Retro Achievement Mastery 121 - Final Fantasy

I had recently played UFO 50, and that game has a game inside it called Grimstone, which is basically an attempt to make a FF1 clone. After playing it and loving it, I decided I wanted to play FF1 again. So I did. I’d never actually beaten it before, though I do own a copy on my NES. I got to the Volcano and then it got too hard. Well, no better time than now, right? And I have a LOT of thoughts on Final Fantasy, and a lot to get to. So let’s get started.

Usually every review of Final Fantasy 1 on the NES starts with talking about how Square was going bankrupt and this was their Final Fantasy, in a way, but that’s a myth and is probably not true, so we won’t be talking about that. Instead, I want to touch on the story of someone very important to Final Fantasy who doesn’t get enough credit today. Nasir Gebelli is an Iranian-American programmer, who was basically the first video game programming superstar. Later superstars like John Romero put together Apple II conventions just in the hopes of getting this guy to show up so he could meet him. He was HUGE in the Apple II scene, but after the game crash, he had basically retired… until a friend of his, Doug Carlston, the owner of Broderbund, told him about this hot new thing coming out of Japan called the Nintendo Entertainment System, and suggested he should try making games for it. Nasir was interested, so Doug flew to Japan with him and introduced him to contacts at Square, who basically immediately hired him off of name recognition alone. Nasir single handedly programmed this game, and the other NES Final Fantasy games. That is extremely impressive. I’ll be talking about a few programming bugs later, but seriously, this is a VERY complex game and I cannot overstate how cool this guy is. He also made 3D World Runner, Rad Racer, and Secret of Mana, for the record.

Final Fantasy is the Least Final Fantasy game, in a few ways. First obviously, it is the least final, because it’s the first. Secondly… it doesn’t really feel like a Final Fantasy game. Some series staples were introduced here. You’ve got crystals being important, musical motifs, and the different classes, and a few enemy types, but that’s about it. It also doesn’t have the same energy as future games, the overarching plot is there, but it’s mostly connected by interconnected vignets you explore in each town as you move around the world map. There’s another myth that’s surrounded the story of Final Fantasy 1 for years, which I feel holds a lot more water, and I want to talk about it. Final Fantasy isn’t a Final Fantasy game, kind of. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons game. A very early Japanese version of D&D, specifically.

Signs that this game was heavily, HEAVILY inspired by D&D are everywhere. First, its structure kinda feels like that of a D&D game. You have a posse of nameless player characters you ascribe your own characters onto, who are chosen from different classes. You have a big arching plot hanging over your head, namely that the world is dying and you’re chosen ones brought together to reignite these orbs, or whatever. Then you explore the world, visiting towns to get new equipment and items, while also picking up quests. Go save our princess. Hey, we’re attacked by pirates, save us. Hey, our prince was put to sleep by an evil wizard, go stop him. Then after a few of those, the plot expands and gets more serious, as now you have to take on the four Prime Evils basically, and finally it culminates on taking on an ultimate evil, and boom it ends. It’s a D&D campaign.

If that was all the evidence I had though, it’d be just a goofy fan theory. No, there’s a lot more than that. The classes you’ve got in this game are clear analogues to D&D classes. Fighter is Warrior, Black Belt is Monk, Red Mage is Bard. Even the White Mage is more of a cleric than a traditional white mage we see in later games. They use hammers and are a BIT beefier than they will be later on. And the magic system is CLEARLY inspired by D&D. It’s often the first thing people point to. It’s a vancian system, where you have different levels of spells, and you have a certain number of casts per day, but after a long rest, your spell slots return.

But the most damning evidence are the enemies and races you come across. Dwarves and Elves and Goblins? Sure, that’s fantasy stuff, that’s no evidence, though elves will rarely reappear in later games… dwarves do show up occasionally. Lali-hi! But then you get things that feel a bit more specific. The Wizards are Illithids. Couerls are Displacer Beasts. Sahags are Sahuagin. Kary is just straight up a Marilith. The Big Purple Worm is uh… the Big Purple Worm. But the biggest proof is the Eye creature. Which, y’know, looks like a big ol’ Eye. But in the Japanese version?

Yep. That’s just a fucking Beholder. And Beholders are like, ACTUALLY copyright, so they changed this thing to a different design in the American version out of fear of copyright. And presumably, a lot of the future identity of the series is an attempt to move away from all this blatant D&D stuff and create something new and unique, which I feel ended up working very well. But it’s still very interesting to view FF1 as more of a D&D game than anything else.

Sorry I rambled about that for so long, it’s just very interesting to me. Anyways, onto the ACTUAL review.

Final Fantasy is an RPG for the NES by Square. The plot is that hundreds of years ago, the Four Fiends corrupted the crystals of earth, fire, water, and wind, and the planet is dying. But prophecy states that four chosen ones will appear and purify the crystals. That’s you. Go out and do that!

The most interesting thing to me about FF1 is the class system, and I really, really like it, on paper. You’ve got four slots, but six different options, so you’ll be leaving two classes behind. You could ALSO double up on classes, a totally realistic possibility. There’s lots of party loadout possibilities. Like, 126 to be specific. You could even be four white mages! Not that that’d ever work. But anyways, your six classes are as follows: The Fighter, who hits pretty good and has good health and defense, and can use a lot of equipment, which makes him expensive to maintain. The Rogue, who hits less and is a bit faster and uses less items, but is pretty much just a worse fighter. The Blackbelt, who uses no equipment at all, pretty much, and hits pretty good, but is a bit squimshy. The White Mage, your healing cleric. Black mage, your damage spell slinger. And my personal favorite, Red Mage, who can use both classes of spells, and can hold their own in combat, but just aren’t quite as good as everyone else. Jack of all trades. They’re also maybe the 2nd worst class. Rogue is the worst.

Yeah, I said I like it on paper. The balance isn’t QUITE there, you could do a bit more with this idea, and they have, and other games have, down the way. But on this one, the rule is pretty simple: Magic is just not as useful. Almost all classes get access to it, after class changes (only Blackbelt doesn’t), and you might think the mages are better at spells. And I mean, they do get access to MORE spells, and can cast more before resting. But, and this is rarely talked about anywhere, but uh, did you know FF1 is FULL of bugs and glitches? And those include the stats. Though, in this case, I dunno if it’s a bug or a glitch, because the Wisdom stat, which you’d assume connects to spell casting, doesn’t only not work… it doesn’t appear to be intended to work? Like, looking in the code, the number in the wisdom stat isn’t connected to ANYTHING else, in the entire game. It just wasn’t coded to do anything. It’s a number on your stat screen. So every character casts spells at the same efficiency.

Also, several spells flat out don’t work. Every character has three slots, and each level has 4 spells for each color of spell. So you might think that it’d be hard to choose which spell to cut out each level, but it very much isn’t. Half the levels have one spell that doesn’t work. Lock and Lok2 are supposed to reduce enemy evasion. They do nothing. Tempr and Sabr are supposed to increase your attack damage? Do not. And it’s not like a lot of the spells that DO work are useful. This game is a balancing nightmare. Oh good, AMUT. Now I can gain resistance against Mute casts. …Which only four monsters cast in the entire game.

Even cure and such aren’t very useful. It’s essentially just some extra potion storage, and you already get 99 potions. Just use the potions tbh, I’m glad I didn’t go White Mage, I was tempted to.

So yeah, beating the shit out of things is the way to go most of the time, though sometimes a good fire2 cast can be nice, especially on the PENINSULA OF POWER, an infamous part of the game where for two spots on an early game area, enemies from the end game show up, with all the EXP and gold that entails. Great grinding spot, especially for solo runs.

As this IS a Retro Achievements Mastery post, I should talk about the challenge run I did. There are achievements for beating the game without class change, and for beating the game without opening any chests. Conceptually I didn’t hate this THAT much at first, except that there are ALSO achievements for opening every chest so I’d need to run back through the whole game again. But uh, in practice, it was annoying. All the best equipment is in chests, and you can use them to cast spells, and while I DID shit on the spell casting system, some spells are legit useful. That Defender sword WHIPS, but I wasn’t allowed to get it. Instead I had to rely on a Silver Sword for literally the entire game, and you can buy it in the third town, about 20 minutes in. Eventually I DID get through, though I couldn’t beat the final dungeon with both these challenges up, it was too hard. So I split my save and ranked up, then reloaded the save after winning and opened all the chests and stomped Chaos’ teeth in with my super weapons lol

So yeah, FF1 is a bit of a mess in every way, but I like it a lot. It’s very charming, and very replayable. Sure it’s outclassed by pretty much every game that comes past it, but we can’t forget where Final Fantasy came from, can we?