Summary
The first of the greatest video game series ever... but is it good?
The Good
I have a mixed feeling about the first Final Fantasy game. Part of the reason must be the fact that I played it after I have already finished all the Final Fantasy games for the Playstation. Maybe my opinion about this game would have been different if I played it when it first came out. I know it was considered quite revolutionary at the time, and of course the fact I played this game after the great sequels didn't exactly help my opinion to turn to a good direction.
I must say that I consider Final Fantasy the greatest video game series ever, and since "Final Fantasy IV" they have always been - each one of them - an entirely unique and deeply touching experience for me. So it is natural that I approached the original "Final Fantasy" with a feeling of deep respect and admiration. Upon seeing the good old trusty "good guys to the right, bad guys to the left" pattern, upon entering a town with inns and weapon shops, upon wandering around on the world map, upon seeing the black mage who looked just like Vivi from "Final Fantasy IX" (duh!), upon defeating the first boss of the game, Garland (after I have defeated him in "Final Fantasy IX"!), and especially upon hearing the two immortal Final Fantasy themes, I felt I discovered a long forgotten friend. Here are some things that convinced me it was indeed a Final Fantasy game:
1) Exceptional quality of graphics and music. Yes, the graphics were great for the time (the game was released in 1987), and the music quality was high above the one available for the PC back then - but of course, the main appeal of this music is the quality of the tunes themselves, especially the two Final Fantasy themes.
2) The turn-based battles with their dynamic music, spectacular magic effects and a variety of cool-looking monsters.
3) The fact every NPC had something to say to me.
4) The emotional approach, that was present even in this first game. When the title screen appears (after the four warriors complete the first quest), and the Final Fantasy theme accompanies the encouraging words that appear on the screen, you can't help feeling this is precisely what will later develop into the epic, dramatic, and lyric poems, which are the later Final Fantasy games.
5) You meet Bahamut! ;)
One interesting feature that none of the later FF games had was the possibility of choosing four main characters from six different classes. That added a lot to the replay value of the game. You could go with the common sense and choose a well-balanced party, or you could experiment and choose only mages or only fighters (which would make the game impossible to beat, as far as I can judge...).
The Bad
However... there was still a long way to go. It is pretty clear many things needed to be improved in the later installments of the series. Here are some small, but annoying problems:
1) If one of your party members kills an enemy, and you have previously given an order to another member to attack the same enemy, this second member will attack air when it is his/her turn. This is especially annoying because there is no way to know how much HP the enemies have. This wasn't fixed until "Final Fantasy 3".
2) The game is extremely slow-going. If you don't fight thousands of random battles, there is no way you will be able to deal with stronger foes. The difficulty level is much higher here than in any Final Fantasy game for the Playstation, but it is not a challenging, but an annoying kind of difficulty. The random battles can get extremely tedious and boring, especially when there are seven or eight enemies attacking you and you have to watch how they slowly hit you, one after the other, without being able to do anything. The level up is VERY slow, you must fight a huge amount of random enemies in order to access the higher level. Your characters miss a lot, especially in the beginning of the game: it is not unusual to have all the four characters missing enemies in a row. If you die, you must go back to a town and pay a lot of money in orer to be resurrected (until your white mage learns a resurrecting spell, which doesn't happen until later in the game. I don't want to think about those who decided to complete the game without having a white mage at all).
3) There is a lack of explanations throughout the game: you often don't have a clear knowledge of what to do next. In shops, you must equip weapons and armor immediately after buying them, so if you accidently buy an unsuitable weapon or armor for a character, you will not be able either to use it or to give it back for the same price.
But those are all minor complaints. The main one is the fact that this game doesn't excel at what actually make the series so great: the story. True, it contains some interesting elements, such as a time-loop, and a surprising appearance of the main villain. I imagine the story of this game is still much better than in most other RPGs of the time. But it is still very, very far away from later Final Fantasy games, mostly because it lacks what those later games have in abundance: personality of the heroes. Not only your party members don't speak, they don't have any personality whatsoever, and neither do the few NPCs you meet on your way. Whether you have a party of two black mages and two thieves, or one fighter, one black belt, one white mage and one red mage - they will behave the same, they won't speak a word and they will appear as a unity of speechless, voiceless, characterless 2D sprites, all guided by the one you put as the first in a row. Could you imagine something more untypical for the Final Fantasy series? Since "Final Fantasy IV", there are Kain and Rydia, Galuf and Butz, Celes and Locke, Aeris and Barrett, Selphie and Irvine, Steiner and Eiko, Rikku and Auron, to care for, to like or to dislike, to guide through the game and through the story, and, mostly, to realize that they are all real people, with their own good and bad sides, with their own worries and their own ideas about right and wrong, to put it shortly - that they are all DIFFERENT. While "Final Fantasy 2" tried to give at least a graphical personality to its heroes, to make them say different lines ("Final Fantasy 3" was a step back compared to the second game in this sense), the first game doesn't define them at all - except making them belong to various fighting classes.
The Bottom Line
So, what we have here is a decent, well-crafted, solid RPG, with a good role-playing system, clearly superior to most of its non-Final-Fantasy colleagues of the time (and even later). But it is a TRUE Final Fantasy? The answer could vary depending on what you think IS a true Final Fantasy. There is no point in denying that this game was the foundation stone of the series. Without it, none of the others would ever exist. For those who believe the original is always the best, this is definitely the first true Final Fantasy. But for those who expect a Final Fantasy game to be a masterpiece in virtually every aspect, to be a profound, engaging, touching experience, to meet characters one could care about, to have a complicated story, will see all this is not exactly what they can get from the original "Final Fantasy". And they will probably not get it until "Final Fantasy IV".
Playing the first "Final Fantasy" made me understand even more clearly how great the later games of the series are. It is the first seed to be put into the earth so that a mighty tree with many branches and twigs will grow out of it. No matter what the actual quality of this game is, it will always have a special place in my heart, being the foundation of the greatest series ever.
