Final Fantasy Origins is a compilation of Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II for the PlayStation. It is the re-release of remastered versions on the PlayStation platform.
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I probably only love this because of nostalgia. The PSX version of Final Fantasy 1 is the best objectively
The first two final fantasies are very important historically but there are better final fantasies to play specially if you are a newcomer. Play this only if you are a true fan of the franchise, otherwise, no need to rage play these games, specially II, which is pretty broken lol
For some ungodly reason Square decided that every subsequent re-release of Final Fantasy 1 should be based on the completely optional easy mode present in this version. As a result, this is the most authentic re-release without the bugs of the NES game.
The mere presence of Final Fantasy II brings it down one star.
The mere presence of Final Fantasy II brings it down one star.
FF I is a good one while still a little sluggish compared to any other version, but II is awfully influenced by those pointless loadings SFX making the pacing more dreadful as the base game could already suffer (that's why GBA and PSP are still the best ones. For both the first 2 legendary games).
Awesome that FF I has both the NES difficulty and an easy one to just enjoy the game. A very cute feature. FF II doesn't need that considering how broken it can get.
I noticed Backloggd put the same versions as "2001" for both PS1 and WonderSwan separately. I guess it would make more sense to consider those just the WonderSwan then and specifying in Origins case which ones have been played/completed.
Awesome that FF I has both the NES difficulty and an easy one to just enjoy the game. A very cute feature. FF II doesn't need that considering how broken it can get.
I noticed Backloggd put the same versions as "2001" for both PS1 and WonderSwan separately. I guess it would make more sense to consider those just the WonderSwan then and specifying in Origins case which ones have been played/completed.
A few months after picking up a PlayStation 2 and telling myself "just put games on the hard drive, do NOT go down the rabbit hole of buying used games," I saw the cover of Final Fantasy Origins and was so spellbound by Yoshitaka Amano's gorgeous art that I broke my solemn vow. It's just that meme of the guy looking over his shoulder, my gaze pulled away from my 1TB Western Digital hard drive towards the alluring figure of Final Fantasy Origins... Yeah... Yeah this game's got a great ass...
Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!
I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, andthat's just what daddy wants its really graet. .
More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.
This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.
Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review
Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!
I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, and
More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.
This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.
Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review
And so began my simping of re-releases.