You can buy the first six Final Fantasy games in one Pixel Remaster bundle or redeem them individually; I decided on the latter, purely to experience the first game and see where it all started.
As someone who has never played a Final Fantasy game before, here are my key observations.
Memory lane
I was amazed at how familiar I was with Final Fantasy – a turn-based JRPG set in a classic fantasy world that was released in 1987, long before I was born. I had a similar experience playing BioShock (2007) a few years ago, finding that, as core as the game was, I had already played more contemporary games that had similar mechanics, which meant that nothing was fresh, although it was less an obstacle to taking control.
I played a few early Dragon Quest games, a franchise that started around the same time as Final Fantasy, and there were clear parallels. A band of heroes defeating evil, turn-based combat, swords and sorcery, merchants to supply you and churches to revive you – even gradually upgrading to boats and airships to enable advanced map travel.
But the biggest similarity I felt was with Dungeons & Dragons. Final Fantasy’s spell mechanics are taken from a tabletop role-playing game, with wizard characters gradually gaining access to higher-level spells for greater damage, enhancements, or utility. As they level up, they also gain the ability to cast lower-level spells more often, and the spells go up to a total of eight levels – though you have to select the spells individually, buying them from local merchants in Final Fantasy settlements.
This concept of magic is based on the same Vance system (by Jack Vance Dying Earth novels) used in D&D, which understands magic as a fixed, finite resource that is prepared, used, and then depleted. I suspect this will become a more fluid MP/Magic Points system in later games, but in Final Fantasy 1 it meant I felt surprisingly at home, with a good knowledge of the types of magic systems in use.
Although the spell names are a little disappointing compared to what I’m used to in Dragon Quest – less so ‘Crackling!’ and more than Mario-voice ‘Poison’ – I understood what these spells were for, despite the limited communication about their effects.
Figure it out for yourself
Obviously, earlier video games had less room for lengthy instructions or descriptions – the designers were working with limited hardware – and that limitation is still evident in this remaster.
I realized how used I was to the overload of information that modern games gave me.
The spell descriptions are incredibly vague, sometimes with the same description for spells at different levels, leaving you to guess how much better the spell is, how the damage multipliers work, and whether the spell is even worth using in a given situation. I tried using the sleep spell multiple times, which never did anything, even when the game told me it was working.
The lack of communication also means that the class selection you make at the start of the game, when you create a party of four, offers unclear pros and cons. It wasn’t until many hours into the game that I found out that certain spells like Teleport were restricted to the two mage classes I chose. I realized how used to being overwhelmed with information in modern games, whether it was making key decisions about party composition or just the likelihood of a certain spell effect working at all. 80%? 10%? How can I strategize with this type of guesswork?
I found Final Fantasy to be a game that let me figure things out on my own – with a little less hand-holding than I’m used to, but also a bit of stubborn silence on key gameplay points, at least from a 2023 Player perspective.
However, the most important thing is how good that basic gameplay loop actually is. The sequence of exploration and combat in the landscape, venturing into multi-tiered dungeons in search of uncertain treasure, traversing towns to upgrade spells and weapons before setting out again – I was quite engrossed and loved the constant sense of progression as I moved through the world. I never came close to losing the party, but I felt challenged enough to pay attention to my resources.
Pixel Remaster does a wonderful job of beautifying a 35-year-old game without seeming like a modern interpretation; it looks and feels better than the NES version, but still represents the original game without too many distractions. The ability to speed up battles with auto-attacks is also a huge relief, saving me countless hours as I breeze through smaller fights, before slowing down to more deliberately engage in spell choices and attacks when bigger challenges await.
Final Fantasy was reminiscent of playing Dungeon Encounters (2021), Square Enix’s scaled-down dungeon-crawler, which rejects many of the expectations of a modern JRPG and sticks to the basics of movement, combat, and upgrades. FF was pleasantly simplistic, focusing on its core mechanics without distraction, even if that meant keeping the story so light it was almost irrelevant at times. Although you have to backtrack geographically, the narrative is tightly linear, which was my main disappointment here.
Simplistic, beautiful, to the point – I enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy more than I expected. If I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t buy the full remaster package to begin with.
