Final Fantasy Retrospective
From thecrankyhermit
Final Fantasy
Square was founded in 1983, as a producer of adventure games for the NEC PC-8801 computer, and later NES/Famicom games such as Rad Racer and 3-D WorldRunner. Faced with disappointing sales and possible bankruptcy, designer Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to return to adventure games, emphasizing exploration and storytelling, and drawing influence from Ultima, Wizardry, and recent Famicom hit Dragon Quest (which itself was heavily influenced by Ultima and Wizardry). Knowing that if it was not a success, it could mean the end of the company and his career in video games, he titled it "Final Fantasy." The game was developed by a team of Square's best, including composer Nobuo Uematsu, artist Yoshitika Amano, and programmer Nasir Gebelli. It made an enormous splash, selling 400,000 copies, spawning sequels, selling even more copies in North America, and transforming the name into the most infamous running gag in the industry.
You control a team of four adventurers, prophesied to restore the power of the elements and save the decaying world from ruin. Your first journey takes you to the kingdom of Corneria, where the king tasks you with rescuing a princess from Sir Garland, an evil knight. In the style of the early Ultima games, you can walk around the town, talk to people for clues, buy weapons, armor, and magic from the stores, and exit the town to an "overworld" which is represented as a scaled-down map of the continent, and later, the world. As you explore the continent, you will, at semi-random intervals, be waylaid by bandits, monsters, dangerous animals, and other hostile forces, whose presence interrupts your exploration and switches the game into a "battle" screen where your party must fight the attackers. Eventually you discover an abandoned temple, which you must enter and explore. Inside is a maze where you encounter stronger enemies than the foes you faced outdoors, you discover hidden treasure chests with rich rewards such as unique weapons and armor, and at the end of the maze, you fight your strongest opponent yet, Sir Garland. Defeating him and rescuing the princess allows the story to progress, and your party to journey to farther lands, where you will explore more towns, take on new quests, travel more terrain, fight stronger monsters, delve deeper dungeons, reap richer rewards, and ultimately fulfill the prophecy of the Light Warriors and save the world.
Pacing your adventure is a battle system, which activates during random and occasionally scripted encounters. Random encounters occur without warning - while exploring unsettled land or dungeons, you will be periodically interrupted without warning, and the overworld or dungeon screen will be replaced with a "battle" screen depicting your party and your assailants and their immediate surroundings. Scripted encounters are similar, except they are not random, and are usually triggered by your party manually approaching and challenging an opponent who is visible in the game world. The battles are turn-based, and are driven by a series of menus. For each of your four adventurers, you select a battle command from a menu, whether to attack an enemy, cast a spell (and if so which spell), use an item (and if so which item), drink a potion, or flee. Afterwards, you select the intended target of your command, beneficial or not. After you do this for all four adventurers, you sit back and watch them carry out your commands, and the monsters make their moves as well. This repeats until one party is annihilated or routed. Upon victory, you are rewarded with gold and experience points, with stronger enemies leaving greater rewards. Accumulating enough gold allows you to return to a town where you can purchase better weapons, armor, and magic. Accumulating enough experience points allows your characters to "level up" which increases their strength, ability, and fighting prowess.
Uniquely to the series, Final Fantasy lets you customize your party at the beginning. There are six classes to choose from, each with their own strengths and abilities, and your party may consist of any combination of four of them. Fighters can wield powerful weapons and wear heavy armor, Black Belts can inflict great damage with martial arts, Thieves possess excellent dexterity and decent fighting skills (and can eventually wield exotic weapons and use magic), Black Mages can cast devastating offensive magic, White Mages can cast healing spells and defensive magic, and Red Mages can do a little bit of everything without excelling at anything. Assembling your party is the first decision you make, and the most important one as well. It determines and enforces your playing style, and can not be changed without restarting the entire game. Most players take a fighting-oriented class and two spellcasters as the backbone of their party, plus a fourth support character according to their preference, and this diversity generally ensures a smooth playthrough. But many players have devised challenge parties, such as three-man parties, or parties without any white spellcasters, or parties without fighters, and even truly insane challenges like all White Mages or a lone thief.
Is it worth playing? Kinda. On its own, it's one of the better NES games, and certainly a change of pace from all the action platformers that arrived in the wake of Super Mario Bros. It beats the hell out of its closest ancestor Dragon Quest, with deeper gameplay, better music, better world design, more interesting monsters, weapons, spells, and more plot. But several of Square's later JRPGs likewise beat the hell out of FF1 for much the same reasons. To a casual gamer, it doesn't offer much that the later 16-bit installments don't do better. But it's nevertheless a landmark title, and deserves recognition for developing the Dragon Quest formula into something bigger, better, and more refined. With several versions available, I recommend the PSP version. It looks the nicest without straying from the conceptual look, it fixes many of the technical flaws of the NES version, and contains gameplay tweaks that serve to lessen the grinding tedium without overly affecting the mechanics. Final Fantasy Origins for PS1 is another option, as it can be played on a big screen and allows you to play without the gameplay tweaks while still fixing technical issues.
My rating:
Final Fantasy II
With Final Fantasy a smash hit, a sequel was inevitable. Designer Sakagushi assumed the role of director, and assembled a larger and better funded team to create it, including key players from before Uematsu, Amano, and Gebelli. This time, delivering a story was the first priority, and the gameplay would be crafted around the narrative in order to serve it better. Final Fantasy II was released in Japan in 1988. By the time work on an English translation had started, the Super Nintendo was gaining ground, and Square would cancel the translation in favor of focusing on their SNES debut, Final Fantasy IV. It would be years before FF2 would receive an official English release on Playstation.
Unrelated to FF1, FF2 is set in a different world and has you control a party of different characters, this time being distinct characters with names, faces, and personalities. Four youth, fleeing from their conquered homeland, are attacked by pursuing imperial soldiers and nearly killed, but rescued by a force of rebels seeking to overthrow the oppressive empire. Wishing to aid the effort, they volunteer to search for mythril, a light but strong metal that could forge powerful weapons and armor for the resistance. Success brings the rebels strength and power, and with it the chance for riskier but greater tasks, until you are ready to spearhead an assault on the empire's capital city and defeat them once and for all. The plot is significantly more involved than the original's, with a more structured series of events, actual characters playable and non-playable, and events with a greater sense of meaning.
The gameplay, on a large scale, isn't much different from FF1's. You still walk around an overworld, one with more logical geography than in the first game, going from one quest to another, storming one dungeon after another, beating up enemies to increase your cash supply and your combat prowess. But there is one major difference - there are no more experience points. There are also no classes - initially everyone is capable of doing anything, just not very well. Rather than increase your abilities by leveling up, your abilities increase with use. A character who attacks a lot will gain attack skill, and will also gain skill with the equipped weapon's class. A character who casts a lot of spells will gain magic, and the specific spells that character casts will become more powerful. A character who gets hit a lot will get tougher.
A number of series staples make their debut here. The item and equipment system is more sophisticated, allowing characters to dual wield weapons for greater damage potential at the cost of their shield arm. There are more battle status effects, for instance, some attacks may inflict a "confuse" status on your party, causing their actions to become erratic. The magic system is revamped - rather than spells being used as if they were items and replenished by rest, every character has a pool of "magic points" which each spell draws from when cast. Battle formation allows you to place weak characters in a back row, where they cannot attack or be attacked by melee weapons as long as front row characters stand to protect them.
After releasing FF2, co-designer Akitoshi Kawazu left the team to create the SaGa series for Nintendo's new Gameboy, which was initially marketed as "The Final Fantasy Legend" in North America to capitalize on Final Fantasy's unexpected popularity. While Final Fantasy would, in his absence, return to an experience points and leveling based system and evolve towards linear storytelling, SaGa would further develop FF2's skill developing system and evolve towards open-ended gameplay.
Is it worth playing? No, and I'm hardly ever going to say "no" so flatly. Simply put, the leveling system makes FF2 nearly unplayable. It does not work as it should, and the only way to make progress is to game the system. Tough encounters will be of almost no benefit. The successful strategy is to repeatedly fight weak enemies, and have your party attack themselves repeatedly to boost their attack and health stats. That in itself isn't awful, but the real problem is magic. You need magic to survive hard encounters, and before your magic can be useful, it too must be leveled up. Count on having to cast cure spells about 500 times before they are useful in battle. 500 times per character. Damaging spells, which initially are totally useless at level 1, must be grinded too. Playing this game is a waste of time. FF2's sole merit is its better story, which although a cut above FF1's stream of fetch quests, certainly can't compare to FF6 which covers similar territory more gracefully and with far more dimensional characters. This is strictly for unusually die hard completionists, and considering the plot has absolutely nothing to do with any other game, maybe not even them.
My rating:
Final Fantasy III
In 1990, Sakaguchi and company released Final Fantasy III in Japan. As with II, there would be no English release, as Square preferred to focus on the Super Nintendo. Unlike II, it would not be re-released in a Playstation compilation. In 2006, a semi-3D remake was released for Nintendo DS, but to this date the original game has not been officially released in English in any form.
Final Fantasy III once again has you control a party of four characters, this time, orphan boys from the village of Ur. An earthquake opens up a cavern, which the boys enter and explore, discovering a powerful light crystal. The crystal bestows them power, and beseeches them to leave their home and seek out the remaining crystals, their power, and use it to restore balance to the world. Your journey takes you all over the known world, and to lands beyond, as you discover that the world is far vaster than you ever imagined.
Thankfully, FF3 abandons FF2's troublesome leveling system and returns to an experience points based scheme. In its place is a new distinguishing feature - the job system. Where FF1 had your choose classes from the start, and held you to your choices, the characters in FF3 all start as generic fighters without any particular ability or strength. After discovering the first light crystal, you gain a number of "jobs," which are much like classes, except you are free to change them at any time outside of combat with little penalty for doing so. Rather than being forced to pick a game strategy from the start, you can (and must) frequently change your game strategy according to the situation. As you discover more crystals, you unlock more powerful and more specialized jobs.
FF3 is also the biggest FF yet, and possibly the biggest game on the system. The world is a bit smaller than FF1's, but is denser with more interesting geography, more towns, more (and deeper) dungeons, and other areas of interest. You spend much of the first third of the game walking around it, doing the will of the light crystals, and completing quests. But eventually you get to travel by airship, and at this point, flying off the land reveals it to be nothing more than a floating rock in an enormous sea of a vast, forgotten world, which awaits your discovery. This moment, thanks in no small part to the brilliantly eerie music, is perhaps the most beautiful and haunting moment in the entire series up to that point.
Is it worth playing? FF3 is bigger, deeper, and more complex than FF1, and it introduces the famous Job system which would be used again by FF5 and Tactics. The plot, though cheesy at first, eventually develops and is a step up from FF1, though a step down from FF2. But it's also quite a bit more difficult than FF1, to a fault. Dungeons are particularly grueling affairs, with powerful enemies, long and complicated mazes, even more powerful bosses, and no save points at all. The final dungeon in particular could easily cost you more than an hour of progress if you slogged through to the final boss and failed, which you certainly will several times. The Nintendo DS remake actually makes it even worse by making the enemies stronger, and for this reason I recommend a fan translation of the NES version over it. Gamers who played FF1 and felt it was a chore may want to skip FF3, but those who enjoyed it and want something bigger and more challenging would do well to play FF3 next.
My rating:
Final Fantasy IV
The first Final Fantasy, though released in Japan in 1987, would not see a North American release until 1990, after the third game's Japanese release. Although quite successful, Nintendo's successor to the NES, the Super NES, would be released a few months later. Square decided to cancel work on an English translation of FF2, and focus efforts on a fourth Final Fantasy for the next generation of video games. A team of 14 developers worked on it, including the usual veterans, but with theatrically-trained Takashi Tokita as lead designer, who wished to develop drama, character depth, and plot to a level beyond what was possible on the NES. After a year of development, Final Fantasy IV was released in Japan on 1991, and in North America a few months later in the same year. As the second Final Fantasy to be released outside of Japan, it was retitled "Final Fantasy II" to avoid confusion.
You play as Cecil, a powerful knight loyal to his king, and captain of the kingdom's air force. He and his men are returning from a mission, but they are troubled - they had just stolen a crystal from a peaceful city, and killed its defenders for it. Upon returning, he questions the king's motives, and is promptly accused of disloyalty and relieved of command. He and his friend Kain are then sent on an errand to slay a dragon menacing a nearby village and to deliver a package. But upon reaching the village, they witness horrifying events and realize they have been tricked into performing a final evil deed to further the king's mad campaign for power. Betrayed, separated, and filled with remorse, Cecil renounces his oath of fealty, and sets out to right his wrongs, regroup with his friends, fight back against his king's wickedness, and to seek his own spiritual redemption and awakening.
From the start, FF4 makes it clear that this is a quantum leap above its 8-bit predecessors. After pressing the start button, the game opens with a powerful, menacing overture, no longer limited to three bleeping sounds, but strings and brass instruments, synthesized by the SNES's sophisticated sound chips. Fade from black, and the story opens in media res with the Red Wings soaring over an archipelago, shown from a cinematic 3D perspective. When airborne monsters attack, the battle screen is richer and more exciting, with graphics showing Cecil on the deck of the flagship engaged in battle, with detailed combat animations. You no longer control a party of level 1 wimps, but are a strong warrior, armed to the teeth and clad from head to toe in titanium plate. The plot is carried not just by dialog, but by visuals, audio, and scripted events. Characters move, animate, and emote to add to the story. Characters perform actions without your input at critical points to drive the plot forward. The music contains many leitmotifs and reoccurring themes to set the mood of important events. What's more is that at four times the cartridge capacity of the 8-bit FF2, there is room for a script that develops the characters well beyond their flat personalities of FF2 (and nonexistant personalities of FF1 & 3). They have feelings, thoughts, personal histories, they emote, they express regret, remorse, outrage, fear, forgiveness, determination, loyalty, bonding, self-redemption, and tranquility over the course of the plot.
As FF4's plot is more driven by its characters than previous games, its gameplay mechanics are likewise rethought. Characters, now strongly defined as characters and not just game pieces, have abilities which are not defined by class, job, or tedious grinding, but by the developers' designs. Cecil and Kane, two elite soldiers of the same kingdom but of different training backgrounds and forces, have fighting abilities which are similar and yet distinct enough to be appropriate for their respective professions. Other characters who join you later also have distinct, appropriate, and often unique abilities and skills. Your party now has room for five characters at a time, but the five is constantly changing as the plot demands it. At critical points, characters join, leave, get separated, and even die. Only Cecil remains in the party throughout the entire plot.
FF4 also introduces Square's famous and patented "Active Time Battle" system. Action, rather than occurring in discrete turns, occurs continually. Every combatant has an internal timer, and all are ticking down simultaneously. When a character in your party's timer reaches zero, you may select a combat action from a menu in much the same way you do in previous games. Then your character will perform the action after a short delay, depending on the complexity of the action (high level spells take longer to cast than poking someone with a spear, for instance). Then their timer will reset, and they will be unable to act again until the timer reaches zero again. Monsters have their timers too, which work much the same way, with the computer choosing an action whenever their timer reaches zero. The result is that combat mechanics from previous games make a smooth transition, but the fights appear to occur in realtime, and are faster paced and more exciting. Square has adapted this system in some form for most of their JRPGs since.
Is it worth playing? Definitely. If Final Fantasy established the JRPG formula, Final Fantasy 4 refined it into the scripted, character-based, story-driven adventure we know today. The plot, though melodramatic and sometimes clumsy, is presented in creative ways, and made all the more fun for it. Gameplay is solid, well balanced, and much more accessible than in its 8-bit predecessors. Its strengths have been done better since, but anyone not skipping straight to FF6 should play FF4. Note, however, that the original US release on SNES suffers from a poor translation and censorship. Other options include a fan translation of the SFC version, or the PS1 version "Final Fantasy Chronicles" (play it on an emulator or PS3 or you will suffer bad load times), or the European GBA version (the US version is buggy). Also note that I do not recommend the Nintendo DS version. It has enough changes to be considered a different game, including a difficulty spike which hurts the pace rather than adds challenge.
My rating:
Final Fantasy V
In 1992, Square released Final Fantasy V in Japan. The development team consisted of 45 people, the biggest yet. Due to its perceived complexity and inaccessibility, it would not receive an official English release until the compilation of Final Fantasy Anthology for the Playstation came out.
Final Fantasy V is set in a world that prospers from energies flowing from four elemental crystals. One day, the crystal of air shatters, and the wind begins to stagnate. You play as Bartz, a traveler, who through a series of circumstances is brought together with an old man with amnesia, a princess, and a transvestite pirate. Investigating the shattered wind crystal, you embark on a quest to prevent the destruction of the other crystals, a quest which takes you to another world, and ultimately reveals ancient secrets of the universe.
If that plot sounds trite and simplistic compared to its predecessor, it is. FF5 is not totally devoid of the drama, emotion, and characterization that FF4 was famous for, but it clearly doesn't have the same focus. What FF5 is far better remembered for is its job system. Resurrected from FF3, you still receive jobs throughout the game, granted to your party by crystals, jobs still determine your character's abilities, and they can still switch jobs at almost any time without much penalty. But it is also revamped - as your characters gain experience, they gain new abilities according to the selected job, and with great skill can mix and match abilities from different classes. For instance, a Knight can wield swords, but a sufficiently skilled Knight can gain that skill permanently, and switch to a spellcasting job and still be able to wield swords.
Is it worth playing? Some prefer FF5 to FF4. A few even prefer it to FF6. I don't, as I find Final Fantasy is at its best when it's at least trying to have an engaging plot. Also, FF5's relatively high level of character skill customization may appear to add depth to the gameplay. To some extent, it does. But it lacks balance, with some jobs being clearly better than average, others clearly worse than average, and some being utterly abuseable to the point where you are unstoppable once you figure out how. It's by no means a bad game, and certainly worth trying out for its novel approach to gameplay. Just don't expect it to have the strengths the 16-bit Final Fantasy's are known for.
My rating:
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VI was released for the SNES in 1994. Series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi relinquished his usual role as director, and passed it down to veteran designers Yoshinori Kitase and Hiroyuki Ito. Longtime contributors Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu returned as the lead art designer and composer, respectively. Localization was handled by now legendary translator Ted Woolsey, whose sweeping script changes are controversial, and yet widely regarded superior to Square's in-house translations of previous games. As the third Final Fantasy title to be translated and released the US (excluding unnumbered spinoff Final Fantasy Mystic Quest), it was initially retitled "Final Fantasy III" by Nintendo of America. It would be the last 16-bit, sprite-based JRPG in the series, and was the most polished, developed, and most fully-realized iteration of the formula that Square popularized in 1987.
For the first time in the series, Final Fantasy VI does not take place in a medieval setting of castles and kingdoms, but in a steampunk-like environment reminiscent of the late industrial revolution. Initially, you play as Terra, a mysterious, magically-imbued, elite imperial soldier, entranced and enslaved by a "slave crown." Tasked with leading an assault on a coal-mining town, the operation goes awry, and the assault team is decimated by an unknown power. Terra survives, and is freed of control, but retains no declarative memory of her past identity or experience as an unwilling soldier, and finds herself confused, anxious, and on the run from Imperial special forces who want her back. Soon, you seek refuge with a rebel force, who welcome your training and powers, and with them, embark on a quest to find allies for the fight against the empire.
At this point, the plot, which had followed Terra from the start, shifts focus to its ensemble cast - the largest in the series. There are 14 permanent allies throughout the game, 11 of whom are fully developed characters with their own time in the spotlight, who not only play unique roles in driving the main plot forward, but have well developed personal stories of their own, which are gradually revealed throughout the course of the game. These segments, where fragments of their backstories are revealed, and eventually concluded, truly bring each character out as an individual and more than just part of a a team, more so than in any previous Final Fantasy title.
Abandoning the complicated Job system of the then Japan-only fifth game, Final Fantasy VI goes back to the formula established by IV and takes it into a more straightforward direction. As with previous games, your party of adventurers journeys from location to location as the plot demands it, and characters join and leave, also as the plot demands it (especially during the first half of it). Character's combat abilities are pre-defined, and are often reflective of their personalities and stories. For instance, Terra is capable of using powerful magic spells in combat, inventor Edgar can use high tech weapons, and his self-exiled martial arts master brother Sabin can execute fighting game-style special attacks, complete with convoluted button combinations.
As with previous games, your characters can be equipped with weapons and armor, which you can buy in stores or find in treasure chests, and your finds tend to get higher in quality as you get further into the game. New to the series are Relics - rare accessory items which grant unique buffs to the character who equips them. And eventually, you will discover the Espers - magical extra-planar beings, which the empire seeks to exploit the power of. Each Esper is unique, and can be "equipped" by any character. Doing so grants that character access to the Esper's devastating magical power, and also, over time, allows that character to learn whatever spells the Esper is able to teach.
And just as with Final Fantasy IV, the gameplay is almost peripheral to the experience. From the start, it is a prime example of excellence in gaming narrative. The aesthetic is distinctively dark from the very beginning, and communicates a stark, desolate world compared to the vibrant fantasy worlds of Square's past games. Dialog, though not a direct translation from the Japanese original (at least not in the SNES/PS1 versions), flows well and effectively communicates information and character personalities. Characters, now 24 pixels tall, are bigger and more detailed than ever, and can emote through simple but effective animations which convey facial expressions and body language. More importantly, the plot is *shown*, and not just told or implied. When the empire is laying waste to a town that is guarding something it wants, you are there taking point as the lead shock trooper. When the main villain kills hundreds of innocents by poisoning a water supply, you are there as a surviving knight, walking around his home and discovering his lord and his family among the piles of bodies, and you remain in control of his resulting vengeful rage. When the most dire events in the series to date occur, they play out before your eyes, and you are powerless to stop it despite your efforts.
And these events mark a drastic shift in the game's narrative and structure. Up until then, FF6 had delivered a focused and directed plot, brimming with heroics, politics, tragedy, and mythic themes. At this turning point, the central plot is all but resolved - the villain's campaign is complete, and there is nothing more for this plot thread but for you to fight your way through his tower of evil and destroy him. But the characters' personal stories still have several loose ends; Terra must come to grips with her identity, and others likewise have pasts to overcome and personal demons to conquer. But the linear structure is gone; the world is yours to explore at your own pace, and the quests which drive these stories forward are scattered across the world, waiting to be discovered at your own pace and discretion. This stage of the game is also where the more powerful Espers can be found, and their abilities quickly become far more powerful than character's innate abilities. In a way, by resolving the individual character studies, and by replacing their unique abilities with a common set of spells, they lose their individuality, and can truly come together as a singular force to combat a great evil.
My rating:
Final Fantasy VI is the ultimate realization of the JRPG template, which combines stat-based gameplay, dialog, visual storytelling, and adventure game elements into a streamlined, accessible package of RPG-lite gameplay mechanics and adventure game presentation and design for a platform where neither is common. The overworld exploration, dungeon crawling, monster slaying, and puzzle solving are all competent, but serve as a functional backdrop for the narrative, which is conveyed through dialog, set pieces, cut-scenes, and sometimes just the visuals and music. When most console games had little to no plot or characterization, Final Fantasy VI delivered an elaborately crafted storyline, memorable characters, and a grand, cohesive adventure.