Along with Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy is often quoted as being one of the most influential and successful RPGs on the Nintendo Entertainment System (see section).
Gameplay
Please note, the following refers to the original Famicom/NES version. For changes in subsequent remakes, see the section on Differences between versions.
Gameplay in Final Fantasy is similar to that of many other console role-playing games. The player wanders around a world map, randomly encountering monsters which must be either dispatched in battle or fled from. Winning battles earns the player gil, which can be used to buy weapons, armor, curative items, and magic spells, and Experience, which accumulates until players achieve certain milestones ("experience levels") at which characters gain greater capacity for strength, damage resistance (known as Hit Points, or HP), and spell casting. The player can enter Towns on the world map to be safe from random attacks, restore HP and spell charges, acquire information by talking to villagers, and shop.
Battle is turn-based, i.e. players select the desired actions for their playable characters, or PC's, such as Fight, Cast Spell, Run, etc. And when finished the PCs execute their actions while monsters retaliate depending on their Agility. The turn-based system was used for the first three installments of Final Fantasy before it was remodeled into the Active Time Battle system.
Influences
The game borrows very heavily from Dungeons and Dragons. The list of enemies the player encounters during the game is almost identical to the bestiary of First Edition Dungeons and Dragons. The spellcasting system, in which magic-using characters have a certain maximum number of "spell charges" for each spell level which increases as experience is gained, is another similarity.
Class system
The Light Warriors face off against Lich (who is named Goblin in here), Fiend of Earth (Nintendo Famicom version shown)
Final Fantasy begins by asking the player to select the character types and names of each Light Warrior (playable character). As is typical of computer role-playing games of the era, the playable characters are more or less passive participants in the story, and therefore the player's choice of character type affects only the Light Warriors' abilities in battle. There are two major types of classes: those that use strength, and those that use magic.
There are three physically-oriented classes in the game. First, the fighter is a specialist in heavy weapons and armor. A Warrior may become a Knight later in the game, who is able to use the most powerful weapons and some White Magic spells. The Black Belt is a martial arts expert who often fights empty-handed and armorless. Later, a Black Belt may become a Master. Next, the thief is a fast, yet weaker fighter when compared to the Fighter and Black Belt. Later in the game, the Thief can be upgraded to the Ninja, who can use almost every weapon, armor, and lower level Black Magic spells.
The final three classes focus on magical attacks. First, the White Mage is a specialist in defensive magic, or White Magic. The White Mage can be upgraded into a White Wizard, which uses stronger White Magic. The Black Mage is a specialist in attack magic, or Black Magic. Later on, the Black Mage may be upgraded to a Black Wizard. Finally, the Red Mage is a jack-of-all-trades character, able to use some but not all of both White and Black Magic, and possessing some fighting abilities. The Red Mage becomes the Red Wizard later in the game.
Story
Final Fantasy takes place on an unnamed fantasy world with three large continents. The elemental powers on this world are determined by the state of four glowing crystals ("orbs" in the original North American localization), each governing one of the four classical elements: earth, fire, water, and wind.
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File:Final Fantasy Origins Outside Corneria.pngOutside the Kingdom of Cornelia (PlayStation version shown)
In the centuries prior to the start of the game, violent storms sunk a massive shrine that served as the center of an ocean-based civilization, and the water crystal went dark. At approximately the same time, a people known as the Lefeinish, who used the power of the wind crystal to craft giant space stations ("Sky Castles") and airships watched their country decline as the wind crystal went dark. Eventually, the earth and fire crystals also went dark, plaguing the earth with raging wildfires and devastating the agricultural town of Melmond as the plains and vegetation decayed. Some time later, a sage called Lukahn tells of a prophecy that four Light Warriors will come to save the world in a time of darkness.
The game begins with the appearance of the four youthful Light Warriors, the protagonists of the story. The Light Warriors each carry one of the darkened Crystals. They arrive at Corneria, a powerful kingdom that has just witnessed the kidnapping of its princess, Sara, by a knight named Garland. The Light Warriors travel to the ruined Temple of Fiends in the northwest corner of Corneria, defeat Garland, and return Princess Sara home. The grateful King of Corneria builds a bridge that enables the Light Warriors passage east to the town of Pravoka. At Pravoka, the Light Warriors Light Warriors liberate the town from a band of pirates, and acquire the pirates' ship for their own use. The Light Warriors now have the ability to travel across the water, but remain trapped within the Aldi Sea, in the center of the southern continent. An isthmus blocks the Aldi Sea from the western ocean. However, Nerrick, one of the Dwarves of Mount Deurgar, is able to destroy the isthmus with the Nitro Powder that the Light Warriors obtained on a quest involving the local Elves.
After visiting Melmond, the Light Warriors go to the Cavern of Earth and destroy the Earth fiend, Lich, who is responsible for the earth's decay. The Light Warriors then enter Mt. Gulg ("Gurgu Volcano") and defeat the Fire Fiend, Kary ("Marilith"). The Warriors defeat the Water Fiend, Kraken, in the Sunken Shrine, and Tiamat, the Wind Fiend, in the Floating Fortress. The four fiends defeated and the crystals restored, the Warriors find that their quest is not yet over: The fiends created an archdemon, Chaos, using the body of Garland, and sent him 2,000 years into the past. Following Chaos into the past, the Warriors discover that it was Chaos who had sent the four fiends into the future, creating a time loop paradox. The Light Warriors defeat Chaos, but the time paradox causes them to forget everything that transpired.
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Game development history
Final Fantasy was developed during Square's brush with bankruptcy in 1987. In a display of gallows humor, producer / director Hironobu Sakaguchi declared that his final game would be a fantasy RPG, hence the title. Far from being Square's final game, however, Final Fantasy proved to be a major success in Japan, not only saving Square from bankruptcy, but presenting them with the second most popular RPG franchise in the country (after Enix's Dragon Quest). Following the successful North Americanlocalization of Dragon Quest (as Dragon Warrior), Nintendo of America translated Final Fantasy into English and published it in North America in 1990. The North American version of Final Fantasy met with modest success, due partly to Nintendo's aggressive marketing tactics. No version of the game was marketed in Europe or Australia until 2003'sFinal Fantasy Origins.
Differences between versions
Final Fantasy has been remade several times for several different platforms. While all of these remakes retain the same basic story and battle mechanics, various tweaks have been made in a variety of different areas, including graphics, sound, and specific gameplay elements. What follows is a brief description of certain characteristics unique to each remake.
Family Computer version to MSX2 version
File:FF1 battle MSX.pngThe MSX2 version featured a larger palette and more vibrant colors
The MSX2 computer standard was roughly analogous, in terms of technical capabilities, to the Famicom/NES, and so, as a result, the MSX2 version of Final Fantasy is probably the closest to the original Famicom version. However, while the Famicom was designed to operate exclusively as a gaming console, the MSX2 was intended to be used more generally as a personal computer. In practice, this meant that the game was subtly altered to take advantage of certain features offered by the MSX2 and not by the Famicom, and vice versa.
It was released on floppy diskette, the MSX2 version of the game had access to almost three times as much storage space as the Famicom version (720 KB vs. 256 KB), but suffered from a variety of problems not present in Nintendo's cartridge media, including noticeable loading time. There were also relatively minor graphical upgrades. In general, the MSX2 version sports an ostensibly improved color palette which adds a degree of vibrancy to character and background graphics. However, some have commented that the choice of colors sometimes seems "off", and argue the Famicom version's graphics were of higher quality, despite the technical superiority of the MSX2 in this field. In addition, the world map seems to have been moved slightly, meaning that the placement of monster "areas" on the world map is slightly different, and that monsters appear in different places than in the Famicom version.
Further, game data could not be saved onto the original program diskette, so it was necessary to provide a blank floppy diskette to save one's progress. For some reason, it was possible to store only one saved game on any given disk at one time, although it was possible to have multiple diskettes for multiple saved games. As an upgrade, the MSX2 featured more sound channels than the Famicom, and as such many music tracks and sound effects were altered or improved for the port. Also, some dungeon music has been swapped.
Finally, in the Famicom version, the strength of a Black Belt would increase with his experience levels, meaning that very soon the player would reach a point where a Black Belt could do more damage without any weapons than he could with weapons. In the MSX2 version, this is not the case: Black Belt strength does not increase nearly as quickly, and as such he cannot operate effectively as a barehanded fighter. Also, a few (though not all) items available at stores have had their costs changed.
Family Computer version to Nintendo Entertainment System version
The 1990 North American localization of Final Fantasy was essentially identical to the original Japanese game. But technical limitations, and the censorship policies of Nintendo of America, resulted in a few minor changes to certain elements. For example, the original game program provided only four character spaces for magic spell names, meaning that a lot of original Japanese spell names had to be abbreviated to fit into the space requirements for the English version. These changes include "Flare" being reduced to "NUKE", "Thunder" being reduced to "LIT" and "Degeon" being reduced to "ZAP!" Also, there were censorship issues, since Nintendo of America policy prohibited games from featuring any overt Judeo-Christian imagery or reference to death. As such, some graphics were modified so that, for instance, churches no longer featured crosses.
Family Computer version to WonderSwan Color version
Many more changes were introduced for the WonderSwan Color remake of the game. The 8-bit graphics of the original Famicom game were completely redrawn for the WSC version, bringing the game roughly on-par with 16-bit era graphics (between Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI). The color palette was much larger and battle scenes now featured full background images.
Character sprites, or two-dimensional pre-rendered figures, were also redesigned to look more like characters from the Super Famicom Final Fantasy games (or the "Final Fantasy SNES trilogy"), especially as they upgraded in class. In the Famicom version, shops and inns had no interior map: once a character entered the building, they were greeted with a menu-based purchase screen. In the WSC version this was changed to more closely resemble other games in the series, where each building had an interior, along with a shop counter where the transaction screen could be accessed. Similarly, the battle screen was redesigned, with all textual information moved down to a blue window stretched across the bottom of the screen in an arrangement similar to that utilized in Final Fantasy II through Final Fantasy VII. As a further update, short cutscenes using the internal game engine were added to expand the story of the game somewhat. One such cutscene involved the construction of the bridge by the army of Corneria.
Also of significence is that the original Famicom version of the game did not have the ability to display more than one window of text during a conversation, which meant that all conversations with non-player characters were strictly limited in length. The WSC version removes this restriction. In the original version of the game, any attempt to attack a monster that had been killed by a previous character's attack would result in an "ineffective" attack. The WSC version introduced an option wherein the attack would be redirected to another monster rather than fail. Similarly, a "dash" option had been introduced: holding down a specific button while walking around in a town or dungeon map would cause the character to move around at twice their normal pace. Both of these options can be turned on and off via the game's configuration screen.
As in the original version, every magic using character has successive "spell levels". Each character has only three available slots per spell level, but is given the option of choosing from four spells. Once that choice had been made in the original version, there was no way to "unlearn" spells to free up a space for the unchosen fourth spell. In the WSC version, this has been changed so that it is possible to delete spells once purchased. In the original Famicom version, the cartridge could only store one set of game data at a time, and every time a new save was made, the previous one was overwritten. The WSC version provides up to eight distinct slots for saved game data. There is also a "quick save" feature introduced which allows the player to save his or her progress at any time (except during battles). This will exit the game, however, and as soon as the game is resumed, any quick save data is lost.
Another change from the original version involves items; only items specifically assigned to a character could be used during battle. In the WSC, this has been changed so that there is a party-wide "pool" of items which can be accessed at any time by all characters. Certain status healing items (such as "Phoenix Down" and "Soft") can now be used during battle. The status ailment "silence" no longer prevents items from being used. In addition to remixing the soundtrack, composer Nobuo Uematsu has composed several new tracks, including a new "boss battle" theme. Because many of the above changes make the game simpler than before, the hit points of certain monsters, and almost all boss monsters, have been substantially increased (doubled, in some cases) in order to better balance the gameplay. Finally, during character creation, the player can choose to have the game randomly assign a name to each character. These names are all taken from other Final Fantasy games and include Desh (Final Fantasy III), Giott (Final Fantasy IV), Kelga (Final Fantasy V) and Daryl (Final Fantasy VI), among others.
WonderSwan Color version to Final Fantasy Origins
File:Final Fantasy Origins Final Fantasy I Battle.pngA typical battle in the PlayStation version.
The PlayStation remake of Final Fantasy was released alongside its sequel, Final Fantasy II, in a collection entitled Final Fantasy Origins (or Final Fantasy I+II Premium Collection in Japan). Both of these games were based on the WonderSwan Color remake, and most of the changes instituted in that version of the game remain in this version. However, there are a few differences.
Although the graphics are basically the same as in the WSC version, the higher screen resolution of the PlayStation means that most of them have been improved to some degree, with quite a bit more detail. Nobuo Uematsu also remixed the soundtrack to Final Fantasy IX quality to utilize the audio capabilities of the Sony PlayStation and also composed a few new tracks like the ones used in the opening movies.
In the Japanese language version, the script has been changed to include kanji. The English language translation, too, has been completely rewritten, and is, in most cases, much closer to the Japanese than the original English NES version was. Character and magic name lengths have been increased from four to six characters, as well. Saved game data takes up one block on the PlayStation memory card, which means that up to fifteen games can be saved onto each memory card, a major improvement. The "quick save" feature of the WSC version has been excised, but in its place a "memo save" feature has been introduced where game data can be temporarily saved to the PlayStation's RAM. This data remains until the system is turned off, or its power supply is otherwise interrupted. There are also full motion video cutscenes and omake. The game is now bookended with two full-motion, prerendered video cutscenes. An "omake" (or bonus) section has also been made available. It includes a bestiary, an art gallery, and an item collection that are unlocked as the player progresses through the game. Also, new "easy mode" has been introduced wherein shop prices are cheaper, experience levels are gained more quickly, and stats are increased more rapidly. This mode is optional and is chosen at the start of the game.[2]
Final Fantasy Origins to Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls
File:Final Fantasy I and II Dawn of Souls - Soul of Chaos Boss.PNGA battle against a Soul of Chaos boss in the GBA version. This one is Shinryuu from Final Fantasy V
Another fairly extensive list of changes accompanies the Game Boy Advance release of Final Fantasy as part of Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls.
The difficulty level of the GBA version most closely resembles the "easy mode" of the PlayStation/Final Fantasy Origins version. Unlike that version, however, there is no option to switch back to the original difficulty level. Similarly, the redirection of "ineffective" hits, which had been optional since it was introduced in the WSC version, is now mandatory.
Additionally, compared to the PlayStation version. Graphics are more or less identical to the WSC version, although the GBA has a slightly higher screen resolution than the WSC, and certain sequences (such as flying around on the airship) look better on the GBA than on the WSC. Even the "spell level"-based magic system is dropped from this version in favor of magic point-based system used in more recent Final Fantasy games. Although spells are still classified at certain levels for some purposes (characters can still only be equipped with three of the four available spells of any given level, for instance), every spell is now assigned a point value. When cast, that value is subtracted from a total number of magic points (or MP) that apply to all spells known by a character. Many new items have been introduced. Healing items are now much easier to procure, and less expensive, as well. Your party starts the game with 500 gil instead of 400 gil as in previous versions.
The omake artwork gallery and item collection present in the PlayStation version have been omitted, but the bestiary gallery remains and operates more or less exactly as it did previously. Certain classes have been modified: the Thief and Monk have become more powerful, whereas the Red Mage has become less so. Stat growth has been altered, and Intelligence now affects the strength of weapon-based magic spells. The game can now be saved at any time, anywhere (again, except during battles). There are three available save game slots, however there seems to be no way of clearing or deleting their contents. Because the changes introduced in this version make the game even less challenging, many monsters and boss monsters have had their hit points increased once again.
Four new optional dungeons have been introduced, one corresponding to each Fiend, and becoming available after that Fiend is defeated. These dungeons are especially challenging and feature items and monsters not found anywhere else in the game. At the end of each dungeon there are a variety of boss monsters from Final Fantasy III through Final Fantasy VI.
Reception
Final Fantasy, along with the original Dragon Quest, proved to be one of the most influential early console role-playing games, and played a major role in legitimizing and popularizing the genre. Graphically and musically, it was a more polished effort than many of its contemporaries. Many modern critics point out that the game is poorly paced by contemporary standards, and involves much more time wandering in search of random battle encounters to raise their experience levels and money than it does exploring and solving puzzles. However, this was a common trait for role-playing games of this era, and one that, in some respects, would remain in place until the mid-1990s. In fact, some reviewers refer to the level-building and exploration portions of the game to be the most enduringly fun.[3]
Legacy
Final Fantasy was also referenced in an episode of a video game-themed cartoon series Captain N: The Game Master entitled The Fractured Fantasy of Captain N. The sprite comic8-Bit Theater is a satirical retelling of the story of Final Fantasy. The theme song that plays when the player characters first cross the bridge from Cornellia is a reoccuring song through out the entire series. It has been found in Final Fantasy IV when Cecil and Kain begin their journey. It is featured in the End Theme song of both Final Fantasy VI as the last three minutes of the 21+ minute piece, and in the very end of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children as the movement immediately preceding the song Calling. It is lastly found in the song "Skies of Alexandria" from Final Fantasy IX.
