Well, the JRPG kick has officially gone into overdrive. I've purchased the Pixel Remaster bundle of Final Fantasies I-VI for my PS5. I've heard, admittedly, mixed reviews of these remakes, but it seems a good way to get to experience these classic games.
I've played a few hours of the original Final Fantasy, and it's interesting to see the way things started off. As a disclaimer, the Pixel Remaster actually makes the game look more like it's from the SNES era than its original NES incarnation. The character sprites would fit in reasonably with Locke, Celes, and Terra (and Crono) and the battle screen is pretty similar to 6.
There are some oddities, though: the text and text boxes are not at all pixelated in the same way. And the music seems fully orchestrated (or if not, done with really impressive modern synthesizers).
Final Fantasy games are, of course, known for their complex plots and compelling characters. But boy howdy had they not really figured that part out yet. The four party members are all there from the start and have no canonical names (I've named them after deities from my homebrew D&D setting) and you can pick between their classes when you start the game. The default is Warrior, Thief, White Mage and Black Mage. I swapped out the Thief for a Monk - I know eventually I'm supposed to unequip the monk's weapon, but I think I'm not quite at that point yet. Anyway, you can also have a Red Mage, which I think is a little bit like a Bard in D&D in that it gets a little of everything.
"Plot" wise, so far at least the game is a pretty boilerplate series of nested quests. I fought the rogue knight (who, spoiler alert, winds up coming back as the final boss of the game) to rescue the princess of Cornelia, which then got the king to have a bridge built so that I could go to a town, beat up some pirates, take their ship, sail to Elfheim, where the prince was stuck in a cursed slumber. So I check out some ruins where the "elf king" says he's trapped unless he can get his crown back, which sends me into a pretty intense dungeon in the marshes. I fight some legally-not-mind-flayers to get the crown, bring it back to the king, he turns out to be the dark elf king who cursed the prince in the first place, but when I kill him, I get this crystal eye back. So I bring that eye to a friendly blind witch I'd encountered earlier and she gives me a "Jolt Potion," which, when brought back to the prince, wakes him up. He now gives me a "Mystic Key" that opens a massive number of doors across the world I've encountered, and will presumably allow me to progress further (though I know of a few locations I'll want to use that key in, including the deepest part of that pretty intense dungeon in the marsh that I'd gotten the crown in).
Gameplay-wise, you basically get a random encounter every time you take your fifth step. Combat is sort of turn-based. You actually enter all of your party's commands at the same time - a sort of "top of the round" moment, but the order in which they go is somewhat randomized (I think there's some stat like speed or agility that governs it.) Thus, if you are set to attack a monster that's already been killed, you wind up defaulting to whatever the game would point you to first. I think there was a similar idea in Chrono Trigger (minus the "queueing up all the turns at once" idea).
Fascinatingly, the Mages' spellcasting actually works a bit like D&D - you have a certain number of MP for each level of spell (but you can't up-cast lower-level spells). Each Mage can learn up to three spells of any given level, and will need to "forget" them to learn others in that slot. Generally, I've found that it's best to be conservative with spells (not unlike in D&D) which does, unfortunately, lead you to kind of just spamming the "attack" action on all of your characters, with the Mages usually doing very minor damage.
As with so many games from the 1980s, and particularly those that were the first entry in what is now a long-running, beloved series, there's a lot of elements here that feel like more of a proof-of-concept than what we'd expect of a full game.
Still, obviously it was innovative enough to launch one of gaming's biggest franchises, and they'd continue to revise and reform their design philosophy.
Three hours in (I believe) I think I've explored nearly half the map, so I'm not expecting this to take the amount of time I usually expect a Final Fantasy game to do (I think I beat Rebirth at the hundred-hour mark).
And I'll be curious to see when the games start really feeling like the fully-formed versions of themselves. Before today, the oldest Final Fantasy game I'd played was VI.
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