Intro – Where It All Began

Final Fantasy originally released on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1987 in Japan and 1990 in the US, and the (oft disputed) mythology surrounding the name is that this was fledgling game dev Square’s “last attempt” at a successful game before eventual bankruptcy. Luckily for all of us, this game was an enormous success and for its time was quite revolutionary, spawning many sequels and leading to the golden age of Square in the 90’s that would transform it into the development (and publishing) behemoth that it is today.

This original game was not without its flaws, particularly in hindsight, and while I played this on the newly released 2021 “Pixel Remaster” version of the game which includes many quality-of-life updates over the original, its weaknesses are still glaring 35 years after its initial release.

The Story

The game begins with you creating a party of four “Warriors of Light”: a ragtag group of unnamed, speechless protagonists whose entire backstory is that they “showed up” in the kingdom of Cornelia holding some dim crystals. You give these characters a name and choose from one of 6 classes and then you are thrust into a “save the princess” introduction quest. Your characters never speak, and the choices you make as to their names and classes are purely for UI/Gameplay purposes and do not play into the story at all.

After saving the princess from the rogue knight Garland in a nearby shrine, you are given a cinematic text crawl over a fancy backdrop setting the stage for your adventure:

• You’re overwhelmed with the destiny placed before you (whatever… that… destiny… is?)
• Your crystals suck right now
• Make them not suck
• And like… stop darkness from being so dark. Please.

We then go on a wild goose chase traveling the world to first get a boat, then kill a dark elf to get a key, to get some dwarves to create a canal, so you can get a canoe, so you can get an airship, so you can travel to some (now stereotypical) dungeons to fight elemental fiends to unsuckify your crystals…

All so that you can travel 2000 years into the past to kill that rogue knight again. Except he’s extra evil now. Or was more evil then. Or will be more evil in the future. But in the past.

Look it’s actually kind of cool that they bring back the schlub from the intro quest, and it set a precedent for what would become a series staple of having a crazy zany escalation of stakes in the 4th act. But honestly, even with all the updates to the story and translation over the years… it still requires many leaps of logic to make the story make any sense.

And then it’s over. It’s canon that your nameless heroes survive but due to time travel shenanigans nobody will ever know what you did because it technically didn’t happen in the “real future” and your whole journey was kind of for nothing. I guess.

The End.

The Gameplay

Okay, so for as rough as the story is, the gameplay is actually pretty damn good. And that’s a relief, because like 80% of the game is spent in random encounters grinding and preparing for the challenges ahead.

Early video game RPGs were heavily influenced by Dungeons and Dragons, and this game in particular is the poster child. Final Fantasy straight up took entire mechanics wholesale from early D&D, a move that seems so prescient considering the recent fiasco about the OGL and whether or not game mechanics are able to copywritten (spoiler alert, they can’t). As someone who is a D&D nerd, this has always made this game more approachable for me, however I can see some of the obtuseness of its systems being rough if you don’t have experience rolling dice at the table.

First, you get to choose a class for your character, and the classes are based on your prototypical DND staples:

Final Fantasy Class	D&D Equivalent
Fighter	Fighter / Paladin
Thief	Rogue
Black Belt	Monk
Black Mage	Wizard / Sorceror
White Mage	Cleric
Red Mage	Battle Mage

These classes would later evolve to become more distinct and iconic to the franchise, but in this first game, the feel of these classes is straight out of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. In particular, the magic system is one of those systems that was nearly an entire copy+paste job, with the Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage having “Spell Slots” that increase as you level up, 8 “Spell Levels” that unlock as you level up, and a “Spells Learned” cap of 3 spells per spell level, similar to the limits on D&D casters on the variety of spells you know.

As an example, having your Red Mage use a first level spell slot to cast “Fire” may end up leading to a game over when they don’t have the spell slot available to cast “Cure” later on. This makes magic tactical and exciting, but at the same time incredibly risky. With the volume of random encounters and the wild swings in difficulty mid-dungeons, the risk-averse player will just save their spell slots for a “rainy day” that often never ends up coming.

The combat itself is also tactical, as it borrows the concept of “Initiative” and “Marching Order” from D&D. At the start of every round of combat, you give all four characters directions, and then the round plays out in initiative order. If a monster (or one of your other characters) gets incapacitated, buffed, or some other mechanical change that affects the state of the battle, your remaining characters still enact their pre-chosen actions when their turn in the order comes up. In practice, this means that pre-planning is key, however, this strategy layer is made obsolete once you “solve” combat with your given team and given enough mindless grinding to level up your characters enough to survive the game’s difficult dungeons. The latter half of the game has you behaving in two modes:

• Regular Encounters: Often just spamming the “attack” option or using special items that cast magic from your inventory instead of using a spell slot.
• Boss Encounters: Perform a set-up of buffs and debuffs (spells like haste, protect, and shell STACK in this game, so buffing and debuffing are a multi-round affair to give your characters a power spike) and then… spam the “Attack” option and use special items that cast magic from your inventory instead of using a spell slot.

Annnddd…. this is actually fine. I know the above oversimplification sounds bad, however this game is not designed to be labyrinthine experience to be played again and again with new strategies. No, Final Fantasy is a 10-25 hour game that you play through and “solve” once, and then it’s over. And that’s okay! It was actually kind of refreshing to finish the game knowing that I’d eked out every last ounce of power from my given class combinations.

As far as balance, there are some classes that are weaker than others at different parts of the game (sans the Fighter/Knight which is pretty much OP from the outset and never slows down) but on the whole, in the Pixel Remaster at least, you’d be hard pressed to create a party of 4 that wasn’t viable.

Unless you did four White Mages. That may have issues with doing enough damage before exhausting spell slots on some of the harder bosses. But even then, I feel like with enough grinding it’d be viable.

The party I used was Fighter, Red Mage, Black Belt, and White Mage. Despite doing quite a bit of 2x speed grinding, the last boss was still a tactical affair and I found myself wearing a grin when I finally dealt the last blow, which is all I could ask of a game like this.

Extras & Achievements

While the game is VERY linear and lacks any post-game content, there are a couple of technically optional activities.

1. Advanced Classes
   • Not sure if this is really “optional” due to the power spike it gives being pretty required IMHO, but to my knowledge I don’t think there was any part of this side quest that was roadblocking my quest to renew the crystals.
   • There is unfortunately no additional layer of agency here, every starting class “evolves” into fixed advanced class. Fighter becomes Knight (Paladin), Black Belt becomes Master, (Red/White/Black) Mage becomes (Red/White/Black) Wizard, and Thief becomes Ninja. Outside of Knight getting a few low level spell slots to cast White Magic, these advanced classes lack any new abilities and are instead just kind of a power-up of existing mechanics.
2. Excalibur
   • There’s a treasure chest in the penultimate dungeon that contains Adamantite. If you take this item to the dwarf city, they’ll forge the most powerful weapon in the game, Excalibur for your late game Knight. This makes the games most overpowered class just straight up broken, as the weapon is strong against all foes, and is considered to attack with all elemental types, amplifying your Knights damage exponentially.
3. Optional Boss: Warmech
   • The first of what would become a staple of the series, Warmech is an optional boss that in some ways is harder than the actual last boss of the game. Unlike most future optional bosses, Warmech is just a random encounter in the last room of the penultimate dungeon, with a 3% chance to encounter. It’s entirely possible (likely even) that most casual players just playing the game would never encounter this fight, and if they did, they’d likely be wiped out immediately if not anticipating it.
   • I found Warmech easier than the last boss, however my particular team was very sturdy and Warmech’s biggest threat is the damage it deals, in stark contrast with the games last boss which is more of a war of attrition.

As far as achievements go, the most difficult achievement for me was simply the “completing the bestiary”, which required backtracking to a couple early game dungeons to fight enemies that had low encounter rates. The other notable achievement was “open all chests”, which seems more difficult until you acknowledge that the Pixel Remaster has the beautiful QOL feature of telling you how many chests you are missing from each zone of the game.

Final Fantasy Staples Introduced

(Please note that this is not supposed to be an exhaustive list, just those things that I personally noticed and took note of during my playthrough)

• First appearance of Jobs(Classes): Fighter, Monk, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage, Red Mage.
• First appearance of Bahamut, although notably he is just a character. This game has no reference to or concept of “summoning”.
• First reference of Cid: The character himself doesn’t appear, but as usual, he’s credited with being associated with the game’s airship.
• First appearance of an Airship.
• First appearance of Crystals.
• First appearance of staple songs:
  • Prelude
  • Final Fantasy Opening Theme
  • Level Up Fanfare (Originally called Victory Theme)
• First appearance of staple monsters:
  • Chimera
  • Gigas
  • Goblin
  • Guardian
  • Kraken
  • Mindflayer (Straight up stolen from D&D)
  • Ochu
  • Ogre
  • Pirate (I know this seems silly, but Final Fantasy, in particular the whimsical ones, LOVE their pirates)
  • Sand Worm
  • Tiamat
  • Tyrannosaur
  • Wyvern

Final Thoughts & Score