A look back at: Final Fantasy I

Which came first, the Final Fantasy or the Dragon Quest? Who would ultimately care?

The irony of the first Final Fantasy is that it was Square's proposed swan song, in that it was the company's final game before they decided to declare bankruptcy. Yet it was the original Final Fantasy which saved the company from bankruptcy and skyrocketed the franchise and the company to popularity, well, after a certain game in the franchise that is. But this game kept the company alive, despite the creators original goal in making it their last effort.

Yet on the surface this game has obviously aged poorly. You look at it in 2018 and obviously just see it as the shining example of a turn-based RPG. It's got the random encounters, the four heroes you get to name and customize, the towns and dungeons, the one-dimensional villain or villains, and in this case we naturally have to have a four-man group of "fiends" which are villains as well. Does it get any more standard than that? It's all pretty basic. But basic does not correlate to easy, as this is the NES and we do the Nintendo Hard thing here. It's likely the next group of encounters will totally wipe an unprepared party. What if it is nine sorcerors in an ambush? Hey, did you forget that you killed this one guy with one party member, now your other ones are targeting empty spaces?

Though there is one thing I must address in the previous paragraph, and that is the word customize. This is key to making any Final Fantasy game worth playing, and for any other RPG to be worth playing as well. That's the beauty of this genre, but here we see most of the customization done at the very beginning, give the four Warriors of Light the names and their respective classes, but that's it as far as customization goes. The characters end up being static in role pretty much the entire way, with no real change apart from the one class change in the game where everyone upgrades, but that's not really anything too exciting. By the way, getting new equipment and spells does not really equal customization in this regard. I like to look at other ways to tweak characters in order to really describe customization.

Final Fantasy is as basic as it gets, yet still offered the one thing I want in any RPG even if it is crude. Yet years later I know I'm still not gonna enjoy this game due to its many annoyances.