Final Fantasy I Down, V to Go

 I've now finished the original Final Fantasy in its PS5 (maybe PS4) "Pixel Remaster" version.

Like a lot of NES-era games, this feels kind of like a proof of concept. I know the Pixel Remaster has a few tweaks to make the game a little more like its later counterparts - Phoenix Down, for example, did not exist in the original, so the only way to revive a party member was to go to a town temple and have a priest resurrect them, or to use the Life spell. What I wonder, though, is whether Ether was also a later edition. Being able to restore your casters' spell slots mid-dungeon absolutely made the game easier, and I think it would be a lot more challenging (and frankly, tedious) if you couldn't re-up your Firagas, Holies, and Flares.

My party composition was only slightly changed from the default - I replaced the Thief with a Monk. My Monk, Jador, was a little slow to get up to speed, and was certainly less durable than my warrior, Coran, but once he got to the point where the Iron Nunchaku wasn't any better than his unarmed attacks, he kind of took off, and only when I was able to get Coran some really amazing weapons like Excalibur or Masamune (the latter only available in the final dungeon, and the former basically right before it) could he keep up.

In terms of difficulty, the game feels way easier than other titles. I don't know if this is due to some rebalancing or if, simply, as someone who grew up on JRPGs, the strategies are second nature to me at this point. Even the major bosses, the four Fiends, seemed to only last 3-4 rounds, whereas any other fight rarely took more than two.

Indeed, the only time I felt genuinely threatened was when facing off against Chaos, the game's final boss. Even then, the fight went relatively smoothly - I kept Haste and Temper up on the two melee characters, used Protera and Invisira to increase the party's defenses (not sure what the damage would have been like without them) and once I had everything up and running (occasionally re-casting Haste as Chaos would cast Slow on some characters) I'd spam Flare. This was the first fight in which my White Wizard Kula felt like she had to be healing more often than not, but with 8 or 9 spell slots at each level, it wasn't hard to spam Healga or whatever it was called.

I think if I were to redesign this, I might make enemy encounters about three times less frequent and about three times more difficult. Until you get the airship, there's no way to travel across the map without encountering monsters about every five steps. So, you get fight after fight after fight in which the battle music barely even plays before you've either obliterated the monsters with quick attacks or a single big spell. Pretty early on, my melee characters were almost guaranteed to one-shot any non-boss enemy they hit, except for the odd ooze that didn't much physical damage.

This is also the old-school quest design in which the only clue to where you should go next tends to be a single NPC in a single town somewhere on the map - I will confess here that I did look up online guides, for example, to make sure that I got the class upgrades as soon as I could. This did result in me accidentally almost skipping Mt. Gulg - I was about to start the Wind Palace before realizing I could have gone to the Mt. Gulg as soon as I had acquired the canoe, so it was an exercise in utterly massacring every monster that popped up - even my Wizards could generally melee them down.

While this entry in the series feels strangely sparse in terms of story, I can also see how players back in 1987 (when I was a year old) must have felt like this was the closest they could get to playing D&D as a video game. It's certainly not ambiguous that the folks at Squaresoft were basically taking elements whole-cloth from D&D - the bestiary is more or less just the D&D Monster Manual, and the game even uses D&D's "Vancian Magic" system, where you have different pools of magic for each level of spell. Mind you, I'm not even that fond of that system in D&D itself, and here it's even more awkward. (I'm a 5E native, so I don't know if "upcasting" was allowed back in the day - it's not in FF1). The four major bosses prior to the final boss are the Lich, the Marilith, the Kraken, and Tiamat, which are all legendary monsters except the Marilith (and Tiamat is actually a goddess whose avatars can be fought in 5E - there's a straight Tiamat stat block for her as the final boss of a big adventure that lists her as a fiend, but a more recent book with an "Aspect" of her that has her as a dragon, which I think seems more appropriate). 

One of the oddities of the game is that it sort of suddenly develops a plot when you confront the final boss - the reveal that there's a whole time loop, and that the rebel knight Garland somehow got sent back in time to become Chaos, who then sent the four fiends forward into the future to ensure he is transported into the past.

Really, the time travel aspect of the game kind of comes out of nowhere.

While the game is largely traditional fantasy, with elves and dwarves and dragons, there is a little hint at the technological aspects that would become far more prominent starting in VI, which is that a fallen civilization built this floating fortress, and some of the monsters you fight in it are clearly robots.

Anyway, next I'll be starting up II and see where that one takes me. My total play time for this was about 13 hours - piddling for a modern Final Fantasy game (Rebirth took me about 100 hours to complete, which did include all the World Intel and all but the last sidequest - still waiting on the patch to fix that one). I'm expecting that the duration will grow with later entries, especially when we get to the SNES games (which I think start with IV).