yeah, back in those days nintendo was worried about two things, more than anything else: not offending anyone and not putting people off by making games too hard.

So they sort of forcibly butchered the translations on a lot of things, to make them more "family-friendly". You'll see that throughout a lot of games in that time period actually ... they wanted to G-rate everything. They also nerfed some bosses and some monsters in general. If you died in the US version more than maybe once or twice, you were terrible. If you died less than four or five times your first time through in the Japanese release, you'd pretty much have attained Final Fantasy Zen (or levelled the living crap out of yourself, and were majorly cautious).

I think the whole ESRB system has really helped a lot of developers loosen up a bit on that, because every game doesn't HAVE to be suitable for 7 year olds now.

They ripped out a LOT of useful stuff between the J and the US versions of ff4 though. D. Wave was just the beginning of it (though admittedly awesome, and you took quite a taste of from the paladin ordeal). Also ripped out: buffs for pretty much everyone who had them, tellah's "recall", fusoya's "spirit", a bunch of statbuilding items ...

But it was still a great game. Besides, even without D. Wave, Dark Knight Cecil was a HUGE force to be reckoned with. I mean ... between him and Kain, there wasn't much that could stand up to them (especially once you got the Black sword and started oneshotting those bigass ravens near Mysidia).