Final Fantasy 4 is a masterpiece.

[DenilCartel]

I totally understand why people treasure this game. What an absolute bombshell of a journey. Imagine being a 20 year old in 1992. No internet for most people, MTV actually played music videos all day, and the only edgy television was on The Discovery Channel when lions ripped the balls off an antelope.
Some lucky people might have had their minds blown by an imported copy of Akira. Others might have been gamers. At the time, especially in the 80s, the Ultima series for PC was one of the few franchises with an ambitious storyline. On consoles, cartridges at the time simply could not hold the necessary amount of text for dialogue and nuance to tell a grand and compelling story. Super Mario Bros 1 for NES is a 31KB game. Thats 0.031 megabytes. Or roughly 2 seconds of an mp3 file. FF1 was 144KB, and one of the biggest NES games was FF3 at 326KB. FF4 clocks in at 664KB. Each letter used is roughly 1 byte of data. Looking at it in a rough and callous way, this could be seen as 664,000 letters vs the NES days of roughly 144,000 for the average game. Of course, with graphics and sounds this becomes much less.

Anyway, this is all to say that the game practically oozes with enthusiasm from the developers. It really seems like they threw all their best ideas, at the time, into this game. Just recently finished this and this one feels as one of the most complete for a FF game. Its both down to earth and extremely high concept. It does not feel convoluted in any way. The simple ebb and flow of the game is a compliment to the big ideas being implemented. I dont think Ive played another FF game that manages to nail such high concepts in such elegant ways. The themes and events that happen are truly inspirational. It completely broke the limits on what a videogame could be, while telling a story that only a videogame could triumph with. Did I mention the pacing? Only Chrono Trigger can compare, and it came out years later.
Highly recommended to any fan of RPGs. Its not nearly my favorite, but this game has all of my respect.