alright, listen up. i've said it before and i'll say it again, i'm not a fan of fantasy settings. i find them to be extremely boring, oversaturated, samey, and overall just not very interesting. all of my favorite RPGs take place in more unique settings, Mother and Shin Megami Tensei are set in modern day, and stuff like Space Funeral and OFF take the time to setup their own, completely unique universes that don't really draw from contemporary fantasy stuff. as such, i've always been kind of wary of Final Fantasy. i mean, the problem is right there in the name, it's Final Fantasy. despite my reluctance, however, i will say that i've always had at least a passing interest in the series. unlike something like Dragon Quest, which sticks to its roots in high fantasy, Final Fantasy isn't afraid to stray away from that stuff. i mean, doesn't a guy drive a regular ass car in FF15 or something? plus, with its status as a classic, i always felt like i should at least give the series a shot for its historical value. i mean, i'm a frequent peruser of RPGs, particularly old RPGs at that, and Final Fantasy is THE old RPG series. so, at last, i finally decided to sink my teeth into my first FF game, starting with Final Fantasy 1.
to be clear, i did my playthrough on the PSP remake of FF1. as much as i love old, creaky NES RPGs, i decided that starting with a more updated version of the game might be the best course of action, since it'd be a lot easier to finish the game that way. then, if i ended up liking it (which, yes, i did) i would feel incentivized to check out the original version. as i've said before, i'm a total nut for checking out every port of a game, seeing all the differences and comparing them.
for my team setup, i decided to go with a Warrior, a Monk, a White Mage and a Black Mage. unlike most other RPGs, and even later FF games, your main four don't really have a set in stone personality, or even official names. this is interesting to me, because this means i can really make them my own. one of my favorite parts of something like Pokemon as a kid was that i could sort of make characters out of my team, coming up with personalities and names for them in my head. i wasn't expecting it, but Final Fantasy 1 sort of allows you to do the same. on top of that, one of my friends pointed out that all of the designs for the heroes in the Famicom version are fairly androgynous, which allows for even more creativity. it's a little bit less like that in the PSP version, but it was still workable. i named my warrior Raz, and thought of her as a sort of tough girl, someone who wants to prove her strength to the world by taking on this monstrous quest. i named my monk Lars, just because i thought it fit him. he seems like the type to brush off a serious injury as nothing to worry about, even though it very clearly is. very confident in himself, tries to act like a lone wolf even though he very much needs the rest of his team to cover for him. i named my white mage Mia, and i thought of her as being quite gloomy. most people think of white mages as being very sweet and caring for their team, since they're always casting buffs and healing spells, so i thought it'd be interesting to go against that. Mia is the type to learn to revive people, not because it helps the team, but because she's really interested in necromancy. finally, my black mage was named Jojo, and they were the most mysterious of the four. they speak in rhymes, intentionally confusing anyone who tries to question their interest in black magic, and overall being a strange individual. this may seem like a small thing, but coming up with this kind of stuff for my party was seriously one of my favorite parts of the game. it's sort of like how when i was playing Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, my favorite part of the game was a meta element, that being drawing the maps for each area.
one interesting thing to note about the player's party is how the party members evolve over time. this was something i only noticed near the end, but the party's roles and usefulness shift a LOT throughout the game. in fact, i'm such a colossal nerd that i made a graph to demonstrate this.
here is my graph. yes, i know its messy, i just drew it really quickly. the basic ideas are there though, Raz was useful the whole time, her big damage is always really good. i did find it kind of weird how you can teach the warrior certain spells once you upgrade to the knight, and even though i gave Raz all the spells i could, i pretty much never used em until the final boss, where i used nullshock and nullblaze. Lars absolutely wrecked house in the second half, but he REALLY sucked at first. i didn't get that his gimmick is that you dont give him armor, and he just felt like a worse warrior. however, at some point during the game, he just started dishing out insane amounts of damage, and combining that with both Haste and Temper made him even better. Mia served her role as healer pretty well, though starting out her healing spells were kind of whatever. they got better over time, but by the time she got her better healing spells i was already rolling in an insane amount of gil, and just bought items instead. Protecta and Invis were still really useful for bosses though! i think Jojo was the weirdest of the four in terms of growth, they start out kind of whatever, just casting the basic elemental spells, but once you get those multi target spells, they were my main damage dealer in the midgame. Raz and Lars definitely overtook them in damage at a point though, and while Jojo was still useful for crowd control, i didnt find myself using them for focus fire as much. Temper is always good, at least!
alright alright, i liked the party mechanics, whatever. what about the real game? well, i remember really loving Final Fantasy I and its gameplay when i first played the game back in May of 2025, but since then i have beaten (checks notes) every final fantasy until 5, and coming back to this one it definitely feels bare bones. that isn't to say it's bad, however, i still like it a lot! no ATB, job system, weapon experience or even rows, this is the most back-to-basics RPG combat you can get. in the Famicom and PS1 versions of the game you actually don't have MP, at least not the way we know it, instead having "charges" for each level of spell. they replaced this in the GBA and PSP versions with just a normal MP system, which while it does kind of lose a bit of the identity the original had, i'd be lying if i said i didn't appreciate the change. though, to be fair, i haven't beaten the Famicom version, so who knows, maybe i'd like it better that way. speaking of magic, you don't learn it from level ups like i expected to at first, you actually have to buy your spells here. on top of that, each level of magic only has three slots, meaning you'll have to give up at least one spell per magic level. in the PSP and GBA versions you can "forget" spells to free up slots, but i only found this out after fully 100%ing the game, so i kinda handicapped myself on accident. turn order between your party and monsters is randomized, i don't think your stats have any influence on who goes first. it was like this for the first couple of Final Fantasy games until FFIV, which i've never been a huge fan of, but it never caused me any issues here. there is one additional thing in this game, however, that is completely exclusive as far as i'm aware: Temper. Temper is a black magic spell you can get in Pravoka, and is in competition for not only the most powerful spell in the game, but even in the series. when paired with Haste, a spell that increases the number of hits a party member deals in one attack, you can begin to rack up some truly MONSTROUS damage, letting you absolutely steamroll bosses. i mentioned it earlier, but this is an excellent combo to use with your monk, and can lead to some spectacular results against Chaos, the final boss. with a maxed out monk, you can bop Chaos in only a couple hits, and it's a sight to behold. this spell was so powerful, in fact, that it left the series after Final Fantasy I, and took until FFXI to reappear. that's 10 games later, and even then it's been completely reworked. now, i haven't played FFXI so i can't be certain if it's better or worse there, but i can see that it took them that long to reintroduce the spell, so they definitely knew of its war crimes. now, does this mean i don't like Temper? hell no, i love the broken shit you can do with it! i feel like people always pose being overpowered in an RPG as a bad thing, but to me that's always the fun part, seeing how far you can push your party in terms of raw damage. plus, this does still take a bit of setup, so it has some risk to it.
in terms of plot, FFI is probably the most barebones game in the whole series, at least of the ones i've played. there's a reason so many RPGS fall into the trope of "collect the four things guarded by a boss so you can beat the final boss!", it's because of Final Fantasy I. (i mean, it could also be that that is just a very easy way to set up a player to visit multiple dungeons with a boss at the end of each one, but... you get what i mean.) i think this would be a complaint if this were later in the series, but honestly? i think the pretty barebones story is kinda cute and charming, since it's only the first game. it's neat to see where a lot of themes and tropes that appear later in the series stemmed from, like the crystals. i feel like making "crystals" be the thing you're collecting in a fantasy RPG is like, the default thing you do, but i think this was the first game to do it. plus, you're not actually collecting the crystals here like you are in FFIII or FFV, each of the Warriors of Light actually have a crystal, that's why they were chosen to go on this quest. there's also the matter of Garland, the main antagonist of FFI. he's the first boss you fight to save Princess Sarah, and you kind of forget about him after that. then, all the way at the very end, you find out that Garland has been alive all along, and was actually the one who sent the whole story into motion. he's been trapped in a time loop for thousands of years, and he's trying to finally break it by sending the world into peril. he then transforms into Chaos, the final boss. now, if you ask me, that's sick as fuck. i love that the first guy you fight is also the last guy you fight, that's always such a cool trope. besides that, though... i think the only other thing in terms of narrative that sticks out to me is the matter of the Flying Fortress.
allow me to indulge myself here; i love the Flying Fortress. it might be one of my favorite locations in any videogame, especially how it's portrayed in the NES version of the game. while in later remakes the Flying Fortress is portrayed as a more traditional "wind castle," the NES version has a completely different interpretation. there, it's a futuristic space station, complete with metal plating, robots, office chairs, a starry galaxy background, and the coolest part of all; WarMECH. i don't need to say anything more about why i love WarMECH, i already made an entire fanclub for it. it's such a sick locale with tons of mystique and intrigue behind it, and i wish they didn't change its entire look in later revisions of the game. in fact, i think they did the same thing for the Tower of Zot in FFIV on DS, which really sucks...
hey, speaking of dungeons, that's another thing about the PSP and GBA versions that i played; they have bonus dungeons! and unlike with my PSP playthrough, i actually committed to the bonus dungeons for my GBA playthrough, and MAN theyre cool. i really love the weird, surreal floors, there was one in Hellfire Chasm where you have to navigate this overworld type area, and it was really cool. i love the idea that in this underground cave somewhere, there's just this completely natural open area, like those garden floors in the caves in Pikmin 2. there's another one where you have to play hide and seek with a group of kids in a town, and again, the idea that this is just here in this deep, dangerous cave is SO cool to me. it makes you wonder how much of it is real, maybe its illusions created by the magic of the boss of the cave, or maybe its some sort of hallucination the heroes are having, i dunno. there was another floor that was a town, but all of the townsfolk were zombies, and it was super unsettling to me. maybe it's because there's nothing else quite as morbid in the game, but it was just really unexpected. it made me feel sort of the same way that the historical society building in Silent Hill 2 made me feel, and that's one of my favorite segments of any videogame ever. something about descending into a deep, dangerous basement or cave, each floor getting progressively weirder and more surreal, gah, its just so cool.
and that is Final Fantasy I. overall, i think the game holds up tremendously well for its age. it can feel a little basic at times, but there really is something cool and historical about it that still made it a ton of fun to play. i will say though, if you haven't played any Final Fantasy games before, i highly recommend starting with this one. the thing about it taking so long for me to actually write a review for this game is that, coming back to it after playing the later games, it does feel a little malnourished. however, i remember when i played it for the first time, i hadn't touched any other game in the series, and as such i had nothing to compare it to. therefore, i found myself able to enjoy it to its fullest, which i think is a very important experience to have. if you're considering playing this one, you really can't go wrong with any of the ports or remakes, as far as i'm concerned. the Pixel Remaster has options for increasing EXP and Gil gained from battles, as well as being able to turn off encounters, if that's your thing. the Famicom version is a little slower paced, but it definitely still has merit in a lot of ways. my personal recommendation would either be the PSP or GBA version though, they're very good starting points to jump off of. and then, if you're feeling a little goofy, you can always play the Wonderswan Color or PS1 ports, or even the MSX version if you're CRAZY. that version has some pretty cool music, i'll give it that at least!