Killing Chaos

A review of "Final Fantasy I", chattering about the Pixel Remaster compilation from Square Enix, and broken game economies.

“Jack? Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…”

“Final Fantasy”.

It’s an ironic name for a franchise, given the interminable number of entries in its series.

A couple of years ago, Square Enix, both publisher and primary developer of the “Final Fantasy” franchise of video games, re-released the first six entries of its mainline series, in the “Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster”, for current-gen consoles and PC.

It was the first time those games had been brought forward for new audiences in totality, with the majority of the latter half of the series making their way to the newer generation of consoles through either new games or uprezzed standalone re-releases of their own. Now that the entire series (with the exceptions of “Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel games, as well as “Final Fantasy XI”) has been brought forward, there has never been a better time to dive into the series from the beginning.

So, I resolved to do just that, playing all the games available in whatever order I please. I realized that I hadn’t finished many “Final Fantasy” games, but I started pretty much every single one in the mainline series. I have played all of them, to some extent, but my completion percentage for the series remains lackluster.

So far, I have beaten: I, VI, VII, XV, and XVI, so there is a fair number of games in the series I have never seen through to the end. Of the ones I have yet to complete, I have played: II, VIII, IX, and X, extensively. I just never got around to finishing them. I wanted to make it a long-term goal to change that fact and chip away at one of the most iconic series in gaming. This is the start of that journey!

Final Fantasy I is a good game, not a great one.

It feels like the first effort at making a role-playing game that wasn’t “Dragon Warrior”, and it shows.

The game is a very short romp, which can last as long as 4-6 hours if you know where to go, what to do, and how to do it. It’s a very small game, with a small bestiary of monsters to encounter, sparse options at your behest to interact with when it comes to party composition, their tools, and their capabilities, and one of the easiest game economies to exploit that I have ever encountered. It can be good fun to mess around with the broken economy, but your mileage can vary in that regard, once the barrier to entry in shops has been made trivial, and your coffers are overflowing with gil.

Buying what you want from weapon vendors, magic shops, and item stores at any point in the game cheapens the experience of the adventure and skews the balance of the game to being comically easy. It’s very unbalanced in the player’s favor when it comes to the difficulty. Even in the toughest boss fights of the game, you will be more than able to tackle them with no issues, I expect. It’s their first crack at this formula, I understand, but it makes the game feel easy to manipulate. Wishing you could afford everything at any time in games is great, but in practice, seeing that be possible isn’t as fun as you think it would be.

This issue is my main gripe with the game. Having a broken economy trivializes the entire game. You will have no issues beating this game, and beating it quickly, because there are no barriers to you doing so. I don’t even think my party got wiped once until the final boss. As you fight monsters in the overworld and dungeons, you encounter little bits of story and treasures along the way. Playing with a guide here seems like the way to go, especially given that this game came out nearly half a century ago on the NES.

I can’t imagine how it must’ve been for people playing this back in the day, with no direction. This game doesn’t even hold your hand one iota, and expects you to always know where to go with no hints. It’s a relic of old game design that comes with the territory of interacting with past media. As entries were developed, the quality of life for these games got better and better. Things were streamlined more effectively, and the narrative was guided better in the world through NPCs and signage, over time. Playing the Pixel Remaster version of this game smoothes out some of the rougher edges of its presentation, orchestration, and setting options, yet the fundamentals of the game remain, regardless of improvement.

At its core, “Final Fantasy I” is an interesting prototype for a beloved series that would get better after its first few entries. The story in here is minimal, at best, but a few essential things are here that can be seen in the DNA of the series in future games. There is a party of medieval-esque heroes, there are crystals, and there is a world-ending situation that threatens all life on earth and the cosmos at large.

There aren’t bespoke characters in “Final Fantasy I”, but you can pick character classes and name them. They are basic template characters that are more blank slates than people, who are proficient in different combat styles and magic usage. You have your standard “Dungeons and Dragons”-esque classes here to pick from. Once you hit a certain level, your class gets promoted to a higher version of its class with a new name and new abilities, so you are rewarded for investing in your classes.

The ‘Fighter’ is your primary physical damage dealer, who isn’t able to learn many of the magic spells other classes can. This class is used to beat people up, mostly, but gains access to low-level white magic as they level. They become the ‘Knight’ for their later class name.

Then you have the ‘Black Belt’, what’s considered a ‘Monk’ in later entries of the series, who is proficient in hand-to-hand combat. You can equip weapons on them, but you shouldn’t. They kinda suck in the early goings, but if you stick with them long enough, they become powerful in the latter stages of the game. They transition classes into ‘Grand Master’, which makes some notably more fierce and powerful in combat.

Next, you have the ‘Thief’ class, another “Final Fantasy” staple. Like the black belt, their early levels are limited at start, but as you grind with them to their next class, they become a fast and deadly killing machine. They change into the ‘Ninja” class, and can learn even more magic than the previous two classes I mentioned, making them one of the best classes to choose in your party of four.

Lastly, you have the Red Mage, the Black Mage, and the White Mage classes. The Red Mage can do almost anything you ask him to. He wears most equipment, learn a fair amount of magic, and can wield the most weapons of any party member, but is a ‘jack-of-all-trades’, and a master of none. He turns into the ‘Red Wizard’ class later, which affords him a wider assortment of things in the previously mentioned categories. He can also learn both Black and White magic, which is cool.

The White Mage is considered the only must-have class since it specializes in all white magic spells, which are status boosting spells, healing, and buffing spells for the party. Not having a white mage means you’re gonna have a bad time, even if the game is easy. Later, they change into the ‘White Wizard’ class (yikes), which lets them learn more powerful versions of white magic spells.

Finally, the Black Mage is like the White Mage, where it can learn all black magic and has the most powerful sets of multi-attack offensive spells to melt the opposition. They’re one of the best damage dealers in the game, and they level into the ‘Black Wizard’ class as you play.

Once you decide the classes you’re playing, you engage in standard classic “Final Fantasy” combat. Your team takes a turn, then the opposing side. Rinse and repeat. It’s good fun, but it’s nice that you can auto-battle or fast forward animations for mob fights in the remaster if you want to do that. I did that when I was trophy hunting for the Platinum, but not much besides that instance. It’s nice at the very least to have a history lesson on how it used to be, even if it hasn’t all been figured out yet. I’m glad I saw it through, for sure.

The story of “Final Fantasy I” is barely there. It’s not even really fleshed out. Your selected classes of four heroes are known as “The Warriors of Light”, and you have been tasked to cleanse four elemental crystals from around the realm, to restore peace to the kingdom. You know, ‘medieval stuff’. As you play through the game, you see the generic biomes every RPG has, you fight a lot of iconic FF monsters, and you make your way to the past to kill ‘Chaos’, the final boss of the game, who happens to also be the fallen hero of legend ‘Garland’.

You find out (spoilers), the bad guys you have been tasked with defeating, sent the hero Garland back in time, who in turn sends the Four Fiends (paradoxically) to the present, creating a time loop in which Garland could be immortal and live forever. It makes zero sense, but what the hell, sure. He is the bad guy, he looks cool, and he is ‘Chaos’, so he’s gotta die. It’s a tough boss fight if you aren’t leveled well, I will grant it, but once you figure out the best way to take him on, the encounter is cake. Then the credits roll. The Warriors of Light destroy the loop, and the people of the world forget them. Kinda, sad right? But basically, the legend of your merry band of blank slate heroes is passed down like a myth to the people so they can recall in some small way that the merry band of heroes sacrificed themselves for the world. The End.

Like I said, beating this game didn’t take long, so I decided to just get all the trophies on the PS4 copy I played on. That was also very easy. There were trophies for getting all the legendary weapons, opening all the chests, talking to ‘Bahamut’ (the iconic dragon summon in later entries), for your leveling classes, and so forth. You’re required to beat all the enemies in the game at least once for the bestiary, and it was pretty easy to get that done as well. Besides the superboss ‘War Mech’, getting all the enemies to show up was a piece of cake. War Mech has a low appearance rate to show up, and given that there are a lot of random encounters, you just have to grind out walking over a bridge a million times before it decides to show up. Besides that minor annoyance, the trophy hunting was a cinch. It was pretty fun to do, for the most part. Once I got that boss beaten, the shiny Platinum trophy appeared in the trophy list, and my journey with FFI was complete.

So that’s “Final Fantasy I”. It’s a fun history lesson to see where the series started. It’s a mostly easy game with some minor annoyances, but it’s solid in its battle mechanics, pretty well designed in its enemy encounters, and has just enough story to see it through for a playthrough. I had a good time with it, even though it’s not really like a ‘good’ game, I suppose. I recommend platinuming it or 100 percenting it if you play it to get your mileage out of it, because it’s very easy to do so. It took me around 16-17 hours to do everything, beating all the bosses, seeing all the enemies, and getting all of the stuff.

I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone but series veterans, because of the minor gripes I had, but it’s more than worth your time if you want to interact with it in a cool, modern way. I appreciate Square Enix for bringing this game and the others in the compilation forward in an easy-to-understand, legible, and modern way, while not changing the game. More old games need to be preserved in new ways, and I think this is a good template for that sort of exercise.

Anyways! I appreciate the eyeballs, and you know what to do, fellow gamers…. Keep gaming, always.