I played Final Fantasy 1

Hugh Braico / November 2024

I recently replayed Chrono Trigger (SNES) for the developer ending, which involves defeating the final boss at at point in the game where you’re supposed to be too weak to beat it. In said ending, famous designer Tetsuya Takahashi (best known for the Xeno series of games) told me “If you thought this was tough, get a load of Final Fantasy 2.”

And I took that personally.

Of course, if I’m going to play Final Fantasy 2, I better play 1 first, right? Right. I picked up a ROM of the original NES version to play on my Steam Deck. I went with the original version because I wanted to experience the original vision for the game (though I did compromise in some ways, eg. by using a fast forward button, and by looking up resources that wouldn’t have existed in 1990).

I thought it was pretty fun honestly, very barebones but it was enjoyable. Difficult as well, even with reference material to guide me along.

I thought it was really amusing seeing how “generic fantasy” FF was before it started to shape its own identity with moogles and chocobos and stuff. Nope, literally stock standard elves and dwarves and stuff like that. Pretty funny.

Here are some thoughts I had in no particular order:

Playing with a resource is practically necessary

You can’t really play this game blind. Or at least, you really shouldn’t. Playing this game without reference material would just be an exercise in frustration. You don’t need a walkthrough to tell you what to do next - just talking to NPCs and paying attention will get you there - but you need something like https://guides.gamercorner.net/ff to look up info on stuff. There are a few reasons for this:

There is barely any in-game info

Largely due to technical limitations, this game doesn’t tell you jack shit about what’s going on. This is going to be a shock if you’re used to modern JRPGs (or honestly even anything SNES era or later).

• Spells have no stats or descriptions whatsoever, just a cryptic 4-letter name and (if you’re lucky) a very short blurb of text when you cast it.
  • Some spells will get passed over by players because they don’t seem that useful. FAST is maybe the best spell in the game because it doubles the damage output of melee characters, but you wouldn’t glean that from the name or the flavour text when cast.
• Equipment items do not have stats, you figure out what their stats are by equipping them, backing out to the status menu, and seeing what changed.
• There is no way to see the crit rate of weapons, even when using the above.
• Equipment items don’t have any descriptions of what effects they might give.
• You’re not able to see which classes can equip a piece of equipment before you buy it.
• The only way to see if an equipment item has a “use” effect in battle is to try it. For most equipment items, nothing will happen.
• It’s not clear if an effect stacks or not.
• Elemental resistances are very opaque. The basic ones like fire/lightning/ice are straightforward enough to brute force, but some things use bizarre elements like Time, or are element-less. Equipment items never say what elemental resistances they give (absolutely critical for some items).

If you play with a pdf of the manual that would come with a physical copy, it does give you some of that info but it’s still not nearly enough by modern standards. The manual is pretty weird, it’s mostly just a walkthrough of the first half of the game. I’ve never seen such a hand-holdy manual before. It does have some useful charts and stuff at the end though.

A bunch of stuff straight up doesn’t work

The game is pretty buggy and if you’re not aware of it, it will screw you over.

• Several spells straight up don’t work (like TMPR and SABR), and it’s not obvious that this is the case. Some actually do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do (LOK2). You could spend the whole game casting some of these with no idea,
• Many weapons have names that imply that they are supposed to have special effects (like Dragon Sword being good against dragons), but none of these special effects actually do anything (though you’ll quickly work this out on your own).
• INT doesn’t do anything. Spells always have the same effect regardless of the INT of the caster.
• I mentioned earlier that you can’t see the crit rate of weapons, but it wouldn’t matter if you could. Due to a bug, the intended crit rate is actually just equal to the internal item ID of the weapon, so later weapons have higher crit rate. This totally breaks the balance of weapons that are supposed to have good crit rate to make up for bad base damage (like Vorpal). It also makes melee fighters a lot better than intended.
• A lot more! I mentioned the worst ones though.

There are several “no take backsies” moments

• There are 4 spells in each tier, but you only have 3 slots. Spells cannot be unlearned. Hence you need to make a permanent decision on what to ditch and what to keep. Save and reloading to try out spells helps a little bit, but it isn’t always obvious what’s going to be the right long-term choice.
  • Woe is you if you decide not to learn FAST on your black mage. Oof.
• You have extremely few inventory slots for armour items - just 4 per character, including equipped armour, which means if you’re wearing a full set on each character you can’t pick up more! There will be several times when you must permanently sell or drop unique armour pieces which cannot be bought again.

Games from this era were social and collaborative in nature

You were supposed to have friends who also played the game and give you tips and advice and stuff like that. One person wasn’t really expected to find out everything themselves. If you are just playing by yourself and have nobody to talk to about the game, you should probably lean on some reference material instead.

Playing with a fast forward button is really nice

This does compromise on the purity of the original NES version experience, but honestly there are a lot of tedious parts to the game that are much helped by being able to fast forward through them. There is no dashing or running, so getting to places feels really slow, especially on some maps like the Ice Cave which have huge linear corridors. Waiting for trash mob random encounters to play out can also be a real bore.

I like the lack of target correction

If an enemy dies before one of your characters attacks it, they will not try to attack someone else. Your attack will just miss.

This sounds like a frustrating “old game wrinkle”, but it creates an interesting battle decision - do you pile up on a single enemy to make sure it dies, or do you spread out to make sure your total DPS is maximised even though it means leaving more enemies alive in the short term? I usually used a spread-out strategy, or a hybrid where I used weaker attacks to make sure stronger ones secured a KO.

I have complicated feelings about spell charges / Vancian casting

There is no MP system - you get a certain amount of casts for each tier of spell per journey between inn rests (dependent on your level), and that’s it. There is no way to recover these while inside a dungeon.

On the one hand, I do like how there is a lot of weight behind the decision to use a spell, and having to choose between different spells in a tier does give rise to interesting decisions sometimes.

On the other hand, I end up wanting to run away from most battles because I want to save my spell charges for the boss.

I’m not sure I like free spells from items

Near the end of the game, the above problem flips on its head and you get handed a bunch of items that can cast a bunch of useful spells for free. Most importantly, multi target damage spells and team healing spells.

---

That’s all my thoughts for now, seems like a weird cutoff but yeah. Eventually I will get around to playing FF2 and see what I think of that.

Go back home