Thoughts on Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy 1 is a mean game – if you don’t try to engage with it exactly how it wants you to engage with it.
First, it wants you to pay attention to what little information it gives you. It’s very similar to Elden Ring in that it’s really easy to miss key items if you haven’t been talking to every NPC you see and looting every chest you come across. Modern games tend to highlight key items so that it becomes impossible to miss them. In FF1, it’s not only likely, but probably also intended, that you miss key items. This way, you are expected to backtrack constantly, do dungeons multiple times, and find new things.
Exploration is rewarded, whether you want it or not.
Second, it wants you to level up and buy item upgrades. This is what people mean, I guess, when they talk about lock & key game design. The vendor inventories are a part of this system. Hard bosses and hard enemies are the locks and better weapons are keys. Obviously, the game has a progression curve, but personally, I hadn’t considered that vendors could be solutions to puzzles.
In most modern RPGs, I feel like you’re discouraged from buying items from vendors, because the drops from bosses and monsters are always more powerful. If that’s not the case, then there is an actual incentive for the player to grind, kill monsters, get gold, buy items, get more powerful.
Third, Chaos sucks and I hate him, and I understand why that guy who really likes nu metal wants to kill him. The Chaos fight introduces such a wild change to the game’s difficulty, it caught me completely off guard. It comes right after the game makes you fight the four bosses of the game in a row and if you’ve been following the progress curve, you can just roll those bosses.
Then comes Chaos with its insanely high health pool and the ability apparently to fully heal himself. It’s dumb and I hate it.
But also, the moment I killed him felt really, really, really good. I had given up on that attempt and felt like I was stuck in what could be called a “revive cycle”: Boss kills my guy, I revive the guy, boss attacks before I can heal, etc. etc. But somehow, the stars aligned, and I was able to deliver the final blow.
Withholding crucial information (such as the boss’s HP) from the player feels like a big no-no these days. But, if it works, it also makes the victory moment feel so much more exciting and earned.
The cool thing about the Chaos fight is that it more or less forced me to make use of every mechanic available in the game. I had to increase my evasion rate, I had to increase my magical resistance, I had to balance my MP by using my Ethers. I made an important decision, every turn. I’m really proud of how I managed to get out of that revive cycle in the end.
You also have to gamble at times. You can choose to do more damage, or you can cast a pre-emptive heal to make sure your players survive the boss’s magical attacks. I understand that the boss’s attacks are more predictable than I think, i.e. he always attacks in a certain order. Still, I enjoyed that I couldn’t fully optimize my actions and had to rely on luck, just a little.
A few additional things that I don’t necessarily like: You always have to use a Phoenix Down to revive a player, you can’t just rest at an inn. You always have to use items to get rid of certain status conditions, you can’t just rest at an inn. Honestly, fine, I understand why they made that choice, but I don’t like it. I already made my way back to the town, just let me rest at an inn and revive.
