Now here is a true classic. While crawling through old Nintendo games, you will find one reoccurring factor: almost every game is a copy/pasted clone of other games and offers nothing in the way of challenge, need for thought, or factors to make you return willingly. While you have a handful here and there worth playing again and again regardless of the low quality graphics and sound, it is sadly rare.
Enter Final Fantasy. Supposedly it was thought the game would be terrible in the sales department because they believed Americans didn't care about RPGs. So they pooled together what I can only imagine were the best coders at the time, created music that while still low quality was excellent, graphics that while looking terrible, STILL managed to show great detail, and an OKAY, but superior to any other NES game, story based upon the age old sure thing of "you're saving the world and everyone else is just gonna stand by and watch".
With this game, they managed to create an instant classic. From the first moment you load the game, you are introduced with a small back story, a beautiful song (aptly named Prelude), and a simple no-non-sense starting menu. New Game. Continue. Message Speed. You only have 1 game, but you only need one game. Begin your quest, and you are greeted by something unheard of on an NES RPG : a character creation menu. Now this might not seem like much today, and really it shouldn't, this should have been a basic thing from the very beginning of RPGs. But back in 1987, this was an amazing feature. Choose your party, create your own difficulty for the game. Each character has their own traits, from the fighter who is just a plain beast on damage, but very expensive, to the black belt who is an average fighter, but free, to the red mage, who is completely useless in every party.
The game throws you out into the middle of a field. You have to choose to be smart and head to town or be Mr big guy and try fighting monsters naked. Overall the game leads you on a path loosely defined, with plenty of text from NPCs to tell you about what's going on, hints on where to go, and even a few on fighting enemies. The entire time you are greeted by a catchy and well made tune that never gets old, to this day I still walk around humming the battle theme in hopes of finding a grey imp on the sidewalk. The player and NPC sprites are terrible, and have the most basic animation that they could have done much better, but the enemies sprites are amazingly detailed for the time. The story is decently long, with a few plot twists thrown in, but overall its pretty basic and uninspiring, yet still better then any other NES games. The game is decently long, very long for actually including a real story unlike dragon warrior, which is "grind enemies for 20 hours till you're strong enough for the next land mass", but once again its a very basic story. Difficulty is a difficult thing to weigh in this game, as how hard it is will depend directly on what your party is, and some parties will breeze through the first or second half while struggling on the other. Overall however, once you know your characters and enemies well, the game loses any real difficulty. It devolves into the same RPG battle formula of "fire on the grass enemies, lightning on everything in water, and spam attack and everything dies". There are only basic spells, stats have a minute effect on battles, buffs are useless, and debuffs/shields are only useful in a handful of cases. It all falls into killing 1 enemy over and over because it drops lots of money, running from everything else because it poisons you or is a waste of time, and buying the most expensive stuff to super own every monster in the lands.
Overall, this game is worth playing. For the time it comes from, it showcases the very best around it. It lacks the idiotic attempts at "humor" the rest of the series attempted, the worthless mascot characters who don't ever actually do anything in any of the games, the terrible pop culture that appeared more and more when the Japanese realized we would buy these games, and contained the features that would become a stable in almost all RPGs thereafter. One of, if not the best game, on the NES, it is worth a play or 50. Now here is a true classic. While crawling through old Nintendo games, you will find one reoccurring factor: almost every game is a copy/pasted clone of other games and offers nothing in the way of challenge, need for thought, or factors to make you return willingly. While you have a handful here and there worth playing again and again regardless of the low quality graphics and sound, it is sadly rare.
Enter Final Fantasy. Supposedly it was thought the game would be terrible in the sales department because they believed Americans didn't care about RPGs. So they pooled together what I can only imagine were the best coders at the time, created music that while still low quality was excellent, graphics that while looking terrible, STILL managed to show great detail, and an OKAY, but superior to any other NES game, story based upon the age old sure thing of "you're saving the world and everyone else is just gonna stand by and watch".
With this game, they managed to create an instant classic. From the first moment you load the game, you are introduced with a small back story, a beautiful song (aptly named Prelude), and a simple no-non-sense starting menu. New Game. Continue. Message Speed. You only have 1 game, but you only need one game. Begin your quest, and you are greeted by something unheard of on an NES RPG : a character creation menu. Now this might not seem like much today, and really it shouldn't, this should have been a basic thing from the very beginning of RPGs. But back in 1987, this was an amazing feature. Choose your party, create your own difficulty for the game. Each character has their own traits, from the fighter who is just a plain beast on damage, but very expensive, to the black belt who is an average fighter, but free, to the red mage, who is completely useless in every party.
The game throws you out into the middle of a field. You have to choose to be smart and head to town or be Mr big guy and try fighting monsters naked. Overall the game leads you on a path loosely defined, with plenty of text from NPCs to tell you about what's going on, hints on where to go, and even a few on fighting enemies. The entire time you are greeted by a catchy and well made tune that never gets old, to this day I still walk around humming the battle theme in hopes of finding a grey imp on the sidewalk. The player and NPC sprites are terrible, and have the most basic animation that they could have done much better, but the enemies sprites are amazingly detailed for the time. The story is decently long, with a few plot twists thrown in, but overall its pretty basic and uninspiring, yet still better then any other NES games. The game is decently long, very long for actually including a real story unlike dragon warrior, which is "grind enemies for 20 hours till you're strong enough for the next land mass", but once again its a very basic story. Difficulty is a difficult thing to weigh in this game, as how hard it is will depend directly on what your party is, and some parties will breeze through the first or second half while struggling on the other. Overall however, once you know your characters and enemies well, the game loses any real difficulty. It devolves into the same RPG battle formula of "fire on the grass enemies, lightning on everything in water, and spam attack and everything dies". There are only basic spells, stats have a minute effect on battles, buffs are useless, and debuffs/shields are only useful in a handful of cases. It all falls into killing 1 enemy over and over because it drops lots of money, running from everything else because it poisons you or is a waste of time, and buying the most expensive stuff to super own every monster in the lands.
Overall, this game is worth playing. For the time it comes from, it showcases the very best around it. It lacks the idiotic attempts at "humor" the rest of the series attempted, the worthless mascot characters who don't ever actually do anything in any of the games, the terrible pop culture that appeared more and more when the Japanese realized we would buy these games, and contained the features that would become a stable in almost all RPGs thereafter. One of, if not the best game, on the NES, it is worth a play or 50. |
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| ID: 809856 | 54 Words
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