They iterated on the combat too much from the original release to the point where they're two pretty different games and yet, the original is still probably the more interesting experience just for the sake of being... the original. You could chalk up the attacks redirecting off dead enemies as a quality of life change but the magic system caught a stray so it feels like FF4 with no ATB or any interesting abilities and thus, lil basic.

The Pixel Remaster is slightly more faithful but it's also a mess of clashing assets IMO. And also, it doesn't have the bonus dungeons in this version. Whenever I saw people mention this, I was a bit confused on why anyone would care about playing more of FF1. Like, the base game here took me about 15 hours to complete (would have taken way longer without a guide though) and for a simple JRPG, that's long enough to see your characters meaningfully grow but not long enough for you to notice all the bosses can be killed with the same strategy. Could the bonus content really do that much to change things up. The answer is: ehh kinda but not really. The only interesting thing about the new dungeons is how they're very slightly randomized. They all have bosses from other classic FF games and drop nice equipment but the way they're set up makes it so you have to go through them multiple times to fight all possible bosses, which is real annoying if you're trying to complete the bestiary.

After you beat these you unlock this big last dungeon where you have a time limit to complete annoying ass "puzzles" to fight the big superduper boss and I'll give it to you straight, I never beat the damn thing. I did get to it, having spent a couple of hours levelling my whole party 20 levels and an additional hour going through the dungeon, but once I fucked up on the boss fight I just kinda went "what am i even gaining from this" and didn't attempt it again. Also, this particular superboss has 8!! different forms depending on what puzzles you can and can't complete under the time limit so. Christ the bestiary.

All in all, I still mostly enjoyed it and for all the trash I lobbed towards the new stuff, it's decent if you're like, a kid in 2008 trying to get their money's worth out of a 15 hour game. The base FF1 experience is still fun, even moreso if you consider it came out 1 year and change after the original Dragon Quest. But for any subsequent runs, I'll probably just either stick to either the original or like, the WonderSwan version.

I used to consider this my favorite game when I first played it on the Wii U Virtual Console. idk what kid me really saw in this to think of it as such, it's likely they weren't the same reasons that made me appreciate it so much now because damn..

Everything in this game just oozes personality, from the different UI elements in all game modes, all the cute lil enemies,the ability portraits.. in particular, the prerendered CG backgrounds are the coolest fucking thing and seeing them around the time where I started to draw seriously inspired parts of my style even today.

The combat (?) is also a pretty big step up from the previous games since the abilities have multiple moves but I don't really fuck with how they chose to condense multiple ones from Kirby's Adventure into a single ability. e.g Fire and Fireball is now just Fire and ->+Y is the Fireball move but.. Fire is lame! Couldn't the whole moveset be Fireball with 8-way movement >_>? Some of them are pretty cool though. Blocking is interesting considering this is a "baby game" but they at least had the grace not to make you completely invincible against grabs and whatever so you can't be like, 100% safe at all times while your partner character fumbles around like a fucking idiot against the boss. Oh yeah, the partner mechanic is pretty meh when playing alone and also not really an adequate multiplayer mode since the second player is almost completely on a leash. It's fun when you need to do save a partner in a rush, not as fun when you press the A button and suddenly open this whole can of worms. It... really shouldn't be the A button, why is A the dedicated "partner" button??

I'm curious to also replay the DS version, but in my only playthrough of that, it didn't impress and looks way duller in comparison. It does have "more stuff" but Super Star is already almost the perfect length so. idk, we'll have to see. If you only played the DS version, I'd certainly recommend this. If you played neither one, I'd also certainly recommend this.

It's ok. Decent conversion of a fighter into a beat em' up but severely held down by a lack of variety in enemies and stages. Yes, there's a kazzilion characters you can unlock and play but they all go through the same places, all fight the same generic lizard dudes (extremely curious to know if they're in any other guilty gear tbh) and all get chunked for half HP at the final boss so it leads you to believe there's more content than there actually is.

In the end I think it'd actually be better if there were less stages per campaign and just have each character go through a cherrypicked few so it wasn't such a chore to play through the game with everyone because there are actually ending CGs I'd like to see!!... just not so much that I feel like doing all that for.