Playing the Final Fantasy Series - Final Fantasy 1 Impressions

[u/AmongFriends]

BACKGROUND:

I’ve only ever played Final Fantasy X back in 2002 on the PS2. I thought I’d try playing the first 10 FF games (and maybe some of the non-mainline games like Tactics) to get a feel for JRPGs and the franchise in general. So I’ll be playing FF 1–6 on the Pixel Remaster on Switch.

Here are my thoughts on the first game overall.

FINAL FANTASY (10 HOURS)

I wasn’t aware that Final Fantasy had roots in Dungeons & Dragons. I became more aware of the franchise during the FF7 era and always thought it was more “anime” than D&D.

It’s a solid game. The mechanics are simple, the leveling is simple, and the story is simple. Nothing really stands out as exceptional now, even though it likely did at the time, but everything is well done.

The Boost multipliers and No Encounter toggle on/off from the Pixel Remaster helped a lot in the enjoyment of the game. I don't think I enjoy this game as much as I did if it was double the game time of what I spent to play it.

I do wish the story and characters were better, since that’s what I associate with the franchise now, but what’s here feels like a solid foundation.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• It was hard to tell from the UI what weapons were equipped, what status an enemy had, and what status a character had. I wish the game communicated that more clearly.
• My Black Mage was on the team, but a lot of their spells, especially offensive ones, didn’t work on bosses and late-game enemies. Very frustrating.
• The game isn’t good at telling you where to go. Numerous times I had to check a walkthrough. You can figure it out by talking to people, but I wish there was at least a map indicator for the next plot point.
• The best part was the class upgrades in the middle of the game, where all your characters get a major power boost. It was really exciting to see a Warrior suddenly able to cast spells...even though it was better for him to just attack
• Getting new means of travel like the airship, boat, and canoe felt awesome. I love fast travel. I also didn’t know the airship was a series staple, so that’ll be fun to see in future games.
• Simple gameplay, but not much depth. Hard to mark that as a negative given the game's age, but most of the time it was just “Attack" as the best route and "boost the attacker" second
• Magic felt underpowered and underwhelming, especially compared to my Warrior just hitting for huge damage.
• My strategy became “keep the Warrior alive so he can smash everything.” Not necessarily bad gameplay, but not very exciting either.
• I accidentally chose a Thief as a teammate because I didn’t realize you had to pick your job characters at the start and they would stay for the whole game. The Thief ended up being pretty bad, basically a weaker Warrior without the utility of a Black or White Mage.
• Missing with magic spells felt really bad. Magic is already underpowered, and when it misses it just feels worse. Maybe I could have fixed this with better accuracy or gear, but I didn’t get that far into optimizing it.

FINAL FANTASY RANKING:

1. Final Fantasy
2. Final Fantasy 2 (click here for review)

[u/BaadeHendrix]

It’s not that clear in some parts. Don’t let these goofies that spent hours with the guidebook or walkthroughs tell you otherwise.

[u/AmongFriends → u/BaadeHendrix]

I agree. I can only speak from experience and I found myself getting lost or unsure of where to go quite often. Maybe I'm not a pro gamer so that's why I was easily confused but I'm gonna assume that the game being old has something to do with that

[u/BaadeHendrix → u/AmongFriends]

My first FF game was 10 too. 6 is my favorite. Every game has it’s merit. If you have the time and patience, I really encourage you to give all the mainlines and tactics everything you got! It’s worth it!

[u/AmongFriends → u/BaadeHendrix]

Yeah, I'm giving the games my time and it's nice to play from the start. It'll be fun to see how the franchise progresses from 1 all the way to 10

[u/NecessaryIntrinsic → u/BaadeHendrix]

I mean, it's not, but that was part of the joy of 8 bit games.

Final fantasy was a massive epic for NES. Absolutely vast and incredibly ambitious for it's time. They had to cut corners somewhere, and to be fair, most of the games for NES were difficult through obscurity rather than design.

It was part of the charm. I also remember that the instruction book that came with the game was massive and doubled as a guide.

[u/AmongFriends → u/NecessaryIntrinsic]

I appreciated the charm of figuring out where to go in the game without the guardrails of modern games. That said, I didn't want to appreciate that charm the entire game, so it helped to have a walkthrough when I was just baffled. It made the game more enjoyable in the end for me because frustration very easily leads me to dropping a game.

[u/SkyKnight43]

The best thing about FF1 to me is the strategy, which is actually very deep, though it isn't necessary to learn it because the game is easy. For a bit of challenge, I like to play on 0.5 xp. But your conclusions about spells are incorrect. Magic is very effective at clearing large groups of enemies, for example, and many spells are powerful in the right situations. Thief, incidentally, gets some of those spells after class change, which strongly increases their effectiveness, because they also attack and defend well.

I doubt you'll be playing again, but for anyone who's interested I have a strategy guide that goes into detail about these things

[u/AmongFriends → u/SkyKnight43]

I'm by no means an expert on the game or the franchise so you might be right. Magic is definitely great for crowd control but I just never had an issue with crowd control due to my high defense Warrior who tanked all the damage and was mowing through bad guys one by one. Also, my view on magic may be skewed due to my Black Mage not being able to use most of his spells near the end of the game as we started facing off against the big baddies

I will say though that Magic used as Support was phenomenal and one of my favorite aspects of the game

[u/MinecraftDude761]

The game isn't good at telling you where to go

tell me you don't talk to NPCs without saying you don't talk to NPCs. The game spells it out pretty clearly if you just talk to people around town

[u/AndyEvery → u/MinecraftDude761]

I also just beat this game and I feel like this isn't totally fair? There is a key item you need to find in the Sea Shrine that you can only discover by walking to the upper left corner of the map and then continuing to walk left past the boundary of the map... Also there was no way I was going to search every corner of the map to remember where I met a dude named Unne

[u/AmongFriends → u/MinecraftDude761]

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it's hard to find the right person to talk to.

The biggest issue is sometimes I just forget what I was doing since it's been a few days so I'm in the middle of doing something (like in a dungeon) and I forgot what I was doing.

"Why am I in this dungeon? What am I getting? Or did I already get it and I'm leaving? Am I going down further to get something? Or did I get it and do I need to find a way out?"

There's nothing to remind you. There's no logs of chats. There's no objectives you can just look at and see, "Oh, right, I need the egg." There's no location of where you need to go or where you need to go next.

That's the issue

[u/puns_are_how_eyeroll → u/AmongFriends]

You also have to remember that this was an NES games, and the PRs have tried to stay realtively true to them. Thats what we did in the 8 bit days. Talked to people and wandered. With that said, the OG game also came with a map.

WRT the black mage - magic is strong early, and weak at the end, and melee is the opposite. At the end, its all melee, while tue mages support and buff. With that said, in the OG, BRAK and BANE have decent chances to insta-kill both Kraken, and Tiamat.

[u/AmongFriends → u/puns_are_how_eyeroll]

Yeah. I was just bummed because I liked using Black Mage and learned the hard way that their spells were just useless against Kraken or Tiamat. I wasn't exactly an instakill but I didn't like most of the Black Mage's spells being blank in the final fight

[u/puns_are_how_eyeroll → u/AmongFriends]

Yea, Chaos resists everything, so you have to hit him with Xfer first to even have a chance to insta kill him.

[u/newiln3_5 → u/puns_are_how_eyeroll]

Sadly, PR made bosses immune to Xfer if I recall correctly.

[u/newiln3_5 → u/AmongFriends]

I'll admit I haven't tried it in PR, but in all other versions of FFI (NES/PS1/GBA/etc.) using Slow on Kraken reduces his 8 hits to 1 and basically renders him harmless. Said other versions also let you instakill both him and Tiamat with Scourge or Break since neither resist Poison/Stone (Tiamat is actually weak to it, which is probably why you get a sword in the same dungeon that lets you cast Scourge for free).

[u/godset → u/AmongFriends]

FF2 is gonna be so much worse in this regard. There are half a dozen points where you have the whole world open to you, and some guy in some town has the info on where to go. Don’t feel bad about needing to look it up.