I found an interesting video on YouTube last night from a series called "Gaming Mysteries." It claimed that originally, Final Fantasy IV was going to be an NES game, and the SNES game know and love with Cecil & Company would've been Final Fantasy V. Mind blowing and sad to think of a Final Fantasy that wasn't. Also interesting to think how it would've changed the numbering. We'd be up to Final Fantasy XV now. Imagining it: Butz/Bartz in Final Fantasy VI, Kefka in FF VII, Cloud vs. Sephiroth in FF VIII, Squall FF IX, Zidane & return of crystals FF X, Tidus & Yuna FF XI (and FF XI-2), FF XII first FF online, The lovely Ashe in FF XIII instead of the lovely Lightning, FF XIV with Lightning, and FF XV the second online FF.

Only plus is it's one less NES Final Fantasy that gamers outside of Japan had to wait years to finally play. Or maybe it would've come to US and been Final Fantasy II, while Final Fantasy II/IV SNES would've been Final Fantasy III for us! Also, blows my mind to think of a time when Square wasn't a gaming powerhouse, and was incapable of handling two projects at once (and was saved as a company only by the success of the NES Final Fantasies).Here's the video...

Thoughts or opinions, everybody? I put this in the Retro forum not only because it's a good place for it, but also I thought someone might remember hearing that FF IV was going to be on NES, circa 1990 or 1991.

I read an article about that years ago. It was only in the planning stage before it was canceled. I believe the person who worked at Square on the canceled FFII NES translation said the Japanese magazine article that much of the information came from was only about half true.

That same article also elaborated on Seiken Densetsu for the Famicom Disk System. They once asked the project leader what the game was about. They couldn't remember.
And yet Square still took preorders for this vaporware 5-disk game.
You know ambitious that is? A few visual novel games were sold as 2 episodes (thus 2 disks). Everything else released on the FDS fit on a single disk.
I do know which site I read this on, but I don't know if I can link. Though this article did tease their next ROM release... with some text like "weill, I'm glad there's not a canceled FFIV or SD game in someone's attic. But who knows what else could be around. Maybe even an unrelease translation of one of their flagship titles?" ) (FF2 if you don't catch on.)

Here is another random Final Fantasy fact. Final Fantasy Vll was going to be a SNES game set in New York City in the year 1999. Some of the ideas were later used in Chrono Trigger, and the Vll came to the rival Playstaion.

Wow, in the early 90's Final Fantasy was a huge success and the public wanted more? What happened?