Over this 3-day Memorial Day weekend here in the US, I finally played the original Final Fantasy. I've finished or at least got far into most of them, so might as well try the rest, right?

Ok, so it's not exaaactly the original -- it's the Dawn of Souls remake on GBA bundled with FFII, which is a surprisingly massive visual and quality-of-life upgrade over the originals. I'm really glad I picked this version and would recommend it strongly to anyone looking to play this game.

A lot of JRPGs, especially old ones, really lose me with their pacing and stories unless that story is excellent. Story-wise, this game can be surprisingly cool later on, but the story is very much in the background for 99% of the game. The progression is mostly spaced out instead by figuring out where in God's name you're supposed to go in the overworld and dungeons. Luckily, the NES version shipped with a comprehensive walkthrough and strategy guide in the manual. With this bit of outside assistance from the devs (that would have largely just been in-game minimaps/tooltips/quest logs in a later entry), the game flows at a super fast, enjoyable pace that suits me a lot more than wandering around aimlessly.

Though the gameplay is simpler than what you get in later titles, it's a fundamentally fun combat system. The game's Achilles' heel comes with how it actually uses that combat. Later on, you can't walk for half a second to find your way in the sprawling dungeons before hitting another rote-feeling encounter, and these really become easy and mindless after the first few times. The bright side is that you never really need to just run around and grind, because purely by exploring dungeons to gather loot off the beaten path, you've already fought a ton of enemies. This serves the function of a game requiring grinding for character-building and padding, but it didn't "feel" like grinding to me, which I think means a lot in its own way. But it became almost maddening by the final dungeon.

Though the combat is largely quite simple, the game also falls into a dark pit that would be repeated with several later entries, and one of my personal pet peeves of this series... A very harsh, sudden difficulty spike solely for the final boss. This battle is a tedious nightmare of one hit KO's and full self-heals, coming after an otherwise simple game. I don't mind this kind of challenge in an optional dungeon, but I hate it every time they've done it in the main game's progression. It's a moment saved for me only by the very cool story bit that it represents.

Long story short, this is a fun retro game that can easily be completed in a weekend. It shows a dev team that already had figured out a lot of what would make console RPGs special in the decades to come. The amazing narratives of later titles are absent, but I feel like I got my own narrative and really enjoyed exploring around the world and seeing what this had to offer.