This review contains spoilers
FINAL FANTASY
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Dungeons: 5/5
Music: 4.5/5
Overall: 9/10
Final Fantasy, perhaps one of the most ironic titles when considering the vast multitude of games that share this title. For those who don’t know; Final Fantasy was named so because it was a last ditch effort before the studio formerly known as Square would have closed its doors and faded into obscurity. If I were to sum this game up in a single sentence it would be this: Final Fantasy is Dungeons & Dragons in video game format.
It all starts with four warriors bearing crystals of light that come forth to stop Chaos from destroying the world. These heroes would become known as the Warriors of Light. Our story begins with the first unique aspect of this game. You get to create your party prior to starting your adventure. You get to pick classes and names for each character. Classes include Fighter, Black Belt, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage. What’s interesting is that you can create any combination of classes to fill your party. This includes running four of one class of characters. I personally ran with three fighters and a red mage. The game begins with news that the princess of Cornelia has been kidnapped! Your band of heroes petition the king to send you to save her from the clutches of the Black Knight. Only the king turns you away because he refuses to send anymore people to their deaths. So you head up to the ruined castle and confront the knight anyways. These heroes won’t take no for an answer. Upon defeating the Black Knight, he is sucked into a portal and Chaos continues spreading across the land. You return the princess to the king and that’s when you’re entrusted with the task of finding the elemental crystals and restoring them to their proper state. This story is pretty cut and dry from here. You begin exploring, going from town to town and helping people along the way. As you do so, you find yourself exploring dungeons and fighting big baddies that are blocking you from restoring the crystals. Once you’ve restored the crystals, the land is still corrupted by Chaos! Well with some help from an ancient race you learn that Chaos has hidden himself in the past. Remember that portal I mentioned earlier? Turns out it’s a portal to the past. Chaos has created a time loop where whenever he’s about to be defeated in the present, he has himself sent back to the past thus stopping you from saving the day. Knowing that, our heroes dive into the past to confront Chaos once and for all. After traversing an unruined version of Chaos’ castle and facing his generals once more, you find yourself finally confronting Chaos. Finally we can put an end to this long journey. Once you manage to defeat Chaos, the world returns to normal. But by beating Chaos in the past that means there was never corruption in the present to begin with. The Warriors of Light have saved the world and nobody celebrates because as far as they know, nothing was ever wrong.
I like the simplicity of the story. I think having a straightforward narrative serves the game well. The reason I give it a 4/5 is because the middle portion of the story doesn’t jive well with the rest of the narrative. It feels like you’ve been sent on this epic quest but the plot is largely ignored aside from when you are approaching the crystals and it doesn’t really pick back up until you have to confront Chaos. I also find the “and nobody knows about it” trope to be frustrating. It undermines the effort put into beating the game. Of course true heroes don’t require recognition to save the day but that doesn’t mean their efforts should go unnoticed.
In the gameplay segment of this review I’ll be taking into account battle mechanics for the characters, enemies, and balancing of encounters. My party consisted of three Fighters and a Red Mage. By the end of the game I had 3 Knights that were overpowered and a Red Wizard that did (almost) everything I needed it to. Next time I play this game I’ll be running with fewer fighters. Running with 3 fighters and anything else makes the game blow by quickly. Your fighters become overpowered very fast and the red mage has a healthy enough mix of white spells for support and black spells for offense. Your martial classes are very simple. Equip them with the best gear you can get and smack all who dare stand in your way. Your magical classes work on a spell slot system. Very much like how D&D’s spell system works. You start off with Level 1 spell slots. As you level up you gain more slots as well as higher level slots. Higher level slots grant you access to stronger spells but are also limited on uses. Your mages start off all but worthless. Black Mage and White Mage have low health and defense and their only viable weapons to start are canes. Red Mage fairs well if you give it a rapier since your better black spells aren’t available until later. Red Mages get to play with both types of spells but they take longer to access higher spell slots making the stronger spells take longer to obtain. White Mages and Black Mages get higher spell slots sooner but they can’t mix and match spells like Red Mage can. Overworld enemies are going to be your main source of gaining experience points (EXP). I chose to grind in the beginning for some early levels and found it to be unnecessary. I’m not sure if they did some tuning on enemy encounters with this pixel remaster but I never had a moment where regular enemies had me worried. In fact only a couple of bosses even posed a challenge. This is likely due to my party composition. I only did a small amount of grinding in the very beginning and after that I only battled what I naturally encountered. I felt like the entire game was pretty trivial until I reached Chaos. I didn’t have to look up anything in this game when it came to strategy until I encountered Chaos. I don’t know how you can breeze through and destroy every encounter and then run head first into the brick wall that is Chaos. After doing some light research and preparation I was able to defeat Chaos. This encounter alone is why I took half of a point off my scoring for gameplay. I like having difficult encounters but encounter balancing needs to make sense. I liked the design of the enemies and bosses and I like the characterization of each boss. The bosses felt like they matched with the element they were guarding well and despite balancing issues, the fight against Chaos was very thematic and was a fitting final boss for the narrative.
Dungeons will be a short subject. This game has a handful of dungeons throughout the game. Each Crystal has a dungeon you must delve into before you can purify it. The dungeons in this game are enjoyable labyrinths that take a reasonable amount of time to clear. The bosses make for an enjoyable cap for each environment. Each dungeon has a distinct identity. Each dungeon is approximately the same in length (except for the final dungeon) and are appropriately scaled to your progression in the game. Dungeons get a 5/5 because they meet my expectations for dungeon content.
The soundtrack this game offers, includes many of the classic themes that we admire today. `The victory fanfare being iconic to video game music. Everybody recognizes that tune. The overworld theme is full of feelings of adventure and discovery. The battle theme feels like you’ve engaged in an epic battle. The boss themes even moreso! I gave it a 4.5/5 because despite the great tracks the main themes are repeated fairly often. Any battle that isn’t a boss battle, no matter the environment is the same. An argument can be made that this is due to limitations of space on the original NES cartridge and that would be a fair argument to make. I still feel that the repetitive nature of the tracks still serves as a detriment to the game.
In closing, Final Fantasy is a well developed game. It was clearly a labor of love from Square and the effort does not go unnoticed. I believe a 9/10 suits this game well because despite my love for the game, it’s certainly not perfect. The game has aged incredibly well and I think it’s a must play for people who want to see what shaped modern gaming today. Obviously with 15 proper follow ups (and twice as many spinoffs) it truly wasn’t the “final fantasy.”
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Dungeons: 5/5
Music: 4.5/5
Overall: 9/10
Final Fantasy, perhaps one of the most ironic titles when considering the vast multitude of games that share this title. For those who don’t know; Final Fantasy was named so because it was a last ditch effort before the studio formerly known as Square would have closed its doors and faded into obscurity. If I were to sum this game up in a single sentence it would be this: Final Fantasy is Dungeons & Dragons in video game format.
It all starts with four warriors bearing crystals of light that come forth to stop Chaos from destroying the world. These heroes would become known as the Warriors of Light. Our story begins with the first unique aspect of this game. You get to create your party prior to starting your adventure. You get to pick classes and names for each character. Classes include Fighter, Black Belt, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage. What’s interesting is that you can create any combination of classes to fill your party. This includes running four of one class of characters. I personally ran with three fighters and a red mage. The game begins with news that the princess of Cornelia has been kidnapped! Your band of heroes petition the king to send you to save her from the clutches of the Black Knight. Only the king turns you away because he refuses to send anymore people to their deaths. So you head up to the ruined castle and confront the knight anyways. These heroes won’t take no for an answer. Upon defeating the Black Knight, he is sucked into a portal and Chaos continues spreading across the land. You return the princess to the king and that’s when you’re entrusted with the task of finding the elemental crystals and restoring them to their proper state. This story is pretty cut and dry from here. You begin exploring, going from town to town and helping people along the way. As you do so, you find yourself exploring dungeons and fighting big baddies that are blocking you from restoring the crystals. Once you’ve restored the crystals, the land is still corrupted by Chaos! Well with some help from an ancient race you learn that Chaos has hidden himself in the past. Remember that portal I mentioned earlier? Turns out it’s a portal to the past. Chaos has created a time loop where whenever he’s about to be defeated in the present, he has himself sent back to the past thus stopping you from saving the day. Knowing that, our heroes dive into the past to confront Chaos once and for all. After traversing an unruined version of Chaos’ castle and facing his generals once more, you find yourself finally confronting Chaos. Finally we can put an end to this long journey. Once you manage to defeat Chaos, the world returns to normal. But by beating Chaos in the past that means there was never corruption in the present to begin with. The Warriors of Light have saved the world and nobody celebrates because as far as they know, nothing was ever wrong.
I like the simplicity of the story. I think having a straightforward narrative serves the game well. The reason I give it a 4/5 is because the middle portion of the story doesn’t jive well with the rest of the narrative. It feels like you’ve been sent on this epic quest but the plot is largely ignored aside from when you are approaching the crystals and it doesn’t really pick back up until you have to confront Chaos. I also find the “and nobody knows about it” trope to be frustrating. It undermines the effort put into beating the game. Of course true heroes don’t require recognition to save the day but that doesn’t mean their efforts should go unnoticed.
In the gameplay segment of this review I’ll be taking into account battle mechanics for the characters, enemies, and balancing of encounters. My party consisted of three Fighters and a Red Mage. By the end of the game I had 3 Knights that were overpowered and a Red Wizard that did (almost) everything I needed it to. Next time I play this game I’ll be running with fewer fighters. Running with 3 fighters and anything else makes the game blow by quickly. Your fighters become overpowered very fast and the red mage has a healthy enough mix of white spells for support and black spells for offense. Your martial classes are very simple. Equip them with the best gear you can get and smack all who dare stand in your way. Your magical classes work on a spell slot system. Very much like how D&D’s spell system works. You start off with Level 1 spell slots. As you level up you gain more slots as well as higher level slots. Higher level slots grant you access to stronger spells but are also limited on uses. Your mages start off all but worthless. Black Mage and White Mage have low health and defense and their only viable weapons to start are canes. Red Mage fairs well if you give it a rapier since your better black spells aren’t available until later. Red Mages get to play with both types of spells but they take longer to access higher spell slots making the stronger spells take longer to obtain. White Mages and Black Mages get higher spell slots sooner but they can’t mix and match spells like Red Mage can. Overworld enemies are going to be your main source of gaining experience points (EXP). I chose to grind in the beginning for some early levels and found it to be unnecessary. I’m not sure if they did some tuning on enemy encounters with this pixel remaster but I never had a moment where regular enemies had me worried. In fact only a couple of bosses even posed a challenge. This is likely due to my party composition. I only did a small amount of grinding in the very beginning and after that I only battled what I naturally encountered. I felt like the entire game was pretty trivial until I reached Chaos. I didn’t have to look up anything in this game when it came to strategy until I encountered Chaos. I don’t know how you can breeze through and destroy every encounter and then run head first into the brick wall that is Chaos. After doing some light research and preparation I was able to defeat Chaos. This encounter alone is why I took half of a point off my scoring for gameplay. I like having difficult encounters but encounter balancing needs to make sense. I liked the design of the enemies and bosses and I like the characterization of each boss. The bosses felt like they matched with the element they were guarding well and despite balancing issues, the fight against Chaos was very thematic and was a fitting final boss for the narrative.
Dungeons will be a short subject. This game has a handful of dungeons throughout the game. Each Crystal has a dungeon you must delve into before you can purify it. The dungeons in this game are enjoyable labyrinths that take a reasonable amount of time to clear. The bosses make for an enjoyable cap for each environment. Each dungeon has a distinct identity. Each dungeon is approximately the same in length (except for the final dungeon) and are appropriately scaled to your progression in the game. Dungeons get a 5/5 because they meet my expectations for dungeon content.
The soundtrack this game offers, includes many of the classic themes that we admire today. `The victory fanfare being iconic to video game music. Everybody recognizes that tune. The overworld theme is full of feelings of adventure and discovery. The battle theme feels like you’ve engaged in an epic battle. The boss themes even moreso! I gave it a 4.5/5 because despite the great tracks the main themes are repeated fairly often. Any battle that isn’t a boss battle, no matter the environment is the same. An argument can be made that this is due to limitations of space on the original NES cartridge and that would be a fair argument to make. I still feel that the repetitive nature of the tracks still serves as a detriment to the game.
In closing, Final Fantasy is a well developed game. It was clearly a labor of love from Square and the effort does not go unnoticed. I believe a 9/10 suits this game well because despite my love for the game, it’s certainly not perfect. The game has aged incredibly well and I think it’s a must play for people who want to see what shaped modern gaming today. Obviously with 15 proper follow ups (and twice as many spinoffs) it truly wasn’t the “final fantasy.”