Few series command as much respect, adoration, disdain, and contention as Final Fantasy. A series born out of desperation held afloat with lofty wings propelled by debunked speculation and rumoured whispers. A series that has reinvented itself at every opportunity yet has never once lost its identity. A series that began with one game back in December of 1987.
With the release of the sixteenth mainline entry, I found it only fitting to go back to the very foundation that formed all of Final Fantasy and absorb it into my very soul. This retrospective is going to dissect what Final Fantasy is, and how it shaped the series that would one day become synonymous with the RPG genre as a whole.
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Once Upon A Time…
One of the defining features of Final Fantasy – and RPGs as a whole – is its complex stories that interweave powerful character moments with unparalleled spectacle and scope in relation to the world stage. What’s most interesting about Final Fantasy is that its story and characters are paradoxically irrelevant, dated even at release, yet utterly bonkers once all is said and done.
Final Fantasy begins – and mostly exists – as a generic Western fantasy that pulls from the genre’s very core. Above anything else, Final Fantasy fashions itself after Dungeons & Dragons and it stays entrenched with this identity until its very conclusion. You are four heroes who have pottered into town. Go save the princess.
Once you have done that, you set off to save the world. Throw in four magical crystals and demonic forces, and you have yourself a fairly standard romp. Your party is never fleshed out beyond simply being heroes, the world never evolves or becomes anything more than a catalyst for adventure, and the plot vanishes after the introduction.
If you’ve never finished Final Fantasy , you would be forgiven for thinking that this was all it has to offer in terms of narrative complexity – nothing. A generic trundle through trials, tribulations, and tropes. A vapid plot that fades as quickly as it came. A whisper on the winds of adventure.
Timey-Wimey Stuff
The thing is, Final Fantasy gets weird. Like, really weird. Right as you are about to finish the game you are assailed with the prospect of an endless time loop that has caused reality to bend and shift to the will of Chaos. Power corrupted beyond imagining to thrust every living being into a never-ending cycle of death. So absolute, even the ones who caused this catastrophe are victims of their own creation. In the absence of you, there is nothing. Because of you, the nightmare not only started, but continues. Garland, so afraid of death, subjects himself to the reaper time, and time again.
All of these concepts are dumped on you just before you slay the last boss, and it’s a lot to take in. Sure, there were hints of something greater going on, but Final Fantasy goes all out in its closing seconds. It even goes as far as dropping a substantial text crawl during the credits to try and push its message even harder. To its credit, it’s brilliant in concept, but the execution is lacking.
Dated By 1987’s Standards
The thing is, Final Fantasy is dated. Not just by today’s standards either. No, I mean even by 1987, Final Fantasy’s story doesn’t hold a candle to what came before it. It’s linear to a fault and generic until the last. When compared to the likes of Dragon Quest, a series just about to release its third entry, Final Fantasy fails to offer any meaningful or interesting narrative choice.
Things get even worse if you compare it to then-ancient RPGs like Ultima. A series defined by its near-limitless freedom and determination to make player choice an integral part of a game’s narrative. Final Fantasy, as whacky as it gets, spends most of its time saying nothing and disappointing.
The World At Large
This takes us to the world of Final Fantasy, the physical (or digital) landscape you explore and interact with during its relatively short runtime. Its large and sprawling islands, oceans, and mountain ranges offer ample opportunities to stretch your legs and breathe fresh country air.
Its towns are all vibrant and filled with interesting NPCs who, whilst most are there to dump clues and exposition, do so in a way that feels like you are piecing together a puzzle. The game is very linear, with only one real path through the game and between its locales, but it’s one that feels well-paced.
There’s just enough empty space to feel like you are able to turn over every rock and peek into every crevice, whilst never leaving you stranded without a way out. This is made even better with the introduction of canoes, ships, and even airships. As you play more, you are rewarded with more effective travel. Eventually, you can circle the entire world in seconds – safe from the turmoil below.
Side quests exist in Final Fantasy, and they are all meaningful in terms of completion and reward. By which I mean finding Bahamut and being blessed with new power – growing not only in stats but in physical stature. You meet Bahamut as mere babes lost amidst the horrors of the world. You leave Bahamut as men – as women – aged not only physically, but symbolically.
Not all things are as drastic as Bahamut of course. Another quest can elude you if your memory should fail. A dwarf mentions early on that should he receive a certain ore, he could craft a blade of unmatched quality. The ore in question will not be found until the game nears its end. It’s up to you to not only track down this ore but to remember the dwarf who requested it.
When looked at individually, these quests are thinly veiled fetch quests with heavy rewards, but when taken as a whole in conjunction with the main quest, Final Fantasy gives you a reason to get out there and scour the earth for its extra content. It’s just nice that the content you find is always worth the effort.
Combating Evil, One Encounter At A Time
But all of this ties into the combat of Final Fantasy. In short, the system is very simple. There is very little to it besides hitting attack or casting a spell – maybe chugging a curative if you are feeling wild. There are little-to-no encounters in Final Fantasy that individually threaten you as a player. Death to Goblins is almost impossible, yet immortal you are not.
I mentioned the world was large, open, and sprawling. This world is integral to Final Fantasy and its challenge. Final Fantasy doesn’t aim to deliver tactically rich battles, it aims to kill you with an endless horde of minor battles. It doesn’t attack your wits, it attacks your resources.
Everything in Final Fantasy is limited. Your Health, Magic, Items, and Money are all resources that are directly attacked in battle, and it’s up to you to decide which resource you want to spend to overcome the challenge. You can spam the basic ‘Attack’ command to save on Magic, but this leads you to take HP damage. This damage can be healed, ironically, with Magic. Alternatively, you could drain your Items, starving you of money when you are forced to restock.
On the flip side, you could use a powerful spell to wipe out every enemy instantly. This leads you to take no damage, but now you have fewer combat options in the future. You may not have the Magic to heal, once again putting pressure on your wallet. Everything is connected, and everything is being drained slowly over time.
Your choices when exploring matter, because you could find yourself out of resources, lost in the wild, with no way of knowing when the next town will arise. This is made worse in dungeons when you never know how deep they go, and what items (and enemies) await you in the dark. Not to mention the added pressure of powerful bosses who bookend these caverns of despair. Will you have enough left in the tank to push through and slay the beast? Who knows. Suddenly, every decision you’ve made up until this point has a tangible impact.
Of course, this kind of combat is not for everyone. It’s a design choice that is not often seen nowadays. The focus on the larger picture over the individual brawl has slowly tilted in the opposite direction as the decades have rolled on by, but Final Fantasy absolutely nails it. This is only helped by the speed of its combat. Sure, you could have hundreds of battles, but each battle lasts less than 10 seconds. It’s impressive then, that those 10 seconds instil so much choice – so much stress.
Your Choice, Hero
But this fascinating decision-led gameplay system exists outside of combat – outside the hustle and bustle of 10-second battles. From the very start of the game, you are asked to pick four classes to represent your party. Each class provides a unique playstyle, packaged with its own unique drawbacks.
The powerful Warrior can deal staggering amounts of damage – heck, he can take just as much back – but he’s expensive to outfit. Mages offer powerful magics, but are physically frail and come with their own resource system. Thieves, Monks, and hybrid Mages round out the selection, letting you make the party you want to play. These choices matter, and your experience in Final Fantasy will change rather drastically based on who you bring with you. That’s not even getting into the mid-game Bahamut promotion.
Arguably, Final Fantasy is at its very best in the first hour or two of its playtime, as this is when every system is firing on all cylinders. You start with a small pouch of gold, your characters are fresh off the creation screen, and you need to outfit them. You don’t have enough to buy everyone everything, so you need to make decisions – you need to make sacrifices.
Do you give your Warrior the best possible weapon, but starve your Black Mage of a potent spell? Do you buy armour, or do you purchase Potions to relieve some of the pressure your White Mage will inevitably feel? Within the first 10 minutes, you will make decisions that will have ramifications stretching well beyond the first hour.
All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the Magic system in Final Fantasy. Traditional RPGs tend to use the standard MP or Mana system. Each spell costs a set amount of Mana and your wizard has a pool of Mana to draw from. It’s universal, and it’s easy to grasp.
Final Fantasy makes two big changes to this formula. Firstly, there is no MP. Final Fantasy makes use of a slightly altered form of the Vancian Magic System, a system most famously used in Dungeons & Dragons. Every spell has a level, and your wizard can cast a set number of spells of that level. Levels never overlap, so you could drain all of your Level 1 spells, but still have a full stock of Level 2 and above.
Not only that, but Mages in Final Fantasy can only learn three spells per spell level, and there are four spells per level. Since Red Mages can use both schools of magic, they have three slots per level and eight spells to choose from. Your spell list can have drastic effects on how your Mage plays, and you have to make these choices regularly.
It’s unfortunate that Magic in Final Fantasy, despite all of this freedom of choice, doesn’t work. Mages are simply too weak, and their spells aren’t interesting enough. The three spells you will pick are always obvious. Damage spells are rarely worth using because the damage is too low. This means buffs are usually your go-to option, and if you have a go-to option, you aren’t really engaging in the freedom offered by the system.
Brilliant Bosses
All of this rambling about resource management and I haven’t even properly discussed boss battles. Sure, I’ve briefly touched on their role within the exploration of the world and its dungeons, but combat is where they truly shine. It is in combat where the complexity of Final Fantasy’s systems starts to shine through the bean counting and administration.
Now, it’s not massively complex all things considered, but going into these fights with the aim to just press ‘Attack’ will get you killed. You can’t go toe-to-toe with them – you need to plan. Depending on your party’s composition, you might need to use Magic to buff your defences, or to elevate your offensive stats. Maybe you need to dedicate turns to using items to stay alive. It’s akin to several battles at once in terms of decision-making, and it’s intoxicating. It hints at what the combat would become in later entries, even though this specific game went down a different route.
Old Final Fantasy On Modern Hardware
After all is said and done, Final Fantasy when it first released was a very different game to what we have now. Judging the game based on its original release is neither productive nor even relevant. Playing Final Fantasy on a Famicom or NES just isn’t something that is accessible to most gamers, and even the many re-releases of this game are awkward to get nowadays.
Thankfully we have access to the recently released Pixel Remasters that not only cranks up the graphical fidelity but fixes so many issues that historically plagued the game. For example, as much as the Magic system in the Pixel Remasters doesn’t quite work as intended, it didn’t work at all on the NES due to several spells doing nothing because they weren’t coded correctly.
Not only that, but the game was more grind-heavy. This means more combat, more spikes in difficulty, and pacing that pales in comparison to modern iterations. The Pixel Remaster is perfectly balanced to require zero grinding. The pacing is immaculate, and you can get through the entire game in about 10 hours. An investment so meagre, that it’s criminal to not sit through the game at least once in your lifetime.
Critical Reception At The Time
Despite the modern version of the game being excellent, the series only exists because the original release was so successful. At launch, it was highly praised by critics and gamers alike. It sold very well in Japan and then crushed in North America shortly afterwards. This not only cemented the game as one of the best games of its generation but put the Final Fantasy name – and its genre – on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
The rest is quite literally history. The series has seen 15 mainline games since 1987, and whilst there have been some hiccups along the way, Final Fantasy is still going strong.
Final Fantasy is a game that demands to be experienced. It’s flawed in more ways than one, but its legacy transcends its scraped knees and bumped elbows. At its core, Final Fantasy is excellent in a way that few games from this time are. It’s benefited from tweaks over the years to keep it relevant, and relevant it has remained. It’s a timeless classic that became the template for what Final Fantasy was to become. At least, that’s the theory. We’ll have to delve into the sequel another day.
