Final Fantasy (Pixel Remaster)

It's Final Fantasy.

I played the "Pixel Remaster" on my PS5.

Final Fantasy is an RPG, the only one that I need, it's the RPG for me but you know that already. I mean, it's Final Fantasy. There's no way you're reading this without knowing at least something about the series, but if I had to explain what this first game is, well, it's a turn-based JRPG where you have a party of four characters and get into random battles while slowly leveling up and getting better gear. 

Where most other fantasy video games, including the rest of the series to my knowledge, use an MP system (essentially, a separate life-bar for how much magic-juice you can spend) this first game effectively takes the notion of spell slots from Dungeons and Dragons. Instead of spells costing a set amount of points taken from an overall pool, you have a certain number of spell slots per spell level, with each tier of spell only able to be cast a set number of times. I know it sounds like I'm starting this off on a rather specific technicality, but as this is something taken straight out of DnD I feel it shows that they weren't exactly subtle about their inspirations.

There are also monsters taken straight out of the DnD Player's Handbook as well as fantasy races scattered around such as intelligent dragons, elves, and Scottish-sounding dwarves, you need to find the Rosetta Stone at one point, and you can forge Excalibur; this game is very much a collection of influences, a kind of Ur-Fantasy game, but that's kind of to be expected. This is the first one, after all, from a time when they had only set out to, well, make a fantasy video game and not something people would be picking apart decades later. 

That's not to say there aren't elements of what-I-have-come-to-know-as-Final-Fantasy in here, however. The story of this game tasks four Warriors of Light with gathering some crystals to undo some great evil. You've got Black Mages, White Mages, and Red Mages, there's an airship, the name Cid gets mentioned; while there may not be Chocobos or Moogles or Cactuars or what-have-you yet, you can every now and then see shades of the games to come.

I keep talking around how this game plays because, well, it's a pretty standard RPG as far as I'm concerned. While this is the first game in this series I've finished, I've played countless games inspired by this, from RPG Maker indies to more recent AAA JRPGs, and this game just feels like a pretty basic one of those. I'm cognizant of its place in history, but it doesn't do much to stick with me outside of being a bit of a historical novelty. That's not without merit, I've certainly played far worse games for weaker reasons, but the end result is a pretty by-the-books JRPG.

I played the "Pixel Remaster" of this, and it overall seems like a fairly decent way to play the game. There are some visual flourishes and additions to the presentation that I don't necessarily love, but for the most part it's a fancier-looking way to play what is largely the original game, and I'm okay with that. You also have the option to enable a CRT filter (it looks fine but I don't think I'd want to play a whole game that way) and can switch to a modern arrangement of the music (I stuck with the chiptunes). I know it's not an authentic recreation of what the original game was like, but for a flashy remaster you could do a whole lot worse.

For what it's worth, here's a screenshot of my endgame save screen.

About 15-and-a-half hours in all.

Final Fantasy is good. Pretty bog-standard, all things considered, but that's to be expected. It's, well, the first Final Fantasy. They hadn't quite established all of the things that would come to be commonplace in later games but even at the start it feels incredibly familiar.

I mentioned earlier that I hadn't finished any Final Fantasy games, but that doesn't mean I had no prior experience with the series. I grew up loving Crisis Core (a game I played about half of) and, uh, Mario Hoops 3-on-3, and in the years since I've played a couple dozen hours of FFXIV and a bit of FFXV, but I've always gotten distracted by other things before finishing them. The one Final Fantasy-adjacent thing I did have a complete experience with was, well, the webcomic 8-Bit Theater. It was crass and I have zero idea how well it holds up (it ended when I was a teenager) but that was a webcomic that used sprites from this first game to very loosely adapt the plot, and I have fond memories of it.