Garland is #3 on the “Final Fantasy in least to most order of how lame their major antagonists are” list

Garland gets a lot of leeway on this list due to the one simple fact that he can claim what a good 60% of other FF villains can’t: he can clap his hands because he’s bad and he knows it. As a black knight he looks as cool as a final fantasy villain probably can look, and his disappointing introduction notwithstanding (we all know about “I will knock you all down,” of course, and then the relative ease your party gets to knock him down instead) he proves to be a surprisingly effective antagonist within the limitations that come with being the first ever JRPG known to mankind. He is, of course, merely playing as a pushover in the beginning, slyly hiding the fact that not only is he responsible for unleashing the four fiends upon the earth, and not only will he continue to do so via a time-loop should the heroes prove successful, but he is also the fearsome demon Chaos! (Chaos is by a mile the coolest looking final form boss the franchise ever put out, in my opinion, and not to mention also in dissidia’s opinion, as he is that franchise’s main antagonist. I remember seeing him the bestiary in the instruction booklet for the game as a blacked out silhouette of some horned winged freakish beast, and I couldn’t wait to see what he looked like). The game hints that Garland used to be a noble knight and was maybe influenced by Chaos, but that’s as far as that goes. He made the choice to be bad, to have Chaos act through him, and it’s refreshing to finally see a baddie in one of these games delight in his own wicked actions. Points do have to be deducted, however, for the aforementioned time-loop scheme, which to this day I am still trying to figure out if it makes sense or not.

Now that I got that out of my system, let’s talk about the rest of this game. This was the first RPG I ever played, and while it is not the best FF it is probably my favorite. When I was a kid my mom let my sister and I each pick a game at the Toys R Us, and while I picked TMNT III: The Manhattan Project, my sister picked this one because the cover looked cool. And while TMNT III was fine, I still think about this game to this day, as a grown ass man in his thirtysomethings. It was in fact this game that got me into the other more popular ones in the series. I saw a commercial on TV for FFVII and recognized the name from this one, and the rest, as they say.

The FF series always straddles an uneasy weird three-legged line between medieval DnD nerd shit, steampunk, and straight up anime nonsense. With the exception of the steampunkish Sky Castle and airship, this one leans almost entirely into the medieval nerd shit here, and I am here for it. As much as I love Dragon Quest, that series really fucked up by having front-facing encounters. The enemies are wonderfully designed, especially the bosses, and even when they’re common zombies or ghosties or skeletons or dragons, their dynamic poses make them look like they’re floating or diving toward your party, and it was satisfying to see your party swing their weapons and cast their spells at them.

If there is a gripe I still have with it though, it’s the “ineffective” glitch. I’ve seen a lot of people try to defend it and they’re all wrong. They’ll say something like “it really forces you to pay attention to what kind of enemies you’re fighting and how much damage they take.” First of all, no it doesn’t. You still end up encountering these monsters over and over again and it’s no less grindy and tedious when you know that your five thousandth goblin takes a little less damage to beat than your five hundredth ogre. And second, that’s not how fighting works. You’re not artillery! You’re not aiming for the real estate your baddie is on, you’re fighting the baddie itself! You really are gonna sit there and try to tell me that when you wind up to kill an imp, but I kill the imp first, that you’re just gonna swing at where you were aiming anyway, and not just move on to the next baddie to help your friends out? No, it’s a glitch and it always was. The only other rpgs to persist with the stupid ineffective glitch are FFII, which is objectively the worst FF, and Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, which is objectively the worst RPG. And if you think it’s a good feature then you’re either a mark or you’re ProJared, and neither one is anything to be proud of.

Aside from that, feel free to check this out on a mobile or GBA version, or maybe a patched NES rom which fixes some of the other stupid glitches, like finally being able to buy more than one potion at a time. Well sure, and why not? Come on, don’t act like you still have a working NES. I know you don’t, those things are like fifty thousand dollars.