How skipped Japanese releases left America with a Final Fantasy II that was really IV, and a III that was really VI
The problem was arithmetic. Square was shipping Final Fantasy games in Japan at a pace its North American operation could not match — localisation was expensive, the Famicom and Super Famicom audiences did not map neatly onto their American equivalents, and Square America made its own judgements about which titles would sell. Final Fantasy II and III for the Famicom never crossed the Pacific. Final Fantasy V, for the Super Famicom, did not either.
That left a numbering problem with no elegant solution. The first Final Fantasy had arrived in North America under its own number in 1990. The next one Square chose to localise was the fourth. Calling it Final Fantasy IV would advertise to every buyer that they had missed two games they could not obtain; calling it Final Fantasy II implied a continuity that was, at the level of marketing if not of plot, broadly true — it was the second Final Fantasy an American player could actually buy. Square America chose the second option. When Final Fantasy VI followed, it became Final Fantasy III by the same logic.
The renumbering worked as marketing and created decades of confusion as history. American players who finished "Final Fantasy II" on the SNES and later encountered discussion of Final Fantasy IV had no straightforward way to know these were the same game. The actual Final Fantasy II and III — genuinely different games, with genuinely different systems — existed in conversations they could not participate in. The series' internal history became something you had to be told rather than something you could infer from the boxes on a shelf.
The confusion compounded because the games were not interchangeable. Final Fantasy II's stat-growth-through-use system and Final Fantasy III's job system were significant designs that influenced later entries; a player tracing the series' evolution through the American numbering would find inexplicable jumps, mechanics appearing from nowhere, and references to events they had never seen. The numbering told a coherent story about a series that had not actually happened.
Final Fantasy VII ended the divergence by the simplest available means: Square called it Final Fantasy VII everywhere. The PlayStation had made a worldwide simultaneous-ish release strategy viable, the marketing budget was enormous, and the game was going to be a global event in a way none of its predecessors had been. Keeping the American numbering would have meant releasing "Final Fantasy IV" as the follow-up to a game called Final Fantasy III, which was both absurd and commercially pointless when the Japanese number was going to appear in every magazine anyway.
So the numbers snapped back into alignment, and the American gap became permanent history rather than ongoing policy. Later re-releases eventually brought the missing entries west under their correct numbers, which resolved the availability problem while leaving the archaeological one intact: a substantial population of players still thinks of Final Fantasy VI as Final Fantasy III, because that is what it said on the cartridge they owned. The renumbering was a reasonable answer to a real constraint, and it is a useful reminder that the canonical version of a series' history is often just whichever version got printed on the box in your territory.