Final Fantasy III

Total Time to Complete: 25.5 hours

When I look back on the original Final Fantasy trilogy for the NES, it reminds me a lot of another famous trilogy on that system, Super Mario Bros. You have the first game which sets up a fun, standards-setting form of gameplay that people remember fondly. Then you have the wacky sequel that completely breaks from the first game and does a whole bunch of experimental things that people either love or hate, and don't really seem to ever come back up again (of course I'm talking about the US version of Super Mario Bros. 2, not the Japanese one). And finally you have the third game, which takes the formula of the original, refines it, maybe takes a few things from the second game that did work correctly, and ends up becoming the definitive version of that formula (Super Mario Bros. 3 is often cited as the greatest platformer of all time). Another famous series that follows this sequence of events is the Zelda series: original Zelda defines the formula, Adventure of Link is totally experimental, and Link to the Past is the de facto standard that all future games try to emulate.

Final Fantasy tries to do much the same thing. When you look at Final Fantasy I and II, they share almost nothing in common in terms of story or gameplay. Final Fantasy III, on the other hand, is definitely a direct successor of the original, bringing back almost everything gameplay-wise with a few tweaks that FF2 introduced. But that begs the question, does Final Fantasy III surpass the original and become that de facto standard?

To put it simply, no, I don't think so. I do think that FF3 is the most refined of the three games, but there are enough issues with it that it doesn't transcend as the game all others after it look up to.

This review is based on the PC/DS version of the game, so it is possible that the original version felt more like a game changer back in its time. But I never played the original version, so this is all I can offer. I would like to think that playing this version is reflective enough of the original that the same judgements can be made. I'm mostly concerned with the gameplay here, graphics and such are just window dressing.

Exploration

It's a flying submarine!

Final Fantasy III is the polar opposite of the first two games as far as exploration is concerned. If you look back at the previous reviews, I praised both FF1 and FF2 for having fantastic dungeon design while finding the world exploring to be severely lacking. Not so with FF3.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that this game has awful dungeon design, since I don't think it does. Thematically the dungeons are quite good. They make sense in the context of the world, a lot more so than in the previous games. However, they are much more linear, so there isn't a lot of actual exploring to do. There are few dungeons where the path branches at all, and almost every single branch leads to a treasure of some kind, meaning that there is no real punishment for going off the normal path. As I've noted before, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does take away from the idea that the dungeons are formations that evolved over time.

On the flip side, world exploration is significantly improved over the previous games. FF3 actually has completely optional side quests, and quite a few of them! Just off the top of my head I can think of at least 5 dungeons that you never have to do if you don't want to, they are simply there to give you cool stuff that you can use to power up your characters (as any good side quest should). And many of these dungeons are never mentioned by any NPCs, you just have to go looking for them (though the Sight spell helps a lot in pointing them out). So that is definitely a welcome addition to the series.

One other thing I will mention that FF3 does well is in hiding away treasures that require some sleuthing to discover. The game even encourages you to keep a sharp eye out by providing a zoom function that causes secrets to sparkle on screen. FF1 didn't do this at all, and FF2 only had a couple instances of it. But FF3 is full of these hidden treasures, even in some dungeons. While I liked this aspect, I do have to bring it down a notch though because none of these secret treasures are really all that useful in the grand scheme of the game. Very rarely did finding these secret nooks reward you with cool equipment, just items that you don't use anyway.

So while I liked seeing the things they added, I feel like they pulled back too far on the dungeon exploration. A better game would have a better balance between the two.

Battle System and Leveling

I don't feel that I need to dig into the battle system that much since it is pretty much identical to the one in FF1 with one minor addition, that being the front and back rows introduced in FF2. Oddly though, the front/back concept doesn't apply to enemies as they are always in one row. Since this is the case, battles are often shorter in this game since the largest number of enemies you will face is 3 or 4. Much different from the maximums of 8 and 9 from the previous games.

The leveling system also goes back to FF1 where characters just gain EXP and have hard levels that grant general stat increases. However, with the introduction of the job system, these stats are much more flexible. With jobs, character stats are determined using algorithms defined by the job that use the character's overall level as the variable. For example, the Knight class favors attack and defense over speed and magic, so as that character levels up, strength and vitality stats will increase faster than the others since those are what the algorithms favor. The reason this all matters is that when you switch to a different job for that character, their stats will change to reflect it, there is no real permanence with them. The only character stat that is not affected by job is HP (though the job a character has does affect how much HP is gained per character level).

To add a little more complexity, jobs themselves also have levels. Unlike character levels that are based on EXP, job levels increase based on usage. So in a way, jobs have a similar function to the usage-based leveling of FF2 (including how easy it is to exploit them!). I will get more into the various jobs in the next section, but the leveling of jobs is a bit odd. The job level doesn't have any influence on a character's stats, but it does influence most of the other algorithms used in the game, such as attack damage, number of hits you do when attacking, and potency of magic casts. So it certainly makes sense to stick to a set of jobs as switching can be costly for a while as your character gets more proficient.

On the whole, I like this way of doing levels, but it is not as interesting as the system in FF2. That being said, it has a lot of merit and could be modified to be more usage based rather than character level based. As it is, the job levels don't have as much impact as they feel like they should, the character levels are still much more important, and I think it would be a more interesting system if those were switched.

Characters and Abilities

FF3 continues on the path that FF2 started and gives us four main characters who have some personality, though again, they are still pretty shallow as far as characters go. Most of the character setup takes place in the first hour or so of the game, and from then on they have only smatterings of real interaction here and there. Still, they are better than the previous games, so I have to give it some credit for pushing things forward. One of the nice things is that, once again, the game goes back to the original playbook and you have the same four characters through the whole game, so you never have to worry about losing characters along the way.

What really sets FF3 apart from the previous games is that it brings back the idea of classes from FF1, but completely revamps it and expands it out significantly. Instead of the six classes you have from the original game, this game has 23 classes (or jobs) to choose from, and you can change a character's job at any time instead of being stuck with the same four the whole game. While this does take away some of the overall strategy of choosing a party that can make it through the whole game, it does add more variety and gives players more freedom in how they approach the game.

As I said above, each job comes with its own algorithms for determining a character's stats. Additionally, each job comes with one or two special abilities that make it unique, with the notable exception of mage and summoner jobs, they all have the same special ability of casting spells. The differences there lie in the magic that can be cast by that job (some are white/black/summon only, some allow for a mix of them), and the amount of MP that each level of magic has. Yes, the magic system also goes back to FF1 where each spell is tied to a level, and each level has a certain amount of casts that can be performed before the character needs to rest or use an Ether. The only notable difference between FF1 and FF3 in this regard is that in FF3, there are only 3 spells of each type per level, so you don't have to make any real decisions here. Just give all 3 spells to your black/white caster.

While having the different jobs does add a good amount of variety to how you can approach the game, it becomes pretty obvious which jobs are better than others. With the exception of magic, most of the abilities really aren't that useful, so those jobs with useless abilities tend to get shunned unless their stat algorithms make up for it. Out of the 23 jobs available, I only used 10 or so of them at all. One character was a White Mage/Devout the entire game, one was a Warrior/Knight the whole time, and the other two were various other attackers. I very rarely had any need for black magic, so going all in on physical ended up being a working strategy the entire game.

One other effect of the job system is that, even more so than FF2, the characters really are completely interchangeable. This tends to take away from the personalities of each if you can just switch the jobs of two of them with virtually no impact, as long as the characters have the same level. This does have its benefits as you have the flexibility to make any character what you want them to be, but it does make the characters blander in the long run.

Difficulty Curve

You may be noticing a theme here...

To put it simply, this game is very easy compared to the first two games in the series. But that, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, which is exactly why I call this section the difficulty curve. The curve is much more important than the difficulty relative to other games. While many people will complain that a game is too easy or too hard, it is much more frustrating when you are playing a game that seems easy but then is suddenly hard for no good reason. It feels like the game is not preparing you for those harder sections.

As far as the overall curve goes, this game does a great job of having a gradual ramp through all of the dungeons, even in the optional and final dungeons. Unlike the first two games, I never entered a dungeon and thought that the enemies were cheap or significantly tougher than the previous dungeon. Even if you just roll through the game without taking time to grind levels, you end up being as powerful as you need to be, so tackling dungeons feels good the whole time.

However, the game is not without flaws as the boss battles tend to spike horribly. That frustration I just mentioned happens a few times during some dungeons as the bosses will obliterate your party if you aren't setup correctly, and the rest of the dungeon does nothing to indicate that this will be the case. One boss battle in particular is awful as there is really only one viable party setup to win, and it is a setup that you would never use at any other point in the game. I am all for having challenging boss battles, but it really sucks when you spend 30 minutes going through a dungeon only to be wiped out at the very end just because you don't know the boss's trick ahead of time. Luckily this didn't happen enough to ruin the whole experience, but it is a glaring problem in an otherwise well-balanced game.

Story Integration

More sigh-inducing than sad

As if FF3 didn't steal enough from FF1, it even goes with the same general plot of having four destined heroes as your main characters. Kind of a shame to fall back on such an overused trope, especially when FF2 went in a more modern direction. FF3 even goes so far as to take away the small sense of agency you got in FF2 with its Memory System. It once again becomes a system of just talking to right people at the right times to advance the story, and doing side quests has no real impact on the proceedings. That being said, it is certainly a lot more refined than either of the previous games. It is always clear what your next objective is, so I never found myself guessing as to what I had to do.

This game also expands on the concept of cutscenes that were introduced in FF2. Pretty much all of the story is told through them. This is also where my biggest gripe of the game comes in. While this probably wasn't as much of a problem in the original version of the game, it definitely sours the PC/DS version of the game.

Basically, there is a big disconnect between the aesthetic of the game and the tone of the game. The look of the game is cartoonish with cute characters and silly antics. But the story as a whole is really dark with a good number of main characters sacrificing themselves and you having to fight people who you are supposed to consider friends. In the original version of the game, I imagine these moments came across as they were meant to, but with the PC/DS version, they came off as overdramatic. They completely pulled me out of the experience and I couldn't take the game seriously at all. And since all of these moments are told through cutscenes, I found myself rolling my eyes each time a cutscene started from early on in the game. So I would say that on story integration, this game fails pretty bad.

Conclusion

It hasn't been that long since the last time I played this game (about five years, which is a long time, but not relative to other games in the series), and I remember the experience being not particularly enjoyable. This play-through did nothing to change that opinion. While the game is mechanically tight, it doesn't excite me. I think a large part of this is because of the tone disconnect and the easy difficulty, it was hard to get invested in it. Generic characters, stereotypical plot, shallow job system, and lackluster dungeons all make for a rather bland package.

That being said, I would still play it again over FF2, just because that game is so frustrating and broken. But at this point, FF1 is still on top of my list.

Current Ranking

1. Final Fantasy I

2. Final Fantasy III

3. Final Fantasy II

Final Fantasy II

Total Time to Complete: 29 hours

Much like with the first game, I was a bit surprised at how long it ended up taking to beat this game again. I do remember that it did take longer than Final Fantasy I, but I assumed that it was just because of having more content. While that is true, I think the difficulty had a lot to do with it as well. That and the dungeons in this game were longer on average.

Final Fantasy II introduced many things that have stuck with the series ever since, but also a few things that haven't been revisited as of the writing of this review. Which, in my mind, is too bad, and I will get into the details later as to why that is. But suffice it to say that this game is a bit closer to what Final Fantasy has continued to be compared to the original game, especially in the experimentation department.

Exploration

CHOCOBO!!!

Since I don't want this to be a rehash of everything I said in the Final Fantasy I review, I'm just going to say that FF2 does nothing different from that one in terms of exploration. That is, Final Fantasy II is completely linear as it pushes you from dungeon to dungeon, and the dungeon design is the most interesting aspect of the game from an exploration perspective. In fact, FF2 is even more linear than FF1 as it doesn't offer one single side quest. At every single point in the game, there is only one objective, and the exploration minimizes down to figuring out who to talk to and what to say or offer to them in order to advance. Not exactly pushing any boundaries here.

The highlight of exploration once again comes from the dungeon design, and I would argue that they are even better in this game than the first. The dungeons in FF2 are long, themed perfectly for the settings, and are just the right amount of difficult to navigate. Unlike FF1, which featured many dungeons where going the wrong way netted you nothing save for more battles, this game will give you some loot more often than not. The dungeons tend to branch out a lot, but each branch has something worthwhile to get, making it more satisfying to fully explore every dungeon. Once again, I give full props for the dungeons in this game.

Battle System and Leveling

This is going to be the real meat of this review as it is the one area that is still quite unique to the series as a whole, and perhaps the entire RPG genre (though I haven't played as many as I would like, so my experience with other series is lacking). At least as far as the main series is concerned, no other Final Fantasy game has a leveling system like the one FF2 has.

The battle system itself is very much the same as FF1 with a couple tweaks. The first one you notice is that FF2 introduces the concept of having front and back rows. And unlike future entries in the series, when you have someone in the back row, they absolutely cannot be hit by melee attacks, only ranged and magic. This has quite the advantage for someone who you want to be protected more than everyone else, say your white magic caster. But on the other hand, it is also a bit of a disadvantage since that character gets hit so rarely that they fall way behind everyone else in terms of HP and defense. The enemies also have a front and back, where the frontmost two rows are attackable by melee and any rows behind those are not (not even by ranged weapons actually, only magic for whatever reason). But outside of this tweak, the actual mechanics of battle are very similar. The only other thing I can think of that is different is that any spell can be cast on single or multiple targets, which is common practice for FF now.

What is worth really digging into is the leveling system. Unlike most other FF games, FF2 does not use the typical concept of: you gain experience points, you reach a threshold for a character, they level up and gain stat increases based on the level and the character/class. No, no. Characters in FF2 gain stat increases by either using weapons, casting magic, or getting the crap beat out of them. There is no concept of levels or EXP, just the concept that when a character experiences something, either attacking or defending, they get more skilled in that area. This translates to: the more you attack with a certain class of weapon, the better you get at those weapons and strength increases; the more you cast a particular spell, the more powerful it becomes for each cast and intelligence (black) or spirit (white) increase; the more your character gets pounded on by the enemy, the more HP and defense they gain.

Personally, I love this idea. I love it so much, in fact, that if I ever get around to making the RPG that is in my noggin, I am going to use a similar system for leveling. It just makes so much sense to me, and it allows for a level of customization of characters that you don't normally see. Sure, it is not as exciting or varied as a tech tree, but it feels more organic than those other systems, and I find myself missing it already as I play the next game in the series.

That being said, it is also horribly broken. Putting the leveling glitch aside (if you are curious though, check the footnote), the actual leveling algorithms are not balanced. The parts of the system that do work well are the weapons, HP, and your general stats (though I still have no idea how some of them are calculated). The parts that do not work are pretty much anything related to magic. It takes way too long to level up any kind of magic so as to be worthwhile, and it is really hard to grok how MP increases work, so you get them rarely. Pretty much the only spell that got to a decent level was cure. This makes sense as healing the party is the most likely thing you would do outside of battle. But unless you have a character who is 100% dedicated to casting black magic, those languish in uselessness as they just take so long to get any better. It is simply more efficient to have everyone be an attacker. And this is a fine strategy until you run into enemies who have insanely high defense and are designed to be killed through black magic. Those battles end up taking forever and using up tons of MP that you don't really have. This all results in the fact that I had to warp out of several dungeons multiple times just because I didn't have the MP to get to the end (I opted not to stock up on really expensive ethers and elixirs).

I do not think that the balance problem is enough to bring down the whole system though. I still think it is novel, and with the right tweaking, it could've been an amazing experience. If I don't do it, I would love to see another game do something like this and do it correctly (perhaps another game does do a similar system, but I don't know of it).

Characters and Abilities

This is going to be pretty short because aside from the fact that the characters have names and voices this time, there really isn't a whole lot to say about them. Since every character you get in the game has access to all weapons and spells, they are essentially blank slates. It is still to your advantage to "class" out each character so that they gain stats in a desirable way, but who is what class is up to the player. The characters do start out with some variation in their base stats, but those are ultimately malleable into whatever is desired. I personally went with Firion as a red mage with a focus on black magic, Maria as the white mage/ranger, and Gus as another red mage with a focus on attack. The fourth characters all ended up being pure attackers. So all in all, there's not a lot to say about how characters play differently since they are fully interchangeable.

As far as the abilities go, there are a good number of things that are new to FF2 over the original. This is only in the realm of magic, as, like FF1, there are no other abilities to gain. The number of spells you have access to is quite large. There are enough white and black spells that no one character can learn all of either type, and each character can learn up to 15 spells, so that means a good 35 or so spells in total. Of course, this comes with the caveat that most of these spells are completely worthless, doubly so because of the leveling system issues mentioned above. Another problem with the spells is that until you actually have a character learn a spell, you don't really know what it does, though you can make educated guesses if you know the general lore of RPGs and FF specifically. But even then, the spell descriptions are often still too vague to know exactly what they do. This game could've done with a little less choice and freedom to make abilities feel substantial. FF1 did a good job of this by providing only three slots for each level of spell, but often more than three choices for each level, so you still had to choose which spells you wanted. But with the complete freedom in FF2 and the bigger range of choices, none of it seems to matter and you end up only using 10% of the spells anyway (Cure, Life, Esuna, maybe some black magic here and there).

That being said though, I actually do really like the overall idea of having just one spell for one particular action that levels up as you use it. As I said in the above section, this comes across as a more natural progression of mastery of a skill versus the arbitrary division of spells that all do the same thing, just at different strengths (e.g. Fire, Fira, Firaga, etc.). I just feel that in this game's case, there are too many spells to choose from for its own good. It is still nowhere near the number of spells you can get in later games, but those suffer from the same problem even more. The higher the range of choice goes, the less meaningful each option becomes.

Difficulty Curve

In this one case you are supposed to die though...

This is probably the area where the game goes the most off the rails for me. While the first game had the occasional spike in difficulty (I noted only two really significant ones that occur before the final dungeon), this one is all over the place. Right from the start you can easily wonder off in the wrong directions on the world map and get annihilated instantly. I understand that the purpose of this is to drive you in the correct direction, and in other games this is done really well, but it feels really off-putting here. When you are on the main path, the difficulty tends to ramp at a good pace, but then spikes again when you run into bosses or other random tough enemies that are completely out of proportion with the enemies around it. The bosses I can understand to some degree, but a lot of these are non-boss monsters that are just put there to mess with you.

On the whole, this game is much harder than FF1 and I will admit that the only reason I finished the game in the time that I did was because of how broken the Blood Sword is (and also abuse of the memo save system). If it weren't for that, this would've taken a lot longer to beat. There are so many enemies you face in the latter parts of the game that are ridiculously cheap. Two kinds of enemies come to mind. The first are the enemies that do a drain when they hit (meaning they absorb the damage they do to you). The problem with the way they hit is that their hits are proportional to your character's max HP. This means that no matter how much HP you have, they have the ability to kill you in two or three hits, depending on how powerful they are. On the other hand, the Blood Sword breaks the game in your favor using the same algorithm, so it drains away about half an enemy's HP each hit. The second are the enemies that cast high level confusion on your characters. Unlike the confusion effects in later games, confusion in this game pretty much means that your confused characters will attack each other 100% of the time, and getting hit does not remove the effect. So there are areas in the game where these enemies will make quick work of your team, and they don't even have to attack you directly to do it, they let you do the dirty work. Very few things are as frustrating in RPGs as getting into a state where you cannot do a thing to stop something like that from happening, and it happens a lot.

It's possible that this is the real reason why people tend to not like FF2, though the level system is often mentioned in the same breath. It is just brutally hard in a lot of areas, and for no real good reason. It doesn't feel like the dungeons are pushing you to think both strategically and tactically the way FF1's dungeons do (minus the ones mentioned in that review). This game just feels cheap and it's simply a matter of having the endurance and/or luck to get through. Definitely the most problematic area in my opinion.

Story Integration

Unlike FF1, there is something to actually talk about here. In FF2, the characters you control do actually have a voice, albeit ones that don't pop up very much. They do allow for some minor backstory with the main characters, but not much beyond that.

The true new aspect to the story integration with this game is in what it calls the Memory System. Essentially, when you talk to certain NPCs, they may mention a keyword, highlighted in red, that you can memorize and ask about later. Usually you start with asking the person who mentioned the word to get more information (and often more keywords), but you can also ask other important people to gather more information that is specific to them. The main reason this system is important is that it is often the only way to advance the story forward. This ends up happening a dozen times or so during the game. There are also some people that you need to give an item to in order to advance. This does provide an additional layer of interaction to the world, but it is very shallow compared to more modern titles. Still, I will give it credit that most modern games are much more guided when it comes to the kinds of questions you can ask of NPCs, while this game is much more open and you can ask any character about anything you want. Of course, most of the questions will result in blank responses, but it is still another way where the game shows its flexibility.

But on the whole, I don't really give this game any positive points for the story integration either. This simple system isn't enough to get over the fact that the game is still boringly linear. While the interaction is a nice addition, it doesn't actually do anything to vary the game in any meaningful way, so it might as well not even be there.

Conclusion

In the end, I generally agree with the common consensus that Final Fantasy II isn't a good game. While I can appreciate the team taking risks and going in a different direction altogether, it fails more than it succeeds, and the result is a game that feels hacky and frustrating through a large portion of it. It makes a lot of sense why they went back to the original FF1 formula when doing FF3, just with some cherry-picked mechanics that worked.

I do still think that there is a lot to take from this game though. I really do feel that if done better, the leveling system without levels could be a great system to work with. Lots of other games do similar things with upgrading individual stats rather than using standard levels, but the upgrades tend to be through purchasing (FFX, FFXII, and FFXIII immediately come to mind here). I think a system where stat upgrading comes from natural progression has real potential, and like I said above, I'd really like to see someone do it (if it hasn't been done before).

Current Ranking

1. Final Fantasy I

2. Final Fantasy II

Footnote

During battles, when you choose to attack or cast a spell, that action gives you points towards leveling that particular weapon class or spell. So, for example, attacking with a sword and shield will give me 2 points for each, and casting cure will give me 3 points. Once these points gets up to 100, you level up that class or spell. In theory, that means if you attack twice and cast cure once during a battle, you should get 4 and 3 points respectively. However, the glitch makes it so that you can completely game this process. Basically, if you have a character who is not the last character to choose an action for, you can select the action you want (all the way through to confirming the target), then back out of that decision, but still get the points. So if I choose to attack, I simply hit confirm twice to select the attack option and my target, then cancel to go back to that character, that character still got the 2 points. You can do this for as long as you want until you get the points for an attack or spell up to 100 and the next level, and the battle won't progress since you haven't actually chosen anything.

This glitch is the reason why I was able to beat the game so quickly the first time around. My characters' weapon and spell levels were all stupid high at each point during the game. I did not take advantage of this cheat this time around as I wanted the real experience as the designers intended.

Final Fantasy I

Total Time to Complete: 22 hours

There were two things that stood out to me when playing Final Fantasy again. The first is that it was harder than I remember it being. As I said in an earlier post, I probably played it on easy mode the first time around, which would certain explain it. The second is that it is remarkably different from any other title in the series. This will be explored in further detail below. Bear in mind that I have not played every game in the series, and many of them I haven't played in a many years, so my memory will be refreshed as the challenge goes on.

Since I'm more interested in reviewing the mechanics, I'm going to split this review and later reviews into discrete sections. Some sections might get added on as the games get more complex, but for this iteration I think the main things to focus on are: exploration, the battle system, characters and abilities, difficulty curve, and story integration.

Exploration

Final Fantasy I is an odd duck compared to the rest of the series. While it seems like it encourages random exploration more than other FF games, when you step back you find that this is not the case at all. In fact, it is incredibly linear up until the halfway point, and even then you only have one optional quest of any importance. The feeling of needing to explore stems entirely from the fact that very little in the way of direction is presented to you. Right from the opening of the game, you are plopped down in the world with no intro or objective. This initial bit of design is clever however, as it places you in front of a town and castle. Obviously your first instinct is going to be seeing what's up with them. It is there that you get your first bit of direction, even though it is hardly needed. The Chaos Temple is literally the only place you can visit at that point anyway.

And the game really doesn't get much better than that when it comes to exploring. Once you complete that first dungeon in the Chaos Temple, you get access to another area, but there's only one path to take. You get to the second town and access to a ship, so now you can cross the sea! But there's only one path to take as the majority of the sea is blocked off until you get the next key item. Once you do that though, the entire sea is open to you! But... you get the idea. Once you get the canoe and airship, your choices do open a little more, but in the sense that you can start doing all the required quests in any order you like. You still don't get the sense of discovering something unexpected when you stumble upon it. With the one exception I already mentioned.

On the other hand, the dungeons are very much the opposite from the world map. The dungeons in this game are designed to be nasty mazes where you will go down dozens of corridors that just lead to dead ends. In this respect, exploration is strong and challenging. Each dungeon really does feel like it is testing you rather than just an obvious path to the boss like those in many other FF games. In a way, they give the impression of something more natural and random than more modern dungeon design. Certainly it is more satisfying to know that any time you take a fork in a dungeon there is something meaningful to discover, but when you explore dungeons where this is not true, it actually feels even better when you finally pick the right path after going down ten wrong turns. As a result, I give the dungeon design in this game a big plus. The world itself could be a little better though.

Battle System and Leveling

The battle system itself is not terribly interesting. In fact, I would say it is probably the most dated aspect of the game, especially in today's world of favoring more real-time battle systems (and yes, this includes ATB-like systems). In Final Fantasy I, you select what each character is going to do at the start of the turn, everyone on the battle field gets placed in an action queue based on agility and some randomization, then the actions just go in order. Not a whole lot more to it than that. The only real tactics that come into play are: who should attack what to minimize turns, and reacting to damage. There is a little more when it comes to bosses since you will likely involve a few more buffs to your party, maybe actually use some decent magic to damage with, but that's all.

Other aspects are very typical as well. Damage and some status effects stick around after battle, so you can take care of those between battles when it's safer to do so. The leveling system is also linear, in the direction sense, not the actual EXP required to advance (those tend to be S curves). Characters only have the single type of experience to gain, which is to raise character level. Each level gives a predefined increase in stats for each character based on their class. And that's really all there is to it. Overall, nothing exciting, but gets the job done.

Characters and Abilities

Not really a whole lot to say about the characters themselves, they are completely devoid of personality. Typical silent heroes. So obviously the more interesting thing to talk about is the class system. One of the things that is still unique to the first game is the idea of choosing four classes of characters that you want before the game starts. And since there are six different classes, you have to weigh the pros and cons of each one and how they will work together. This system also allows for some interesting challenges that have been thought up over the years. Want to try to beat the game with just four warriors? You can do that. Probably won't be much fun, but you can certainly try.

Aside from that aspect though, the classes themselves and the abilities you can get, which only amounts to white and black magic, are incredibly generic by today's standards. Of course this game is three decades old at this point, so it is not surprising that the tropes of old have become old hat. This isn't trying to knock the game since what the game does give you tends to be pretty useful as far as magic goes, it's just nothing special. And since part of the point of these reviews is to determine what aspects of these games are still valid, I have to put it out there that the abilities are just serviceable. Outside of boss battles, the various cure spells are the only ones that really get used if you have strong enough attackers (which I did).

One thing I do think is worth mentioning though is how MP is done in this game. Unlike most of the other FF games, characters do not get a general MP pool and each spell costs a certain amount of that pool. Each level of spells gets its own number of casts, which makes it so that powerful spells still get restricted on use. You can not sacrifice casting weaker spells in favor of stronger ones. I think this is a great way of adding more strategy to tackling dungeons, especially since the game doesn't provide any ether-like items to replenish spell casts. Once you run out of magic you have to leave the dungeon to sleep. This way of limiting casts per level or per spell has been revisited by other FF games, but not nearly often enough. I think it is something that should be done more often.

Difficulty Curve

RAGE!!!!

This game is definitely front loaded on difficulty with a couple random spikes in the middle and at the end. Specifically, the first dungeon you enter in the game, the Marsh Cave, is absolutely brutal for early characters. Mainly because there are so many enemies that poison, and the only way to deal with it is with antidotes. Once you get past that barrier, the dungeons are more reasonable until you get to the mid point and the Ice Cavern. That dungeon is loaded with bullshit enemies that are stupid powerful and will wipe out your party without warning. That was the only point in the game where I had to struggle to get any progress (and I abused the hell out of the memo save function to get through it).

After the Ice Cavern though, and you get access to the quest to upgrade your characters, the difficulty enters into a nice curve where your party is keeping up or even slightly ahead of the enemies. That is up until the last dungeon where it spikes up again, but that is an understandable one as it is the last dungeon. It should be tougher than everything that came before it. Otherwise it wouldn't be as satisfying.

On the whole, I actually think the difficulty curve of this game is excellent with the two exceptions of the Marsh Cave and Ice Cavern. The entire game I had to do multiple attempts on each dungeon, minus a couple that were doable in one go, but it wasn't frustrating to have to leave a dungeon early to heal up and re-coop. It just meant that the dungeon was pushing me to my limits and each time I went back in a little stronger and wiser. As I said earlier, I think the dungeon design of this game is brilliant, and part of that is the way it pushes you just the right amount. Most of the time. F that Ice Cavern.

Story Integration

Since I think it is pointless to talk about the quality of the stories in these games (it is too subjective to be worthwhile), I think a more interesting discussion to have is in regards to the way it integrates into the world and systems. That being said, I don't think there's much to talk about here in regards to the original game. The story is sparse and does little to speak about the setting or the characters. You have "four valiant youths" who came from... somewhere, four fiends who have awakened at various points in the 1000 year timeline that encompasses the full ark of the story, and... that's about it. There is a bit of a nice twist when you discover that the very first boss you faced and took out easily is actually the ultimate baddie (spoilers!), but again, that's more story than integration.

The integration itself is about on the same level as the world exploration aspect. That is to say, it entirely relies on you actively going to talk to people yourself, and everything you get is in snippets and vague hints. This is very much in the days before cutscenes and story-driven scenes. So, I honestly don't have much to comment on here for this game. The world and story are about a generic as fantasy gets. You get the feeling that the focus here was on good dungeon design and gameplay, and story was an afterthought to keep players moving forward.

Conclusion

I wasn't really looking forward to playing this game again because I remembered it as being really generic and uninspiring. However, in the end, I find that I enjoyed the dungeon diving a lot. And if there was one thing I would take away from this game, it would be that aspect of it. Dungeons that are complex to navigate and provide a strategic challenge to get through. Too many dungeons these days are really just there to provide different scenery as you travel through the world. This game gets more at the heart of what dungeons were originally designed to be, a test to see if players are strong enough and smart enough to get in, take the loot, and get back out.

Guess I should play more rougelikes.

Current Ranking

1. Final Fantasy I (duh)