Final Fantasy Challenge: Final Fantasy. “I Garland Will KNOCK YOU ALL DOWN”

Copyright Square Enix

It’s been a while since I did one of these, huh? Well, with a week before Baldur’s Gate dropping and me not wanting to explore too much before it comes out, I decided it was time to get back into tackling my Final Fantasy challenge. I’ve beaten Final Fantasy I before, but that was back in high school, so it’s been a long time for me, and that was the Dawn of Souls remake. That got rid of spell slots and some of the difficulty in favor for MP and some increases to character toughness. This time, I played the Pixel Remaster version, which is still somewhat easier than the original NES version, but I also wasn’t going to play that either. I don’t want to deal with no auto-targeting or only being able to save at an inn. That shit was fake difficulty.

So, Final Fantasy I is interesting to me as a long time tabletop RPG fan because of how similar it is to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I know in the 80s, and for Western RPGs in the 90s, they really aimed at building their games as being like a published module you could play through on your own, Final Fantasy I, to me, feels the most accurate to that in a lot of ways. Part of it is the use of spell slots instead of MP, but also how paper thin the story is. Everything in the game is in service to the adventure. The dwarves under the mountain exist to build the canal and make the best weapon in the game, each dungeon connects to the last, every boss is connected to each other and directly to the final boss, every town exists to be a means of upgrading and pushing the player forward on the plot. I’m not old enough to have played AD&D in the 80s, but my uncle did, and I’ve read a bunch of the classic adventures and that’s how a lot of them felt.

That doesn’t necessarily make it a compliment, but it’s not an insult either. The game is very simple and straight forward. The Warriors of Light need to go to each dungeon, fight the Four Fiends and then they fix time. None of this is told through big, flashy cutscenes or sections of long dialogue, just some quick exposition and moving on to the next thing. The game is told a break-neck pace, probably because the dungeons here are the real draw, with the story being sort of draped across it to give context to why we’re fighting a Lich this time, or why Garland has kidnapped the princess.

Each dungeon is unique, and a few of them have their own gimmicks, like the breaking ice in the Ice Cave or the lava in Mt. Gulg, but most of them just have elemental enemies and that’s it. That’s not disappointing, this game came out in 1987 and had to struggle against the limitations of an NES, so what it manages to pull off is actually quite impressive. However, in classic Final Fantasy fashion, the game gets weird right at the start. Tiamat is basically in space, diving into a Volcano is like, dungeon 5, and you end the game by delving back in time to stop a time loop. Like all Final Fantasy games, this game goes places, and it definitely set the tone for the series as a whole.

It’s interesting how much of Final Fantasy as a series just exists already, right from the start. Jobs, the art style, the kinds of monsters, the Dungeons and Dragons inspired high fantasy, ancient civilizations and elemental crystals are all established right from the start, and they’re still huge parts of the series. Even the weird twists and the crazy sci-fi elements get thrown right at the series from the beginning. There’s something to be said about how it kind of understood what it wanted to be right away, and every game in the series has been refining those ideas ever sense. Even at the beginning, it wanted to be more action oriented than Dragon Quest, even though it doesn’t have ATB or actual action combat yet, it’s a game where the music, the combat and the sprites of your party and the monsters push the player to act quickly, fight faster. It’s not an action game, of course it’s turn-based, but the ideas are all there to make it seem more action-packed.

My team, this time around, was made up of a Fighter, Fenris, a Red Mage, Dusk, a White Mage, Morrigan, and a Black Mage, Aethereon. Despite the fact they had no personality, did not say a single thing and aren’t really characters at all, just a D&D party designed so one player can play through a campaign on their own, I fell in love with these goofballs. I had ideas of their personality in my head, although I imagine part of that is being a writer, and I thought about what they might say to each other in their travels. The sprite work of the un-promoted Jobs really help. Kazuko Shibuya’s sprite art is gorgeous, even in the OG version of the game, and the various Jobs each have so much personality. Just look at the flaming red hair of the Warrior or the weird mysteriousness of the Red Mage. Why does he wear a mask? Also, she created the iconic look of the Black Mage. She did a great job in updating them for the modern age, too, but I do have to say, the promoted spites still aren’t great. I think the Knight gets hit the hardest, or perhaps the Ninja, because both the Warrior and Thief are great. That said, Black Wizard losing his hat is a downgrade, and there’s a reason we all thought the White Mage was a woman until she gets promoted. Red Wizard is a straight upgrade though. That said, a lot of my love for the party wore off when I promoted them, but I’ll still be using those names for Final Fantasy III. They sailed off to fight on a new continent.

Or they traveled through the Interdimensional Rift. If Gilgamesh can do it, than so can my party of dudes.

The one issue I had is that I blew through the game pretty fast. There were parts where I had some difficulty. Dusk had trouble surviving the first few boss fights, getting straight up bodied by Marlith. Although he was the MVP the only time I came close to getting a wipe. I got ambushed by a monster-in-a-box when I was trying to get the Elf Prince crown. I didn’t know which chest it was in, so by the end, Fenris and Aethereon were dead, and on my way out, Morrigan got poisoned. He wound up carrying the whole party back to Elfheim on his own. Then he got killed by Lich and Marlith. Aethereon also had some issues, lagging behind the rest of the party. I ran into a Crazy Horse for the first fight I did, and he got killed in one hit before any of my party could do anything. The rest of the party leveled halfway to three and he was dead. Even by the end of the game, he still lagged half a level behind everyone else.

Still, it didn’t matter too much. While the first part of the game has some difficulty to it, although apparently the Pixel Remasters give a bit more XP than before, once the White Mage gets some slots and the Black Mage and Red Mage get Fira, the game becomes a lot easier. After Lich died, I tore through the game, never once worrying about dying after that incident with Dusk. Morrigan kept everyone alive, and once Fenris was Hasted and Tempered, he just fucking murdered bosses. Marlith, Tiamat and Kraken barely made it to round 3 of combat. The only exception I had was Chaos, who straight up one-shot Fenris and Dusk multiple times, ran through all 8 of Aethereon’s Flares and burned through all of Morrigan’s healing spells. Except Cure. Of course, Chaos has more hit points, 20,000, than all of the Chaos Shrine Four Fiends combined, 15,100, so it makes sense. He has almost four times as many hit points as Chaos Shrine Tiamat, who is the second toughest boss in the game. Still, I got him, but I struggled, even with the best equipment, weapons, I was level 48, had max HP and spell slots.

Still, Chaos was a nice change of pace, because while I don’t really like hard RPGs, I do want some challenge. Steamrolling the entire game is a bit of a disappointment. Especially since I missed the treasure in a few dungeons the first time, and had to go through them more than once. The Ice Cavern was the worst, because I left the dungeon through different stairs than I came in, right at the very end of the damn place. So I had to go back through to get the Levinstone. Plus, I made a point of getting all of the chests for the achievement, so that meant traveling back a few times. Still, I got to the top of Mirage Tower without the warp stone and beat the Sunken Shrine without getting the Rosetta Stone, so I had to go back through them twice. All it did was make me stronger. And a bit annoyed because the encounter rate is so damn high. It was generally two or three per corridor, if I got lucky.

I think the biggest issue I had was trying to fight Warmech, something I’ve never done before. I never ran into him when I played it on the Dawn of Souls version and I didn’t run into him while on my way to fight Tiamat this time. When I beat the game, I had three Steam achievements left and I wanted to grab them, because I was level 48 and was only missing Warmech. I figured, I’d kill two birds with one stone. I put on Game Grumps and proceeded to spend the next 100 minutes trying to find him. I kicked his ass, finished out the Bestiary and got the final achievement, giving me the “Get all achievements.” I started at level 48, I finished at 60.

One final thought I had was about the sprites. They have so much character and personality, before they get promoted of course, that they carry all of 8-bit Theater. I’m glad I didn’t name my characters Fighter, Red Mage, White Mage and Black Mage like I did last time, but I get where Brian Clevinger got the personalities from for his webcomic. Also, I don’t know how people beat this game with four White Mages. That shit is crazy.