Final Fantasy I: Back to the roots of a legend

What can be more exciting than to play the first installment of a mythical series twenty-seven years after its original release? It’s a fantastic opportunity to see how the craze started and to study the evolution of the said series from a historical point of view. And for a gamer that could never play the said series before due to a number of reasons, it’s also the thrill of discovering a gaming monument in perfect chronological order. 

Of course, I know that technically, this is not exactly how the Final Fantasy series started; for this PSP version is not an exact replica of the original game. Developed by Tose and published by Square Enix in 2007(jp/usa) and 2008(eu), it’s an enhanced version of the Gameboy Advance remake known under the name Final Fantasy I&II: Dawn of Souls, which was itself already an enhanced version of the original. Gee, are things not getting a tad watered-down here? Oh, well. This mythical first installment of a mythical series has already been remade a good number of times for different platforms, and I’d wager that this PSP version won’t be the last one. Whatever floats your boat, Square Enix. 

That PSP Lifting

What we have here is thus the latest iteration of a long line of Final Fantasy I remakes; and as one may expect, it has been revamped for the occasion. The graphics are crisp, sleek and glossy, in pure PSP-fashion, and a huge amount of details has been added to the sceneries and layouts. The audio department also enjoyed a good remix: the original themes sound gorgeous and more complex than in the former versions, and the sound effects are smooth and well integrated into the music. (By some ironic twist, the themes from this game reminded me of… ChocoboTales, where they are revisited in what can only be considered pure and unashamed fan-service.)

The battle system also went through a couple of neat enhancements. The most immediately noticeable is the addition, on the battle screens, of new backgrounds that vary depending on which type of terrain you stand on when you engage into fighting. As for the most useful, it has to be the automatic reassignment of attack(s) to another enemy in case the enemy that was initially targeted dies before your character(s) can attack it. Let’s remember that this was not present in the NES version: in that same situation, the character’s turn was purely and simply lost, which forced the player to strategize their attacks a tad more. However, this felt more like a consequence of hardware limitation than like a deeply though-out design choice; and thus, despite some complaints that this enhancement removed some of the challenge of the original game, it’s quite a welcome one. 

Still, let’s not be fooled by those changes, for they are mostly cosmetic and skin-deep only: this PSP version of FFI is basically nothing more than an 8-bit RPG with a sleek, modern look. It may shimmer and bristle with details, but it remains old-school at heart: the design of the towns, the appearance of the sprites, the dialogue, the world map and, last but not least, the gameplay, everything screams 8-bit in that game. And that’s exactly what I was expecting. 

No-frills is the name of the game

I decided to play that game mostly to fulfill my long-time dream of playing the Final Fantasy series; but I was also quite curious and interested in it from a historical point of view. What I wanted was a glimpse into the early stages of J-RPG, into those nearly mythical times where pioneers probed and felt their way through a vast and uncharted new territory. As I mentioned earlier, I am quite aware that this version of FFI is not the real thing, and that my glimpse may well be taken through a magnifying glass of sorts; but I am confident that it remains faithful enough to the original to allow some historical analysis. And I can always play original 8-bit RPGs later on if my historical curiosity about them becomes ravenous. 

As I started playing RPGs during the 16-bit era, the 8-bit RPG and its specific staples and rules were virtually unknown to me—apart from a few vague notions, as we’ll see later. I was thus thrilled by the prospect of discovering a gaming territory that was entirely new to me, and I have to admit that I was often surprised by what I encountered. This made me realize how huge a leap was taken in the RPG department from the 8-bit to the 16-bit era and makes my historical analysis all the more fascinating and engrossing. 

Of course, the first thing to surprise me was the bareness of the whole narrative. I somehow expected it, but not to that extent; not to the point of starting the game directly on the world map with my party fully formed and no backstory whatsoever and having the king ask me straight to rescue his abducted daughter after barely ten seconds of talking. You sure are fast to trust people, your highness!  This sets the mood and is actually the template for the whole game: anytime you reach a new place, you have to find the specific NPCs who will either ask you to perform whatever task is needed to save the day or give you some vague clues about how to further progress. In the same vein, the towns are as bare as they can be, featuring only the basic shops where you can refurbish and the traditional inn and church, sometimes along with a royal castle containing an NPC with a mandatory task to entrust you with. As for your characters, they remain silent through the whole game and don’t experience any sort of character development. Now this is an unadorned narrative if I ever saw one: everything is clear-cut and minimalist, with no attempt of fleshing out thing whatsoever. This could nearly pass as an artistic statement of sorts, really. Not that it disturbs me at all; I actually have a soft spot for simple storylines, and once I got past my initial wonder, I quite enjoyed the simplicity and straightforwardness of FFI in that regard. 

Contrasting starkly with the conciseness of the narrative is the vastness and openness of the world you have to explore. Your travels go mostly unobstructed and huge areas are accessible nearly from the get-go; as for the occasional obstructions, they are bound to be removed, and quite promptly at that. I was absolutely blown away by how huge the world map is and how free you are to scour every corner of it. I certainly didn’t expect that from an 8-bit RPG; I rather expected to be restricted to tiny areas at a time and constrained to travel a single definite path, the way you are often in… well, 16-bit RPGs. Now, that’s embarrassing. Shouldn’t these changes be seen as a regression of sorts, hum? But once again, it’s fairly interesting to see how things evolved in just one generation, from an approach where you have to explore and figure out where you must go by yourself to one where you are somehow gently guided and pushed to the next available area. 

Furthermore, FFI features a massive number of areas that are basically useless. The world map is covered with completely empty lands, unoccupied except for monsters, and the dungeons brim with vacant rooms and dead ends. Once again, the 16-bit era marked a huge departure from this template by creating much tighter level designs in which every single place has a purpose. In a 16-bit RPG, following an alleyway in a dungeon or a hidden pass between mountains will lead you to a side quest or to a secret treasure; in FFI, it will most likely lead you to a dead end. It’s hard to figure out if this was implemented to enhance the thrill of exploring a vast unknown world, which was essentially a brand-new gameplay experience at the time, or to extend the lifespan of the game, making this a classic case of fake longevity. My guess is that it is likely a well-blended, smooth mix of both. 

Another thing that kind of shocked me is how utterly irrelevant character statistics are when it comes to fighting. FFI features all your classic stats, like Attack, Defense, Agility and so on; but unlike what you can see in modern RPGs, those stats have little to no influence on what happens in battles. The Agility stat, for instance, has no impact whatsoever on the order of attacks: your characters or the enemies will attack purely at random, making it impossible to establish any reliable strategy. The others stats are hardly more relevant: a given character can do different amounts of damage to the exact same enemy from one turn to the next, which somehow mock the Attack stat; the same goes for Defense, with a given character taking various amounts of damage from the same enemy from turn to turn. As for Accuracy, well… If you ever want to equip a stronger weapon but hesitate because it would lower your Accuracy stat by ten points, don’t bother and go for it: it won’t make any visible difference on the field. There may be some hidden rules behind this apparent lack of pattern, but I wouldn’t wager on it; these programming inconsistencies are most likely due of the technical limitations of the time. The whole issue makes battles arbitrary and sometimes erratic, but it’s not a deal-breaker, for it doesn’t make the game unplayable; it just makes it somehow random and unpredictable when it comes to fighting. 

Another thing I didn’t expect was the total absence of any sort of dungeons puzzles. Dungeons rather follow the labyrinth model, with branching paths and occasional dead ends, and that really struck me as extremely simplistic. Of course, I didn’t expect some puzzle galore like in FF: Crystal Chronicles either, and it would be quite unfair to lambast an 8-bit RPG for being too simplistic; but on the other hand, The Legend of Zelda, released roughly at the same time on the NES, featured a good number of clever dungeon puzzles. So it’s not a matter of hardware limitation this time, but more likely a conscious design choice. FFI was not meant to be a dungeon puzzles RPG, but rather a 'slaughter-your-way-to-the-bottom-of-the-dungeon' RPG. Whatever floated your boat, Square.

One last little surprise element for the road: the moniker given to your party by NPCs in the game world, which immediately rang a bell. You and your fellow adventurers are referred to as “The Four Warriors of Light”. Just like the quartet of adventurers in Final Fantasy: the Four Heroes of Light, the spin-off released on the DS more than twenty years later. I love when a series cultivates continuity between its episodes with the reoccurrence of such details.  

The meat and potatoes

So, I was surprised quite a lot, and that’s a good thing. Not everything took me by surprise, though; there were some elements that I fully expected to find in FFI, and they didn’t fail to show up. The first of them is one that doesn’t need introduction, for it’s been there since the dawn of console RPGs, and it’s been known to be at its most potent and offensive in the 8-bit era; we’re of course talking about the Grinding, ladies and gentlemen. 

Note that I’m saying the grinding, not the level-grinding. Unlike what one may expect, you don’t need to level-grind that much in FFI; in fact, you hardly need it, except if you want to clear the five optional dungeons that have been added to this version of the game. Let’s face it: FFI on the PSP is actually a rather easy game. My understanding is that the original was much harder, but over the years and the subsequent rereleases, the difficulty level had been toned down to follow the evolution of gaming trends; in parallel, new and much harder dungeons were added to provide hardcore players with fitting challenges, should they want to tackle them. But I digress. I was talking about the grinding—the grinding alone, not the level-grinding. 

Let’s face it: this game, in pure 8-bit RPG fashion, features metric tons of grinding. 

This overabundance is solely due to the extremely high encounter rate. Once you’re out of the safety of towns, you’re bound to land in a random battle every couple of seconds. The encounter rate varies depending on which area you’re exploring: the ocean has one of the quietest rates, with one encounter every seven to ten seconds, while the world map is a bit more demanding, with encounters every three to five seconds. As you may expect, the worst offenders are the dungeons, which ramp up the encounter rate to every three seconds or so, with some specific areas throwing battles at your face literally every second. I’m totally serious. And yet, since the game is easy, these random battles never really pose a threat to your progression. They just test your patience, and they do so without pause or mercy. 

But that’s the way it’s supposed to be, after all: Grinding is the meat and potatoes of 8-bit RPG. And upon playing FFI, I understand much better why. Grinding was mandatory in that game because there was so very little else to it, and that probably applies to every 8-bit RPG with heavy emphasis on grinding. The minimal storyline, the imperfect battle system, the simplistic dungeon design and the paper-thin characters would simply not be enough to provide a satisfying and fulfilling gameplay experience, were the grinding removed. It had to be introduced in healthy doses, to flesh out the gameplay and give some density and depth to the game; it’s the firm and juicy meat around the bare bones that are the basic architecture of FFI. 

The same can be said about the general elusiveness of your objectives, which is another characteristic I expected to find in an 8-bit RPG. Unlike modern RPGs that set you on rails and tell you very precisely where to go next, FFI gives you only the most basic clues about what you should attempt to do and where you should be headed and lets you figure out the rest by yourself. (This could be seen as an interesting alternative for dungeons puzzles, in a way.) And once again, this gives some depth to the game by involving the player and making them work for it (whatever ‘it’ may be at any given time), which I find somehow more rewarding than being fed every specs of information about where to go and what to do. It can sometimes verge on abstruseness, though, especially in the latter parts of the game. Once again, it’s hard to determine if this was implemented solely to flesh out the game and introduce a challenge element of sorts or if it was rather a cleverly concealed attempt at fake longevity; and once again, my guess is that it’s most likely a smooth blend of both. 

The test of time

Playing FFI was an incredibly interesting experience that taught me a lot and helped me understand better the evolution of console RPGs, as well as the reason at work behind the prominence of such classic 8-bit RPG features as intensive grinding and cryptic progression. But historical analysis alone doesn’t cut it when we’re talking about a videogame; it is certainly worthwhile, but it’s not the primary purpose of gaming. A game must be an entertaining and enjoyable experience first and foremost, and the question is: does this PSP version of FFI fit the bill? 

Well, it certainly does. In fact, it holds itself surprisingly well and manages to offer a very engrossing gameplay experience, despite being quite simplistic by today’s standards. I find grinding to be both soothing and stimulating once I get into the rhythm of it, and I love games that manage to say clear-cut and simple while offering enough to keep me occupied, so I was fully satisfied with my playthrough of FFI. It’s refreshing to take a break from the sometimes over-inflated modern RPGs: no mandatory cliché character development, no convoluted storyline, no babbling galore, no malarkey of any sort; just you, the game, and mountains of grinding. So comfortingly simple. 

I only regret that this PSP version was made so much easier than the original. I never felt truly endangered on the field, neither during my millions of random battles nor during the boss fights, which I usually cleared in just a couple of turns. Since I never ran away from any encounter, I became quickly overleveled and overloaded with useless money. Worse, I hardly ever used any of my items because there was simply no need for it. I feel there is a balance problem here, and it steals away a part of the challenge: it’s never stimulating to have mountains of currency that you can’t spend and tons of items that you don’t need to use in a RPG. This imbalance is particularly blatant when it comes to the difficulty level: the main quest lifted from the NES game has been made incredibly easy, but the optional dungeons (four imported from the GBA version and one exclusive to that PSP version) are ridiculously hard and can’t be cleared lest you grind for hours or wait until the end of the game to tackle them (probably both, in fact). I would definitely have preferred a higher and more unified difficulty level like in the original, which would have provided a smoother and more balanced experience. Once again, this is quite a modern feature, obviously designed to accommodate both the hardcore and the casual RPG player, and I feel it doesn’t really belong in an 8-bit RPG—be it a remake. Oh, well.

As for understanding better how the Final Fantasy craze started, which was another reason that prompted me to play that game… Well, I’m still left in the dark when it comes to this. While I can obviously feel the appeal of that game and can honestly say that I enjoyed every minute of it, I somehow fail to see how it could be a smashing success to the point of single-handedly salvaging a whole company from the engulfing pits of bankruptcy. Many ideas are lifted straight from the slightly older Dragon Quest series and what is original to the game is rather nondescript and unmemorable. I guess it's something you can only understand in context: you had to be around in the 8-bit era and see this happen to feel the importance of that game and be properly swept away by it. Given that Europe was mostly deprived of 8-bit RPGs, even more so than North America which was already not so spoiled in the matter, I simply couldn’t experience this game in its rightful original context. And it’s not something I can recreate by any means, especially after having played RPGs from latter eras. 

But what I garnered from this game was sufficient to delight me, so I’m not complaining. It provided me with excellent hours of gameplay and a deeper understanding of the evolution of RPGs, and I’m quite grateful for that. More than that, I’m actually craving more 8-bit RPGs. The next milestone to satisfy my historical appetite will most likely be the Dragon Warrior I&II remake on the Game Boy Color. The very first installment of the mythical Dragon Quest series, never released in Europe, handed on a handheld plate: what could be more exciting than this? As for now, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!