Finally knocking the first couple FF games. I only need to finish V and I’ll have finished every single player mainline game.
These were fun! They’re for sure going to be my “least favorites” of the franchise, but they’re still great little games. The GBA versions helped get me through them pretty quickly too. I is very simple and charming, II is interesting and makes for a super weird sequel for its time. Perhaps this version elevates a lot of the pain, but I didn’t have a bad time with it. I don’t dig II’s systems but it was a short experience that felt inoffensive. Not bad! I did try to play the first game authentically on my NES but I couldn’t go through with it knowing versions with less tedium existed. Maybe I’ll do it someday just to say I did, but for now I think it’s safe to say the GBA versions are excellent ways to play these.

A remake of both Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II. By far the earliest versions of these games that I would personally recommend as playable although much of this review will roughly apply to any versions of these games released after this one as well.

The original Final Fantasy is one of the great Ur-JRPGs, a genre-defining classic. You created your party of adventurers, choosing from across a small range of different classes each with their own quirks to how they play, you drop down into a quintessentially "fantasy" medieval-style world. After rescuing a princess from a renegade knight the party find themselves thrust into a plot involving elemental fiends terrorising the world, although it spirals out from there in some surprising ways. The gameplay is purest old-fashioned JRPG turn-based battling, with the classes you chose at the start determining much of how you'll engage with battles, not to mention how difficult the game is. There's a ton of replayability hidden in the class system, inviting players to keep trying different setups, although the fluctuating difficulty might put some off. Provided you're playing one of the many remakes of Final Fantasy, I think this first entry in the franchise holds up marvelously well.

Final Fantasy II is a much more plot-oriented sequel; it's clear that this was an attempt to flex the team's writing muscles and experiment with a more long-form and driven storyline. Our principal party of Firion, Guy, and Maria (plus a rotating 4th slot) joins a band of plucky rebels waging war against an evil emperor - it's all very fantasy Star Wars. Final Fantasy II is most remembered for its utterly cracked leveling system that on paper tells players to use individual skills in order to get better at them (in theory an intuitive and somewhat ahead of its time system) but in practice can be broken merely by looking too hard at it, turning the game into a wildly skewed mess. II was also innovative in its dialogue system, which offers players a tree of "remembered" prompt words, all of which can be used on every NPC to get some sort of new response and clue as to where you need to go next. It's another idea well ahead of its time but wonky in execution and I think that sums up II. It's very nearly a good game, but remains the black sheep of the franchise - still, failing because you've tried too many new ideas at once is preferable to not trying anything new at all.