, the king of Baron has gone on an expansionist kick, attacking other nations and stealing their Crystals, which are powerful magical artifacts of great importance. Cecil, along with the Red Wings, attacks the defenseless magic village of Mysdia and steals their Crystal as the game opens. While it's a successful operation, he feels doubt and anger over being forced to attack innocent villagers for an unknown cause. Expressing his doubts causes Cecil to be relived of his duty and sent on a quest to a nearby village to deliver a fateful "package." The events of this delivery cause him to turn against Baron, and with the help of a ragtag group of allies gathered from the world's other kingdoms, he sets out to stop Baron's terrible rampage and discover the mystery of Golbez, the armored warrior who appeared to take over the Red Wings once Cecil was banished.

To modern gamers, Final Fantasy IV's story may actually seem a bit simplistic. There are plot twists and shocks aplenty, but they're far more subdued compared to the twists in more recent Final Fantasy titles. There are no 30-minute cut scenes, and most of the characters are fairly to the point and honest. If you're expecting something like Xenosaga, you might be a bit disappointed. Final Fantasy IV has a fairly strong story and exceptionally solid characters, so it's easy to grow to like the heroic Cecil or to cheer when a seemingly dead character returns from the ether to save your team from certain doom. It may not be deep or life-changing or alter your perception of reality, but Final Fantasy IV manages to be a lot of fun.

Returning fans may find a few noticeable changes, although most of them are quite subtle. A few flashbacks have been added to scenes in the game, showing off the histories of Cecil, Kain, Golbez and Rosa in a way that does little to alter the overall plot, but gives you a more detailed look into the characters' minds. Actually, one of the new features is the ability to look into the minds of your characters, so when you access the menu, you'll receive a little word bubble popping up from the party leader. It's a small feature, but it has the twin use of giving you a brief look at the character's thoughts and occasionally reminding you of where you need to go in order to advance the plot. It's a small, but welcome, addition.

Gameplay is roughly what you'd come to expect from a Final Fantasy title. You move between town and dungeon, slowly exploring the entire world and advancing the plot with each step you take. Final Fantasy IV's world is actually fairly open to exploration, with a number of cute little secrets available to gamers who take the time and effort to discover them. Chocobo forests are scattered throughout the world, and most cities contain secret passages leading to treasure, hidden bars, or even a programmer's room, where players can meet all the folks who worked on the game. By the time the game is over, you'll have no less than three airships and a hovercraft at your disposal, and each of them will be necessary to explore the world.

Dungeons are fairly simple as well. You enter and have to find your way to your particular quest, battling random monsters the entire time. One nice addition to Final Fantasy IV DS is the Mappingway Map. Early on, mascot Namingway discovers that (due to voice acting), he can't rename anyone in your team. This causes him to become disillusioned and try to seek out a new way of life. His first attempt is Mappingway, which adds a map to the bottom screen on your DS. Each map is completely grayed out when you first arrive in a dungeon, and as you explore, the fog will lift from the map. If you reveal 100 percent of the map on that particular floor, you'll receive a cache of special items. While none of these items are irreplaceable — barring the special Augment you get for revealing 100 percent of all maps — they're a nice little bonus and encourage you to explore every nook and cranny, instead of simply rushing through.

It wouldn't be a Final Fantasy without combat, and you'll be doing plenty of fighting in Final Fantasy IV. It's not a particularly difficult combat system to learn: Each member of the party has a bar that slowly fills up, and when it's full, you can attack, defend, use an item, or cast magic. Your goal is to lower your enemy's HP to zero before they lower yours to zero. If you've ever played an RPG before, nothing here is going to throw you for a loop, and it's pretty clear that Final Fantasy IV was once a SNES game. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not at all, but someone expecting a more modernized system might be a bit disappointed.

Perhaps the biggest change to Final Fantasy IV comes in the form of the Augment system. In the original Final Fantasy IV, each character had his or her own set of abilities. Edward the Bard could sing songs and hide from attacks, Yang the Monk could charge up his attacks for extra damage and perform a screen-wide kick attack, and Cid the engineer could instantly identify enemy weaknesses. However, Final Fantasy IV also had one of the highest character turnovers in the franchise's history. With the exception of Cecil himself and Edge the ninja, every character in your party would leave your team at some point , and with the exception of Kain, Rydia, Edge and Rosa, most of those characters were a permanent loss, meaning that your ability to use Bardsong or Twin Magic was lost forever after a certain part of the game. Final Fantasy IV Advance's solution to this was to allow you to switch party members after a certain point, but Final Fantasy IV DS takes a different approach in the form of Augments.

Augments are one-use key items that can be found throughout the game and grant a character with a new skill. Once you use an Augment, however, you can never unequip it, so you've got to decide carefully which character gets which one. Some of these skills are new to the game, such as the Counter and Phoenix abilities, while others come directly from the other characters in the game, such as Bardsong or Kick. The twist here is that finding Augments is not as easy as it looks. Some are given to you as part of the plot, but most of them are hidden in the game. Some require you to backtrack through dungeons, complete side-quests, or steal them from bosses, but the best Augments require something a little bit more … obscure. They can be given to any character in the game, even those that leave you permanently. If they leave, you'll receive extra augments in return. Give Tellah the Sage any augments, and you only receive his default Recall ability. Give him two, and you'll also receive the powerful Last Stand and Fast Talk abilities.

Once you have Augments, they completely change how the game plays, often in a way that makes it many times easier. Each character menu has five slots, generally bound to the Attack function, their own exclusive abilities, and Item. With the exception of Item, you can remove each of these abilities from the menu and replace them with Augment abilities. This allows you to create some fairly insane combinations of abilities.

For example, my Cecil was eventually given the Kick, Counter, Draw Attack and Brace abilities. This allowed me to set him into a defensive stance where he took 25 percent damage from all attacks; all enemies attacked him first; and any time he was attacked with a physical move, he countered with a kick attack that hit all on-screen enemies. Likewise, my white mage Rosa was eventually capable of double-casting every spell in her inventory on all enemies or allies while ignoring the reflect status. As you can see, Augments are the key to the difficulty of the game. If you learn to use them correctly, everything after you receive the Counter ability will suddenly become much easier. Use them incorrectly, and you'll probably find yourself grinding to defeat a tough boss that you could have taken down with optimal Augment usage.

In addition to the Augments, a few other new twists have been added to the combat system, such as Auto-Battle. In your character's menu, you can set one active ability as the Auto-Battle command, so when you press X during a battle, Auto-Battle with activate, causing those characters to automatically choose that ability over and over again until either the enemy falls or you turn off the feature. Clever Auto-Battle setups can allow you to win battles without paying attention to the DS' screen, making the high encounter rate in some areas less aggravating. Of course, if you leave on Auto-Battle during a boss fight, you can expect to meet a nasty end indeed.

The second addition is Rydia's new summon, Whyt, which is a bit different from most of the summon attacks you'd see in Final Fantasy IV (more comparable to Aeons in Final Fantasy X). When Rydia summons Whyt, he replaces her in battle for a few turns, fighting automatically until he falls or is desummoned. Whyt is fully customizable, so you can select abilities from any of those available to your primary characters. However, his stats can't be altered quite so easily; each of his primary stats (Strength, Stamina, Speed, Intelligence and Spirit) is linked to a touch-screen minigame. Each minigame is connected to one of the final characters (Paladin Cecil, Kain, Edge, Rydia and Rosa) and is unlocked when that character is in your party. Scoring well on these minigames improved Whyt's stats and gives you items and new costumes for him. Maxing out all of his stats is pretty tough, but it's possible if you're an extremely skilled gamer. Even Whyt's face is customizable, with the touch-screen serving as a drawing pad allowing you to alter his face however you want. Beyond being summoned into battle, Whyt can also be wirelessly sent to battle friends to see who has created the strongest Eidolon.

Be warned that even with these new features, some parts of this game can be pretty nasty. There are more then a handful of enemies who will devastate your party if you don't take the proper steps to weaken them as soon as they appear, a number of bosses with gimmicks that require special tactics to defeat, and the last dungeon is probably going to drive gamers through the roof — especially if they've gotten used to the sleepwalking difficulty of recent FF offerings.

Graphically, Final Fantasy IV is a mixed bag. The new 3-D graphics are certainly impressive for the Nintendo DS, and the environments and enemies are quite well done. The awkward part comes in the form of the character designs, which appear stuck somewhere between trying to make them realistic and trying to retain the SD charm seen in the original Final Fantasy IV for the SNES. They're not exactly bad, but they take a bit of getting used to, especially considering how top-heavy they look. That is roughly my biggest complaint with the graphics, and many of the annoying mistakes from Final Fantasy III have been fixed. The top and bottom screens are used quite well, with the bottom screen functioning as a map or the character's health screen while action plays out on the top. Loading is minimal to nonexistent, and despite Final Fantasy IV's high encounter rate, you'll probably run through battles quite quickly with the aid of the Auto-Battle feature.

Final Fantasy IV had one of the best soundtracks of all time, and little has changed in the remake. Some of the songs have been cleaned up a bit, but that is about it, and they sound just as good, if not better, than they did on the SNES. The big addition to Final Fantasy IV's audio presentation is the voice acting. Most of the major scenes in the game are now voiced, although purists can turn off these voices if they prefer. I found them to be quite good, although not always how I had envisioned the character sounding. Cecil wasn't bad, although he was a bit cliché for my tastes, and Kain's unbelievably deep voice made me do a double take the first time he spoke, but none of the voices are terrible and most of them work quite well.

Final Fantasy IV was one of the best games on the SNES, and not much has changed on the DS. The updated graphics and visual flair may make it more appealing to new gamers, but it retains enough of the old game to warm SNES gamers' nostalgic hearts. The new Augment-focused combat system takes a bit of getting used to, and I'm a bit saddened that it takes away from the uniqueness of each character. It made up for that by Augments being limited, which means you're given a lot more customization options with your characters while ensuring that each one retains hiso r her own niche. Final Fantasy IV is a great title, and certainly one worth owning, even if you've already played through the game before on the SNES, Playstation or GBA. If you're willing to deal with a Final Fantasy that actually challenges you to use all of your resources, you'll find Final Fantasy IV to be quite a fun game indeed.

Score: 8.5/10