Played the GBA version
Despite being another very early example of establishing the general conventions that would become staples of the JRPG format, it's honestly pretty amazing how stylistically different Final Fantasy feels when compared to the early Dragon Quest games. While at their core, both series had their roots in some fairly similar territory with the gameplay loops being functionally the same, there are some pretty interesting differences in how each is presented. Furthermore, the game allowed for a much greater sense of customisation and a stronger sense of openness to how one could approach exploration, all culminating in a game which in some regards felt far larger than that the DQ games achieved on their first 2 tries.
While Dragon Quest would put the player in an inhospitable world where they had to both carve out a name for themselves in such an environment, Final Fantasy instead takes the approach of making the game feel far more grandiose, putting your party in a position where they're the legendary heroes right out the gate. What could potentially seem like a simple narrative difference ends up affecting the gameplay in a fairly substantial way, the biggest of which being the way that the player is made to feel very powerful at a rapid rate. Rather than slowly building up a party as the game goes on, the player gets to choose all 4 members of their party and their archetypes immediately, being able to choose between 6 different classes and even have multiple of the same ones along for the quest. This immediately establishes the stronger focus this had on having the player form more concrete strategies while also being able to tailor it more around their own playstyle, such as being able to bring along an extra melee powerhouse if they wanted to focus around more aggressive strategies.
There's almost a sense of maximalism to how the game approaches encounters on the whole as well to further reinforce the fact that your characters are meant to be legendary right out the gate, not only with the damage numbers being comparatively high, allowing players to dal hundreds of damage within the first half hour, but the groups of enemies themselves are made to appear far more threatening when really being reasonable for the most part. The sense of power you feel from fighting a group of 9 enemies and absolutely destroying them effortlessly is pretty satisfying and manages to contribute to a game that feels a bit more like a power fantasy on the whole. I also thought that the magic system was pretty neat even if a bunch of the spells seemed to inexplicably just, not work properly. While unconventional, the fact that you purchase magic spells from the shops throughout end up bringing another element of strategy with team composition, only being allowed to get 3 spells of each level often leading to situations where the player will have to think about what will contribute to their goals the most and how to mitigate any potential shortcomings that they'll suffer as a result of not just being able to get everything. While this ultimately doesn't actually work too well due to the aforementioned fact that some spells just don't seem to work properly or as well as you'd think, leading to pretty easy choices most of the time, I still think that this approach is pretty cool and unique, and would be neat to see implemented more thoughtfully in another game.
Unfortunately, Final Fantasy's attempts at making for a more epic adventure come with its own set of drawbacks, the biggest of which being how open the game feels without giving the sufficient tools to facilitate a truly compelling experience with it. The first stretch of the game works pretty well, giving a short little tutorial section that's entirely on land and feels pretty linear while still having enough moving pieces to leave a sense of intrigue, it's simplistic, but it works well at establishing the world without overwhelming the player. I feel like the player is given access to the boat a bit too early however, and while at first it's fine when you're essentially confined to a huge lake enclosed on all sides, only giving you access to another couple of areas, once you get out of here, all bets are off. The game opens up at such a rate that you get given an airship before even completing the 2nd huge quest objective, and this is after having to mess around with sailing across these huge expanses of empty ocean just hoping to find another piece of land to do anything on, and from here it essentially devolves into a mindless fetch quest without anything interesting to frame most of it.
So many steps required to progress further are presented in a very generic way, often just being a random item in a random dungeon that's not tied to anything other than player progression. Without any way to tie a lot of these key items to something interesting within the world, it ends up feeling overly artificial, and while it occasionally brings something interesting, like revealing this weird sci-fi aspect to the world, it's too few and far between for it to have a proper impact on the experience outside of these isolated moments. It's just fortunate that despite the cryptic and boring way the player explores the overworld past the first couple hours, that the dungeon crawling is actually pretty fun. Each place the player has to explore feels sufficiently different in its layout and atmosphere, aided by the phenomenal soundtrack and the fact that the core combat is pretty satisfying, and it made these sections the clear highlights of the experience for me, even if the random encounters were undoubtedly way too frequent.
On the whole though, despite the many, many prominent issues I had with this game, at the end of the day I still don't really dislike it either, not just for its influence, but because I do respect what it was trying to do, and just think that it perhaps didn't really understand how to properly execute some of the big ideas that it had. It's a good, but archaic foundation for a series and it had enough positive qualities and was short enough that it was totally playable for the most part (even though a guide was required), just don't go in here expecting any sort of masterpiece.
Despite being another very early example of establishing the general conventions that would become staples of the JRPG format, it's honestly pretty amazing how stylistically different Final Fantasy feels when compared to the early Dragon Quest games. While at their core, both series had their roots in some fairly similar territory with the gameplay loops being functionally the same, there are some pretty interesting differences in how each is presented. Furthermore, the game allowed for a much greater sense of customisation and a stronger sense of openness to how one could approach exploration, all culminating in a game which in some regards felt far larger than that the DQ games achieved on their first 2 tries.
While Dragon Quest would put the player in an inhospitable world where they had to both carve out a name for themselves in such an environment, Final Fantasy instead takes the approach of making the game feel far more grandiose, putting your party in a position where they're the legendary heroes right out the gate. What could potentially seem like a simple narrative difference ends up affecting the gameplay in a fairly substantial way, the biggest of which being the way that the player is made to feel very powerful at a rapid rate. Rather than slowly building up a party as the game goes on, the player gets to choose all 4 members of their party and their archetypes immediately, being able to choose between 6 different classes and even have multiple of the same ones along for the quest. This immediately establishes the stronger focus this had on having the player form more concrete strategies while also being able to tailor it more around their own playstyle, such as being able to bring along an extra melee powerhouse if they wanted to focus around more aggressive strategies.
There's almost a sense of maximalism to how the game approaches encounters on the whole as well to further reinforce the fact that your characters are meant to be legendary right out the gate, not only with the damage numbers being comparatively high, allowing players to dal hundreds of damage within the first half hour, but the groups of enemies themselves are made to appear far more threatening when really being reasonable for the most part. The sense of power you feel from fighting a group of 9 enemies and absolutely destroying them effortlessly is pretty satisfying and manages to contribute to a game that feels a bit more like a power fantasy on the whole. I also thought that the magic system was pretty neat even if a bunch of the spells seemed to inexplicably just, not work properly. While unconventional, the fact that you purchase magic spells from the shops throughout end up bringing another element of strategy with team composition, only being allowed to get 3 spells of each level often leading to situations where the player will have to think about what will contribute to their goals the most and how to mitigate any potential shortcomings that they'll suffer as a result of not just being able to get everything. While this ultimately doesn't actually work too well due to the aforementioned fact that some spells just don't seem to work properly or as well as you'd think, leading to pretty easy choices most of the time, I still think that this approach is pretty cool and unique, and would be neat to see implemented more thoughtfully in another game.
Unfortunately, Final Fantasy's attempts at making for a more epic adventure come with its own set of drawbacks, the biggest of which being how open the game feels without giving the sufficient tools to facilitate a truly compelling experience with it. The first stretch of the game works pretty well, giving a short little tutorial section that's entirely on land and feels pretty linear while still having enough moving pieces to leave a sense of intrigue, it's simplistic, but it works well at establishing the world without overwhelming the player. I feel like the player is given access to the boat a bit too early however, and while at first it's fine when you're essentially confined to a huge lake enclosed on all sides, only giving you access to another couple of areas, once you get out of here, all bets are off. The game opens up at such a rate that you get given an airship before even completing the 2nd huge quest objective, and this is after having to mess around with sailing across these huge expanses of empty ocean just hoping to find another piece of land to do anything on, and from here it essentially devolves into a mindless fetch quest without anything interesting to frame most of it.
So many steps required to progress further are presented in a very generic way, often just being a random item in a random dungeon that's not tied to anything other than player progression. Without any way to tie a lot of these key items to something interesting within the world, it ends up feeling overly artificial, and while it occasionally brings something interesting, like revealing this weird sci-fi aspect to the world, it's too few and far between for it to have a proper impact on the experience outside of these isolated moments. It's just fortunate that despite the cryptic and boring way the player explores the overworld past the first couple hours, that the dungeon crawling is actually pretty fun. Each place the player has to explore feels sufficiently different in its layout and atmosphere, aided by the phenomenal soundtrack and the fact that the core combat is pretty satisfying, and it made these sections the clear highlights of the experience for me, even if the random encounters were undoubtedly way too frequent.
On the whole though, despite the many, many prominent issues I had with this game, at the end of the day I still don't really dislike it either, not just for its influence, but because I do respect what it was trying to do, and just think that it perhaps didn't really understand how to properly execute some of the big ideas that it had. It's a good, but archaic foundation for a series and it had enough positive qualities and was short enough that it was totally playable for the most part (even though a guide was required), just don't go in here expecting any sort of masterpiece.