This page provides various guides and notes for completing Final Fantasy IV, mostly in a speedrunning context.
There are two primary categories for speedrunning Final Fantasy IV:
There are also several other categories that are considered less important:
The following guides were originally written by me, primarily as notes to use during my own runs. As such, they are biased toward strategies I use in my runs and may be suboptimal in places (though you can still get very good times following them). In addition, several techniques used in the run are not fully explained. They are best used as a reference during a run or as a basis for your own notes. However, there is still plenty of text dedicated to explaining things, so they may still be useful for learning in conjunction with other resources. All of these guides are for the USA SNES release. Keep in mind that for Any% No64, the Rosa guide is more up-to-date than the Edge+Excalbur guide is. The Rosa route has been improved substantially over the years and I no longer particularly recommend the Edge route (but you're free to use it, of course, and sub-3:10 is easily doable).
If you are looking for splits or autosplitting functionality (works with SD2SNES, FXPAK or various emulators), those are available here.
The following guides are in-depth notes created by two of the top runners of the game. They are excellent for either learning the runs or as a basis for your own notes. (The main NoCW notes by the_roth discuss the 9-item route. The community has since decided that the 12-item route is faster, and a link is provided to the_roth's addendum regarding that route.)
The following two guides are both for the Pixel Remaster version of the game, which despite being quite popular, I do not currently cover. I am not as familiar with that run, so I cannot personally vouch for the quality of the following guides.
These guides are for routes or versions of the game that are less common in the community. The guides may be out of date or even more suboptimal than usual. They may, however, serve as an interesting introduction or starting point.
The following guides have nothing to do with Final Fantasy IV, but are available here nonetheless:
These guides cover smaller topics and are useful for learning specific techniques or more about speedrunning tech. Feel free to suggest topics. The general idea is to have concise guides covering topics that were previously only covered in obscure places or in long tuutorial videos.
The following resources are potentially useful for learning to speedrun the game. They are not all up-to-date or completely correct, but some information can be gleaned from them nonetheless.
All of the following were created by Myself086, who has contributed extensively to FF4 speedrunning. Many of them are linked separately in the relevant locations in the guides.
