Final Fantasy (ファイナルファンタジー), released 12/18/1987, developed and published by Square/

This is a biggie; the first in a long running series that continues to this day. In the Super Famicom era, FF was always head and shoulders above other contemporary RPGs — is this true in the Famicom era as well? I would say so. At this point there were only four of these classic top-down command-based RPGs: Dragon Quest 1 and 2, Glory of Heracles, and Momotaro Densetsu. Final Fantasy does advance on them in several ways, I think.

First off, the name: for a long time, I had always heard that this was called “Final” Fantasy because it was Square’s last attempt at a game before they went bankrupt. However, Sakaguchi Hironobu, the developer, has said in interviews that they wanted something that would shorten to “FF” in order to be memorable, and that “Final” was a word that was familiar to Japanese people. The Japanese wikipedia article doesn’t even mention the bankruptcy story, so that might just be apocrypha that started outside of Japan.

As soon as you start you choose your 4 Light Warrior classes. This is the first JRPG-style game that lets you do this — the designers would have been familiar with it from Wizardry and Ultima, though. The selection forms a big part of FF1’s replayability and ensured a long running popularity. People tried out unusual parties and also proved that the game can be cleared with a single Light Warrior of any class (even un-upgraded).

The visuals are similar to Dragon Quest on the overworld although they found a way to code faster movement for the airship. The battles are different, though:

Unlike the Dragon Quest style where you can only see the enemies, here you can see the players as well and they have little animations for their attacks. The results are still communicated via text boxes, but it’s a bit more visually striking than DQ. The battle system is pretty basic at this stage; unfortunately you have the “ineffective” message if you target someone who gets killed that turn. Magic is done via Wizardry-like spell levels, and all the spells are bought in stores.

The game came out in 1990 in the US (after Dragon Quest III). I have fond memories of the game — I subscribed to Nintendo power so I got this hint guide issue. I’m not sure why I thought I would like the game; I believe that I had played a bit of Dragon Warrior and Ultima: Exodus but for some reason I was obsessed with the game even before I got it. I read the strategy guide over and over again.

The game didn’t disappoint me. I played it through several times although I didn’t always know what I was doing despite the guide. I remember never using Cabins or Tents, and I didn’t understand how useful the heal items (helmet/staff) were. I played through the entire game without realizing you could equip more than one piece of armor. I remember that I had made it to the sea palace before my save game got deleted and so I had to start over. But I did finish the game.

I think this game is clearly ahead of the other top-down command RPGs of the time, but it still shows its age in a lot of ways. The interface has a number of issues: any status effect puts the character at the end of the marching order. There is no way to buy more than 1 item at a time. There are pretty severe equipment inventory restrictions, particularly in a game where you might want to keep multiple weapons around because of their effects.

There are also a surprising number of bugs, including some pretty serious one. Intelligence has no effect. The monk armor ability is glitched, as is the chance to run from battles. Some spells have no effect (or the opposite effect). There is a patch that fixes all or most of these bugs and adds some QoL improvements, which is probably the best way to play this game if you don’t want to play one of the remakes (which bring much more drastic changes to the gameplay).

On the whole if you had to choose an RPG from 1987 to play, Final Fantasy would be a great choice despite all the issues. Here’s Zenic’s playthrough of the whole thing.