Vidya Thoughts

A mixture of reality and fantasy

The origins of Final Fantasy are pretty well known. Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to make a role playing game but the genre was not a proven commodity in Japan. Then Dragon Quest came out and changed everything. Dragon Quest would go on to become such a phenomenon that according to a Game Informer interview with current series producer Yu Miyake, following the release of Dragon Quest 3, Japanese police requested that Enix not release new Dragon Quest titles on weekdays because too many kids were skipping school in order to buy the game. Even before 3, Dragon Quest proved that the role playing genre could be successful in Japan and Sakaguchi was given the go ahead to start making his own RPG. So a team of seven individuals went on to make the first title in what would go on to be one of the biggest franchises in the world.

The cute version of the FF origin story that gets repeated time and time again is that Square was a company on the verge of financial ruin and the title was named “Final Fantasy” because it was the company’s last shot at success. If Final Fantasy were to be a failure, it would indeed be the final fantasy title Square would ever produce because the company would be out of business. This tale has likely been embellished because, well, it’s cute. Who doesn’t like a Cinderella story? 

“The name ‘Final Fantasy’ was a display of my feeling that if this didn’t sell, I was going to quit the games industry and go back to university. I’d have had to repeat a year, so I wouldn’t have had any friends – it really was a ‘final’ situation,” Sakaguchi said in an interview with MCV UK in 2007. But in an interview with Chris Kohler of Wired from 2009, series composer Nobuo Uematsu stated that: It’s true that Sakaguchi was going to quit, but the bigger reason, the real reason, was that Square was going to go bankrupt and the designers believed that it would be the company’s swan song.

And most recently, you have a keynote speech that Sakaguchi gave in 2015. Casey Baseel of Sora News translated what he had to say about the naming of the franchise like this: ”The team had already decided they wanted something that could be easily abbreviated using the Roman alphabet. They were also set on something that could be condensed into a four-syllable abbreviated version in Japanese, and FF (pronounced ‘efu efu’ in Japanese), fit both criteria. Given the genre the game fell into, making one of those Fs ‘fantasy’ was a no-brainer. But what about the other one? Actually, ‘Final’ wasn’t the team’s first choice – the initial idea was to call the game Fighting Fantasy. However, they had to nix that plan when they discovered there was already a board game called Fighting Fantasy, which was in turn based on a series of British gamebooks.”

Stuff of folktales. Would the fun origin story for Fighting Fantasy be like “Square realized they didn’t have a fighting chance unless this game succeeded. And it was a Fantasy title. So the title Fighting Fantasy was born.” I like to picture the warrior class as some sort of Paul Bunyon character with a chocobo as a blue ox. I think it’s fitting that a fantasy franchise has fantastical and exaggerated origins.

Personal failings

My first experience with the Final Fantasy franchise was with Final Fantasy VI (III in the U.S.) on the Super Nintendo. I was a poor kid who was coping with my lack of access to Final Fantasy VII by playing the next best thing my game rental store had. I tried to get into it but it was difficult because I knew the GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME FOREVER was out there and I just couldn’t play it because I didn’t have a Playstation. Eventually though, I would get there and become a fan of it all. I loved moogles and I wanted more of them.

So like any person who discovers their new favorite franchise for the first time, I needed to experience every single game that it had to offer in some way. Even as a middle schooler, I was savvy with emulators. How else would I play Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension? So instead of being a responsible member of society and purchasing the easily available Final Fantasy Origins on Playstation 1, I instead downloaded NESticle and a rom of Final Fantasy and…boy was it not for me. I saw the heights the franchise would get to and this just didn’t compare. Where were the fancy summons? The card games? The story?

I feel like this is probably a very common experience when trying to play the old Final Fantasy games. The franchise wasn’t always about delivering a game and a story, it was at one point just a game with a story as scenery dressing. I would go on to play Final Fantasy I on the NES as an adult and was able to see the beauty in it, but I will never forget running into a brick wall the first time I played the game.

Actually playing the game

Final Fantasy I is a different experience from what I was used to. While it is turn based like those Playstation games, it feels like more of an adventure game than the later titles. The player will need to really explore the world they are in in order to find out where to go next. You have the basics of your journey: Everything is fucked and you need to restore the light of the four crystals in order to make things right. The four crystals are representative of the four elements (Earth, Air, Water and Fire) so your adventures will take you to those biomes far and wide across this massive – for the time – world.

The NPCs do give you hints about what to do next, but they don’t hit you over the head with it. There isn’t a line of dialogue that explicitly tells you that you need the rosetta stone from the sunken shrine in order to understand the people of Lufenia, which will then lead you to the tower of mirages, which will eventually get you into a fight with Tiamat. You have to talk to everyone and piece it together. You have to explore.

As you explore, you will be slammed with random encounters. Since you aren’t expected to know where to go on your first playthrough, a lot of your grinding might feel natural. Even still, when you first get to an area, you’re probably not gonna be able to waltz up to the boss and smack them down. In later Final Fantasies, I find that if you just don’t run away from fights, by the time you get to the boss of an area you will probably be well equipped enough to defeat them. This is not the case in Final Fantasy I. Grinding is a big part of the gameplay. The first time I played the original Final Fantasy, I waltzed over to the Chaos Shrine to fight Garland and got my ass handed to me because I didn’t spend enough time beating up goblins.

While a lot of people might look at grinding as cumbersome, I think it’s important to note that it was a big part of the gameplay. You weren’t playing for the story with this game, you were playing for the adventure and part of said adventure was fighting a lot of battles. It was also about keeping track of your inventory and using magic responsibly. Instead of magic points like later entries use, the original Final Fantasy uses magic charges. It’s a system much like you’d see in Dungeons & Dragons where you can only use your spells so many times until you rest to recharge them. Originally, there was no way to recover your magic outside of this. If you wasted all of your Fir3 (Firaga) charges on random enemies, that was it. You couldn’t use it again until you rested. Need it for a boss? Too bad. Go back and try again.

When your main gameplay loop involves fighting a lot of battles, your strength becomes more apparent as you play making progress feel really significant. Let’s say you just got done dealing with Mount Gulug and you head back to the first area of the game, Cornelia. When you get there, you’ll find that those goblins that you had to wail on in order to ensure Garland didn’t knock you down aren’t so bad anymore. Even your White Mage can probably one shot them! This isn’t an experience unique to this particular Final Fantasy, but when a lot of your random battles are won by the skin of your teeth it really does feel quite special here

The battle system itself, primarily attributed to Akitoshi Kawazu (though I’ve also seen Hiroyuki Ito credited), is truly turn based. You can attack, use magic, use items or run. Barebones, but you can take as long as you want to select what you want your character to do, which might feel strange to series veterans more accustomed to the ATB system. I’ll get more into THAT system in the first game that uses it: Final Fantasy IV. The basics of FF1’s system would carry the first three games of the franchise, though some elements around the battle system get changed in those titles. In the first game, I would say the combat is fairly simplistic and the actual gameplay is more carried by things you do on the periphery like item conservation, but I think they expand things a bit in the next two games. This is a fine baseline.

Changing things up

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the screenshots I am providing for this game come from the Pixel Remaster. In this version of the game, they make things a little easier for the player. Shops sell ethers, you generally don’t need to spend as much time grinding and there is an NPC in Cornelia that specifically exists to tell you where to go. The Pixel Remaster tries to take this ancient title that middle school me rammed his head into fruitlessly and make it accessible to more people. It is nice in the sense that it will allow more people to play the first Final Fantasy, but is that really the same experience?

When I first started the Pixel Remaster, the very first thing I did was walk over to the chaos shrine to fight Garland. My head was going back to my middle school days where I was mercilessly killed by what a lot of people consider a joke boss. I didn’t do any grinding and I stepped in and…I just won. And in like five hits to boot. Not feeling confident before a boss? Just quicksave. Gone was that need to grind, instead it felt like I was playing the game on fast forward. Just like with later Final Fantasy titles, I would go from location to location and if I just didn’t run away, by the time I reached the boss, I would be well equipped enough to win. Sure, some of the crystal guardians (the four fiends) were tough battles that would feature one party member getting killed, but most of the time these fights would be uneventful.

Looking around to see if I was misremembering my experience with Final Fantasy I, I found a reddit post that said the remaster was made for people with jobs or had better things to do. In a sense, I agree, this game does get to the point a lot quicker…but is that really Final Fantasy I?

I think in order to get the true experience with the original Final Fantasy, you need to toss up that emulator – or NES classic, or NES or whatever you have at your disposal – and throw yourself at hordes of enemies. As I said earlier, the original Final Fantasy is not a game you play through for the story. If FF1 had a narrative as engrossing as Chrono Trigger but was locked behind this really hard to approach (in a modern sense) video game, I would say it’s necessary to ‘dumb it down’ so people can experience it. I don’t know if I see it that way with the Pixel Remaster though. Sure, you can beat the game this way and that’s great for people that just want to play every single Final Fantasy game and get on with their lives, but I don’t think you’re getting the authentic experience. The tedium that comes with random battles, the rage you might feel after finishing a dungeon only to die on your way out of it and the grind is every bit as much of what Final Fantasy is as the four crystals are.

Now that’s not to say I think all of the changes are ‘experience ruining.’ I think most people consider video games of yesteryear to be a little obtuse in order to sell strategy guides. That’s a slightly cynical way to look at it, but how the hell else were you supposed to figure out Casltevania 2? Were you supposed to just blindly bomb every single wall in Legend of Zelda in order to find a path through the dungeon or were you supposed to find a copy of Nintendo Power to very helpfully point you in the right direction? So quality of life features that don’t actually alter gameplay, like the hint giving dancer NPC and the remake offering a wide variety of maps, are fine by me. You’d have to pay a premium to see these in a strategy guide in the past, so I don’t think having easy access to that content is game ruining. You can also just ignore it! You can’t ignore not needing to grind though.

I also think this specific remake of the original Final Fantasy does one thing way better than some past remakes. It retains the magic charge system. Your level 8 flare (nuke) spell can only be used so many times and its usage is independent of your other magic spells. This makes it so if you want to have an authentic experience where you have to strategize your magic usage in dungeons, you still can. Having all your magic tied to the same magic points system changes things too drastically and I think most players could not forsake quality of life items to experience something closer to the original.

And visually, while I prefer the charm of the older sprites, I love that this remake does its best to remake those and present them as something new. Here I have compiled the playable character sprites from the original and the Pixel Remaster. In case it isn’t obvious, the order goes NES, Remaster, NES, Remaster. You can tell the new ones are based off of the old ones, even if some of the changes are odd (I miss my fighter having red hair). I compare the way this looks to how the Super Mario All-Stars games look. Yeah, the sprites are redone but they are close enough to the original where it still feels authentic. Now, let’s take a look at the GBA remake sprites.

They just look completely different. There’s no ‘trying to retain the spirit’ of the original, your characters look completely different. Yeah, your thief looks more like a thief but it’s a different guy entirely! The class ups no longer look like ‘grown up’ versions of their original selves, they just look more advanced. Your black wizard no longer looks like Sabin, he looks like Vivi! I think a good remake that is trying to be faithful should try to embody the spirit of the original as much as possible and just changing things this much feels superfluous. So I’m glad Square Enix did something else for the Pixel Remasters. The best option would be to include the original game with all remastered versions of the game but that will likely never happen.

I’m only going to touch briefly on the music. I don’t think Final Fantasy I hits the heights of the later entries, but there are definitely some classics in there. The battle theme is iconic, for instance. I think the original versions of these songs are definitely the way to go. Something about the remixes the Pixel Remaster collection has just sounds too pure. They sound like something off of an RPG maker assembly line. Thankfully the console ports offer an option to stick with the original songs but for Steam players like myself…uh, well, I hope you know how to mod!

My experience through the early Final Fantasy titles for this series will be through the Pixel Remasters just because they are the most convenient ways to play them in 2023. But I have also played each of these games before. Maybe not to completion, but I know what they are supposed to feel like. But for people who just want to play every Final Fantasy game, I encourage you to at least try to play the original version instead of the Pixel Remasters. It just isn’t the same experience. If you’re a returning player though, nothing wrong with trying a different way to experience a classic.

Notable characters

I have wanted to write something like this about Final Fantasy games for quite a long time. I was inspired by articles written by a guy named Pat (Pitchfork) for the website Socks Make People Sexy. These were all done a long time ago though and I wanted to make something similar, but in my own voice and from my own perspective. One of my favorite things he would do in these articles is do a rundown of the cast. So I plan on doing that with my retrospectives as well. Final Fantasy I doesn’t have a ton of plot important characters, but let’s look at what we have. These impressions are based on my most recent playthrough of the game.

My party: The Warriors of Light

You need to pick four characters for your journey through this game and unlike (most) later entries, your characters have no personality. You have to name your crew, pick from the six classes and kind of imagine how their personalities would be.

Chuck the Warrior/Knight. So both my party composition and a couple of their names come directly from an old webcomic called 8-Bit theater. I feel like the most recognizable gag for the Warrior in those comics was ‘sword-chucks’ which is a genius invention that works exactly as it sounds.

In this playthrough, Chuck was an absolute beast. He took 1 damage from most enemies and almost never died. In fact, I think he never did keel over until the final battle with Chaos. He almost single handedly carried me through the entire way. I have never been one for challenge runs because I am a giant baby, but I would wager simply not having a Warrior would make things really hard for most people. Truthfully, I think a party of three Warriors and a Red or White Mage would probably be more effective than my diverse and fun party of rapscallions. Hey though, it’s early, they were still figuring out the job system!

GP or HP? the Thief/Ninja. The second of my 8-bit theater references. This line has stuck with my for the years and I don’t know why. So it felt natural to name my Thief that. Unfortunately the Pixel Remaster decided to rename GP to ‘gil’ as that is the series standard so now my little thief’s name makes less sense. Ah well.

Despite being named a thief, you can’t actually steal anything in the original Final Fantasy. So what differentiates him from the king of DPS the Warrior is his speed. The Thief can dodge a lot of things and as a result, he didn’t really die all that much either. He wasn’t quite as invulnerable as the Warrior – the fight with Marilith/Kary/the fiend of fire was basically a Warrior solo effort at the end – but he was a very effective secondary damage dealer. He received a brief promotion during the battle with chaos to be every bit as important as the Warrior though. I gave him the most powerful weapon in the game, the masamune, and when he was hasted he would sometimes out damage Chuck. Wow!

Rich Evans, the Red Mage/Red Wizard. I am stupid. So when thinking of a name for my Red Mage, the first thing I thought of was another thing with the word red in it: Red Letter Media. And then I was like, well, you’d have to be a real asshole to hate Red Mages. So I chose the one RLM guy I thought you’d have to be an asshole to hate. Rich Evans.

For people unaware, the Red Mage is a jack of all trades. They can cast white and black magic. A healer and a damage dealer! On top of that, they are handy with a sword so they can do just a bit of everything. Unfortunately, I found Rich Evans to not really be good at much of anything. Casting black magic as a red mage is pointless. My Black Mage out-damaged Rich Evans by a lot. The physical damage he would cause was handy during random encounters, but against actual bosses he might as well have been swinging a twig. There Rich Evans was a heal bot and honestly I didn’t think cure or cura healed enough to be horribly useful. If I were to run again, I’d just use a white mage because I think the added hp on each heal would make a big difference. Plus they get holy which is canonically the coolest Final Fantasy spell.

Vivi, the Black Mage/Black Wizard Wow gee whiz I wonder why I named my Black Mage Vivi. In case you didn’t know, this is the Black Mage that appears in Final Fantasy IX and he pretty much just looks like a Black Mage. Unfortunately I forget that the Black Wizard looks like a completely different Final Fantasy character

Ah well. I’ll just pretend Sabin came in to replace Vivi halfway through and he learned black magic or something, I dunno.

In this playthrough, Vivi was pretty much my ‘oh my fucking god I don’t want to sit through this random battle, use Flare or something so we can move on’ character. In boss battles he was my second most valuable damage dealer, but he was also squishy enough that it felt like he would go down before I even knew it. But boy, casting Blizzaga once was great. Usually my strategy with him would be to cast haste on Chuck or Rich Evans and then cause whatever damage I can (In FF1 haste makes it so you hit someone more times on your turn, so it’s a damage buff. It doesn’t make you faster like it would in an ATB game). I like having a magic damage dealer in the party just because you run into those pesky slime-style enemies that take like four damage to sword strikes, but I didn’t run into THAT many of those and when I did Chuck or GP or HP? would usually score a crit and take care of things. I didn’t mention it above but the crit rate had to be upped by like 1000%, I got them all the time.

So basically in my next playthrough it’s KNIGHT KNIGHT KNIGHT and White Wizard. Speaking of White Wizard, I didn’t mention the other two classes: Black Belt/Monk and White Mage. I, uh, didn’t use them but I thought I would mention them. Masters, the evolved form of monk/black belts, are a more useless dps than the Ninja and White Mages/Wizards are healer first characters. There!

Princess Sarah

She is the princess of Cornelia/Corneria. Calling her a major character is a bit of a stretch, but the journey of the Warriors of Light technically starts with her kidnapping at the hands of Garland. Plus, she gets used in a lot of supplementary material later on. She gets a major role in World of Final Fantasy from what I remember. I included this specific screenshot because I have no idea what she’s trying to say here. Is she trying to say she wants to have some alone time with Chuck? Is the screen fixing to fade to black with her going “you’re so norty?”

Bahamut

For funsies I decided to compare Pixel Remaster Bahamut to other forms of Bahamut. On the left is NES Bahamut. Not quite intimidating, I would say Pixel Remaster Bahamut looks like Bahamut Zero in comparison. On the right is a version of Bahamut from the PSP version of Final Fantasy. I haven’t played that specific version but I included it because I just think that style really sucks compared to the more pixelated version.

Bahamut has one role in this game: to give your team a class change. It’s the one thing I would call a sidequest in the original Final Fantasy and it is so important that I almost hesitate to call it a sidequest. Changing your class makes your character exponentially more powerful. For challenge run fanatics, I’m sure using the starter classes is neat and all, but for people like me who cower at such things…you’re going to want to run around with a ninja instead of a thief.

He doesn’t have much of a character outside of this though. He’s just a kindly king of the dragons. I just thought it was neat that the most iconic summon in the franchise got his start in the very first game. A lot of series staples from Final Fantasy don’t originate with the first game, but this bad boy does.

Cid!?

The above screenshot is talking about the creation of the airship. Cute! Of course, this line of dialogue isn’t in the original game because it’s a little too on the nose. The tradition of Cid in numbered games wouldn’t start until 2, but this little throwaway line of dialogue that was added in the GBA remake of Final Fantasy tried to tie it all together. I don’t like this little bit of retroactive continuity but felt it was important to note that it’s in the most easily accessible version of the game. But it’s a lie! Ignore this NPC! Booo!

I didn’t know where to put this but I love the Troll

NES on the left, Pixel Remaster on the right. Look at this guy! You can practically hear him go “AIEEEEEEE YOU’VE RUINED MY LIFE IT’S OVER FOR ME AGGGGGGGGGGH” Plus I love the shadow on his crotch. This is a family game, you can’t just put troll penis everywhere all willy nilly.

The Four Fiends

Some more sprite comparisons for you. I really like the updated versions of these guys, I think they do a good job of capturing the spirit of the original designs. Upper Left: Lich (Earth). Upper Right: Marilith/Kary (Fire). Lower Left: Kraken (Water). Lower Right: Tiamat (Wind)

These guys are your main ‘boss’ enemies, they guard the four crystals. They snuffed the light out of them so to speak. They have no characterization at all, but they are the big bads of the game and even show up for rematches in the final dungeon. In this playthrough, I struggled the most with Marilith. She was unleashing fire attacks that would just obliterate my entire party, save for Chuck. I think he wound up winning the fight with about 40 HP left. I think these enemies are particularly effective in the Pixel Remaster because they represent a spike in difficulty. The game is a total cakewalk until you reach Lich. He has more HP and causes more damage than anything you have faced so far and, to me, represented the first serious threat of death. It’s a little unnerving seeing your number two DPS cause like 30 damage.

The fights you have against them at the end of the game are intense. A lot of end game enemies love using death against you. While you can guard yourself against that, it can still be a little frustrating to be smacked with it if you’re not ready. In the Pixel Remaster, this is lessened by the ability to save before each battle but in the NES version you really need to be on your game to make it out of the final dungeon alive.

Garland/Chaos

The first and final boss of Final Fantasy. It’s like poetry, it rhymes. He was once a loyal knight of Cornelia but became corrupted at some point and kidnapped Princess Sarah. It turns out the four fiends you defeated were Garland’s servants from 2000 years ago and sent him back to the past to heal after your party kicks his ass at the start of the game. When you defeat the four fiends, it opens a portal in the chaos shrine to that period of time so you can finish things. You then fight his true form Chaos. To learn more about Garland and Chaos, make sure to play the hit game “Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.” Are you a bad enough dude to take out Chaos!?

Chaos represents probably the harshest swing of difficulty in the Pixel Remaster. The game doesn’t present much of a challenge until this point. As I said, no game overs. Then you fight Chaos and all of a sudden the game remembers its NES roots. Chaos causes ~300 damage per attack – Vivi had 450-ish HP on my first attempt – and this gets boosted up to around 700 per hit if he casts haste on himself. On top of this, he can randomly cast curaja on himself to completely heal up. It’s frustrating causing thousands of damage only to see that 9,999 in green text. It’s a true endurance fight and definitely worthy of being the final boss of this game.

When I got to him, I believe my party had just hit level 50. This is the original level cap and it took a zillion years to hit it in the NES version, so I assumed I would just stroll up and win like I did with every other battle. Nope! Obliterated. Luckily I took advantage of the quicksave function the remaster added and after I got slaughtered about five times in a row I went back to grind. Finally, I was getting that authentic FF experience I spent a few paragraphs bitching about up there! I decided to give it a go after my characters hit level 57 and…I did better but I was still getting my ass kicked. Eventually though, I prevailed. I used an item to get Saber on Chuck and kept him hasted, I used an item to get blink (helps with evasion though if it did anything who can say) on GP or HP and I just prayed Vivi stayed alive long enough to cast Haste on everyone. I suck and didn’t realize I had temper and that temper could stack so that probably would have helped but hey. I won in the end. And only Vivi died! So I’ll take it.

I was just relieved he didn’t have another form. Hey it’s early, the form changes will come later I assure you.

It started here

With each Final Fantasy, I want to note when certain series traditions start. Sorry if some of these seem really obvious.

Four Fiends, Crystals, Warriors of Light, Jobs, turn based battles, the world map, random encounters and Nobuo Uematsu

This is the game that started it all, so of course it establishes the basics of the franchise. Felt it was important to list Uematsu here because he is the main composer for the franchise. He’s been here since day one!

These all get talked about in some way above, so I won’t dwell on it too much, but these things appear over and over again in the franchise. Jobs, called classes here, get several games in which they are more prevalent so I will save that discussion for a later day. The other elements pop up from time to time too, whether in the mainline series or in spinoffs. Final Fantasy IX, for example, lifts the four fiends and crystals wholesale for its endgame, which makes sense given that FFIX is sort of a ‘series celebration’ game.

Class changes

Hardly a Final Fantasy invention, but still something that I would consider a staple, especially in those job heavy games I mention above. When your character gets a class change, it feels like a significant moment and comes with a giant change in power. They don’t happen in every Final Fantasy title but you always remember when they do happen. Probably the most remembered example of this is Cecil’s transformation into a paladin in Final Fantasy IV.

Airships, boats, etc

Another little graphic comparison for you. On the left is the Pixel Remaster airship and on the right is the NES airship. I actually prefer the NES airship because it reminds me of one of those wacky flying inventions people would make. But this isn’t a bad take on it.

Final Fantasy is a game about exploring the world and one of the best ways to explore the world quickly is a vehicle! The first one you get in FFI is a ship and later you get an airship. This progression is consistent with the rest of the series because you don’t usually just get an airship, you receive various vehicles with various limitations. Sure everybody loves the Highwind in Final Fantasy VII, but you can’t get that without first experiencing the tiny bronco, the buggy and a chocobo.

Colored magic

Not exactly a Final Fantasy original, but this game establishes black magic as the damage dealing kind of magic and white magic as the healing sort of magic. Black magic has a lot more support options in this game than it typically does, so the distinction isn’t quite as stark as it would become. We do not get to experience the joys of blue magic just yet, but it will come whether you want it to or not.

Some beloved enemies

A couple of series staple enemies start here, though their designs aren’t quite familiar. Evil eye (I always call him Ahriman, even though I know that isn’t the species name), Black flans, Minotaurs, Goblins, Ochu, Elementals, Gigas, Giant Worms and probably many others that I can’t think of right now pop up here. No cactuar or tonberry though. You gotta earn those mascot enemies!

Super bosses…kinda

It’s not actually the hardest boss in the game, that’s chaos, but in the Flying Fortress you have the chance to randomly encounter an enemy called Warmech. This guy is stronger than most bosses and basically every random encounter in the game. It only appears on one floor though and you may not even encounter it unless you’re unlucky – so you either prepare for it and hunt it down like you would a typical super boss or you get unlucky and have to either run or die. It doesn’t have the difficulty of a super boss but I think the odd nature in which it is encountered makes it kind of close.

Ultimate weapons…kinda

The Excalibur is the second most powerful weapon in Final Fantasy I, behind the Masamune which can be found in the final dungeon. It is exclusive to the Warrior and you have to find an item called Adamantite in the Flying Fortress (where the Air crystal is) in order to have it made for you. Character specific ultimate weapons would go on to become a major staple of the franchise, so I thought this game having a class specific ultimate weapon was worth noting. The reason I say “kinda” in the header here is because I really feel like the ultimate weapon should be the strongest one.

In conclusion

So is this game worth playing? Yes. Ideally in the original format but if you don’t have the patience for that sort of thing, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to play the Pixel Remaster version of the game. I do think your experience with the game isn’t as authentic and you’re not experiencing the most ‘true’ version of the original Final Fantasy, but it’s at least closer to the real thing than other remakes. I would say start with the NES version and if you find yourself running into a brick wall early on, switch it up. At least you have an idea for how the original feels.

The original Final Fantasy is an old and hard to approach game and it only gets more so with age. But if you want to appreciate what the franchise would go on to become, if you want to understand just how far things have come, you should try.

Thank you very much for bearing with me and reading this far. Just like with the original Final Fantasy, I’ll be learning just what I want to make of these writeups as I do them. As I said up there somewhere, I have wanted to do a writeup of this series for a long time. At least a decade. So even giving me a couple of minutes of your time is appreciated.

Up next

Final Fantasy 2, a notorious sequel.