The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite my best efforts, these installments refuse to be compressed down all that much. I apparently have had quite a bit to say about these games.
But let’s jump right back into the action. After slaying two of the four Fiends and having noted that the remake has a different difficulty curve than the original game (or more faithful remakes), it seems that both the original version and the remake have once more converged upon the same spot. Namely, the part wherein things become quite a bit more dull and slog-like than is entirely necessary.
By this point you have plenty of resources at your disposal and you’re not thrown into a pitched battle for survival every few fights or as a result of a lucky critical hit. Most of the fights can actually be blown through pretty quickly. The downside is that they’re almost constant and don’t offer you much of worth. No useful drops are found, gil is functionally worthless (you’ve got enough to restock and no more shops to spend it in, so you’re taking in far more than you spend), and you wind up wishing to just be done with all the pointless random encounters.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Remakes of the first Final Fantasy have an odd dichotomy going. In the early parts, it’s easier to be curmudgeonly about the more “faithful” remakes while wishing for a game that isn’t brutally crushing you at every turn solely by fiat. As the game goes on, though, the more modernized versions start inspiring more ranting about how things were back in your day.
But that’s a little further along in today’s entry. As you probably remember, we left things off right around the time when the game finally remembers what the stated goal was at the beginning of the game. You know, when you’ve finally finished derping around enough that you could go deal with the Earth Fiend. Which is annoying, but in a way I almost wish the game had continued along that vein, sending you on elaborate, sprawling sidequests just to make a little forward motion. It really creates the sense of two distinct games, where you spend a whole lot of time getting to fight the Fiends at all and then you just sort of kill them in quick succession.
There are only a few places where you can break from the game’s very linear sequence, and taking care of the Earth Fiend first is not one of those places. It’s more obnoxious than all that, really – you have to descend, kill a vampire, open a passage, talk to an NPC who literally does nothing else, then go back down and actually kill Lich. It’s kind of pointless, and it feels like padding the length of the game without even giving you an extra dungeon to go through by forcing you throw the same dungeon twice.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 1
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The Final Fantasy Project is a look back over the franchise’s entire history, starting from the beginning and moving up to the most recent game when I finally finish this whole thing. Those of you who have followed my work in various places may remember that I already started this project over the summer, but it sort of fell off the radar between a combination of Final Fantasy XIV and the steady realization that the format I had picked was not actually a good one for what I wanted to do.
So consider this a revival. Not a reboot, though; I’m still pretty happy with what came out of my work over the summer, so the first couple of weeks are going to involve a repost and cleanup of what was written during the initial run. That’ll be compressed as much as possible, but if you really want to spoil yourself, the original versions are out there. So let’s start from the very beginning.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 