At first, it seems like a real shame that this game is based off of the US SNES version, with its amazingly terrible translation/localization and easytype-based braindead level of difficulty. However, once the timeline starts diverging, things get… really good, and really interesting.

Like many players, I always found the sudden unexplained dick move of Leviathan attacking the ship to be extremely infuriating, especially since it’s never really mentioned again despite the obvious wide ranging effects of that, and he’s never called out on it. Aside from the neat changes to your party’s abilities, this hack really *starts* with answering the question of: what if that didn’t happen?

Rather than going into the Baron Waterway with a full post-Scarmiglione party consisting of Paladin Cecil, Yang, Tellah, Palom, and Porom, you are going in with a mere four-member party of… a Cecil who is still a Dark Knight, a child Rydia who may be a better summoner but doesn’t know any normal White or Black magic, a Yang with no elemental claws, and an Edward who… is actually much more powerful than usual, but is still Edward. With all that working against the party on top of coming in one dungeon ahead of schedule, the easy type enemies here certainly manage to live up to the hard type ones.

The difficulty just keeps going like that from there for a while, often briefly becoming even more extreme as it skips ahead multiple dungeons, or creates entirely new ones. Most of the bosses live up to that increased difficulty as well; when you actually do fight Scarmiglione… despite the unchanged health, he is certainly far tougher and more believable as The Elemental Fiend of Earth than even his hardtype canon counterpart. Buy potions, lots of them. With things this much harder, I am *almost* willing to cut Leviathan some slack for his actions in canon.

As for the new plot… while it lacks the pacing and storytelling of the original, it makes up for it in that almost everyone seems generally saner and more intelligent than in canon, while remaining true to themselves. They do things because of who they are and what the situation is, not because they are holding the idiot ball and the plot says so (or because mind control is everywhere). The thing with Leviathan isn’t even quite the first instance of this, another major idiot move shortly preceding that was changed; rather than your two female party members getting told by the king of Fabul to go wait out the fight with the women of the kingdom and be healers instead (despite Edward obviously being far more qualified for that), they are helping with the battle from the battlements as long range attackers (mostly offscreen). Post-Cagnazzo is full of little moments like that. And don’t worry about the original game’s translation, once things diverge… well, let me put it this way: Yang is the high monk he’s supposed to be, not an inexplicably constantly sneezing “karate man”.

My biggest point of criticism though is that party members leaving and various points of no return tend to be even more abrupt than in the original game, and feel far less deserved. First of all, once you jump down the hole in Eblan Castle… you will abruptly discover that maps have been rearranged and changed such that you aren’t getting out for a long while, and by the next time you are outside of a dungeon, your party composition will have significantly changed. And once you return from the underworld to the surface… well, the hack lets you go into the endgame with any party composition at all, but it does it in a really strange and unintuitive way, where you have to complete sidequests to make party members LEAVE, which is done for the sole purpose of freeing up a slot so someone else can join.

The canon game’s way of having a changing 5-person-max party is by making them drop like flies either from apparent self-sacrifices or from Leviathan being an evil jackass (and then mostly turning out to be not quite dead, just recovering from severe injuries in bed for the rest of the game). It’s hard to decide whether that is worse or better than this hack’s solution of having so many of them just suddenly… *leave*, with all their valuable equipment, to do something else instead.

Overall, though: I DEFINITELY recommend this hack to fans of Final Fantasy 4, in terms of both the gameplay and the speculative alternate history it is extremely good. Also, it has some interesting replay value and secrets; after beating it the first time, try going into the final dungeon with just Cecil, both as a Dark Knight and as a Paladin, and also maybe try the Mist Skip glitch.