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Final Fantasy IV Turns XV
Jeremy Parish, keeper of the retronaut flame, has a nice post on his personal site marking the fifteenth anniversary of FFIV. Released in the states as Final Fantasy II for the SNES, the game chronicles the adventures of dark knight turned paladin Cecil and his wacky band of cohorts. It's still one of my favorite games in the series. From the article: "Tiny sprite theatrics notwithstanding, FFIV had something called moxie. It boldly featured one of those videogame plots where things happen for seemingly arbitrary reasons and there's a lot of traveling back and forth and into dungeons on mini-quests to justify endless killing random monsters and fighting bosses. I guess that's not moxie, really. But whatever it was, it drove dark knight Cecil Harvey across the entire world, into the dwarf-infested depths and eventually to the frickin' moon, so it would be silly to split hairs."
IV = 4, not 9.
Uhh... you haven't played FF6, have you?
FF4 was pretty lame in the villain department. Zemus/Zeromus hated Earthlings so he wanted to destroy them by using the power of the crystals or something. No backstory was given for why he hated them. So your criticism stands.
But FF6 is a different matter entirely. Kefka starts as a general in the Imperial army. The Empire is greedy for land and power (obviously, or it wouldn't be The Empire). So Kefka is already a powerful goon in the goon army. He's also a prick. So he hatches a plan to not only usurp the emperorship, but also to take over the world and rule it to his greedy ends. In the process, he "blows a lot of shit up and kills people". It also seems that he's mentally unstable, and by that, I mean that he's batshit-fucking-loco. All of this qualifies as both motive and personality.
As for gameplay, well, it's all about deciding what happens and when. FF6 is quite a bit less challenging than FF4 in this department. FF4 definitely had the best balance of any FF game. It was the first FF game that wasn't strictly turn-based, but had attack timers (the Active Time Battle system), and yet it hadn't degraded into the realm of FF6-and-up where by the end of the game every attack does 9999 damage. You actually could get to the end of the game and have your ass handed to you by the enemies you met wandering the final corridors of the game. And yet, every step of the way you were constantly getting it handed to you, so it wasn't a matter of the rest of the game being too easy. And my experiences are based on the US version, which is based on the Japanese "easytype" version! Now that's gameplay!