I've had this game for quite some time on my NES Mini, and it's a game that I've been meaning to play through for quite some time. I played through the Dawn of Souls remake on GBA when I was younger, but I've always been curious as to just how different the original NES game feels to play. A friend of mine was talking about Final Fantasy a fair bit a few days back, and it gave me the push I needed to finally hook up the NES Mini and give this game a play. It took me about 24 hours to play through the English version of the game with relatively copious save state use (with my 2 fighter, 1 white mage, and 1 black mage party).

The original Final Fantasy's story is a pretty neat one and it's remarkably complex given that it's a game from 1987, when JRPGs were still something so so new to the world. You play the four Warriors of Light, four player-created party members who are here to save the world. The four fiends have taken the power of the four elements, and you need to defeat them and save the day. It's a simple premise, of course, and the signposting can be a little rough at times for exactly where to go, but the conspiracy behind it all is neat to watch play out, and is still entertaining all these years later. Most impressive of all for me was the localization. Sure, the game is from 1987 and the localization is from 1990, but it's still remarkable just how well put together the translation for this is.

The gameplay of FF1 is the real showstopper here, and in no small part due to how until very recently every port of this game stripped out all the unique (and admittedly rather bothersome) aspects of its design. Like many early JRPGs, FF1 takes a lot of its base ideas and aesthetic trappings from Western RPGs like Ultima, Wizardry, and most notably, Dungeons & Dragons. Sure, you have a party of four characters, the order of the party they're in dictates how likely they are to draw enemy fire (more likely in front, less likely in back), and you equip armor to get stronger and fight to get experience points to level up. You have six different jobs you can pick from, each having their own strengths and weaknesses (granted some of them have such awful weaknesses they're not worth using at all). Many aspects of FF1 aren't terribly remarkable, even for the time.

But the really unique thing about how FF1 plays compared to so many other RPGs of the time is that it eschews any kind of MP system. Instead, you have D&D-style spell charges, and your mages need to rest at an inn (or consume an expensive overworld-only item) to get those charges back. What this means is that you need to be very careful about when you dish out your spells, and really you never have a good opportunity to sling spells about with how large and maze-like the dungeons you're in are. Monsters hit so hard, your most common way of healing will likely be (like I did) always buying back up to 99 healing potions whenever you go back to town, since healing with white magic is such a quickly tapped-out resource. Running from battles, particularly in the later dungeons, is also a very good strategy to conserve resources for similar reasons.

Overall I'd certainly put FF1 on the easier side of NES RPGs, but it can be absolutely devious with how the rare wandering packs of instant death-toting mages can be in later dungeons. There are of course no continues, and you need to save at an inn if you want a continue point from where you die, so dying is a really mean punishment. This is especially true with how gratuitously long any battle takes to play out. This game makes Persona 1 or Final Fantasy 7 look like they have fast battle systems with how long they can take. Every attack to every target takes so long to play out that an area of effect spell against the enemy maximum of nine targets can take over a minute between all the animations and loading times for the game's number crunching. That sheer time investment more than anything else is probably the biggest thing that makes FF1 quite so difficult to go back to these days, at least in its original form.

The presentation is really pretty, and it still holds up well even now. You have the distinctive profile-view of the party vs. the monsters, with the party's sprites being more simple and the monsters' being more detailed, and the animations that the party do when they attack must've been pretty dang slick looking back in '87. The music is also quite good, although there was a pretty surprisingly small amount of it. There's only one battle theme, for example, with even the final boss not getting his own battle theme.


Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. FF1 was a very important game historically, and for an 8-bit game it holds up pretty darn well, but that's sorta damning with faint praise with just how brutal so many 8-bit JRPGs are. I'd say that, at a glance, FF1 is certainly one of the 8-bit JRPGs that has aged the best, but with just how BORING it can be to sit even one random encounter, this is a game that will likely only appeal to those very interested in their video game history, or only more devout JRPG fans.