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You know, growing up with Kingdom Hearts has given me something of a unique perspective
on Final Fantasy. Most of what I knew about it came from these games, and the rest I
gradually picked up through cultural osmosis and a bit of Crisis Core, Advent Children, and
Dissidia. I’ve got a strange relationship with Final Fantasy, alright, it’s weird. I know. Yet,
it's an entire slice of gaming history for which I don't have the proper context. For one reason
or another, I couldn't bring myself to connect with many of them. I've started almost
all of them, and only finished a few.
Over the years, I've been able to better
distinguish what I like and dislike about turn-based RPGs, something I did not understand
when trying many of the older Final Fantasies. I've developed more of a tolerance for the
often strange difficulty spikes and grinding that follows closely behind; so, I thought hey,
it's probably time to give them another chance. And with the release of the Pixel Remasters,
this is as good a time as any. I know the Pixel Remasters are a bit controversial, and they
might not uphold everything about the originals, but the point of this journey is just for me to
finally play the damn games, and I'm gonna take the route which allows autosaves and quicksaves.
Not to give too much away, but there's a chance I wouldn't have even finished Final Fantasy
II if I was playing the NES version.
So here I am: going in about as blind as one
can reasonably expect, to give a bit of a fresh perspective on ye old Final Fantasy.
--
Final Fantasy
--
Travelling back to the first Final Fantasy
brings with it certain expectations. It's the first entry in one of the longest running
video game franchises. It is also an NES JRPG. You can imagine that I came into it kinda
expecting the worst. I know myself: I hate grinding, I hate frequent random encounters,
and I don't like the archaic difficulty design which accompanies the games of this era. To
be frank, I was dreading this playthrough.
To my surprise, it wasn't that bad. It was
actually decent. I suppose it was a lot like anxiously awaiting a visit to the doctor. You
build it up in your head, expecting the absolute worst, but when you get there, it's done in a few
minutes. Wouldn't exactly call it a great time, but it was much better than all the
pent up emotions in my head.
What immediately took me off guard was the level
of choice present in your party composition. I was under the impression that
the default selections: Warrior, Thief, Black Mage, and White Mage were your
only choices. I mean, come on: they’re the iconic quartet. Come to find that not only is
there a Monk and Red Mage, but you can also mix and match the six classes in any way you want,
including duplicates. My picks were Warrior, Monk, Black Mage, and Red Mage which immediately led to
a much more offense-oriented playstyle. I didn't have access to any of the nuke heals that the
White Mage did. However, my Red Mage could learn a lot of useful single-target healing and support
buffs. Didn't hurt that he could also dish out the damage when push came to shove. I was kinda
expecting to just have the archetypal team where one of my characters could do literally nothing
when they weren't healing. White Mage isn't exactly one of my favorites. But hey, I didn't
want to use White Mage, and I didn't have to!
Part of me was hesitant to replace it with Red
Mage, though, fearing a sudden difficulty spike. As I ventured into the late game, and my Red
Wizard still couldn't learn the high level White magic, I was starting to get worried that
my party wouldn't be able to hold its own against the endgame threats. Which leads into my next
point: Final Fantasy I isn't very difficult. I am playing the Pixel Remaster, so I'm sure there
was some number crunching behind the scenes, but even still: the only somewhat difficult fight
was against the final boss. That I was able to make it through the game with a Knight, Master,
Black Wizard, and Red Wizard fairly comfortably is still baffling to me, and has already gotten
me pretty pumped to go back and try other combinations. It doesn't really seem like there
are many formations which would ultimately screw you over, besides maybe a full team of thieves
(though an eventual team of Ninjas does sound pretty hilarious). Since magic sorta peters out
in usefulness, I want to try replacing my Black Mage with a Red Mage, making room for a Thief
or something. Or perhaps I'll throw together 3 Monks for some frankly ridiculous damage
output, with 1 White Mage as life support.
I wouldn't say the possibilities are endless;
I suppose I just never thought I'd want to play Final Fantasy more than once. Part of that is
because everything about it is incredibly simple. Restore power to the four elemental crystals,
and then defeat Chaos. That's about the extent of what happens. I guess there is a pretty out
of left field time travel reveal, which gives me a lot of validation for still liking Kingdom
Hearts, let me tell you. The first Final Fantasy game is built upon the idea that Garland was
sent back in time 2,000 years by the Four Fiends so that he could send the Four Fiends
into the future to send him back to the past. Final Fantasy itself was built upon the back of a
fucked up time loop/paradox thing, and I can't say I was expecting that. Your party doesn't speak,
so the bulk of your interactions are with the townspeople. Some of them will build out a bit of
the world, and some of them will point you in the right direction. Give Matoya back her Crystal
Eye, show the Rat's Tail to Tiamat, use the Rosetta Stone to learn an ancient language. Your
progression is linked to the story, but that story is about finding items and giving them to the
correct people, so that you'll gain access to a dungeon where you can fight one of the Four Fiends
and restore the elemental crystals. A fair amount of random encounters will get in your way, you'll
play through the odd dungeon every now and again, but this is essentially the Final Fantasy loop.
I do think it's a bit… odd that there's basically nothing to do outside of the main progression
path. Most of that is relegated to optional chests inside the dungeons. Even the side quest
for Excalibur is just going back to the dwarves after obtaining some ore in one of the final
dungeons. It's slightly alleviated by the ability to do a few things out of order, like the Fire
and Ice caves, or Tiamat's Job Upgrade quest. In this version of the game, though, there are
no optional bosses or dungeons to speak of, really, and it makes the world feel a little bit
artificial. My first playthrough took me around nine hours, and that's when I didn't know where
to go. I could probably cut that time in half with the superior knowledge I have now. I'm even
more eager to do it since I know there won't be any mind-numbing grind sessions along the way.
That short playtime really makes a big difference. Part of me can imagine a universe where this
quest for the crystals took place over a 20+ hour adventure, and that gives me anxiety. Granted, a
lot of this fondness could be attributed to the Pixel Remaster that I'm playing. Nobuo Uematsu
decided to go sicko mode with the soundtrack, so pretty much every track in the game is the
best thing you've ever fucking heard [track examples]. Yeah, maybe some of these dungeons get a little
repetitive in their layouts and gameplay loops, but that music? I think a God composed that music.
I also think that the game looks pretty decent with this Remaster. Fix up the squashed font, and
you're left with a pretty decent visual makeover for an NES game that helps each of the dungeons
stand out visually. The in-battle backgrounds and spell effects are gorgeous, and the water
looks unreal. Seriously, I don't know why they went so hard on the water effects.
Something tells me that I would be able to stomach the original NES version, though.
I know things apparently just don't work, the battle pacing is slower, and the
game looks and sounds like an NES game. But the core of the experience is still gonna be
there. You're still gonna have a lot of freedom, the music will still have been composed by
Nobuo Uematsu, and the quest will still be a relatively short one. Final Fantasy, while
not being a particularly impressive video game, is surprisingly fun for what it is. It's pretty
easy to see why a game like this would have taken off in the 80s, and I'm excited to move onto the
Final Fantasy which everyone seems to despise!
--
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--
Final Fantasy II
--
I didn't actually know much going into
Final Fantasy II. This guy named Firion, who I first met through Dissidia, was the main
character. The experience system was unorthodox, and apparently everyone hates it. But hey,
I enjoyed Final Fantasy I despite going in expecting to hate it: perhaps Final Fantasy
II will be the same. And it was… kinda.
I'll say that for the first half of my
playthrough, I was enjoying it more than the first game. You have a much more involved narrative
to follow with a party of named characters. There's enough of a narrative build-up here
to have several important characters die, and for their deaths to leave a pretty big impact.
Your overarching struggle against an evil empire is pretty dynamic, with the Empire destroying
towns and killing innocents left and right. I remember being taken aback after doing a
dungeon, coming back to a town, and realizing it had been razed to the ground. You start the game
getting destroyed by a swarm of Black Knights, setting the bleak tone pretty early on.
Final Fantasy II is a desperate, often futile struggle against an evil, oppressive regime.
It really isn't anything more than beating down the bad guys, but it's easy to see how
this game would lead the series down its more narrative-focused direction. Your three
party members are the ones you're stuck with, barring the fourth one which will change
throughout the game. They don't say or do much, so it's usually down to the people you meet along
the way to carry the brunt of the narrative. You go back to Princess Hilda for your orders,
you meet characters like Josef and Leila who help you out for a while, and have various run-ins
with the foreboding Dark Knight. Firion, Maria, and Guy don't really talk to each other at
all, they mostly just react to whatever is going on around them. Still, you get some funny
moments, like flustered Firion getting wooed by fake Princess Hilda; or cute revelations like
Guy being able to talk to animals. I just couldn't really tell you who these three are,
other than plucky wannabee rebel soldiers.
That's honestly fine, though, because the focus
is on the movements of the Empire and your efforts to stop them. I really like the progression of
the narrative when compared to Final Fantasy I. In that game, you sorta had to figure out where
to go, and it would usually just place you in a random dungeon to get a very specific item that
might open the way to a crystal. Charming in its own way, but it tended to be a little aimless.
Final Fantasy II has you going to places for more immediate reasons. The Empire is building
the Dreadnaught, you should probably go figure out how to stop it. Princess Hilda
has been kidnapped, go to this Coliseum and rescue her. The only way to stop the
Empire is to find the legendary spell Ultima, so you have to go find it. Like I said before,
when you go somewhere to do something, time moves with you. The Empire will have destroyed a city,
or the rebel army will have mobilized to retake their kingdom. Final Fantasy II's world feels
more lived-in because of stuff like this, and progressing through it is really rewarding.
On the other hand, I was interested in this new experience system. In this game, you don't level
up conventionally. Instead, you can increase each of your stats individually, resembling an Elder
Scrolls like system. The more you're damaged, the higher your health stat increases; the more
you hit enemies, the higher your strength becomes; the more you cast spells, the higher
your Intelligence and MP become; and, when you attack with a weapon type in battle, that
character's weapon level raises and they become more proficient with it. This is a pretty infamous
system, but I'm gonna be honest with you here: I didn’t really have a negative interaction with
it? I'm gonna assume that the Pixel Remaster fixed some fundamental problem with the EXP system;
rebalanced some numbers or something, because I never once had to grind in FF2. Not once. Granted,
this is also likely because I decided pretty early on how I wanted to build out Firion, Maria, and
Guy. I wanted Firion to be skilled with swords and shields, as well as becoming the primary
healer; I wanted Maria to be a bit of an Archer mixed with a Black Mage; and I wanted Guy to be a
heavy-hitting axe wielder. Guest characters would frequently fill positions I had neglected,
like hand-to-hand, daggers, and spears.
Because of this, I was pretty much always ready
to tackle the next challenge. I never felt like I wasn't doing enough damage, or that I was getting
one-shot by enemies. In fact, there were points at which I felt the game was a little too easy.
Harder than the first, for sure; health recovery items were much more expensive, and enemies were a
little more trigger-happy with the status effects, but in the early game it was pretty smooth
sailing. I was having fun exploring the dungeons, since they were a lot bigger with more secrets
to uncover. I suppose I just like when there's more for me to sink my teeth into; Final Fantasy
I dungeons tended to be really short and simple, and I wasn't too into that. Here, they're huge
gauntlets that'll test your resolve if you don't come well prepared. I remember forgetting to
stock up on recovery items before entering the Dreadnaught, and man: that became stressful very
quickly when I realized I couldn't get out.
It contributes to the more desperate vibe of FF2
as a whole. You're up against an evil Empire, and a lot of the time, you're the underdogs.
You're the ones losing more in the countless skirmishes that unfold. Fitting, then,
that the Field theme is so reserved. The Battle and Boss themes are
more epic in their compositions, and the Imperial Army theme is
simply the definition of foreboding. Yeah, it's safe to say I was really into Final
Fantasy II… unfortunately, it's also one of those games that just gets worse the longer it
goes on and the more time you have to ruminate on its design. Around the quest to find
Ultima, the game's pacing slows to an absolute crawl. You've just retaken Castle Fynn with
the rebel army, a big moment for the narrative, and where you'd naturally assume that
things would start heating up.
Instead, you're asked to go find Ultima, an
ancient spell that can defeat the Empire. Uh, okay, I guess? Just a small distraction
before taking the fight to- wait, what? I have to find two masks and a crystal rod, which
involves going through two really long dungeons, just to open the way to one of the longest,
most tedious dungeons in the game? And only after a mini-dungeon where you get swallowed by
Leviathan. I get that Ultima is this super secret, legendary spell and it would probably take quite
a lot to unearth it, but maybe we could have just gone to the big tower, instead of being asked to
clear three full-sized dungeons. It's here where I noticed the game's difficulty was ramping up
a bit: and by difficulty, I mean that the game started pulling some frustrating bullshit.
At this point, pretty much every enemy would poison characters just by hitting them with
a normal attack, meaning the menu was opened constantly to get rid of it. But then, some
enemies started inflicting truly nasty effects. Some of them would stun a party member on hit,
meaning you can't issue any commands to them. Even more egregious, if the stunned character is
hit again, they will be re-stunned. It is entirely possible that your whole party could be stunlocked
if you're unlucky. It happened to me a few times. Some enemies can turn you to stone on hit, which
is similar to being stunned, except that you lose the battle if your entire party is turned to
stone. Not just that, some enemies have attacks like Bad Breath which can turn all four of your
party members to stone in one turn. If it's an Ambush, where the enemies get to attack first,
you could just die right then and there. Enemies in the late game can actually induce death
on a party member by hitting them once, and pairing that with an Ambush was… interesting.
Another thing I began to notice more and more as time went on was the encounter rate. I think it
almost doubled from the first game, and it is noticeable. You can walk three or four steps and
run into another battle, which let me tell you, does not mix well with a set of dungeons which
have become much longer and more complicated. It was around this time where I realized the
game doesn't reward experimentation very well. I do like that it allows you to pick what
roles you want each party member to play, but the thing is: you have to decide very early
on what you want those roles to be. Good luck trying to change them halfway through the game,
it's just not gonna happen. Unlocking new spells eventually became disappointing, because I
knew that I was never going to grind it up to the point it was useful. For normal battles,
it wasn't even necessary, because outside of the bullshit one-shots enemies could occasionally
throw out, I still wasn't having any problems dealing with the enemies. There really was no
need to level up Flare, but boy did I try.
I think the best way to illustrate the flaws of
this system is through the spell known as Ultima. I put this on Firion and spammed it in every
battle going forward, intentionally handicapping myself in the hopes that it would eventually pay
off. It never did, and I wasted my fucking time. Apparently one of the programmers intentionally
made Ultima useless and built a cipher that would prevent anyone from changing the code, which is
just… wow. The reasoning here is that "sometimes legends just don't live up to their names" and
like… fuck off with that. What does that even mean? Several hours of this game are dedicated to
finding Ultima. Minwu dies to get you this spell. I could understand if this was just some random
spell you could find in an optional dungeon or something, sounds like that could have been a
clever little twist; this is a spell you are required to pick up. Absolutely no one comments on
the apparent uselessness of Ultima. No one. It's almost as if it wasn't supposed to be useless.
*sigh* sorry, that just really gets to me. They tried so hard to be quirky there, and for what?
Literally what does this accomplish other than fucking with people? I guess they succeeded
in doing that much, hats off to you.
Then flaws in the guest character system show
themselves. Initially, it's pretty cool. Minwu has a bunch of high level White magic to play around
with, Josef hits stuff like a truck. But, again, you start to realize that you have basically
no idea how long these party members are gonna stick around, so there's almost no use investing
anything into them over the core three members. They join your party with no stat gains,
meaning they usually struggle to keep up for quite a while, and you really have to get
them to a place where they'll be competent. Ultimately, this comes to a head with the story
of the Dark Knight who, *gasp* is Leon from the beginning! Pretty sure most people saw that twist
coming, but I think what bothers me most here is how mishandled the moment itself is. You storm the
Empire's castle, defeat all the enemies, and then get ready to face the Dark Knight. You've had many
encounters with this dude throughout the game, you've built up a bit of a rivalry. The tension
builds, you get ready to fight the Dark Knight, and uh… yeah, you don't fight the Dark
Knight. You don't fight the Dark Knight. You don't fight… the Dark Knight. Excuse me?
Ricard sacrifices himself, the Dark Knight is revealed to be Leon, and then he helps you fight
the Emperor. Great. Really fulfilling rivalry there, bravo. If they just let us fight him,
it would have made all the difference. Then, when he joins you, he has essentially nothing
except his weapon skills. Cool. Get ready for him to die a lot until he's caught up to
speed. It all culminates in Hell: literally. Pandaemonium is such a cool dungeon. The music
is phenomenal, some of the best I've ever heard. I dig the pink-purple aesthetic here, it's not
what I would stereotypically think of as hell, but it works. And yet, it's also a horrible
dungeon, because this is where you're introduced to enemies that can inflict every status condition
at once, stun you, stone you, and insta-kill you with a single hit. I really wanted to get the most
out of these dungeons, find every chest in every corridor, but I just gave up here. The encounter
rate is way too high, the dungeon is way too big, and the enemies are way too dangerous
for me to be screwing around.
By the time I got to the Emperor and fought him,
I realized that if I hadn't decided to start using the Blood Sword, the final boss would have been
a nightmare. I probably would have had to grind in Hell for centuries, because I was doing next to
nothing, and he had, you guessed it, insta-kills! It's kinda sad, because I really appreciate Final
Fantasy II. It had a lot of cool ideas and clearly wanted to push its narrative conventions,
but it's one of those games that eventually completely falls apart. Even then, I respect
the high points of it so much that I don't even think the game is all that much worse than the
first one. I don't know that I want to play it again anytime soon, but hey: it technically
wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be! That's a win, right?
--
Final Fantasy III
--
I knew pretty much nothing about this one
going in. It feels like this is the Final Fantasy I hear almost no one talking about, so
in that sense, my expectations were tempered. One of the first things that stood out to me as
kinda weird was that the cast didn't have default names or personalities. We've gone right back to
Final Fantasy I, where you can name yourselves whatever you want. Unlike FF1, though, the
characters still speak from time to time. However, the way they speak is a little confusing. You
fall through a hole in the beginning, and there are blue lines of text attributed to no one in
particular. This is meant to be when your party is speaking, but because there are no attributions,
it's hard to tell who is speaking to who. You can surmise that the Red Onion Knight is speaking to
the rest of the party, but then there's clearly an argument that takes place during the dialogue
between the other members. Later on, though, it feels like the game exclusively refers to your
first party member, and they are the one who gets to speak or react to things that are happening.
Though, I guess the implication is that your entire party is reacting to character deaths and
the like in the exact same way? I don't really know what they were going for here, I'm gonna
be honest, but eventually I kinda just viewed them as a great big hivemind and carried on.
The story here, like the games preceding it, is largely held up by the various characters you meet
along the way who join you for a few dungeons. I'm gonna be honest, I don't really remember
a lot of their names, with the exception of Cid. I think it's neat that all the people you
helped get warped to the Crystal Tower at the end to return the favor. But the characters aren't
nearly as interesting as the setting itself, and what the game asks you to do. Everything
in FF3 is so much more than it seems. You start out on a world map, same as always, but
you learn that this landmass is floating in the air for some reason. Pretty cool, I guess, a nice
bit of flavor. I wonder why it's floating here? Later on, though, I was trying to figure out
where I was supposed to go next. I could swear I had checked every location on this island,
where was I supposed to go? That is, until I flew off the edge of the map and realized: oh, this
isn't the whole game. There's so much more.
A world that has been flooded by a cataclysmic
event your party needs to undo. I wouldn't say FF3 is a post-apocalypse, since everyone is still
alive when you de-flood the world, but it is a world that your party needs to fix. Bad things
happened to it, the Darkness has run rampant, and your Warriors of Light must restore balance.
It's a more whimsical game, with some cute moments, and the occasional death here and there.
Ultimately, it didn't leave much of an impact. It was a simple bout against the darkness and not
much more. That doesn't matter too much, though, because it makes up for its nothing story
with its incredibly unique job system.
I love that you can pick whatever party you want
in Final Fantasy I, but one problem I have with it is that you're pretty much stuck with whatever you
pick. I didn't recognize that Black Mages would eventually become pretty useless in the endgame,
and if I had known that, I probably would have picked something else. Final Fantasy III, then,
makes it so you can change classes whenever you want. Each job has its own independent leveling
system. Say you try out Black Mage and find that it isn't your cup of tea; you can change to a Red
Mage or Bard or something. Unlike Final Fantasy I, where you had 6 jobs to choose from, this game
has 27. Granted, some of them are basically just upgrades to previous jobs, but there are so
many entirely unique ones to play with.
Evoker can summon legendary creatures like Shiva
and Ifrit to cast devastating black magic; Bards focus on healing and buffing the party; Knights
are beefy and can take hits that were targeted at your squishier party members; Scholar, probably
one of my favorites for the early game, can not only read enemy HP and weaknesses, but can use
Alchemy to increase the effectiveness of items. Healing items will restore double the amount
of health, and the AOE elemental magic items will deal a ton more damage. There's just so much
variety here, and at least in the Pixel Remaster, you aren't punished for experimenting often.
Scholar eventually fell off in its usefulness pretty hard, so I switched over to an Evoker,
which I could later evolve into the Summoner whom I took into the endgame. I enjoyed the
defensive capabilities of the Knight, but Dark Knight sounded even cooler, so I eventually
switched over to that and discovered its insanely good AOE melee ability. My Red Mage eventually
turned into a Bard, focusing on a no cost AOE heal as well as some decent buffs, and then evolved
into a Sage in the endgame to keep the party alive. Finally, my Monk, my best party member from
Final Fantasy I, who did frankly insane damage, would become a heavy hitting badass Dragoon,
and eventually a Ninja. After buying Shurikens, they still maintained the title of highest
damage dealer, though my Summoner was still able to outperform them in the long run by spam
summoning Mega Flares from Bahamut. Which, by the way: is so radddddd. I love that you can go
and fight these optional bosses, and your reward is to be able to summon them in combat. There
weren't really any optional things like that in 1 or 2, so I really appreciate that here.
Sure, there were jobs I didn't really click with immediately. Geomancer and Viking
weren't doing much for me at the time, but that really just gives me a lot of motivation
to do another playthrough with different jobs, in much the same way as the first game. You
can, again, have any combination you want, so your options are nearly limitless. There's
also more of a reason to come back for 3 because it's significantly more difficult than 1 and
2. I found myself dying a lot more often, and having to rethink my job composition and
strategy. With the exception of two moments in the game, where I had to just grind for a little
while, the challenges I faced could be overcome through clever thinking. The Dragoon's Jump
ability isn't just a way to deal big damage, it's also a way to keep one of your party members
out of harm's way for an entire turn, and that came in clutch during many hard fought battles.
The Knight taking hits for other party members, the Bard buffing and healing the entire party,
and getting lucky with Evoker Ifrit heals or big boy damage were all valid strategies that
didn't result in me having to just grind, which made for a playthrough which was
a lot more mechanically satisfying.
The encounter rate has been reduced, and so
has the amount of frustrating status effects. Additionally, dungeons have been further expanded
to add hidden areas with really good items and equipment. Usually there will be environmental
signs like cracked walls or something to clue you in, and it gives every dungeon just that extra
bit of depth. I mean, it honestly says a lot that I didn't mind going through Eureka and the Crystal
Tower back-to-back for a few hours, because I just loved exploring the tower. I didn't quite love
the ten minute grind I had to do to clear Eureka, but it could have been much worse. You weren't
running into enemies every five seconds, and those enemies weren't killing you in one hit. They were
just a bit beefier and a bit harder hitting, so you had to be a little more cautious. That's all
I'm really asking for here, a tense yet exciting set of dungeons to clear where you get to see your
job numbers go up and learn cool new skills.
I don't think it's perfect, though; sometimes you
can feel quite limited by what the game wants you to do. You'll be asked to switch to a job to clear
a specific dungeon or encounter. You'll need a job that can cast Mini or Toad to enter tight spaces,
and then once you're Mini you'll need to use magic to deal damage since your melee becomes useless.
I don't really like these dungeons much since it forces you to use jobs you might not have leveled
or just don't want to use at the time. Whenever you switch a job, it means that your preferred job
isn't getting experience, and you have to re-equip all your weapons and armor. It's just tedious.
There's a similar thing going on with a few of the boss fights, where Scholar's Study ability is used
to figure out a boss' changing weaknesses, and the Dragoon can devastate one of the flying bosses.
It just so happens that I was using Scholar and Dragoon during both of those fights, but I can
only imagine how frustrating they would have been without those jobs. Yeah, it's pretty obvious
in both cases, since NPCs practically spell it out to you that you're gonna want to use these
jobs, I just don't like how limiting it is.
More than that, though, sometimes it feels like
you just can't use a job as soon as you get it. You get a new set of jobs whenever you
re-awaken one of the elemental crystals, which is where you'd think you would be able to
change immediately and try them out. Some jobs, though, have unique weapons and armor, making
it extremely difficult to do anything with them, especially since they start at level 1. The most
apparent example of this is with the Dark Knight, who uses katanas. You don't get a weapon
that a Dark Knight can actually use until three or four dungeons later, for some reason, but
I really wanted to start leveling my Dark Knight. So every once in a while, I'd switch to Dark
Knight, check to see if I got any weapons for them, and conclude that I just didn't have
any. What feels even more like a slap in the face is that you only get your Dark Knight gear
after the dungeon which introduces duplication, where enemies will summon other enemies or divide
themselves into two. Bladeblitz is extremely useful for this, NPCs even tell you as much, and
hell: the dungeon after this one does this again, and you're definitely encouraged to use
a Dark Knight. But as of this point, you don't have any weapons you can actually put
onto your Dark Knight, so you just have to deal with these enemies that multiply and divide nigh
endlessly. I was getting really frustrated here, why couldn't the next shop have just sold katanas?
Seriously? All I wanted to do was try out Dark Knight and the game was actively fighting me.
Those are really my only issues with it, though. Like I said, I thought the Crystal Tower
segment was actually kinda fun. I like long, masochistic endurance tests as long as they aren't
frustrating, and this is one of those. The World of Darkness was especially brutal, fighting four
bosses with huge health bars, trying to conserve the last of my hard earned elixirs. The final
fight against the Cloud of Darkness was the hardest thing I'd done in this series yet. It
did so much damage, and had so much health. All I could do was spam shurikens, melee attacks, and
Mega Flare from Bahamut, constantly clenching my teeth wondering when she was gonna go down, until
finally that oh so satisfying animation played and I pumped my damn fists in the air. Helps
that the final boss track is straight fire.
There's definitely a possibility that
I appreciate this game more because, as I see it, a lot of this stuff would go on to
fuel some cool sections of Final Fantasy XIV. Like, when I heard Eternal Wind for the first
time, I was freaking out in my discord call. I had no idea that this was that amazing theme
from Shadowbringers. I suppose that might be why I liked the Crystal Tower so much, because XIV
has an entire raid where you explore the crystal tower and enter the world of darkness and fight
pretty much the same bosses, so it was pretty cathartic to see where the inspiration for that
stuff came from originally. It's really not one of the best RPGs I've ever played. The story is
fairly generic, the job system has its issues, I had to grind a few times. But man, for the most
part, it was just fun to experiment with the job system and go through dungeons. In a way, it feels
a bit like a better version of Final Fantasy I, where a simple story paves the way for a game
which I'll likely be replaying sooner rather than later.
--
Conclusion
--
Final Fantasy on the NES is clearly where the
series was finding its footing. These three games are so different that it's hard for me to find a
common thread besides the returning enemies and chocobo. I still find it admirable that Final
Fantasy II was such a departure from the norm, that it tried to do something really cool. I came
out of this pretty satisfied, which is curious because I knew from the outset that these three
games were probably going to be the ones I liked the least. The future games have more involved
stories, more interesting settings, more places to explore, interesting characters with
established backstories and actual narrative arcs. I always knew that the first three games were
going to be the forerunners, but it's impressive to me that I was able to enjoy them as much as
I did, and has me excited to finally move to the SNES era. IV, V, and VI are praised to hell and
back, and I want to finally figure out why.
