Final Fantasy Review

The original Final Fantasy, the game that started it all... Oh yeah, and don't expect any sequels, either. I mean, it's not like there was going to be about 14 sequels, numerous remakes of this game, even more countless spin-offs and what-have-you, etc., etc.

Anyway, we all know the story about this game by now, I'm quite sure. You see, Squaresoft was going out of business, and as they were about to go under, the created one last video game before finding another industry to go into, and they wanted their final game to be a fantasy RPG. However, that isn't why it's called 'Final Fantasy.' See, they originally wanted to call it Fighting Fantasy, but that name was already taken, and as they had already settled on the initials of 'FF' they wanted a word that started with the letter 'F', and so they came up with the name of 'Final Fantasy.'

Now, I didn't start with the NES version of Final Fantasy 1. Heck, I didn't start with ANY of the actual Final Fantasy games. My first exposure to Final Fantasy 1 was on the Playstation, when it was with Final Fantasy II under the title of Final Fantasy Origins. Anyways, Final Fantasy 1 is the game that saved Squaresoft, but what is it that makes it so good? Well, let's dive in and find out!

My favorite thing about Final Fantasy 1 is that your party is whatever you want it to be. You can have a well-rounded team, which should be the obvious choice because it makes the game easier, or you can have a totally lop-sided team, such as having two warriors, a thief, and a black belt (monk in the later translations). Now, I don't know about most of you, but I am an absolute SUCKER for character creation and party customization in RPGs like this! Seriously, this alone gives Final Fantasy 1 a huge amount of replay value. Four characters with six possible classes for each meaning that you have a grand total of around about 127 possible party combinations, with one of those being butt-fuzzingly difficult, and that would be a party of four White Mages. Seriously, only do that one if you have literally nothing better to do with your time.

Anyways, after finishing your party generation, you are immediatly thrust into the game itself, right outside the Kingdom of Cornelia, or Corneria in the more modern translations (probably mixed that up, but whatever) and you have nothing on your party except four darkened orbs (crystals in the remakes and ports) and 400 gold pieces to start your party off with whatever gear you think that they'll need. You can buy them weapons, armor, and spells at the shops in the first town, and after that you go to see the King and he tells you that his daughter was kidnapped by Garland. Basically, the heroes go out to rescue the princess at the beginning of the game. The hero of Dragon Warrior and the Mario bros. rescue their princesses, but they do it after having been out adventuring in the field for a while. The heroes of Final Fantasy 1 take care of that little problem right at the beginning!

Ah, forgive me, I skipped a little ahead. Before you go to the Chaos Shrine (Temple of Fiends in the remakes, I think it was) you should spend a bit of your time fighting random battles and grinding to increase your party's level and fighting abilities. Now, for the original version of the game, this is where one of the coolest and most infuriating things about the original game there is: the battle system.

Now, this screenshot might make you think "so what? Loads of games have been doing that sort of battle system for a while now, what makes this one so special?" Well, every single turn-based RPG that came out before Final Fantasy 1 was in the first-person perspective. Final Fantasy 1 is the JRPG that introduced the side-view battle system. Suddenly, you see your Fighter swing his sword, or your White Mage cast one of her myriad healing spells, and for those of us who grew up at the time, that had never been done before. Even in games where you could see your character in battle, like the Ultima games, they never actually swung their weapons when attacking an enemy. Anyway, it was a huge deal at the time. Nowadays, everyone just takes it for granted. Unfortunately, with the NES version of Final Fantasy 1, as with almost any cool thing out there, this battle system does have its problems, or rather, one large problem, and that is the ineffective attacks, like the one you see in the screenshot to the left, or up, from this position. If one of your characters kills an enemy and another party member was targeting that enemy, the attack hits nothing and is considered ineffective. It slows down the game, then again most people criticize most JRPGs for the random battles having to rapidly press the A button to win the battle and move on, but with this system  you can't, and it sucks. I would gladly trade off having to exercise my brain for the convenience of rapidly pressing the A button just so I can level up faster.

Anyways, after leveling up a little bit, you head to the Chaos Shrine and find Garland, saying how he'll have the king exchange Cornelia over for his daughter's life. However, your party manages to defeat him (if you bothered leveling up that is) and you save the princess' life. Her name is Sara, by the way. Anyway, you all return to Cornelia and the King has the bridge leading to the northern part of the continent built, (repaired in the ports and remakes)  meaning that now you can travel out even farther into the world. But before you do, you get the title screen, which you can view at the top of the review, right beneath the title. After that, you have to get a ship to continue your journey, and it just so happens that, to the west of Corneria, the town of I-forget-the-town's name has a serious pirate problem. After defeating them, you get the ship, and you go to the Elven Kingdom of Elfheim and restore the prince so that he gives you the Magic Key. You then get some TNT and blow open a canal with the help of the Dwarves of Mt. Duergar, and then the world of Final Fantasy just opened up a lot more for you. You then have to defeat a Vampire, get a ruby from his room, leave and go feed a Golem the ruby you just got, and then you get the Earth Rod from a sage and go back to the cave where you fought the Vampire, and go even deeper into the cave, and sure enough, the Lich is there. Defeating him and stepping on the pedestal restores the Earth Crystal. You then have to go to the town of Crescent and get the canoe, and it is at this point where you can start to deviate from the path a little. Instead of going to the Volcano to save the Fire Crystal, you can go north from there and enter the Ice Cavern and get the Levistone, which then take to the desert south from there and get the airship and then you can do anything that you haven't done yet out of order! Save the crystals from there in the opposite order, go and do the Trial to get a tail and take it to Bahamut and get a class change, etc., etc.

You know, for an NES game, the graphics in this game aren't too bad. You can tell what everything is, the towns and castles on the overworld all look realistic, as does the placement of trees on the map to make forests. The monsters also look very detailed considering that this is an NES game. There is an awful lot of black in the graphics, though that's to make up for the fact that they couldn't just fill the screens with whatever they wanted. Remember, NES cartridges couldn't hold a lot of data back then, so space was at a premium. The music in this game also gives the vibe of going on a grand adventure to save the world, which is perfect at getting you in the mood to see what the game's world has to offer, or at least it does in the remakes, but even still, the original music is good, too.

Of course, I have been praising Final Fantasy a bit too much, and with the exception of the battle system, I haven't really pointed out the game's bugs, of which there is a lot. To give you an example of this, look over at the screenshot to the left. You see how my Thief's highest stat is Luck? Well, it doesn't work. See, Luck is supposed to increase your chances at successfully running away from battles. Instead, it's based on the position of the party that that particular member is in, making the one defining trait of the Thief class worthless. The Intelligence stat also doesn't work, and it's supposed to make your spells stronger, but it doesn't, meaning that your spells are just as strong at the beginning of the game as they will be at the end of the game. In addition to that little flub-up, half the Black Magic spells don't work, either. The Temper and Saber spells are supposed to increase attack power and/or accuracy, they don't work, and the Lock spell is supposed to make enemies easier to hit by lowering their evasion, but it not only doesn't work, it actually does the exact opposite and makes the enemies harder to hit. How do you mess that up? Also, when you rest out in the fields, if you use one of the items to save and it can restore MP, the game only restores your spellcasters' MP (or uses per day, just like in Dungeons & Dragons) after saving the game, meaning that if you reload from that point, your spellcasters will have whatever spell uses they had before resting. Again, how do you mess that up? I'm not a programmer of any sort, but I'm pretty sure that it can't be that hard to code a working system, especially if the inns in the cities and villages in the game can do it.

Anyway, after killing the Four Fiends of the elements and restoring light to the orbs/crystals, you find that the crystals are sending energy to a focal point, the point where it all began, the Chaos Shrine. Going back there reveals that the black orb can send the party back in time to fix the world's problems, as it came into existence around 2,000 years ago. Fighting through this new version of the Chaos Shrine sees the party fighting the Four Fiends powered up again, only they're stronger this time due to not having slept for over 2,000 years, and at the bottom of the dungeon, you find the mastermind behind all of the problems that you and your party have faced up to this point: Garland!

It falls down to it in this battle. If you win, then the 2,000 year time-loop will be broken once and for all. If Garland wins, then the 2,000 year time-loop will continue on for all eternity. After all that your heroes have gone through, they defeat him, and your reward for defeating Chaos is... the story being erased from canon. Turns out, Final Fantasy games have always had a history of having convoluted plotlines.

I gotta be honest, I still like Final Fantasy 1 even to this day. However, I cannot recommend the original version of Final Fantasy 1. Tell me, you remember seeing me talk about ports and remakes of this game, right? Well, thankfully, Squaresoft had the idea to port it to numerous systems. It was ported to Japanese computers as the original version and the MSX, it was then ported to the Wonderswan Color (a Japan-exclusive console), then to the Playstation under the title of Final Fantasy Origins along with Final Fantasy II, then to the Gameboy Advance under the title of Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (Final Fantasy I & II Advance in Japan), then it got ported to the PSP, then again to iOS and Android devices. Any single one of those ports are far better than the original version. I could recommend the NES version of this game to you if you have an affinity for these old games or you just have the patience levels of a saint, but it holds up well. I mean, obviously, why else would Squaresoft (Square Enix now, technically, but whatever) have ported this game as many times as they have if it didn't sell well? Oh, yes, there's a port of the game I forgot about. It was for the Nintendo 3DS, and surprisingly, it was Japan-exclusive, too! Kind of odd, considering that Final Fantasy I sells and has sold so well over the past 3 decades or so, but whatever. Square Enix doesn't have a lot of faith in the Western game markets, something they continue to prove to this day.

Having said all of this, the rest of the Final Fantasy franchise has had it's ups and downs, but it's not my favorite, but we won't get to that one until the SNES era games that I'll review.

This review, including all text and screenshots, are © 2019 Jestan Diams. Please do not repost this review, in part or in full, anywhere else on the internet or in video game articles or what-have-you, without my express written consent.