FFIV Interview Talks About Creating Cecil First, Yang’s Wife’s Frying Pan

Square Enix released a Final Fantasy IV interview with Game Designer and Scenario Writer Takashi Tokita. Much of it focuses on various characters from the game. But in particular, a few things come up. For example, Tokita mentioned how Cecil was probably the first FFIV character created and discussed the inclusion of Yang’s wife’s frying pan for a critical moment.

Editor’s Note: There are FFIV spoilers in Tokita’s interview responses.

First, when it came to discussing which FFIV character was created first, Tokita mentioned Cecil was likely the first to come up. This was due to the concept of having a dark knight become a paladin as an early plot point. Here’s his exact quote from the interview.

I think it might have been Cecil, him being the main character and all. I’m pretty sure the concept of changing from dark knight to paladin was there from the start, as well as the rival Kain and heroine Rosa. From there, to keep with FF’s balanced variation in character age and gender, I thought that it might be good to include children – a pair of twin mages with one a white mage and the other a black mage, from which Palom and Porom came to be. Yang and Edge and the like were my idea as well, to include a kind of sense of variety.

Later, Tokita brought up the appearance of Yang’s wife’s frying pan and what led to it being implemented as a “resurrection” item.

Farewells are so intensely dramatic, so our original plan was for characters to start dying one after another. But Mr. Sakaguchi didn’t think that was a viable element in a video game and instead wanted to keep members alive, including them all in the party. We were able to make that happen in later ports of FFIV, but there’s no showmanship in just having everyone live on and on forever, so with Yang we had you go to his wife and get the frying pan that has the power to wake him up. In FFIV for Nintendo DS, we included a function that shows you what the party members were thinking. With that, we made a point to add lines like Cecil mistakenly thinking something like, “Oh, if we cook food with this…!” upon getting the frying pan.

Final Fantasy IV is available on the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation, PlayStation Portable, PC, Super Nintendo, and Wonderswan. A 3D remake appeared on the Nintendo DS, PC, and mobile devices. It will also be a part of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster line and show up on the PC and mobile devices.