Woah, a week flew by without a post from me. My bad! Holidays get crazy and I lose track of time. Well, let me gift everyone with a new Nintendo post, then? Sounds like a plan. Today I’ll don my mage robes and get down with the original Final Fantasy.
(Final Fantasy box art, photo from Wikipedia)
Sixteen years into the world’s most popular video game role-playing game series, with fourteen main titles and a plethora of sequels, spin-offs, movies and anime, countless merchandise; it’s easy to forget Final Fantasy’s humble origins, so let’s go back to where it all began, ironically where it was all supposed to end.
Final Fantasy’s odd title comes from the fact that it was indeed meant to be final. The game’s creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, had been working for Square (now Square Enix) for several years, helping to create racing and sports games, but nothing he was particularly proud of. So with the intention of finishing one more game for the company before leaving, he set to work on a fantasy-world role-playing game.
FF‘s world is indeed fairly typical Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons flavored fair, in which wizards and warriors go on quests, fighting monsters and encountering all kinds of strange races (dwarves, elves, mermaids, etc.) in order to thwart a great evil. Far from the first RPG, Final Fantasy was influences by other similar titles such as Ultima, Wizardry, and it’s soon to be main competitor in the Japanese Role-playing game department, Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior here in the states until recently). But FF did add some elements that the other games were mostly lacking, including bringing in the classical four elements of earth, fire, wind and water, and utilizing them so that certain enemies of one element would be weak to the other, a staple in table-top RPGs such as D&D. FF also granted the player to choose the four characters (out of the six available) in which they wanted to use on their adventure. Each character represented a different class, which of course meant different uses and abilities in combat. The player could choose from a sword-wielding Warrior, a Black Mage (specializing in offensive magic), the White Mage (healing and defensive spells), Red Mage (a little skilled in the previous three’s abilities, but not nearly as skilled in one area as the main class), a thief and finally, the monk. Choosing a balanced combination of characters could make or break the adventure, so the player has a few options from the get-go. Later in the game, the characters will gain a class change, which changed their appearance and furthered their skills. This was a big change of pace from most RPG video games at the time, which pretty much forced a type of character or role on the player, FF carried on the tabletop tradition more by allowing the player to have a degree of control over their adventure. The selection of characters would lead to the creation in later entries of the series into the “job system”, where characters could change their class, or job, as many times as they would like over the game, and classes such as the various color mages would become staples within the series (particularly the Black Mage, whose iconic look would appear time and again throughout the series)
(The first dungeon. Photo from mobygames.com)
The plot, too, is quite influenced by western role-playing games and fantasy lure. The backdrop to the story tells about a world which had many advanced magical civilizations, governed by an orb of an elemental type (in other words, a water-based community akin to Atlantis was powered by a water orb, and so forth). Over the time, these orbs would become darkened, and lose their power, causing the kingdoms to fall. The world fell into darkness, but a prophecy foretold of four “Warriors of the Light”, each having possession of one of the orbs, and they would restore the orbs, and bring light back into the world. Pretty simple beginnings, and most of the game’s quests a fetch quests, where the warriors have to get an item or artifact to a non-player character, who in turns helps the warriors advance their main quest, such as allowing the characters to ravel more of the world by boat or airship (a flying zeppelin type ship that would become a huge feature in later FF games) but FF does have a few twists along the way, keeping the player engaged and committed to their quest.
(A look at the over world, photo from millennium.org)
After choosing their four Light Warriors, the game begins on the over-world map. The map is a top-down scaled version of the game’s world, and which can be explored at the player’s whim, but random battle encounters will occur, and if the player is not properly equipped, they could meet an easy doom by traveling too far. From the over-world, the player can enter places such as towns and caves, and within towns, players can go into stores and inns to rest and buy better items and equipment, in order to survive the over-world and dungeons. When in battle, the game shifts from the top-down perspective to a new screen, where the four player characters are on the right, and the enemies to the left. Their actions such as fight, magic, item and flee can be selected for each character to try and defeat the various baddies. Most fights are random, except for bosses and few other necessary encounters to further the plot. Battles won gain experience points, which in turn allows the players to become stronger, wield better weapons and spells, and defeat tougher foes.
(The battle screen, photo from Nintendojo.com)
It may be hard to imagine by today’s standards, but many of these features were breakthroughs, and compared to other similar titles at the time, Final Fantasy’s game play options, story progression, graphics and sound (the music’s director, Nobou Uematsu, would gain international acclaim with his later series soundtracks, including performing music from the games live with full symphony orchestras) would place FF in a league of it’s own. It popularized the RPG format in video games (though maybe not immediately, as the next two NES entries in the series did not make it outside of Japan for many years, until later system remakes were released), but still other companies tried their luck at creating RPG outings, including Sega’s Phantasy Star and Nintendo’s Earthbound, to their own varying degrees of success. Many of the flagship concepts and creatures of the Final Fantasy series, such as Chocobos and Moogles, were absent from the first game, but still, the seeds for one of the world’s most popular video game series were sown, and of course, this would be far from the final fantasy.
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