Every active member of this forum has heard of final fantasy. It's a massive franchise, encompassing more than 30 games, each with several remakes, with 14 in the main series and a 15th on its way. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most influential RPG series of all time. Final fantasy has been around for a while however, and over the years it has changed a lot. Final fantasy VII is often the most-praised, for introducing the emotionally touching/emo (YMMV) story elements that the series was known for later. But while the fifteenth game in the series (XIII-2) approaches, let us take a look back at the earliest years and the original final fantasy. For authenticity's sake, I actually played the original version using an emulator, instead of any of the remakes. So let's reveal our one-winged angel form, and fly right into final fantasy. On starting the game, the first thing you'll see is the basic premise: Four warriors, having gathered mystical orbs, have gathered to save the dying planet. It's a very basic premise, and its never really elaborated on. What are the orbs? How did the warriors find them? Where did the prophecy come from? This is for the player to fantasize up himself. A big problem with this game is that you never really see any of these described disasters. The overworld appears lush and thriving, your sailboat moves just fine (as does your airship), and there is no darkness anywhere. After the intro, you get the character select screen. Here you can choose between the 6 classes: black mage, white mage, red mage (Meee has an avatar of this guy), black belt, fighter and thief. Here, a second problem pops up: there is no explanation of anything anywhere. Classes, items, weapons, magics, armour and vehicles all come without any explanation, and thanks to the shortened names of many of these, the titles aren't self-descriptive either. Most online documentation for this game is for the remakes, which changes a lot of things, so its barely useful in this regard. But since I don't want you to suffer, I'll just give you the descriptions. The black mage is the battle mage, the white mage the cleric, the red mage the jack-of-all-trades, the black belt is a martial artist, the fighter is a one-man army and the thief is a useless *****. I chose a team of black mage, white mage, black belt and fighter, since you don't need a jack of all trades when you have all specialties. You also get to name the characters, which is actually quite annoying, since the names have to be exactly four letters long. In the end, I just abbreviated em to BLMG, WTMG, BLBL and FGTR. You start near the city of Coneria, completely unarmed and unarmored. How these guys qualified as warriors in the intro, I'll never know. Your first task is to save the princess. What this has to do with the prophecy you are never told, but its good training. Some knight named Garland went rogue and kidnapped the kid. So you buy yourselves some basic weapons, kill yourself some imps and a madpony, and buy yourself some armour and spells, before heading to Garland's castle. Every single time you take a step in the overworld, there is a chance of a random encounter, and most of your encounters will be these random ones. These random encounters make traveling a massive chore (imagine playing pokemon with all roads completely covered in tall grass and no repel). So I arrive at Garland's castle, loot half his chests (for the other half I need the mystic key), he makes the dumbest threat ever (he will knock me down, OH NOEZ!), and I kill him without much trouble. So I save the princess, and get rewarded with a ****ing bridge. Whoop-de-frigging-do. Can't even ask toll on the damn thing. Still, I can walk to the next city. Having taken the wrong way to the next city, I enter the cave of Matoya, the blind witch. Apparently someone stole her crystal ball, and now she can't see. And that while she was needed to cure the prince of elfheim! After plundering everything she owns and consulting one of her brooms (I'll check into rehab tomorrow), I reach the town of prontera. Here I learn of a vile pirate terrifying the village! So I use the money I got from random ogre encounters to buy me new aggresive spells (after looking up what the hell these spells do on the interwebz) and new weapons (after looking up who can use what weapon, and how good they are). I'm fully prepared for the battle of my life! I can take him! I have never been so stoked! BRING IT ON, YOU VILE PIRATING BASTARD! and then I don't even get to fight him. Just his crew, which is apparently made up of imps, since they only take a single hit to kill. Huh. I apparently just leave the savage pirate here, unharmed. JUSTICE HAS BEEN DEALT! I did get a nice ship out of the equation though. Since I've heard so much about this sick elven king, I guess that's where I'm going next. TO ELFHEIM! En route to elfheim, I learn that the random encounters never stop, not even if you travel by ship. I get boarded by Sahags (many names are abbreviated, so I'm gonna assume that stands for sea-hag), Oddeyes and at one point even a shark. The people of elfheim aren't really all that informative, though one person tells me about a creepy castle to the north-west. Having no other leads, I decide to check it out. So I come across an obvious villain lair with an obvious villain, who tells me he is a king and he was double-crossed by Astos, and asks me to retrieve his crown. Apparently my IQ is about 90 points lower than I thought, since I don't just hit the villain until he tells me where Matoya's crystal eye is. Ah well. It's probably won't be that bad. I got four experienced warriors, right? TUNE IN NEXT TIME, AS THE FOUR WARRIORS DESCEND INTO A FRIGGING ANNOYING DUNGEON, SINCE APPARENTLY THEY ARE TOO BLIND TO RECOGNIZE AN EVILDOER.
Good read, had a bit of laughs but...it feels like i'm reading one of those survival logs that you came up recently. Still good though.
... Marsh cave... Marsh cave is the first time you notice how much the RPG genre has evolved over the past 25 years and especially the advances in dungeoneering. If you look at a dungeon nowadays, you get intriguing level designs, varied, organized enemies, unique mechanisms and, overall, a very fluid feel. Here, it's just repetitive and rather annoying. The enemies are range from weak skeletons to poisonous slimes to poisonous werewolfs to poisonous scorpions. Yeah, poison seems to be a theme here. Because the only way to heal inside a dungeon is to use your white mage, and she runs out of magic rather quickly, dungeons amount to a test of stamina. Can you reach your goal before your health runs out(or, in the case of marsh cave, your antidotes)? Because the enemies are all random encounters(battles start randomly during walking), you can't just retreat to the surface to sleep in a TENT, CABIN or HOUSE. This also has the result of making exploration unappealing. I think this is the first RPG where I didn't even want to fully explore the dungeons. On the other hand, it is also the earliest produced RPG I ever played. Just goes to show you how far gaming has gotten. Now, back to being semi-funny. The first thing you notice when you enter marsh cave, is that the music is one of the most glorious 8-bit things ever heard by man. The second thing you'll notice is that it is, not, in fact, a cave. It's a building. The walls are pillars, the floor is paved, you enter by stairway and there are several rooms. Shows how in touch with nature those ***** elves really are! Anyway. You make your way into the cave, get poisoned to death and retreat. try two. First, you stock up on antidotes. The shop is incredibly annoying because you can only buy 1 item at a time, which takes about ten seconds. You will face about 20-30 fights during marsh cave. half of those are poisonous. Most of these 10-15 fights will leave 2 or 3 characters poisoned. So that's a grand total of 30 or so required antidotes. Have fun spending 5 minutes buying antidotes. The most annoying thing(to me) about these poisons is the fact that it doesn't make sense most of the time. Sure, oozes, spiders and scorpions make sense as being poisonous, but the most common poisonous encounter is probably the werewolf. Remember the parts of werewolf lore about them being green-furred and highly poisonous? So you make your way deep into the least cavernous parts of marsh cave, find a house in a treasure chest, and.... wait. what? Yes. In final fantasy 1, two of the handiest items, making you capable of resting outdoors, are the cabin and the house. Later in the game, when you got some more cash, you will probably carry around a small stack of cabins and houses. Don't you ever bring 3 or 4 houses along when you go camping? Anyway, you find the crown the villai... erm... mysterious elven king was looking for, and bring it back to him, but not before sleeping in the house you found (if the house fits in your backpack, couldn't you just sleep in there?). And shock and behold, the elf turns out to be Astos and attacks you. What's even weirder is that when the battle starts, you can see a more detailed sprite, and the guy looks NOTHING like an elf, which makes it very weird that you characters couldn't recognize him. The battle starts, and he instantly kills black mage, using the instant-kill erase spell. Luckily, my other guys, especially fighter and the now-bare-handed, unarmoured black belt, who deal major damage and have high defenses. Astos dies and... and.... I have no idea what to do. I press a on the place where he used to stand, no crystal for matoya. I check the throne, no crystal. I go back, all the way, through every corner of marsh cave and guess what? NO CRYSTAL! It's only after scouring the map, discovering a tiny dwarven village as well as earning some good exp and gold that I discover where the crystal is. In my pocket. No, this game gives you no message when you loot something off a boss. Bah. You go to Matoya, who gives you a herb and tells you to **** off. Seriously, what a *****. You return to elfland, re-awaken the king, and you receive... Oh my god. THE KEY! Oh, glorious, glorious key! Basically, every single zone you visited up till now, from cities to castles to dungeons to that tiny dwarven village contained some locked doors with implied piles of treasure. And as I collect this stuff, it does not disappoint. Powerful silver weaponry and armour. Artifacts such as Were (sword symbol), coral (sword symbol) or power (staff symbol). Nice amounts of gold and usable items. And even... TNT. Hell. yes.
I get to blow something up. Hell yes. I have no idea what I'm gonna blow up, but it's gonna be awesome! Maybe I get to blow up marsh cave and it's stupid werewolves. That would make me really, really happy. Since I have no idea what I'm gonna blow up, I search around and talk to everyone. Again. Finally, in the dwarven village I find a guy who needs TNT to complete his tunnel. Not exactly as much fun as blowing up a city, but if the plot dema...... HOLY **** HE JUST BLEW A HOLE IN THE DAMN CONTINENT. I mean, damn. That must have been a lot of frigging TNT, judging by the amount of land that has now been vaporized and the fact that the crater is deep enough to take my ship through. The explosion would have had to rival some of the weaker nuclear weapons. Anyways, after completely ruining the local ecosystem by connecting the sea with the local-fresh water supply, a lot more of the world is opened up to me. I can now reach two new towns, one that has been ruined by a lich and the other at the base of Gurgu volcano. Since the ruined town is closer, I go there first, and finally learn to resurrect the dead, and warp the fabric of the space-time continuum. Take that, natural order! Fueled by supernatural powers that could shatter the very threads of reality, I go out again to battle the nearest dungeon: earth cave. Now, here is a fun little dungeon for you. To get to the bottom of the earth cave, you need the ROD from sarda. to get to sarda, you need to get past the titan. To get past the titan, you need a ruby. To get a ruby, you need to do the earth cave dungeon. And since all fights are random encounters and it's impossible to actually clear out a dungeon, you need to do the dungeon twice. The first time, the boss you face is VAMPIRE, a vampire. He goes down pretty fast. The second time, after reaching sarda, and doing the dungeon all over again, plus an extra flooor, you face LICH. It's at this point that I start to wonder why the fiend of earth is not thematically connected to the earth at all. The other three fiends are all connected, so it just seems weird. Does earth have a thematic connection with death I am unaware of? The earth cave is actually fairly easy. The monsters are pretty basic, with few status effects. The only thing that can happen is you getting petrified, but that is rare, though the potions to soften you are annoyingly expensive. Both LICH and VAMPIRE are heavily damaged by both anti-undead and fire spells, something which I have in abundance due to having both a white and a black mage. Next up: walking over Lava. Are the four warriors the new, extra-crispy, Messiahs?
iirc upgraded classes have better stat gains, so might be good idea to do it when you can. Could be wrong tho
They do, but I already played past the class changes. In-game, I'm currently about to travel back in time 2000 years through the castle of fiends. I just couldn't think of anything good to say in the review for a while, that's why it drags behind so much.
The save game (used an emulator) got deleted on a computer harddrive-failures and I'm a bit busy to play up to the final level again.
Aw... Fair enough... FFI is the only one I never beat all the way. Game got so freaking grinding and the status causing monsters were too numerous and the money was such a pain to get and the leveling was such a pain. I quit at the crystal eye part. xD -___- One day I will defeat it.
