I’ve always been an NES purist when it comes to Final Fantasy 1 (and 2 and 3). I had only ever played the original versions of those games before and I find them excellent and everything I had seen of every other version only looked uglier and the music worse. HOWEVER, I was not always like this, my first experience with 4 being the DS version as a teen, and with the recent release of the pixel remasters and my also recent forays into the world of FF romhacks, I’ve been interested in exploring other editions of other games, particularly the older ones, where the changes are more radical and transformative. Picking Which Version of an early FF to play is always a nightmare if you care about little details, because Square is a bizzarro company that like most media companies equates modernity with quality and doesn’t understand why anybody would care about preservation or find quote unquote antiquated technologies and techniques more appealing than whatever when can put out today (on a limited budget OF COURSE). So what we get is a series of games where, for at least FFs 1 – 5 there is no true definitive version, but rather many unique versions, not quite ports and rarely quite remakes, that mix and match qualities haphazardly. Extra content here, different graphics there, tweaked gameplay one day that’s reverted the next - and no rhyme or reason to which edition will see which changes retained or revised. Hell, even the Pixel Remaster series, the most recent attempt by Square to pedal a “Definitive” last word on the early entries in the series after over a decade of people yelling at them for putting hideous phone ports on Steam, goes the route of entirely new spritework that’s like kinda sorta in the style of Final Fantasy V’s original sprites but with a unique flair, and an entirely rearranged, fully orchestrated soundtrack. As positively as these games have been received and as appealing as their individual elements are, I personally find it difficult to accept such a radical departure as a true vision of what this game is, when the NES one is right there and slaps super hard. All of this is to say that my choice to check out the PSP version of this game was almost entirely arbitrary and based on how easy it was to put on my Vita, but I did sort of consider it as the “definitive” culmination of the changes that had been building in this iteration of Final Fantasy 1 Remakes.

At the very beginning of this, I said that I mostly thought final fantasy remakes were uglier and had worse music and I think that’s true, this game looks and sounds immeasurably worse than its source material. But it’s hard to compare to something so tightly and perfectly tuned to the limits of its hardware and working constraints. I wouldn’t want to iterate upon the NES battle theme either. An impossible challenge. So, taking this game’s aesthetics on their own merits, they are quite lovely. The spritework is incredible, Square was really sending incredible artists to die in the FF handheld remake mines out here, and their work, especially in enemy sprites and the new battle scene backgrounds, are gorgeous. I think the animations are on point too, mimicking the character of the originals really well, even when animations are added or embellished. I’m sure having Kazuko Shibuya’s spritework to reference in the 16 bit games helps a lot with being able to keep that character in the art design here, but even so I think it’s basically the highest compliment I can give to say that this game LOOKS like Final Fantasy, looks right at home in the series, and my brain never really questioned that, even though no Final Fantasy ever actually looked anything like this.

I can’t say the same for the music. Game sounds like shit, I hate it. Yet to hear a version of an NES Final Fantasy song that sounded good on more modern tech, they’re just not written for it. There’s a richness, a fullness, a twang, a bing to the NES compositions. They’re simple but they’re strong, and they’re all timers for a reason. The PSP arrangements aren’t BAD and they’re valiant efforts – I can feel the attempt to emulate the verve of that battle theme, but the soundchip, these fake instruments, they just can’t pull off the Vibe. Adding horns, a drum kit – these things don’t work, and that’s true for all of the music here, and it’s kind of a bummer.

Also a bummer is the changes made to the way the game plays. Final Fantasy II, as maligned as it is by people who read about it on the internet, did a lot to establish the long-term character of the series by introducing a ton of its iconic elements, waaaay more of them than the first game did. Final Fantasy I, by contrast, is rooted at least as much if not more in wholesale ripping off dungeons and dragons as it is setting the tentpoles for its own series. This remake (and, presumably, most others, though I know the pixel remaster doesn’t) understandably but unwisely tries to mechanically align things more with what would come later, after FF4 firmly set in stone what the series looked and played like. The biggest change to the gameplay is the replacement of early D&D style spell charges for mage characters with a JRPG standard MP system, which throws everything out of whack in your favor. There’s a lot less strategic consideration to dungeon crawls in particular. Where in the NES version it was very similar to OG Dragon Quest, with your magical resources being essential to your survival in terms of having enough to handle the boss that you expected to be at the end of a dungeon but also, critically, for the return trip. With MP, that scarcity is easily mitigated by ethers, which are available at most shops and cost little enough that less than halfway through the game is was easy for me to keep a stock of 99 of them at all times, and with the way MP pools grow steadily you get way more casts per spell (especially useful spells that see regular use like status relief and mid-range healing ones) than the charge system would ever afford you. Even if the game wasn’t seemingly tuned to let you just kind of steamroll through the whole thing no probbo, which it definitely is, this MP thing alone would be a huge game changing factor to the way the game is played regardless.

So what DIDN’T they take from us here. Well they simply can’t take the truly evil dungeon designs, where you go down a five floor dungeon made of increasingly complex fuck you mazes and full of enemies that poison and overpower you, kill a boss, half to walk all the way out of that dungeon, only to go talk to a guy and have him say “oh shit you only killed the vampire? The real bad guy was like ten feet behind him get back down there you fuckin moron, you idiot” and then having to go do all of that AGAIN right after. They didn’t take the rat tail. They DID take the sci-fi trappings of the sky fortress which is a fucking weird thing to do considering all the robots are still here but they DIDN’T TAKE THE ROBOTS so I’ll call that a win. They didn’t take the sense of subversive mindbending ambition that is the actual plot of this game, which people like to mock the ps1-and-later entries for but is absolutely here from the very beginning, ambitiously, and beautifully. There’s this prevailing opinion propagated by people who haven’t actually played this game or weren’t paying attention when they did or, understandably, were misled by modernized, sanded down versions like this, that Final Fantasy 1 is a game lacking character, as basic as any of its tabletop war gaming predecessors or early PC RPG forebears and this just isn’t true in the moment to moment. There is genuine weirdness and high ambition all over every inch of this game in every aspect of its design, and despite a lot of the stuff in this version actively (though surely accidentally) working to cover that up, it peeks through the cracks regardless.

I don’t think it’s wrong to make a game easier (I simply love easy games, personally), and I don’t think it’s wrong to mix things up when you’re making these kinds of remakes and ports, but it all comes back to preservation. For something like 25 years, people were gonna play the playstation version or the GBA version, or this version, which is just the GBA version at higher resolution with some PS1 shit slathered over the top. Now they’ll play the Pixel Remaster. For most of those people, it’s not even a matter of elective choice, it’s a matter of availability. It’s just hard to get access to this game, and to know everything that’s been changed, and to understand the way those things impact the experience. It’s not that most people would even care probably so much as it sucks that Square and most other developers are so callous with their own history. There’s just no access to an authentic vision of where these games came from, and where they came from was fuckin sick! Final Fantasy rules, it’s a great game! I wish they would let me play it without like, stealing it lol. But hey, no choice no choice, I encourage everybody to play Final Fantasy I for the NES. This one is okay too. Ultimately I think everybody should just play Final Fantasy, however they do it. It’s a really cool game.