Final Fantasy - ProJared

[Music] [Applause] [Music] in 1987 square was a struggling developer about to go out of business and in a bid to save their future they released one last video game aptly titled Final Fantasy that's not why they called it that they originally wanted to call it fighting fantasy but that name was taken so they went with the next best f war they could think of now we're not that F word anyway this game was eventually released into America in 1990 I've talked before about how I've had a long sentimental history with the Final Fantasy franchise with it reaching his 30 year anniversary it's been long overdue since I looked back upon it the original Final Fantasy game is how I got started and I loved it but I've never given it the proper critical eye until now one of my favorite things about the original game is how your party is whatever you want it to be it gives you six classes to choose from for four party members this alone gives a lot of replayability as you can try different party makeups and challenge yourself just don't do for white mages that'll never work for this playthrough I'm going with my favorite build fighter thief white mage and black mage and what better way to go on a journey to save the world than alongside my friends unfortunately the names max out at four letters so join our warriors of light deep jerd Ian and Ruth the game begins with the party right outside the kingdom of corneria or Cornelia in the more modern translations you start off with nothing and a paltry 400 gold to purchase weapons armor and a couple of spells the story is that a disgraced Knight of corneria garland kidnapped princess Sarah and took her north to the temple of Thieves the four warriors each carrying a darkened orb or crystal set out to rescue her it's a simple premise save the princess basic but it gets you going into the game right away after getting the entire party equipped and realizing how dirty my faces I feel personally attacked it's out to the wilderness for what else random battles it may not seem like it but this screen alone was revolutionary when this game came out the enemy party is clear and more importantly you can see your own party to the side see before Final Fantasy the few NES RPGs that came up before this were in first-person view with little to no animation with static battle screens and texts playing out what happens in battles suddenly there's this new hotness that's like whoa did you see that he swung his sword holy crap that was fire these few simple graphics made the battle so much more alive than anything we had seen before seeing the power of your spell's helps you feel it and when you feel it battles become more engaging and every time you deal damage you see them get covered in a fart cloud I guess battles are completely turn-based each round you choose an action through each one of your party members and then see them play out in a random order affected by their agility stat to be efficient you need to pick your targets carefully because in this game if a monster is killed and another party member was targeting them that attack hits nothing and is ineffective one of the most common criticisms I hear of this battle system is the ineffective attacks it annoys players and feel like they wasted attacks in time and well they did think of it this way another problem most people have with RPGs is when a random battle starts and all you do is rapidly press the a button to fight and move on as quickly as possible but with this system you can't and it works Grint these ineffective attacks keep you engaged in every battle to move on quickly you need to plan out your turns and user teams as efficiently as possible rather than just mashing a to physically attack everything as you get a feel for your party and their strengths and the overall toughness of the enemies of fight you become aware of the best strategies and act accordingly for example I know that in this group of imps peep can easily take one down on his shirred has an okay chance of killing one as does Ian's Juve doesn't stab for much and will definitely not kill one by himself unless he casts a spell but he can back up dirt or Ian to help guarantee slaying that enemy minimizing the damage will take in return that in mind I execute and can see it play out this is the thought process you'll go through for every single battle you stay in there thinking out attacks that minimize damage or don't waste spells and execute your plants this does make battles feel like they take longer but to me having to think this way for every fight to maximise efficiency is awesome and I would gladly trade off exercising my brain each fight for the convenience of rapidly pressing a the actual combat itself is simplistic everything is in text boxes at the bottom showing the attacker of the target and the results not exactly the most thrilling know it makes battles feels slow-paced I'm pretty old-school though so to me when I see this I imagine it's like the game is a dungeon master telling me the results like it's saying to me dirt attacks the wolf 22 damage it even has a slight delay on some results giving itself its own sense of dramatic pause peeve attacks the mad Pony 36 damage terminated the brief pause between attacks also keeps each action a sense of impact like it gives it a moment for everything to sink in your brain gets a small moment to process what just happened newer RPGs move so fast that your choices are almost reactionary instead of planned out thought through or strategic but here you see what went down and you can think out your options I'm not saying this battle system is better than others but it does have its own merits that worked fantastic for the time and personally I think still holds up especially for people who are more accustomed to over RPGs if you find this combat to be too slow or too boring honestly you're not wrong but I hope you understand why this was so good and why I still love it speaking of love the level ups in this game are so good maybe it's just a personal preference but when I level up in an RPG I want to know exactly what improves and final fantasy provides that this is a rarity for RPGs since most tried to save time by not giving you that information but this is what makes leveling up so fun is seeing what improves especially since this game has a little bit of a randomness factor so it's really exciting when goof gets a large hit point boost since I'm so used to him getting jack squat oh my god you've just break 200 already after leveling up a little bit we went to the temple of fiends and faced garland who is as threatening as a Nintendo game can let him be AI garland shall knock you all down defeating him returns princess Sarah back to the king who orders a bridge to be built letting you cross the continent into a more expansive world this also triggers one of the most iconic things in the history of Final Fantasy [Music] this little scene is wonderful for two reasons one it sets up that your journey has just begun you saved the princess but could barely go anywhere now the world opens up to you and the true test has begun - this is the first instance of what is commonly known as the theme of Final Fantasy this song would be used in every main series Final Fantasy game from here on out except for two and ten and thirteen so not all of them all right never mind every battle also starts with what I consider a very iconic baseline this is used for numerous battle songs and a lot of Final Fantasy games I love this every time I hear this I'm filled with a nostalgia of the series roots and excitement to see how far it's come with whatever Curt game I'm playing and few things are as iconic or triumphant as that victory damn seriously people who have never even played a Final Fantasy game will hum this jingle to themselves after succeeding at something and one more iconic song the prelude is played right as you start up speaking of franchise tables how about the Black Mage of all the character designs that started here this one has endured the most airships started in this game as did the general sci-fi elements of the series as even this game has robots and ancient civilizations that is somehow more advanced than modern day it also has the main characters going around to restore for crystals each one representing one of the elements gene epic RPG which you collect for treasures of the elements and I don't know how to make this running gag work here the general story is pretty loose as you travel the land and help talents with local problems each one pertaining to one of the four crystals or orbs as they're called in this game which is actually pretty good plot structure as you're solving several smaller arcs that all feed into a much larger story pretty impressive for an NES game Final Fantasy also has several great moments of breaking linearity as soon as you cross the bridge you can freely explore the world available to you without any fears then after helping the dwarves blow up in the canal the entire ocean is open to you with several towns to go to you can also skip the volcano and go straight to the ice cave which goes to the airship which opens up the rest the game and then you can do all kinds of things out of order there's even a completely optional side quest involving Muhammad if you complete his trial in the castle of ordeals and deliver him the rat tail from there he awards you with a class change powering up your entire party peep the fighter becomes a knight allowing him to cast low-level white magic jerk the thief becomes a ninja giving him more access to weapon proficiencies in being able to cast black magic Ian and Juve become white and black mages allowing their full potential and being able to cast the most powerful spells in the game I also really like this moment because it shows that your party has gone on such a journey that they just didn't gain levels they matured they look older more experienced wiser you feel their increase in power either from casting higher-level spells or suddenly dealing more hits with every attack this in addition to the level up stating precisely what increases each time makes growth of your party in this game feel so rewarding it's exciting every time rather than just something that you have to do to progress with all this constant praise and love for Final Fantasy you're probably wondering doesn't even do anything wrong well half the game doesn't work good god there are so many bugs and glitches in this game it's not even funny like half the spells don't work temper and saber are supposed to increase your attack power they don't work there's a lock spell which is supposed to make it easier to hit your enemies what instead does the exact opposite and makes them get way more evasion remember how I said it's awesome when the game tells you when stat increases happen well intelligence doesn't work so your spells don't improve at all the luck stat is used for running away and it doesn't work properly either it's more about what position you are in the party rather than the luck making the one defining trait of the thief absolutely worthless you can also find rare equipment like the flame sword to deal more damage against undead and ice monsters the wear sword to deal more damage against where enemies the Dragon Sword for Dragon's coral sword Sun sword giant sword and more none of them more they're all just regular swords sometimes the buds work in your favor as is the famous peninsula of power this small area lets you fight enemies that were intended for way later in the game and a well-placed fire to blast can skyrocket your party and experience points and gold pieces which is needed sometimes since this game has a few moments of sudden difficulty spikes aside from the single room temple of fiends the first true dungeon you go into is the marsh cave and if you're not prepared this place will kick your ass everything deals a lot of damage some enemies resist attacks and a whole mess of them will poison you the volcano drains or hit points with every step there's also the ice cave which you need to do to get the airship and this place is filled with dudes that instantly kill you with a single touch or how about making your way through the second-to-last dungeon and right before the fight with the fourth elemental theme this super rare monster war mech shows up and wrecks your entire party and you got to do the whole dungeon again anyway after defeating all four fiends and each elemental aura is restored you see all their energies from the four corners of the world lead to a center point of the map and that point is the temple of fiends back where it all began returning there and using the light orbs to remove the dark orb there reveals a teleporter which transports the entire party two thousand years into the past there you battle the four fiends once more and face the final villain of it all garland remember him seriously though do you it turns out the person who released the fiends 2,000 years ago plunging the world into darkness was garland who was sent in the past by the fiends themselves creating a time loop garland then becomes the ultimate evil chaos thankfully our stalwart heroes peep dirt Ian and jhooth defeat him and save the land sending them back to the present with everyone having no knowledge of their feats this also means the prophecy of the for LightWire saving the world was self-fulfilling and became true because Yuri didn't and turns out Final Fantasy games have always had a history of having overly convoluted plots by the way if you were wondering where all the top-notch graphics were in this game it's right here in the end credits look at that that's a good looking the end this was awesome I thoroughly enjoyed playing this again I still have just as much fun and excitement playing this now as I did almost 30 years ago it's easy to see why this game was so successful in Japan and in America in fact fun fancy one is still worth playing today but not this version Final Fantasy 1 was ported numerous times first to the wonderswan which was brought to the PlayStation 1 under Final Fantasy origins and then updated again for the Game Boy Advance as Dawn of Souls and one more update on to the PSP honestly any one of these versions is better than the original things our rebalance bugs are fixed new things are added any one of these are fine I think the ps1 version offers the closest recreation to the original game with reasonable modern conveniences while the PSP version has updates that makes it play much differently but also has the most content and easily looks the best I can easily recommend playing Final Fantasy 1 again at least any of the ports that I mentioned if you're truly old-school or have patience then the NES original is still excellent that's why my final rating for this game is a black mage out of 10 it's simple but everything about this game has endured to this day much like the iconic Black Mage itself the RPG gameplay is as old-school as it gets and it's one of the best examples of that the class creation impactful character growth and strategic battles keep you engaged throughout your entire playthrough since the basic story won't do it for you it's difficult to fully recommend the original version unless you have an affinity for them but any of the more modern ports are still good for me I'll always love the videogame that got me into RPGs and making me the gamer that I am today and I'll always get that same rush of emotion as I did the first time I crossed that bridge I adore this game it's because of this and I got such a fondness for RPG games in general and this one certainly made me fall in love with the franchise even though I know it's not the best one this will always be among my personal top final fantasy games because of what it did and what it means to me I'm sure the other Final Fantasy games are still just as good hey thank you for watching until the end if you aren't already please subscribe if you want something else to watch you can watch my last video or head over to my gameplay channel or I've got tons more you

Channel: ProJared

Views: 1,890,783

Keywords: projared, final fantasy, FF, square enix, square, squaresoft, Final Fantasy 1, final fantasy 1, ff1, NES, famicom, nintendo, black mage

Id: TJ9m5DkWSVs

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2017