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.

Why I'm Doing This

This project won't be successful for me, and I blame Baldur's Gate 3 for rekindling my desire to do it.

The idea of this project is for me to play RPGs and lots of them. I love RPGs, it is my single most favoritest genre of video games, and I love video games. But I don't play them often, and I want to.

Moreover, I want to remember my thoughts on the games that I play. I have an excellent specific memory but a terrible general memory. As an example, the only reason that I know that I have seen "Thor: Dark World" is because I can remember that I can never remember it. This is actually why I know it is a bad movie, not because I have any thoughts on it, but because I know I have seen it more than once, and I *STILL* have no idea what it's about other than Thor is probably in it. It's a weird trait.

So, for a long time, I've wanted to log what I play (and what I watch and do, but that's a different topic). To take notes about it while I'm playing it, rate the thing I am playing, and explain the rating. So, at the very least, in 10 years from now, when my memory is bound to be even worse, I can go back and read my experiences playing it and be like, "Oh Yeah! That's what Baldur's Gate was all about!"

The Baldur's Gate Dillemma

In addition, I enjoy playing through franchises. And this brings me to why I blame Baldur's Gate 3. I bought Baldur's Gate 3, why wouldn't I. I even started it. But even though I recognize that this game is clearly designed with someone who has never played 1 & 2 in mind because most modern gamers are too young to play those games, I can't help but want to be better versed with what happened in those games. While I remember playing them (well, I remember playing 1, but I am unsure of 2), I only remember specific mechanics. I remember that BG1 was one of the first RPGs that started to leave turn-based behind, and the method they used was a pause feature that lets you pause the action so that you could queue up your actions, giving you a bit of the best of both worlds.

Of course, I now want to go back and play Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 before I play 3. It is very disheartening and leaves me not wanting to play any of them. Because what happens if I do that and 10 years from now, 4 comes out, and we will be back in this situation all over again. With the concept of this blog, I can go look back at previous notes and only feel the need to fully replay them if I want to!

The RPG Playthrough Blog

I will admit that this isn't a new concept for me. I've had RPGComplex.com registered for years. The idea began a decade ago. A coworker of mine and I always talked about RPGs heavily while at work. And we both frequented RPGAddict. 

One day, he was like, "I really want to go back and play through Morrowind and Oblivion." Then we discussed why not play through all of them. Those first couple get ignored a lot. We could blog about it independently and make a podcast where we sit and talk about our adventures playing through the games, not unlike what RPGAddict does.

Well, that never really worked out between us. Trying to get two grown adults to get together and chit-chat periodically about games was a difficult thing to plan. But the seeds of the idea have remained ever since. I have made a minor attempt at a blog before, tried to tie the concept into YouTube channels and Game Streams, and stopped for various reasons.

Heck, I actually did have a blog where I chronicled my adventures in Asheron's Call. That blog lasted a while until I quit the game and, for the time, probably had a decent following.

Can I make it Work?

Will this time be different? Well... I don't know. Maybe? 

What I want to do here is simplify things. Worry about "rules" less; they will be around, but maybe not as much as I had done before. I want to keep the pressure on myself low. I want to keep ratings easy. And even the idea of blogging is supposed to be more accessible instead of setting up a custom site, YouTube channel, or whatever. I'm creating a reasonably standard blog on a hosted site, and if I continue, I will update it as I go with things I may want that improve everything.

But most importantly. I want to play RPGs again because they spark joy. This method will allow me to remember what I did and push me to keep it up. Whether anyone joins me or not doesn't matter. I literally need to do this for me.