RPG #1: Final Fantasy 1

"The name' Final Fantasy' was a display of my feeling that if this didn't sell, I was going to quit the games industry and go back to university. I'd have had to repeat a year, so I wouldn't have had any friends – it really was a 'final' situation."

-- Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy¹

Game: Final Fantasy

Developer: SquareSoft

Published: December 18, 1987

System: Famicom/NES

Sakaguchi was frustrated during the development of Final Fantasy. He felt like Squaresoft didn't believe in his game. He thought the team he was given could only create the game he wanted. And he didn't believe that there would be enough interest or support to get him a sequel to the game.

The guy sounds a lot like me.

He was wrong, of course. Well, at least about not getting a sequel and it being his Final Fantasy. In terms of sales, Final Fantasy 1 sold around 1.2 million units on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The franchise has sold over 180 million units, making it the 12th biggest franchise, and it is one of the few remaining franchises from the NES not owned by Nintendo. There have been 16 numbered entries into the series, several sequels to those entries, and spin-offs galore, including tactics games, MMOs, rhythm games, racing games, and fighting games. There have even been movies.

My History with Final Fantasy

The first Final Fantasy holds a special place in my heart. It was not the first game I played by far. It wasn't the first game that really got me addicted to video games either. It was the first game that completely changed my view of what video games could be.

I first played the game on a whim, as many games I played at the time. I went to the video rental store and looked at the games on the shelf that were there that Friday after school. Saw this new game on the shelf and said, why not? Paid my $2.50 for 3 days and 2 nights of Nintendo fun, brought it home, and kept the game for 2 weeks because I couldn't put it down, incurring late fees that I would likely be paying off for a month or longer. But it was worth it.

I was addicted.

Until I played Final Fantasy, I had been playing platformers like Super Mario Bros., Fast-paced games where you could finish a level in a few minutes. I had played Zelda previously, and it could be the cause of my continued desire to explore in video games. But you only got an overall sense of story in Zelda at the end. In reality, the game had an almost identical story to Mario. It just had a different method of unlocking that story.

Final Fantasy changed how I looked at games and forever changed the games I preferred. Going forward, when I went to the rental store, I would seek out titles providing stories and choices. It acted as a gateway into Strategy games as well, which has much of the complexity I was looking for out of RPG.

Over the past 10 years, I have realized that Final Fantasy has become so incredibly fundamental to my development as a gamer that I decided to return to it every year in December, usually coupled with other Final Fantasies and retro RPGs like Dragon Warrior.

Choices

Putting Final Fantasy into the toaster slot of your Nintendo Entertainment System, you find something entirely new in console RPGs of the time. A choice. What's this? You can have a party of 4! characters?! And you can choose their classes?! And their names!?! Dragon Warrior didn't have anything on this.

Characters chosen, I find myself in the game, in front of a town and a castle. Like Zelda, there is no clear direction yet. Again, choice. I could go to town, go to the castle, or ignore both and explore my surroundings! 

We decide to head north and talk to the King, only to find that the princess is in danger! We must head north to save her. Well, this sounds familiar enough. Along we go. A quick boss fight later, and we save the princess! The king rewards us and sends us off to the port town eastward. We head across the bridge and the credits role. Instead of ending the game, though, we have just begun.

Having credits at the beginning wasn't really done in video games, but became a mainstay of the series

And this is how we will begin this project of mine to play through as many RPGs as I can, fittingly, with the game that started it all. Thank you, Hironobu Sakaguchi, for sticking it out for one Final Fantasy.