Looking for people who played the original Final Fantasy (NES)

[StewShearerOld]

Hi everyone!

So I write Good Old Reviews, The Escapist's weekly retro review column.

This week I'm working on the original Final Fantasy for the NES and I was hoping to use it as an opportunity to roll out a new addition to the reviews. I want to add your memories to the mix.

What I'm hoping to do is to find Escapist users willing to conjure up their own favorite moments and memories from the game and share a brief (3-4 sentences) write-up encapsulating their experience. Later this week I'll pick one or two that I'll then include in my review in some way I'm still figuring out!

Thanks in advance and I look forward to reading your stories.

 

[Ima Lemming]

It's the Star Wars of video games - it keeps getting remade and more buggered up each time. Namely, the Sky Castle; it wasn't actually a flying castle, it was a space station that the earthbound people called a flying castle because they couldn't comprehend what it really was. Then the remakes turned it into an actual flying castle.

 

[aozgolo]

My favorite experience of the game I think was after going through the Castle of Ordeals and seeing all my characters upgrade to their "adult versions" as I called them. The game was a really great adventure, and I loved how it set the stage for games to come with how it slowly opened the world through story cues. It just kept ramping up from building a bridge, to getting a ship, to making a canal, to acquiring a canoe, to getting an airship, to going under the sea, to getting sent to space, and finally going back in time. Each successive story reveal that unlocked more of the world really was an experience in itself.

 

[Dalisclock]

Final Fantasy was one of the first JRPGs, or really RPGs of any type I ever played. I remember being introduced to it by the game rental store and Nintendo Power(which makes me feel old), but I didn't actually beat the game until long after I first played it. In fact, I'm pretty sure I beat 4,5,6 and 7(not in that order either) before I actually got around to finishing the original just because of the difficulty and the clunky interface.

 

[mohit9206]

I played the GBA version which was very easy. In fact the game was so easy my party did not die even once. The game barely had a storyline just collect crystals and save the world but the gameplay was decent. Good thing it was traditional turn based system because i absolutely hate ATB system of later final fantasy games. However like with pretty much every final fantasy game, the encounter rate was too high and sometimes frustrating. But the game had a simple charm and soul that made it addicting to keep playing. Its very dated by today's standards but still worth playing for those who have never played it since that is where the legendary series began.

 

[Rayce Archer]

I never actually owned FF, I rented it. Sometimes I didn't re-rent it fast enough and I'd have to start over. When the rental went out of business I got it, but the battery died before I could finish. In those days the guts of NES carts weren't well understood; I didn't know I could rip it open and stick in a new watch battery so I hawked it for like a dollar.

What blew me away at the time was how advanced it felt. Battle had windows and text dialogs and all these numbers, and it made you feel like you were really making important, smart decisions when you geared up. Magic befuddled me, because the game did not make it totally clear what spells did or how many you could have, and I chafed at the per-day limit (of course later I worked out that leveling up gave you more uses of weak spells, a chance for cascade, etc. That per day limit was a cool nod to D&D and I was sad it never came back because it made mages feel powerful and special.

It also rocked young me's world that the title screen was AFTER the first quest. At first I thought it was just kind of a cheap game, then BOOM the actual beginning. It put the scope of the whole thing in real good perspective- still does, in fact.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

My favorite part of the game is the very beginning. You're given a quest, set out on it and fulfill it, kinda, as soon as you kill Garland (a pretty intense boss on its own). Except once you're done the entire world opens up at your feet and it turns out all you did was play through the first act of the game, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end (something that doesn't happen very often; very few games have proper first acts, tutorials notwithstanding). The first time I played FF I was ready to call it a win, I was convinced that was it to the game.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Probably the fact that the format was completely different from anything I'd seen before. I played FF before Zelda 2, and had really only played some platformers and Duck Hunt before then.

The real hit came however when I went to my cousin's and saw how much farther he had gotten and how his characters had progressed. He was doing the Temple of Fiends Revisited and being rather young I couldn't quite fathom the Marsh Cave at that point. I couldn't figure out the map spell and believed that the first continent was the end of it, and that the Marsh Cave had to be about halfway through the game at least. So I see the advanced classes and the feelies and the monster charts and the maps (he had the Nintendo Power guide) and wonder to myself 'just how long is this game?!'.

And that is how I started liking Final Fantasy. If I had to pick one thing that wowed me, it would be the scope, and the huge gap between your strength and abilities from the start to the finish.

 

[snekadid]

I played on the original FF nes cart and had before that only played dragon warrior. As such, FF completely blew me away with its depth. My favorite moment was getting the airship. It was really a pivotal moment, you've walked all across the world fighting all sorts of evil and at the end of a quest the airship rises out of the desert sands and rises into the sky and from there, the world is yours. I honestly don't think that moment was done better in any FF game until FFVII and that's only because they had better music.

On the down side, because I played Dragon warrior first, I never used the Lit spell until very late in the game because I thought it was the light spell for caves...... I never thought it meant lightning..... /cry

 

[Recusant]

What I remember most is that the cartridge FuncoLand had a piece of plastic (part of the internal casing, as it turned out) broken off that bounced around a lot. Periodically, it would screw up the circuit board and erase my save file. Not knowing that I could open the casing and take it out (I was quite young), I had no choice but to restart the game, again and again and again. Finally, I got another copy and managed to finish the darned thing. That was a glorious day.

Within the game itself, though... I opted for what seemed a good offensive party; fighter, black belt, red mage, and black mage. It served me well, but I was long disappointed by the black belt's performance; I had hoped that the Class Change would make him the powerhouse I wanted him to be, but it didn't. Then one day, out of boredom as much as anything else, my friend (who I was basically playing through the game with) suggested we head back to the area around Corneria and see how well we could handle the monsters with no weapons or armor equipped. Fairly well, as it turned out- except for our Master, who basically atomized the poor imps with the damage he did bare-handed. We kept him unarmed for the rest of the game, but that first moment of delighted shock has stayed with me since that day.

 

[cathou]

ok, funny fact, i've play this game for hours and hours, thinking wow, the difficulty of this game is pretty high ! i was about to get the tnt and discovers the rest of the world, when i happen to talk with a few guys at my school about that game. and i said to them : my caracters are really weak, i level them a lot, buy the best weapons for them and they dont seems to hit harder. then one fo them said : ok, but are you sure you equiped them with the good weapon ? and in an epiphany i realised : equiped ?? so yeah, i got that far without any armor or weapon equiped what soever...



anyway, final fantasy. back then when it came out, it was something most of use had never seen before. back then there was no internet to check what needed to be done next, so it was really an experience that unveiled slowly before you. each time you were sure that the game was over there was more to discover. Something not possible today, because it's so easy to find help on internet, maps and everything. on a personal level, since English is not my first language, and that i was 11 at the time it came out, i had to play this with a dictionnary with me to translate the game, so final fantasy actually helped me to learn English...

 

[jedisensei]

Final Fantasy came out in the heyday of the Nintendo Power magazine. In one issue, a poster for the game was released. This one:
http://40.media.tumblr.com/1b99dc16388eda8fe087ee83a04807af/tumblr_mwit5uCra31sorarco1_1280.jpg

That poster hung on my wall for months as I awaited the game, teasing and inspiring my own fantasies of adventure and grandeur. It's fair to say that this single instance of crossover-media (with the game, itself) created a life-long RPG afficionado out of me.

 

[StewShearerOld]

Ugh. I want to thank all of your participation and offer my apologies because I failed to come up with a good way to integrate these, something I should have done before soliciting your stories. I will be writing a second column for the first Saturday of April covering the game further. I promise to use these by then, at latest.

 

[CaitSeith]

Defeating the 9 pirates was an impossible task for me the first time I rented the game. The next time I finally won that battle, I discovered how huge suddenly the world became once I got their ship and the exciting sense of freedom to explore it (something that very few games had at that time). That summarizes the experience: fighting for the sense of freedom.