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A couple of weeks ago, Cooper covered old school games for your cell phone. And when he said old school, he really meant old school. We’re talking Atari games and the original Super Mario Bros. We’re going to get a little more new-school than that, though Final Fantasy is a pretty old RPG series. Square Enix has announced that they will make a Final Fantasy IV sequel available exclusively on a mobile platform.

Technically, there was no Final Fantasy IV in America. It went one, two, three, seven, which is confusing to plenty of people. Final Fantasy IV was released in Japan under that title, but was released for the Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy II. So any of you who played that game back in the day will get a nice surprise from this sequel. This idea spawned while Square was working on a remake of Final Fantasy IV for the Nintendo DS.

They’re really going to try and test the limits of mobile gaming by offering the game in chapters. The first chapter, slated for a February release, will be free, but future monthly chapters will be between $4 and $5 per month. So not only are they trying to make the game unique for mobile, they’re trying to extract an ongoing fee. We’d be fine with this if there was a cap on how much you could spend on the game. For instance, once you hit $20, the rest of the updates should be free.

Game Life sums it up well:

If Before Crisis Final Fantasy VII, a previous mobile game, is any indicator, a monthly charge for playing episodic content could lead to annoying difficulty and lengthy time-consuming quests, all while burning a hole in the pockets of most gamers.

We’re going to have to wait for reviews before ponying up for this one. Though the temptation to play Final Fantasy on our phones is great.

[Game Life]

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