Final Fantasy I

Final Fantasy is one of those games that has haunted me for awhile. Ever since I picked up Final Fantasy Origins when it came out, I've tried playing through it several times, only to get bored about halfway through and abandon it. Thus, this ended up being on the top of my list for "Games I'll Complete For This Blog", and boy, do I have a lot to say about it.

This game is nearly universally praised by both fans and criticize. People who I know to be tough reviewers heap praise on it. Me, myself? I didn't care for it. This will go alongside Final Fantasy VII as one of the most overrated games I have ever played.

I'm going to start by saying I usually enjoy playing NES games of long running franchises, because it's interesting to see the series stripped down to the essentials. However, this is the first turn-based RPG I've played for it, and I'm starting to see that some advancements are made for a reason.

At the start, you customize your character with a name and classes, either Warrior, Thief, Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage. I picked Warrior, Monk, Red Mage, and White Mage, and through that I saw how unbalanced the whole thing is. The Fighter does damage if you can sink gil into equipment, while the Monk does massive damage unarmed. Red Mage was useful in the beginning but started playing can't catch up, while White Mage was good for healing and not much else.

The entire time I was playing this, I was wondering if maybe there was something about the battle system I was missing. It seemed like I was always at a disadvantage, dealing with powerful monsters. Only many weren't powerful in the sense being strong, but having instant-death attacks, stone, poison, or paralyze. And those that really were heavy hitters were still pretty cheap, since in this game there are only potions, which you can only carry a certain amount of, and have to administer one at a time. I was literally more afraid of random encounters than of bosses.

Mages can heal, but you're going to want to stop and think. Each magic user has levels of spells, of which they can learn three each, and each level has charges. And only a few charges. This is not like any other RPG I played, you really have to stop and think whether or not you want to use your magic. This is good, actually, but I'll discuss it more in a moment.

The plot of this game is "There a four fiends, go kill them." While I appreciate simple plots in games, in RPGs they can be a curse, since you have no idea where to go or what to do. Navigating can be a real problem, and it was likely made worse by the fact that I couldn't figure out how to bring up the map until much later in the game. Yeah, I can be an idiot.

Also, this might be an Origins thing, but NPCs would often park themselves right in my path and then take their sweet time moving. That might seem petty, but man was it annoying.

I was growing frustrated by the game by the Flying Fortress, and decided to forget about 100% completion and just beat the game. This turned out to be a mistake, because as it turns out doing that is what was keeping my levels up. Chaos trashed me. But then, after doing all the side stuff, I thrashed him.

So, here's what I wanted to talk about. I've been saying that the difficulty in this game is unbalanced, but then I thought: how exactly do you make a turn based RPG hard any other way? I really don't know. Final Fantasy VII isn't hard, Dragon Quest IV isn't hard, Pokemon and Super Mario RPG weren't hard once I knew what I was doing. Playing it, I realized how illiterate in RPGs I was.

I have a reserve of turn-based RPG series to play: Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Breath of Fire, Pokemon, Digimon World, Phantasy Star, and others. Thus, my review might be considered incomplete until I can better know this style. But for now, thumbs down.

Rating: 4/10