Rarely can a game’s ending evoke the same sentiments I get at a graduation. I love an ending that makes me reflect on the challenges and frustrations that I had to deal with on the journey but also makes me grateful to have completed the experience, even to the point of wanting to do the whole thing over, knowing what I know now. I realize that at the end of the journey nothing got easier, I just got better.
My relationship with the Final Fantasy series is one that I always feel helps place my adult life in different sections. I vividly remember grinding through Final Fantasy VI in a grimy house that my track teammates all lived in. As a joke we named the ensemble of characters after ourselves. To this day, I still take a second when I hear people talk about the game and use the name Sabin for one of the characters. I have to remember “Oh yeah, that’s who we named Brian.”
I beat both VII and IX in a dingy apartment just outside of Tokyo. During a time in my life where I would go days without actually speaking English to anyone it was refreshing to continue the tradition of naming characters after teammates and going on an adventure with them, even as I was all alone on my own adventure across the world.
Final Fantasy XII had started in the throws of the COVID pandemic and maybe one day I’ll actually get around to finishing it, but as I occupy my newest male living space, something just felt right about buying a classic FF game and running through it. Not just a classic, but the classic.
My own March Madness took hold as I bought the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy I, rolling with a Fighter named after the super-senior who guided me through year one, a black-belt named after my soul brother, a black mage who took the name of our track team’s tomboyish tree-hugger, and I took the role of the white mage, because every squad needs a healer. You don’t win March Madness without an unassuming white-boy after all.
Over the thirteen hours it took for me to beat the game I realized just how different of an experience playing video games has become since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. RPG’s were still in their relative infancy as they were making their way off of the table top and onto the TV screen. To a degree, the first Final Fantasy feels like it necessitates a table, given all the study-material that was packed in with the original cartridge.
I wasn’t going in completely blind to be fair. I could still recite Duane And Brand0’s Final Fantasy Rap on command, but having that as my only guide for what was to come is kind of like going into a US History class armed with only the Schoolhouse Rock songs.
My expectations were actually betrayed. Years of angry video game reviewers had me thinking that NPC’s and townsfolk would give deliberately misleading information like in Zelda 2 or Castlevania II. (Something about NES sequels and deceptive NPC’s. I’m not sure what was in the water in Taito City during that period, but it really had all the developers on some big hater energy.) Instead, just about every NPC speaks with something important to say, but the issue is technological limitations made them say the literal most essential thing, to a point where it seems like pointless flavor text.
E.G.
In a modern game someone would guide you in the right direction and say something like: “Ah, our prince is under a sleeping spell. If only someone could find the witch’s seeing-eye crystal so she could make a remedy for our beloved prince.”
In Final Fantasy 1, the most you get is something to the effect of: “Our prince won’t wake up.” Then someone else says, “There is a witch to the north of here.” Maybe someone else in the town would say, “That witch in the north can make a remedy that can wake up our prince.” You get stuck, exhaust your options, then go to the witch who says something like “Where is my crystal? I can’t see without it!”
Again, it’s not impossible. Every word is intentional, but the game can’t do much more to help you. Much like the first Dark Souls players are gonna have to exhaust every possibility, or take diligent and deliberate notes on the words said to them, either by NPC’s or by real players who have posted in the ancient GameFAQ’s forums. Once they go through just about everything including dungeons littered with random encounters, tiles that damage you with every step, revive spells that bring the dead back with literally 1 HP, and rare Warmech spawn, they either make the breakthrough they need, or realize they have to change their entire approach.
Ultimately though, those changes in approach are what led me to getting the dub and taking Chaos down. See, the thing about a game that is as limited technologically as Final Fantasy 1 is that the narrative isn’t going to call for some new attack to be given to me, no new ability that comes through thanks to the power of friendship. Plot armor will not get you the win; it’s gonna have to be you. Like March Madness itself, the team that best adapts to change, and molds its game plan to specifically beat the one opponent that’s against them on the court, is the team that’s going to win.
Yeah, blasting magic spells from the back row may have been “my game” but it didn’t get me anywhere. It just got me stuck in a loop of endless defeat, AKA the Fordham Men’s basketball experience.
Final Fantasy 1 is still a winner because it teaches one of the best lessons that a game can, “if things are not working, you gotta change something.” It’ll do that in ways that are fair, ways that are cheap, but always in a way that makes you glad you started that journey, and that Sakaguchi’s fantasy was anything but final.
