Final Fantasy IV · Super Nintendo Entertainment System · 1991 · Japan → USA
Final Fantasy IV shipped in North America as "Final Fantasy II," skipping three games in the series that had never been localised, creating a numbering confusion that persisted for years and required extensive explanation when the skipped entries eventually reached Western audiences.
Final Fantasy IV released in Japan in July 1991 as the fourth mainline entry in Square's RPG series. The three preceding games — Final Fantasy II (1988), Final Fantasy III (1990), and Final Fantasy IV itself — represented the franchise's Famicom and early Super Famicom period, but only the original Final Fantasy (1987) had been released in North America, via Nintendo of America in 1990. When Square prepared Final Fantasy IV for Western release, it made the commercial decision to number the North American version as "Final Fantasy II" rather than "IV," on the grounds that North American players had only experienced one previous entry and would not understand the numbering gap. This decision produced a numbering system that diverged between Japan and North America: the Japanese Final Fantasy V (1992) became the North American Final Fantasy III (1994), while the Japanese Final Fantasy VI (1994) became the North American Final Fantasy III as well in some planning before ultimately shipping as Final Fantasy III (1994). The confusion compounded as franchise coverage in gaming magazines attempted to reconcile two parallel numbering systems for the same games. The situation was further complicated by the content changes made in localising Final Fantasy IV. The North American "Final Fantasy II" was also edited for difficulty — several mechanics were simplified and some content was modified — making it a different game from the Japanese original in both name and content. When Square eventually released the Japanese originals in collected or remastered forms in Western markets, players discovered that their "Final Fantasy II" and "Final Fantasy III" were actually games IV and VI in the Japanese sequence, while the actual Final Fantasy II and III remained unlocalised for over a decade.
Square's decision to renumber Final Fantasy IV as "II" for North America was commercially understandable and historically disastrous. From Square's 1991 perspective, North American players had played one Final Fantasy; numbering the next one "II" would signal a direct sequel rather than confusing them with a gap of three entries. The logic was sound for the launch window. The problem emerged over the following three years as two more Japanese entries were localised, both also renumbered, and gaming magazines began publishing coverage that needed to explain to readers that "Final Fantasy III" was not the third game in the series but the sixth.
Nintendo Power, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and other North American publications developed a convention of noting Japanese titles alongside North American ones, but this required readers to maintain a mental translation table that varied by platform and year. Players who encountered the series through North American releases and later explored the franchise's history had to reconstruct the actual sequence from a numbering system that bore no relationship to the games' development order.
The renaming problem persisted until Square's international releases began using consistent global numbering. Final Fantasy VII (1997) was the first mainline entry to carry the same number in all regions — a decision made partly because by 1997 the global gaming press had created an informed international audience that would notice and discuss numbering inconsistencies, and partly because VII was the first game in the series designed from the outset with international release as a primary goal.
The actual Final Fantasy II and III — the games that had been skipped — reached Western audiences through the Nintendo DS remakes in 2006 and 2006 respectively, more than fifteen years after Final Fantasy IV had been renumbered to fill their gap. Players who encountered these remakes discovered that the games they had been missing were genuinely interesting: Final Fantasy II's unusual non-level-based character growth system and Final Fantasy III's job system were both designs that later entries in the series had revisited and refined. The renaming decision had not only confused players about numbers; it had denied them access to two games that would have given them a more complete understanding of where the series had come from.