Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Ever since the spoilers of the new Final Fantasy set for Magic along with my friend group playing a Final Fantasy Pathfinder game, I have been understandably in a Final Fantasy mood.

Final Fantasy has been a void space in my gaming oeuvre, partially because I didn’t grow up with an NES, SNES, or Playstation 1 when I was growing up. I was always aware of the franchise, especially when my introduction to the series came from me playing a ton of Kingdom Hearts 2 and encountering the various Final Fantasy characters there.

I put off playing the games until I played Final Fantasy VII Remake as my first actual playthrough of a Final Fantasy game and having a ton of fun with it, having bought the original on Steam shortly after (never completing it because of life reasons).

About a week ago when I started getting more into a Final Fantasy mood, I discovered that I could buy the Pixel Remaster versions of the first six Final Fantasy games for a decent price and decided why not.

I finished playing the first Final Fantasy and thought that I would give my thoughts on the game as a whole and my experience playing with it.

Plot and Game Play

The plot of Final Fantasy follows four characters, known as the Warriors of Light, who each hold a Crystal that represents one of the four elements: Fire, Earth, Water, and Air.

The world has become worse as evil fiends darken the larger Crystals of the ones that the Warriors of Light carry, and it is the job of the Warriors of Light to defeat each of these fiends in order to relight the crystals to restore the world to peace.

The way that the game works is that we choose four Warriors of Light among the six available classes; Warrior, Thief, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage and go around the world to light the Crystals.

We accomplish this by going to different towns and kingdoms accomplishing tasks and getting directions to various dungeons and how to get some better movement options, like a Ship, a Canoe, and eventually an Airship.

As we travel there will be random encounters of one to nine creatures and we fight in turn based combat, with when we win we get EXP which levels up our character, Gil to buy us things in shops, and occasionally random items.

We also can travel through dungeons, which also have a variety of enemies that will attack us and also various treasure chests which contain varieties of items, weapons, armor, and key items to help progress the story.

Very much a classic RPG in play style and game play.

Game Play Experience

For my playthrough I chose Warrior, Monk, White Mage, and Black Mage for a decently rounded party. I don’t know if it speaks closer to my age or my own personal interests, but while I was playing I was having a relaxing time while playing the game.

Going around, fighting monsters, getting loot, and beating bosses had such a relaxing feeling for me that I didn’t mind that there was a lot of encounters while going through the overworld and the dungeons.

What made the random encounters more bearable was that there was a combat fast forward option (which I believe is an addition to this version of the game but I could be wrong) because it allowed me to use the previous actions of the last fight to speed through a fight.

This really helped because as I said, there were a lot of encounters in the game, so it made going through common mobs easy. It also wasn’t an ongoing mode, meaning that every combat I could choose whether or not I could go into the auto battle mode, which made it going through the common mobs quick and I could be more active against bosses.

It was a double edged sword because of how the system was implemented, meaning if at an encounter after a boss I decided to use the auto battle feature and I used a high level spell or item in the previous fight, then I would use that spell or item again without necessarily meaning to.

Travelling was pretty easy as well because there was a mini-map of the entire overworld so I always knew where I was, while in dungeons the mini-map only showed a small area of the map so it would be helpful for navigating, but not to spoil what the entire map looked like.

The other means of movement where nice to have, the Ship being the first one and allowing you to go to places that had a dock, the Canoe allowing you to travel rivers and smaller bodies of water, and then finally the Airship which allows you to travel to anywhere on the map being able to land on spaces that are open grass.

The story itself is pretty bare bones fantasy fare, but the charm in the simplicity allowed me to turn my brain off and enjoy the game play loop and the music, which has also been remastered in the game. I was a fan of the Dwarves in Mount Duergar and the Lufenians because they were either fun to talk to for the Dwarves or provided some interesting NPC interactions for the Lufenians.

Nitpicks and Complaints

Now it wasn’t a perfect game, and there are some things that do affect how I feel about the game.

Of the smaller things, I found the NPCs to be generally non-effective, usually saying how everything is terrible with the occasional NPC telling me what to do next if I was lost or to get an item to further the story by accessing more of the map or getting a better weapon.

While I don’t expect every NPC to be amazing, there were a lot of NPCs that had the same dialogue as other NPCs, which made me less inclined to speak with other NPCs, which did bite me in at least one occasion in furthering a story quest.

I don’t know if the game was bugged or I was playing incorrectly, but the weapons that also casted a spell didn’t seem to work for me. I don’t know if the weapons allowed me to cast that spell or were supposed to cast the spell when they attacked, but I was underwhelmed by those weapons.

The items that cured status effects also weren’t really all that useful in my playthrough, with the exception of Antidotes and Gold Needles because I got poisoned often and my characters would turn into stone on occasion.

I also found that spells, while decently varied for the time the game was made, suffered from Pokémon All Attack Syndrome, meaning that for the most part I used offensive spells and healing spells, while a bunch of other spells went by the wayside.

Spells that inflicted status conditions on my opponents didn’t seem as effective as just using offensive spells that did damage to multiple enemies because the ones that were offensive seemed to always hit while ones that applied status conditions could potentially miss.

Spells that protected or buffed my party also went mostly unused, partially because they were of a higher level to cast and in some cases felt ineffective against bosses, especially at later levels. The buff spell I used the most was Haste because it allowed by damage dealers to make more attacks.

The weapons and armor of the game felt very tailored to the Warrior, at least for my playthrough, and while I was able to get items to help my other party members, it felt like the Warrior got the lions share of the loot.

Speaking of damage dealers, I don’t know if an NPC says it at some point, but for a good chunk of the game I had accidentally handicapped my Monk by giving them a weapon, when I should have had them barehanded. When I found this out, my Monk became one of the most effective damage dealers rather than the punching bag that got knocked out the most out of every member of my party.

Like I said, the story is pretty bare bones and there are only a couple of memorable characters because of it, Garland being the most prominent because of their role in the story of the game. The four fiends were pretty memorable because of their designs, but I felt like I may have accidentally over leveled when I first fought them because they went down in a few hits.

Overall Score: 7/10

I had fun playing the game, and while the story was pretty generic, there were some interesting points that I enjoyed.

The combat was straightforward, especially when I figured out my Monk could be better, and figuring out where to go next made the game fun to play.

Overall it took me 14 hours to complete the game, which is just under the average time to play and when I beat the final boss I saw I was missing only two beasts from the Bestiary.

I do think that the game could have used some more interesting NPC dialogue options, some trickier combat, and some varied weapons and armor options I think the game would have been better.

I will be going through the other Final Fantasy games and reviewing them in a similar way, though don’t expect them to be every week since they are multi-hour RPGs. I will talk about them when I do finish them, but next week should be a regular Casual Chat.

See you all next time!

Lali-ho!

From, J.M. Casual