Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy's simple story works in its favor, as the gameplay is equally simple and easy to grasp, yet surprisingly enjoyable even returning many years after its release. Of course, the game's influence is vast as an early role-playing game featuring random encounters, open-world exploration, and a class-based combat system. This is impressive considering its release in the late eighties, but more importantly, its systems are still fun to play. These gameplay mechanics in conjunction with the game's effective approach to story makes it a classic for good reason. The straightforward plot beginning with the Warriors of Light seeking four elemental crystals takes a backseat to the gameplay but has surprisingly engaging moments considering its transparency. Exploring dungeons while fighting for the party's survival feels tense and escaping dangerous encounters feels rewarding. Seeking out the next instance of progression can be frustrating at times, but the payoff of finding that veiled next step is more often satisfying than frustrating and contributes to the battle balancing intentionally. The series would see a vast change in direction regarding characters and methods of storytelling, for the better, but beginning with such a solid foundation of gameplay was essential to future successes for the franchise.

Before this i had never played a jrpg in my life, atleast not from what i remember. Im not new to rpgs however as i have played some of the best western rpg games of all time such as morrowind, oblivion, fallout 1 & 2 + new vegas and baldurs gate (not finished with baldur). The idea of a fantasy turn based rpg game is not new to me but jesus christ this game is difficult.

Lets start with the question, how did we get here?

I have for a long time been a huge retro gamer, ive collected many old games since i was about 13 tho 3-4 years ago i sold off everything but my ps2, megadrive and banjo kazooie (as a memory for selling my n64 and the rest of the collection), however about 5 months ago i decided i wanted to get back in again. so i started planning for what i was going to buy. Considering i had owned all of the old nintendo consoles, Nes-gamecube i decided i was gonna go an alternative path this time and buy a sony product. A ps1. The main reason was because i wanted to play metal gear solid since i had metal gear solid 2 on the ps2. so I went to a retro gaming market and bought a ps1 however i had also planned something else on the side if i didnt find mgs 1. I had known for years ever since i got my Nes that Final Fantasy VII was considered one of the all time best games. And so i found it at the market. And then everything fell into place. I havent played Final Fantasy VII because i said "ok well, im gonna play the metal gear series in order, might as well do it for Final Fantasy". So i ordered Final Fantasy Origins as well as Final Fantasy Anthology over christmas for about 50 dollars each (PAL cds so of course they are like 5x as expensive as NTSC or JP) and started playing in order from 1-7.

And now for the actual review:

This must be the hardest game (of recent memory) i ever completed. Fallout 1 & 2, morrowind and oblivion have no chance against this and i thought the rng mechanics in those games were complete bs, wait until you meet FF1, The lead developer must have been satan himself. I would say its the worst in video game history. The amount of times i died or one of my party members died because an enemy got the first roll is a number so big, steven hawking and albert einstein wouldnt be able to conceive it. On a very serious note in this review and i mean it really, if you have anger issues or have gaming rage episodes often then please stay away from this game, you are going to a break a controller guaranteed. I tend not to get angry ever when playing video games, i have over 1000 hours in csgo and ive played many of the call of duty games so i know what its like to be mad at the game but both cod and csgo have from recent memory never made me as angry as this. I strongly suggest you play an emulated version of the game so that you can save whenever possible and increase the game speed by atleast 10x. It will make your life so much easier. Also even tho i have never played it, i can already tell that for the people who plan on playing the NES final fantasy, may god be with you because if the game mechanics are broken in this version released in 2003 then i cant imagine what it was like back in 1987.

I was addicted to this game for over a week, i played it almost non stop for 25 hours completing the game. I sat down for about 8 hours on my last playthrough and my neck was sore when i was finished. This might be really negative but personally i see it as a good thing. I was so invested in the game and that feeling, that special type of feeling where you dont want to put down the controller because youre so invested in the game is something i havent felt in a long time playing a video game.

Now for an explination of the game. Final Fantasy takes place in some fictional high-fantasy world. Apart from the original Dragons quest this is one of the few games that pioneerd the JRPG genre of video games so whilst the game might have been really ambitious originally for the NES in 1987 it feels a bit outdated even tho i played the remake from 2003. You play in a party of 4, there are like 7-8 classes to pick from, i went with the standard warrior, Thief, White & Black mages. Thats the characters the game picks from the start. Considering i had never played a Final Fantasy game before i had no idea what to expect so i just went with the standard settings playing on the original game difficulty. the first 2-3 hours or so were pretty good, random encounters were not a bother yet but i could tell they would be a problem late game (which they were). You start in the town of cornelia and are tasked with getting 4 elemntal shards. earth, wind, fire and water. By doing so you can defeat the evil chaos knight who has been spreading chaos with his armies in the land of World A (creative title). Pretty standard story, i would say its generic almost but considering this almost invented the genre its really impressive.

The common criticism i feel for the game is definitely that after you get the boat the game really opens up and becomes slightly more cryptic. Personally the real problem with the game is the core mechanics as ive stated above about the Rng. After a while the whole grinding to level up becomes super annoying and just becomes a real chore. You start to hate random encounters and how they always seem to go wrong. One way they could have fixed this would have been if the flee function had a 100% success rate which it doesnt. This is a real problem late game as you cannot run away from dragons, one of the tankiest and most powerful enemies in the game. I only managed to run away from white dragons once in the whole game and i think a blue moon was out when i got it. This had the effect of a member dying almost always a mage since their defense is the weakest and i had to either kill off the rest of my party to load the manual memory save (you can only hard save the game to your memory card if youre sleeping in an inn & or outdoors, and manual memory saves can only be accessed if your party dies. If you reset the console the memory save will be erased and you lose progress) or leave the whole dungeon just to revive my mage. Some spells in the game did offset these problems. White mage gets probably the 3 most important spells in the game, cure4, Revive (cant remember the spell name) and Warp2. Cure4 restores all your Hp, Revive as the title says brings one of your party members back to life and warp2 teleports you out of a dungeon instantly. The only problem with the mages in the game is the MP system. Now its very clear that this is one of the first games to have an MP system because the only way to replenish your mana is to sleep. i finished the game at level 28 and most of the high level spells like Cure4 i could only cast about 4 times. In the last dungeon this is real problem because you have to fight 4 bosses and they respawn if you leave the dungeon. So you either have to risk doing the 4 boss fights all over again or pushing onwards with lesser and lesser MP.

But despite all this the game really shines with simple yet epic story telling, easy to understand quest (apart from the caravan), which i personally liked a lot. I dont think i had to look up a walkthrough ever, i just searched up some of the enemies to see their weaknesses. I loved the towns and the feeling you got after upgrading your class. When i was level 20 times were epic. I could one shot most enemies with my knight and the overall gameplay loop got so much better because i had the resources to fight and level up much easier. The airship as well is fantastic and getting 0 random encounters in the air was an amazing gameplay mechanic and probably saved me thousands of gold being spent at inns as well as precious time if i had to backtrack.

Its hard to explain why i liked the game so much. Even tho i would say its one of the hardest games ive completed in recent memory i still enjoyed the experience so much. That feeling of not wanting to put down the controller and wanting to finishing the game was so special i cant help but overlook a lot of the flaws.

If you thought elden ring was hard. then i got a game for you.

Played the GBA version

Despite being another very early example of establishing the general conventions that would become staples of the JRPG format, it's honestly pretty amazing how stylistically different Final Fantasy feels when compared to the early Dragon Quest games. While at their core, both series had their roots in some fairly similar territory with the gameplay loops being functionally the same, there are some pretty interesting differences in how each is presented. Furthermore, the game allowed for a much greater sense of customisation and a stronger sense of openness to how one could approach exploration, all culminating in a game which in some regards felt far larger than that the DQ games achieved on their first 2 tries.

While Dragon Quest would put the player in an inhospitable world where they had to both carve out a name for themselves in such an environment, Final Fantasy instead takes the approach of making the game feel far more grandiose, putting your party in a position where they're the legendary heroes right out the gate. What could potentially seem like a simple narrative difference ends up affecting the gameplay in a fairly substantial way, the biggest of which being the way that the player is made to feel very powerful at a rapid rate. Rather than slowly building up a party as the game goes on, the player gets to choose all 4 members of their party and their archetypes immediately, being able to choose between 6 different classes and even have multiple of the same ones along for the quest. This immediately establishes the stronger focus this had on having the player form more concrete strategies while also being able to tailor it more around their own playstyle, such as being able to bring along an extra melee powerhouse if they wanted to focus around more aggressive strategies.

There's almost a sense of maximalism to how the game approaches encounters on the whole as well to further reinforce the fact that your characters are meant to be legendary right out the gate, not only with the damage numbers being comparatively high, allowing players to dal hundreds of damage within the first half hour, but the groups of enemies themselves are made to appear far more threatening when really being reasonable for the most part. The sense of power you feel from fighting a group of 9 enemies and absolutely destroying them effortlessly is pretty satisfying and manages to contribute to a game that feels a bit more like a power fantasy on the whole. I also thought that the magic system was pretty neat even if a bunch of the spells seemed to inexplicably just, not work properly. While unconventional, the fact that you purchase magic spells from the shops throughout end up bringing another element of strategy with team composition, only being allowed to get 3 spells of each level often leading to situations where the player will have to think about what will contribute to their goals the most and how to mitigate any potential shortcomings that they'll suffer as a result of not just being able to get everything. While this ultimately doesn't actually work too well due to the aforementioned fact that some spells just don't seem to work properly or as well as you'd think, leading to pretty easy choices most of the time, I still think that this approach is pretty cool and unique, and would be neat to see implemented more thoughtfully in another game.

Unfortunately, Final Fantasy's attempts at making for a more epic adventure come with its own set of drawbacks, the biggest of which being how open the game feels without giving the sufficient tools to facilitate a truly compelling experience with it. The first stretch of the game works pretty well, giving a short little tutorial section that's entirely on land and feels pretty linear while still having enough moving pieces to leave a sense of intrigue, it's simplistic, but it works well at establishing the world without overwhelming the player. I feel like the player is given access to the boat a bit too early however, and while at first it's fine when you're essentially confined to a huge lake enclosed on all sides, only giving you access to another couple of areas, once you get out of here, all bets are off. The game opens up at such a rate that you get given an airship before even completing the 2nd huge quest objective, and this is after having to mess around with sailing across these huge expanses of empty ocean just hoping to find another piece of land to do anything on, and from here it essentially devolves into a mindless fetch quest without anything interesting to frame most of it.

So many steps required to progress further are presented in a very generic way, often just being a random item in a random dungeon that's not tied to anything other than player progression. Without any way to tie a lot of these key items to something interesting within the world, it ends up feeling overly artificial, and while it occasionally brings something interesting, like revealing this weird sci-fi aspect to the world, it's too few and far between for it to have a proper impact on the experience outside of these isolated moments. It's just fortunate that despite the cryptic and boring way the player explores the overworld pas the first couple hours, that the dungeon crawling is actually pretty fun. Each place the player has to explore feels sufficiently different in its layout and atmosphere, aided by the phenomenal soundtrack and the fact that the core combat is pretty satisfying, and it made these sections the clear highlights of the experience for me, even if the random encounters were undoubtedly way too frequent.

On the whole though, despite the many, many prominent issues I had with this game, at the end of the day I still don't really dislike it either, not just for its influence, but because I do respect what it was trying to do, and just think that it perhaps didn't really understand how to properly execute some of the big ideas that it had. It's a good, but archaic foundation for a series and it had enough positive qualities and was short enough that it was totally playable for the most part (even though a guide was required), just don't go in here expecting any sort of masterpiece.

Despite what its status suggests, Final Fantasy's debut didn't really stand out from the pack much, sharing the sedated pace and grindy, aimless progression with the rest of the era. That being said, two features are worth heeding: a) the customizable starting party - a simple yet clever way to bestow replay value, and b) the great soundtrack (courtesy of Nobuo Uematsu, one of the all-time greats), which would remain a constant in the series for a long while.

There's almost no reason to play this original NES version other than historical interest. The game seems to have been designed from the start and from the end with random areas in the middle to connect those two points. It's also bugged, broken and unbalanced.

If you're new to Final Fantasy, just start with the fourth game (or anything after the fourth game).

i spent more time grinding shit at 1600x speed on an emulator than i did progressing the storyline, which by the way is quite profound for how simple it is. i sincerely commend the many mad japanese children who beat this game growing up without any help. i can only imagine the feeling they must have experienced upon seeing that beautiful credits screen roll. FF1 is a product of its time but if you can set your mind back a few decades it's quite a special experience