Earlier this year I got a chance to go to the Distant Worlds concert, which does orchestral arrangements of music from the Final Fantasy series. I'm a fan, of the classics at least, but even then I have a big gap around the beginning of the series. This was motivation to pick up the pixel remaster series. The pixel remaster is an effort to sort of unify the look and feel of the first 6 Final Fantasies. The also have some minor changes. My specific goal here was to play the first 4 games, which I never had to any significant degree.
This journey starts with the original. Final Fantasy was a landmark title and basically help setoff the JRPG genre (despite what Naoki Yoshida says I think it's a term of endearment). For me it's specifically interesting looking back as I got in much later and this history was not super familiar aside from some assimilation via general Final Fantasy fandom. The immediate thing that stuck out was how it sticks a lot closer to the older D&D style RPG. There isn't actually a named character, later franchises meta games like Dissidia included a still generic "Hero of Light" who I guess embodies a warrior class. Instead players of the first game are free to name their own character and choose their classes. These classes stick for the remainder of the game unlike future titles so you better choose wisely. I went with a default of warrior, thief, white mage and black mage. It's good the game gives you this default because I couldn't imagine not having a warrior in the first slot. What isn't immediately obvious is that the ordering of the characters determines how often they are targeted. The warrior is the tank of Final Fantasy so using it to absorb blows is nearly essential. Mages should come last as they are fragile.
I had fully expected the game to be a bit of a slog, old games are just like that but I actually found it to be fairly compelling in 2024. Yes, it's still tedious with random battles but the overall game length is pretty short and aside from a few places I never felt it was unfair. There was definitely some early shock though. Revives don't happen at inns, you need to go to a church and pay a high fee for it, or an expensive phoenix down item (which leaves you with 1 HP). In the early game this can really eat into your funds so you need to be careful about KOs. Another was being hit with poison and having no way to get rid of it. It damages you every step, and inns don't heal it, you must get an antidote. This is some ways is refreshing because you really need to stock up before heading out. The overall plot is thin and requires going from town to town, dungeon to dungeon in a non-linear fashion. This freedom was pretty unexpected. As such the way enemies scale is pretty flat. You fight a lot of the same enemies throughout the game, you get marginally stronger from level ups but equipment is a much bigger deal and this means that dungeon spelunking takes a toll regardless of the order you choose to tackle them. Dungeons themselves haven't changed much in 30 years, they are mazy with some treasure chests (sometimes with the good stuff), a lot of random battles to slowly eat your resources and a boss at the end. Critically, you cannot save in dungeons (the pixel remasters let you with a special save system) so you need to slog through to the bottom and defeat the boss in one go (a few require revisits). This can create a fair amount of tension, do you try and wade your way back to save and heal or keep forging ahead knowing you risk a boss encounter at the end? I actually wish this was more prevalent in modern games. For the most part though, the difficulty wasn't bad, bosses don't last more than a few turns so as long as you don't get some unlucky ambushes that KO your fragile units it's mostly the tedium of actually fighting through the dungeon.
Although I can't be 100% sure this wasn't just the pixel remaster. I did a little research on the changes and they didn't seem too significant. The original doesn't really properly randomize things so you can cheese it, but at the same time items are a little more expensive. The remaster also gives you a map which shows you a little bit further than you normal could see which allows you to avoid some dead ends. There are also other features for auto-battling, turning off battles and making these easier in general I didn't use. From a presentation standpoint they it looks nice. I think some of the art comes from the GBA remakes but some was redone to be a little more accurate to the original. The redone music is also very nice and you can switch back and forth with the original, something I did often to change it up.
There were a lot of things I think the remaster missed out on though. The first was that text was awful and looked out of place as it was oddly high-res, a common pet-peeve of mine when playing modern 2D pixel games. Thankfully the console version fixed this issue because there were so many complaints, giving an option for an appropriately pixelated font that looks good but it's also not the default. I actually had it on for a while before I noticed the option to turn it on. While I really liked switching back and forth with the music, I really wish there was a quick button toggle to do it so I didn't have to go into the menu and could easily try out the differences in tracks. With that I'm also sad there's not option for original graphics or at least a widescreen version of them. At least for the NES titles the SNES style pixel art just isn't the same.
In any case the game itself was quite playable for being as old as it was. Progression was somewhat cryptic so I used a guide (that's how we would have done it in the 90s with Nintendo Power) but maybe not so bad it was required. Some things are still mysterious like the number of hits and physical damage. The speed/agility stat is tied to this but sometimes it just feels like you do low damage even with many hits. The usefulness of haste as a damage booster was not revealed until the very end fighting the last boss. This boss is actually pretty unfair and you can get very unlucky. In fact if he casts haste on himself it's like to ruin the run because he can one hit KO any party member even with protect up. Since reviving with phoenix down gives you 1 hp and most of his other attacks are magic that targets everyone it's nearly impossible to turn it around if your main healer gets killed. He can also caste curaja to heal half his HP. It took me 3 tries to get a run where he didn't do either so I did use the pixel remaster to pseudo-save-scum a bit but I wasn't doing that whole dungeon 3 times.
I'm very pleasantly surprised and happy I finally gave it a chance.
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