What would happen if you started off Final Fantasy 4 with the airship? And if every boss and item in the game were made completely random? It’d turn into one big, sprawling treasure hunt, that’s what would happen.
Final Fantasy 4 Free Enterprise, a ROM hack that launched earlier this year, transforms the seminal Super Nintendo role-playing game into something else entirely.
You start off in Castle Baron with two random characters and immediate access to the airship Enterprise, allowing you to fly pretty much anywhere. From there, you’ll have to hunt down characters and key items as you try to either collect everything or beat Zeromus as quickly as possible.
Say you start off with Yang and Edward. You might fly to Mysidia to get two more characters – say, Kain and Rosa, randomly replacing Porom and Palom – then head to Fabul, where you’ll run into the Calcabrena dolls. Beat them and you might get the TwinHarp, allowing you to go and defeat whatever random boss has replaced the Dark Elf. And so on, and so on, and so on.
You need to know Final Fantasy 4 pretty well to play through this mod, but if you’ve played through Cecil’s adventures a few times and want to switch things up, this randomiser is a fun, wild way to do it.
The Free Enterprise website has more specific details on what you can toggle and how this whole treasure hunt works, and speedrunner Rivers McCown (who we spoke to earlier this year about breaking Final Fantasy 4) has written up a great guide for new players if you want to try it yourself.
If you want to see it in action, here’s prolific RPG speedrunner Puwexil playing through the mod:
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