Collection essentials #58: Final Fantasy (NES)

Here’s another NES game that spawned a still-running, iconic, hugely-successful media franchise. Final Fantasy is the most successful JRPG series in history unless you count Pokémon, and a series that has a lot of significance to me personally. 

Final Fantasy 1, obviously, laid some of the groundwork for the series and the genre as a whole, though it lacks some of the elements and some of the refinement which made the series truly great and successful later on. It wasn’t the first JRPG, as it was preceded by the first two Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior games, but it took the foundation laid by those and experimented with it in ways that helped it stand out. One new thing it did that you can tell from the screen shot is that it portrays all of the player’s characters on the screen during a battle, as opposed to previous games like Dragon Quest where battles were from a first-person perspective, not really giving any visualization of your characters partaking in combat. 

But the most significant thing FF1 brought was its class system. Classes were not a new concept, as the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons had introduced the concept many years prior. A character’s “class” is a title which determines their attributes, abilities and what kind of equipment they can use, and basic examples would be a “warrior” which fights with melee weapons and is able to survive a decent amount of damage and a “wizard” who wields a staff and casts magic spells but doesn’t have much defensive prowess. In FF1, you customize the four characters on your team upon starting a new game and choose each character’s class. This gives you some welcome freedom for your experience, and also brings some replay value to the game. And midway through the game each character’s class gets upgraded to something better, which was also a fun innovation. This implementation really helped FF1 stand out in its day. 

Unfortunately, Final Fantasy 1 can be hard to go back to in modern times, like most RPGs of its era. It’s a game that forces you to “grind” by fighting random enemies to make your characters strong enough to progress which many will find boring, and the game can be punishing in a way that will cause frustration. There are some basic conveniences absent; for example, if you assign two characters to attack the same enemy on your turn, and the first character kills the enemy, then the second character will just flail at the empty space and waste their turn rather than shifting their attack to another enemy that’s still standing. Final Fantasy 1 has also seen several remakes over the years which provide enhanced graphics and sound as well as addressing some of these issues, so those offer a smoother and more enjoyable experience than this original release. 

But there’s still something special about seeing the start of an enormous franchise in its original form, witnessing the origins of some of its recognizable elements such as recurring music, unique classes, magic spells and items. That’s why it’s essential to the collection.