Final Fantasy (2004)

Wow. I'm honestly impressed. I never would have expected the very first entry in possibly the most widely known JRPG franchise (Pokemon is it's own genre, imo) from way back in 1987 to contain such a complete package of the "bones" of the genre. I went in expecting something far more fragmented and half-baked, as it's so old, but it's all here.

That's sort of where the issues with this game lie though. It's just the bones. Probably the most "pure" JRPG I've played, and I don't entirely mean that as a compliment. A party of four main characters with no personalities or histories set out to visit the four crystals and save the world. With maybe a touch of time travel. There's your plot synopsis, and it doesn't really go much deeper than that.

I had the most fun with this game when I finally decided to give in after hours of wandering and use a guide to figure out where to go, because the random encounters which plagued me throughout nearly every tile of the game made it exasperating trying to explore. At this point it became a great game for playing while doing other things, like grinding out the hundreds of events in Monster Prom with my partner.

But what I found by sticking with the game was what must have been quite impressive back in the day. The world is so big for a game of the period, and there's a lot of cute dialogue from villagers in various towns. The magic system is actually pretty solid overall, and somehow outdoes some of the others I've seen in far more recent games. I also kind of loved the final dungeon. It was very cool revisiting the major bosses I'd dealt with through the game, but this time beefed up as hearty appetizers before the massive final confrontation.

So yeah, it's very basic, but it has me excited to see how this monster of a franchise develops as I make my way through it. What I've heard of Final Fantasy II does not bode well...

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.