Possibly a dumb question about the difficulty level of this game

[Pike]

So when Final Fantasy IV was first released in the West as Final Fantasy II, the difficulty level was really toned down from the original Japanese version. Was this difficulty restored in the subsequent remakes?

[Mirage]

As far as I can remember, yes. At least the PSP version has the normal difficulty.

[The Man]

I'm pretty sure the PlayStation re-release was also of the Japanese hard version.

[Pike]

Oooh interesting. I wonder just how much easier the SNES version actually is.

[Sephex]

Since I had so much experience with the original US release, I didn't find any other version hard. Plus, not many people seem to know this, but the original "FFII" we got wasn't the easy type version. FFIV Easytype was Japan exclusive and made AFTER the US release of "FFII." So "FFII" was just a different mod, but still harder than the FFIV Easytype version.

For more reading on this and other cool tidbits: http://arcanelore.net/articles/ff4wrong/

[Wolf Kanno]

The PlayStation port is the real version of the game. The GBA version has been reworked a little due to new content but the real issue is that the US version is buggy and can give the player some unfair advantages, the DS version is a revamped hard version but this is largely to give old fans a new challenge and to compensate for the new customization system. The PSP version appears to be based on either the iOS version or the Advance version (specifically the PAL Version which fixes the ATB bugs in the US version) so it should be close to the original in difficulty but retains some of the reworking due to retaining some of the Advance versions special features.