After co-founding Square Co., Ltd. in 1983, and following years of unsuccessful game-making, Hironobu Sakaguchi released what was to be his final game in December of 1987: a fantasy game by the (clever) name of Final Fantasy. Needless to say, the game was a success, and it went on to make the voyage across the Pacific and to help popularize the role-playing game genre in North America. Square fed off of the series for a few years, along with its other long-running series, Saga, and Final Fantasy games continue to be made to this day, even after Sakaguchi himself moved on. I cannot imagine where video gaming, specifically role-playing gaming, would be without Final Fantasy, but today Square (now Square Enix) is by far the dominant RPG developer in the world and has influenced games of literally all genres.

Now, after nearly fifteen years of playing these games, I have embarked on a series-long marathon, as declared in December of 2006. My game-by-game reviews will shed light on some of the finer details of the series, and the changes of direction that shaped a genre. I will also try to accomplish the age-old challenge of objectively ranking the games. Follow along with me as the series unfolds, character by character, story by story, last boss after last boss, Excalibur after Excalibur. This will be a journey that will span hundreds of hours, and along the way there will be many trials, much enjoyment, and perhaps even some shed tears. You might call me a fanatic.

I really don't want to spoil these games for anyone, because I encourage people to become players of the series. If the need to include a spoiler ever arises, I will make the text black so that it has to be highlighted to be read. Still, be aware that tons of game information may be disclosed in these reviews. If you don't want to know who the main bad guy is, or other things of that nature that aren't blatant spoilers, then only read on with discretion.

GAME INFORMATION

Released:

1987 (JAPAN)

1990 (NA)

Nintendo Entertainment System

By nature any review of the first game as part of a series of reviews must be a bit lower on meaningful content. The only thing I would have to compare with Final Fantasy is Enix's Dragon Quest, but I don't see a point in doing that. This review will look at the foundations of the series and subsequent reviews will build upon that; they will examine what new ground was covered, what was thrown out, what was modified, what was improved upon.

NEW TO THE SERIES / BASIC GAMEPLAY FEATURES

So Final Fantasy was a game of beginnings, but beginnings of what? First, a class system was introduced (this would later become known as the "Job System," which underwent revision in some of the sequels and spin-offs). You get four characters, and you can choose between six classes that you have to stick with for the entire game. Each class has its own set of equipment that can be equipped and its own strengths and weaknesses. Each type of mage has its own set of magic spells that can be learned. It's quite basic.

The battle layout would remain the same for years to come: your party sets up vertically on the right-hand side of the screen, while the enemies appear on the left, and the battle commands are at the bottom. You get to choose between "Fight," "Magic," "Item," "Drink," and "Run." There are three potions—Heal, Pure, and Soft—that can be drunk, and any item in the inventory can be used in battle as well; these sometimes have magical effects on allies or enemies. Each character can hold four weapons and four pieces of armour in their personal inventories.

There are effects to character status that greatly affect the way battles proceed. The classic status effects Confuse, Mute, Poison, and Stun make their debuts in Final Fantasy. You can also be turned to stone. In order to revive a fallen party member, you must either use magic or return to a town to pay for life. The inconvenience of not having an item capable of restoring this major status effect is something you must deal with. In battle, the order of your characters is important, as the person at the head of the party will be attacked more often than the others.

Money (GP) and experience points are earned by winning battles. Enough experience points will raise a character's level, meaning that they will be strengthened, and the value of the different attributes (Hit Points, Magic Points, Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Vitality, and Luck) may increase. HP and MP are restored at Inns or by using Tents, Cabins or Houses, and HP can also be restored by Heal potions.

For magic-users, magic is separated into levels, and each level has its own set of magic points that increase with experience. Each spell uses one magic point in its level. Magic spells either target one enemy or ally or they target all enemies or allies; each spell has its own rule. Spells are used to inflict HP damage, to restore HP, to cause or cure status effects, or to temporarily increase attribute values in battle. Some spells teleport your party throughout areas in maps as well.

You can travel by foot or by vehicles as you progress in the game. A ship, a canoe, and the first-ever Final Fantasy airship become available later on.

Towns generally have the same shops, where you can buy magic, weapons, armour and items.

Some of these features of Final Fantasy were tossed out by the time the series reappeared on North American shores, but many have lasted the entire twenty years. As RPG players, we often take many of these innovations for granted, as we see them in almost every game we play. Not all of these were invented by Sakaguchi's team, but many were. The series's first game started even more than it would appear: in the North American localization of the game, many of the spell names were shortened to the four-letter maximum that was imposed on the translators, and Nintendo censored some of the "religious-themed" parts of the game. Classic spell names like "Flare" and "Holy" became "NUKE" and "FADE," for example. Then there was the unfortunate "Xcalber" abbreviation.

(In future reviews, the new elements of the series, the unique elements, and the old things that were tossed out will be summarized in lists. A good resource for more-or-less comprehensive lists of such series developments is Final Fantasy Compendium.)

CATEGORICAL RATINGS

Each game in the Final Fantasy series will be rated out of ten points on the criteria of the 14 categories listed below. Each category holds a certain level of importance in determining the final rating of the game. I will not reveal the exact weighting, but the order of importance is as follows:

1. Gameplay
2. Battle
3. Interest
4. Story
5. Characters
6. Challenge
7. Flow
8. Dialogue
9. Villains
10. Music
11. Extras
12. Replay
13. Themes
14. Environments

The ratings will be very tough, because there are very high standards to be lived up to. These ratings exist only for the purpose of ranking the games of this series. If a game receives an 80% overall rating, for example, that doesn't necessarily mean that I don't think it is the best RPG ever made—just so you know.

GAMEPLAY

The class system of character development provides for a lot of variety in gameplay and challenge level. Though it is much more restrictive than its versions in later games, it is good in that it forces the player to be strategic in every aspect of gameplay, from battles to buying items. The system is easy to use and understand, but there is no interaction in character development outside of buying magic and equipment. The gameplay is very simple and limited; there is no item specifically for restoring magic, and healing potions don't restore much HP. Exploration is basic, but at some points in the game the player must do a lot of it to figure out what to do next. Talking to everybody in all the towns usually helps, as they may give a hint or two. Having to toss out equipment in order to open a new treasure chest can be very annoying.

BATTLE

Battles are extremely slow, even on the highest response rate. I can't believe I was once patient enough with RPGs to play this game at regular speed. The battle system is basic here: every ally and enemy gets one turn per round (multiple hits are possible), and commands are given all at once at the start of the round. Modern RPG players will immediately notice that a targeted enemy will be attacked even if it is killed before the turn comes, effectively wasting your turn. This is a great annoyance, but it does make battles more interactive; the player has to actually plan out each attack to be most efficient (this is true in other systems as well, but much more so in this case). Also, hit percentages are so low through the first part of the game that there are often more misses than hits. Not having a revivification option other than magic also can lead to great frustration, disrupting progress and making difficult battles even harder.

ENVIRONMENTS

The typical RPG environments are here: the world map consists of grasslands, marshes, forests, mountains, deserts, rivers, oceans, caves, towns, castles, and a volcano. There are some memorable locations, like the Gurgu Volcano, the Sea Shrine, and the Floating Castle. Some of these places vary enough to make exploration interesting. For its time the world was probably quite vast.

MUSIC

Several series mainstays were introduced here by composer Nobuo Uematsu: The Prelude, Theme of Final Fantasy, Victory Fanfare, and the introductory motif for the battle music. Despite the limited sound system, the compositions are very good, and translated well to full orchestration later on. There is only one battle music in the game, which seems baffling today. There are only about twenty tracks on the soundtrack, but they're all pretty good. The overworld music is probably my favourite, and apparently Belle and Sebastian liked it, too (I'm convinced that they copied it). The score is only a taste of what Uematsu would accomplish later, but it's basically on par with the other good video game soundtracks of the 1980s.

CHARACTERS

Any playable characters are nameless, have no personality, and never speak. In fact there is no fleshed-out character in the entire game. Garland, with four message windows in total, says more than anyone else over the course of the game. This wasn't out of the ordinary at the time, but it is an area in which the Final Fantasy series would make great advancements in the future. The only uniqueness of character is found in character classes, which really have nothing to do with personality.

VILLAINS

The four Fiends of the elements and Garland are the only major villains. Though the background story had mild potential for interest, the villains are zero-dimensional, even though I do like Garland as a villain, for whatever reason. The only real plus is that the four Fiends against which you battled had an element of unity to their purpose, even if you had no clue what their motives were. Again, this stuff wasn't out of the ordinary for video game RPGs in 1987. Tremendous strides have since been made.

DIALOGUE
(0)

It would seem as though I'm picking on this game, but these categories will become extremely important as the role-playing game evolves. Not once in the entire game is there dialogue (there is monologue, but never any reply). The purpose of anything spoken in the game is to gain information from non-playable characters, and there isn't really anything of substance to be found anywhere. Thus was the primitive nature of early video games.

STORY

It's almost thrown in as an extra at the end, but the 2000-year time loop idea was probably pretty bold at the time, not like the save-the-princess thing it looked like at the beginning. The game features an ancient advanced civilization, prophetic sages, and an epic struggle between good and evil. The driving force for the game's events is a quest to defeat the four Fiends of the elements (Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind) to save the earth from destruction.

THEMES

Final Fantasy is a battle between the four Light Warriors and the four Fiends; a battle to save the world from destruction. Not revolutionary or deep by any means, but it could have been much worse. The themes are standard and safe.

INTEREST

The game is a bit monotonous, but I certainly didn't find myself dreading to move on to hunt down the next Fiend, even if it was much like hunting down the previous one. One thing that can really bog down the interest level is the slowness of the battles. It's not as fun to walk into a large cave or dungeon, knowing you'll have to endure about 30 long, grueling battles before you get to the boss. Saving up money for new equipment and magic can be an overwhelmingly large task, but is somewhat exciting, too, because money is scarce for a large part of the game's beginning, so you have to choose which stuff you really need. Playing the game on an NES emulator with a fast-forward function really solves a lot of these problems, but, of course, that subtracts from some aspects of the experience as well. Use with discretion.

FLOW

With no superfluous dialogue or cutscenes to wait through, the game flows pretty nicely from mission to mission. What really holds it back is the slowness of the battle engine. Flow will become a problem later in the series as well, but for very different reasons.

CHALLENGE

The challenge is somewhat unbalanced. Using the standard party of one Fighter, one Bl.Belt, one W.Mage, and one B.Mage, I had to buy 99 Heals (the maximum) often more than once per dungeon just to make it through and get all the treasures. It takes several minutes of pressing 'A' to buy 99 Heals. Despite this, most boss battles took just two rounds for me to beat. Any difficulties in the game can easily be overcome with some leveling up. The Marsh Cave and the Ice Cave are two of the more difficult challenges, and may require several tries with an average party that is at an average level. Fortunately, the last part of the game is probably the most difficult. The challenge definitely varies depending on your initial choice of party. Completing the game with four Fighters is easy, but with four W.Mages, it will require a lot of time, patience, strategy, and, most of all, luck. The game is a challenge, but not always a fun challenge.

EXTRAS

The first real side quest in the Final Fantasy series is the Castle Ordeal quest, where you must find the Tail in the castle and show it to Bahamut, the dragon king, as proof of your courage. The reward is pretty good, as all your party members' classes will be upgraded. Other than that, there are some very important optional weapons and armour that can be found with some exploration. By comparison to later games in the series, there is not much at all.

REPLAY

The best feature of the game has to be its replay value. The different party possibilities allow for a lot of interest and challenge, even though the story and missions all remain the same. There are a lot of different possible combinations, most of them pretty interesting. While the game is quite slow, it's also not too long, so it's well-suited for this type of replaying.

WEIGHTED RATING: 44%

It isn't really fair to subject the old games to today's standards, especially since RPGs today serve much different purposes than they used to. We have different expectations of them these days: we want them to be more interactive, to tell a deep, compelling story, to allow us to relate to the characters' struggles, and to be a more literary or cinematic experience rather than just a straightforward battle-fest. Even though Final Fantasy falls short in comparison to the great RPGs of the past fifteen years, its contributions to the RPG genre will never lose their importance. Great changes will come, some old standards will go, new experiments will be undergone, and the face of the franchise will evolve continuously. Final Fantasy, though, will forever remain a landmark RPG, a classic, and a relative masterpiece.

(Note: After much careful thought I have decided to revise the rating system slightly. The weighting is a little different now, and the criteria for each category has also changed. Most notably, I changed "Characters" and "Villains" from 1s to 2 and 4, respectively. The reason behind this was that, although there is not much at all to the characters or villains in this game, I had to allow room for more fleshed-out ones that had more bad than good. The characters and villains in this game were more "neutrally" poorly done; neglected, if you will. Of course, none of this matters if subsequent games in the series do not fare worse at this category, because the purpose of the system is for comparison only.)

Labels: Final Fantasy

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