Before I even played Final Fantasy 1, I experienced an existential crisis on how to play it: there are nine different versions of this game, with roughly three distinctly different experiences between them. While I would not go so far as to say that beating FF1 on, say, the PSP is categorically different than beating the original NES version, there’s a lot of aesthetic and gameplay changes between the two (including entirely different ways that magic power is employed). I myself played the recent pixel remaster; largely because it was the most easily accessible to me, but also because it seems to do a good job at preserving the original’s feel with some modern gameplay enhancements (ie. frequent auto saves, maps, a number of stat changes across the board). I would not claim that this is the best version of FF1 by every metric, but it is an appealing one as someone that doesn’t necessarily want the most difficult, frictive version out there.
Sanded edges aside, my time playing FF1: Pixel Remaster was mostly spent being delighted by how good the game remains. I have a decent working knowledge of the series based on having heard a lot of discussion about them over the years, but I’ve only played FF3 (and did not finish it because the DS version gets obscenely hard), FF13, and FF13-2, and had assumed the games before FF4 lacked compelling narratives. While FF1 is not bursting with complexity, it is a remarkably confident game with a desire to keep surprising the player throughout its entire runtime. This partially works so well due to its sparseness of setting; the fact that the world is comprised of a dozen disconnected towns speaks volumes alone, as do allusions to a past advanced civilization that has since been forgotten. It gives the world a kind of apocalyptic flavor as you’re asked to encounter about 100x more monsters than people. Things keep escalating until a delightfully odd final dungeon concept that I actually think constitutes a spoiler to reveal here; suffice to say that the sci-fi elements that define much of the series show up a lot earlier than I’d realized.
The JRPGing of it all is obviously pretty no frills, as this was basically inventing the genre in tandem with Dragon Quest 1 & 2 (which I should also check out at some point). But for what the systems in this game lack in complexity, they make up for with brevity and a propulsive sense of progression. One of the main things that has historically held me back from checking out JRPGs is how often they turn into massive time sinks. FF1 thankfully took me about 12 hours to beat while using a guide as reference; even with the affordances of the pixel remaster, it’s clear that this was designed to be beaten over the course of a few play sessions. The dungeons here are typically no more than 3-5 floors in length, and the world navigation is designed in such a way that there’s really only a couple of moments in the quest progression that I would describe as obtuse (normally you only have a couple places to check to figure out what to do). My favorite moment in the game came relatively early on, where I had to weigh the benefits of continuing through a dungeon or retreating to prevent a party wipe. It’s this risk/reward element that serves as one of the genre’s backbones, and this is one of the first times I’ve really Felt It. Playing through this has single-handedly made me interested in the genre again, and it makes me excited to see how the series continues to grow and change on all fronts going forward!
Sanded edges aside, my time playing FF1: Pixel Remaster was mostly spent being delighted by how good the game remains. I have a decent working knowledge of the series based on having heard a lot of discussion about them over the years, but I’ve only played FF3 (and did not finish it because the DS version gets obscenely hard), FF13, and FF13-2, and had assumed the games before FF4 lacked compelling narratives. While FF1 is not bursting with complexity, it is a remarkably confident game with a desire to keep surprising the player throughout its entire runtime. This partially works so well due to its sparseness of setting; the fact that the world is comprised of a dozen disconnected towns speaks volumes alone, as do allusions to a past advanced civilization that has since been forgotten. It gives the world a kind of apocalyptic flavor as you’re asked to encounter about 100x more monsters than people. Things keep escalating until a delightfully odd final dungeon concept that I actually think constitutes a spoiler to reveal here; suffice to say that the sci-fi elements that define much of the series show up a lot earlier than I’d realized.
The JRPGing of it all is obviously pretty no frills, as this was basically inventing the genre in tandem with Dragon Quest 1 & 2 (which I should also check out at some point). But for what the systems in this game lack in complexity, they make up for with brevity and a propulsive sense of progression. One of the main things that has historically held me back from checking out JRPGs is how often they turn into massive time sinks. FF1 thankfully took me about 12 hours to beat while using a guide as reference; even with the affordances of the pixel remaster, it’s clear that this was designed to be beaten over the course of a few play sessions. The dungeons here are typically no more than 3-5 floors in length, and the world navigation is designed in such a way that there’s really only a couple of moments in the quest progression that I would describe as obtuse (normally you only have a couple places to check to figure out what to do). My favorite moment in the game came relatively early on, where I had to weigh the benefits of continuing through a dungeon or retreating to prevent a party wipe. It’s this risk/reward element that serves as one of the genre’s backbones, and this is one of the first times I’ve really Felt It. Playing through this has single-handedly made me interested in the genre again, and it makes me excited to see how the series continues to grow and change on all fronts going forward!