Final Fantasy (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Nintendo’s 1990 role-playing game for the NES, Final Fantasy. The four elemental orbs of light, the world’s sacred arbiters of the balance of nature, have gone dark. The winds cease, the seas rage, fire engulfs the countryside, and the earth itself begins to rot. Civilization teeters at the brink of extinction, and the people’s final hope rests on a prophecy. The great sage, Lukahn, has foretold the coming of four legendary warriors destined to deliver the world from darkness, and now, four fate-bound strangers from distant lands, each carrying an orb, approach the dream city of Coneria. So begins the story of Final Fantasy, the cornerstone of the Squaresoft empire. Originally released in 1987, Final Fantasy was Square’s attempt to capitalize on the enormous popularity of Enix’s 1986 Famicom hit Dragon Quest. The Dragon Quest influence is clear, but Final Fantasy strives to be more than a mere clone. In an effort to push the genre forward, it incorporates elements from Dungeons & Dragons and western CRPG dungeon-crawlers. Parties are made up of four members, and each can be assigned any one of six distinct character classes, allowing players to personalize how they approach the adventure. A balanced party made up of a fighter, a black belt, a white mage, and a black mage is great, but if the idea of playing as a group of thieves tickles your fancy, there’s nothing to stop you from doing just that. Some combinations are more viable than others, but you’re free to do as you see fit. This flexibility extends to your choices in developing your magic users. Though mages are limited to three spells per magic level, you can cherry pick those you like in order to create specialized roles for each of them. This is particularly useful since many of Final Fantasy’s enemies have exploitable elemental affinities. Beyond those things, it’s a standard 80s JRPG. The minimalist plot is doled out across a string of vaguely related events, and the world is little more than a melange of fantasy tropes lifted from Ghibli animes and Tolkien novels. It’s a bit mechanical in nature, but that’s to be expected of a game that was attempting to influence the shape of its genre in its formative years. Remember the original King’s Quest? FF1, DQ1, and KQ1 are all very similar in that regard. Final Fantasy is also notable for being one of the first successful console RPGs in North America. Just as they had done in 1989 with Dragon Warrior (), Nintendo took it upon themselves to localize and publish Final Fantasy for English-speaking audiences the following year. It went on to become a huge success, largely due to how heavily it was promoted. Nintendo went so far as to dedicate an entire issue of Nintendo Power to it. Volume 17 was the game’s first official strategy guide published in English. It captured the hearts and minds of many, but Final Fantasy wasn’t a perfect game. Far from it, in fact: the game is riddled with bugs that were never fixed for the international release, and certain aspects of the game are outright broken. Several spells do nothing when cast, weapons meant to target enemy-specific weaknesses don’t work as intended, the intelligence stat is ignored when calculating spell effects, a bug in critical hit rates negates most of the advantages provided by the thief class, and items that are meant to protect against status ailments and instant death attacks provide no immunity whatsoever. (As an aside, I’d like to say that I tried to not let my knowledge of the bugs dictate the choices I made in this playthrough. The game is much easier and less frustrating if you purposely plan around them, but playing like that would’ve gone against the spirit of what I want my recordings to represent. I try to play games as people would’ve back when they were contemporary releases - as the designers intended. Most of Final Fantasy’s issues weren’t well understood or widely known until the rise of the internet and emulation provided hobbyists the means to pry into a game’s inner workings. So, yeah, I knew that I was handicapping myself with my equipment choices at certain points. It was on purpose.) The laundry list of issues certainly hurt the game and result in a clear gap in quality between it and the early Dragon Quest titles, but that didn’t stop an entire generation of gamers from falling in love with Final Fantasy, nor did it prevent Square from building an empire on its back. Flawed as it may be, Final Fantasy is a classic. (And how about that last boss sprite? The dude’s schlong is a horned demon!) _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video.