It’s tough to know how to start a video
like this, about something that is so important
to you, that you don’t really know how to
adequately put it into words. The Final Fantasy
series means so much to so many people, and
I definitely belong to that group. My absolute
adulation for this series stems from the earliest
memories I have – I was 4 years old in late-1999,
and that’s when I got the opportunity to
experience Final Fantasy VIII for the first
time. I remember sitting there watching the
game’s wonderful, intense cinematic opening,
taking in the serenity of Balamb Garden, feeling
unsettled by the eerie atmosphere of the Fire
Cavern, and then being completely blown away
by the cutscene that plays as your first real
mission begins, when you land on the beaches
at Dollet, and it was right then, as that
cutscene played out, that my obsession with
this series truly and irreversibly began.
Since then, Final Fantasy has, and I mean
this in the best possible way, consumed my
life – my early childhood was spent playing
Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X on repeat, and
my teenage years were spent searching out
and experiencing the other Final Fantasy games
I’d never had the opportunity to play before,
and I just loved every single moment of it.
One thing I’ve always wanted to do is share
my love for this series with other people,
and try and communicate just what it is that
Final Fantasy ultimately means and represents,
and why people gravitate towards these games
so much. So, what I’ve ultimately decided
to do is go through it all really, take it
step by step, and comprehensively look at
the series, from its pioneering first entry
to the present day, examining with a fine-tooth
comb all of the most important games throughout
the series’ history. It’s gonna be quite
a journey.
So, before we get going, I think it goes without
saying that this video will contain massive
spoilers for the whole game, and the same
will be the case for all the other videos
in this series too. Well now that you know,
let’s jump in to the first entry in this
wonderful series: Final Fantasy.
The very first Final Fantasy game was released
all the way back in 1987, developed and published
by a video-game company called Square. It’s
important to realise that at this time, video
games, at least in terms of home consoles,
were very much in their infancy – Nintendo’s
release of the Famicom in 1983 ended up leading
to massive success, and unlike Nintendo’s
first attempt at a home console, the Color-TV-Game,
the Famicom’s popularity led to a release
in the west, although under a different name
– the Nintendo Entertainment System, or
the NES. The NES grew to be enormously popular,
and it was on this console that Final Fantasy
first made its mark. After a run of bad fortune,
Square’s Director of Planning and Development,
a certain Hironobu Sakaguchi, pitched the
idea for a role-playing game – an idea influenced
by games such as Ultima, Wizardry, and above
all others, Enix’s iconic 1986 release,
Dragon Quest. And so, Square began work on
Final Fantasy – but interestingly enough,
it wasn’t always called that. The initial
idea for the series was that it would actually
be called Fighting Fantasy, which was ultimately
changed, and the reason for that seems to
have become a bit of a video game myth, which
some of you will have undoubtedly heard – what
you tend to hear is that because it was Sakaguchi’s
last chance at success in the industry, he
fittingly named the title ‘Final’, but
this was actually debunked by Sakaguchi himself
in a 2015 interview with the renowned Japanese
gaming publication Famitsu:
‘There's an urban legend that the 'final'
in FF meant that this was our last project.
While we were having some hard times back
then, the truth is that as long as the title
could be shortened to FF, any word would've
sufficed. It was initially going to be Fighting
Fantasy, but there was already a board game
out with the same name.’
Just to make things a bit more complicated,
the game’s composer, Nobuo Uematsu, said
in an interview with Wired in 2009 that these
rumours actually had an element of truth to
them:
‘It's true that Sakaguchi was going to quit,
he said, but the bigger reason, the real reason,
was that Square was going to go bankrupt and
the designers believed that it would be the
company's swan song.’
For the most part all this does is confuse
things really, but the one thing that does
seem to ring true in both of these statements
is that Final Fantasy was really up against
it, and became a huge success against all
odds, and as a result it really put both the
names of Square and Final Fantasy itself on the map.
Now as the progenitor of one of the most iconic
and important video game series in history,
it’s not surprising to hear that the first
Final Fantasy game has been paid a lot of
retroactive attention, if you will, by way
of remakes and re-releases – and so, one
of the things I’d like to briefly discuss
with you before we head into the game proper
is which versions or editions of this game
are available to play, what the pros and cons
are, and which I would ultimately recommend
if you were to try the game out for yourself.
Of all the games in the series, the first
is probably the one where you have the largest
set of options to choose from – that being
said, the ones that I would consider most
worth your time are the original NES version,
Final Fantasy Origins on the PS1, Final Fantasy:
Dawn of Souls on the GBA, and the 20th Anniversary
Release on the PSP. The original is definitely
worth playing, but isn’t necessarily the
most user-friendly at points, and could definitely
be a shock to the system if you aren’t acclimatised
to games from that period in gaming history.
Origins improves on a lot, particularly from
a graphical standpoint, and also includes
a remixed soundtrack and even FMVs – but
it doesn’t stray as far from the original
in some other regards as the future releases
do, so would probably be your best bet if
you want to experience something closer to
the original with slightly more polish. The
GBA version added multiple quality of life
improvements, such as a revamped and more
recognisable magic system, being able to save
anywhere, and most importantly, a really decent
new script translation. And finally, the PSP
version keeps all the most important fixes
made in the previous iterations, whilst also
overhauling the graphics and music once again.
There’s also more optional end-game content
if that’s your kind of thing. Now that you
have the info, the choice is yours really,
but for the purposes of this video I will
be basing my analysis predominantly off the
original NES version, because, I mean, it
is the original, but I’ll also be using
the PSP version for cross-reference when relevant
or required.
Okay, finally, it’s time to dive in. Let’s
start it up.
The first thing you get hit with as you load
up any edition of the game is this wonderful
piece of music:
‘The Prelude’. Have a listen.
This is such a brilliant, simple, and iconic
piece of music, that is so instantly evocative
of the beginning of a journey. There is a
certain minimalism and purity which pervades
this song, immediately engendering a feeling
of hope, but also conveying a realistic sense
of a journey’s scale, with its undulation
between highs and lows representing the toll
your quest will take on you, and the unavoidable
ups and downs that accompany every Final Fantasy
story. An amazing fact about this song is
that Uematsu actually wrote it in no time
at all; in an interview in 2014, he was asked:
‘What do you remember about the first track
on Final Fantasy, “Prelude”?’
He said:
‘Around the time I worked on that, I’d
just finished making all the music and thought
everything was complete. Then my boss Hironobu
Sakaguchi suddenly came into the room and
told me to make one more song for the opening
screen. He gave me 30 minutes. I remember
rushing to make it right there. I never dreamed
that song would continue to be used in the
Final Fantasy series.’
We’ll touch more on Uematsu later, as other
noteworthy songs pop up, but even before we
get into any more of this analysis, it’s
worth keeping a mental note of just how important
he was to the success of this game and the
series as a whole. And with my fanboying over,
let’s finally have a look at the title screen.
It says:
“The world is veiled in darkness. The wind
stops, the sea is wild, and the earth begins
to rot. The people wait, their only hope,
a prophecy…
‘When the world is in darkness Four Warriors
will come…’
After a long journey, four young warriors
arrive, each holding an ORB.”
So, what you see on screen now, what I’ve
just read out, is about the extent of the
context you get for the story prior to starting
the game. Nowadays, Final Fantasy is regarded
as a pioneering series when it comes to narrative
progression in games, and for good reason,
but this can only really be applied to the
series from Final Fantasy IV and onwards.
Final Fantasy I is not really a game which
has the ability to fall back on its story
as a safety net, because the narrative thread
holding the game together is pretty thin.
We’ll get to that in a sec. Before that
though, I’d like to discuss one of Final
Fantasy I’s defining characteristics - its
distinctive lack of a main character.
Instead of being provided with a protagonist
and party members, you make your own in this
game, and get the opportunity to name them,
too. You have four slots in your team, and
the option of six class archetypes – you
have the Fighter, the Black Belt, the Thief,
the Red Mage, the Black Mage, and the White
Mage. All of these are recognisable classes
from JRPGs as a whole, but this is where it
all really started – the Black Belt class
is more commonly referred to as a Monk now,
at least within the FF series, but the others
are pretty immediately familiar if you have
experience with the genre. What makes this
work above all else though, is that being
able to immediately customise your party exactly
to your liking provides you with a pretty
instant connection with them. Generally you
have to take time to warm to party members,
but picking out the four classes you want,
naming them, and being put directly into the
game helps to develop an instant rapport between
you and them. When it comes to what classes
you should pick, it’s a very subjective
choice, and there aren’t really many wrong
answers – across both versions you’ll
see on screen, I’ve made sure to use every
character at least once in each party, just
to show that every individual character does
have utility, even if some are better than
others. I’m not going to tell you who to
use, but we’ll get more into the thought-process
behind character choice as we delve further
into combat later in the video.
After you’ve chosen your characters, you’re
dropped quite suddenly and unceremoniously
onto the world map, with very little to go
on aside from a town and castle directly in
front of you. It doesn’t take much to figure
out that the game is inviting you in. You
find out shortly after entering that this
is the town of Coneria, which leads me onto
something you’ll be seeing a fair bit through
this video – let’s call it ‘linguistic
cross-referencing’. Final Fantasy for the
NES suffers from what we’ll call an occasional
case of bad translation. In future versions
of the game, Coneria is universally referred
to as Cornelia, which rolls off the tongue
much more comfortably for native English speakers.
But why was this change made? Why was it wrong
in the first place? One of the most helpful
things to do when wrestling with bizarre localisation
is to look at the original source material,
which in this case is Japanese. Katakana,
in case you don’t know, is one of the three
main Japanese syllabaries, alongside Hiragana
and Kanji. The purpose of Katakana is really
interesting, because one of its functions
is to facilitate the transcription of foreign
words and loan-words into Japanese. Think
of it like italics in English, it helps to
clearly delineate the components within a
sentence to make its meaning more understandable.
Let’s look at the Katakana for Cornelia:
So this reads as ‘Ko’, with the line meaning
that the prior syllable is stressed, ‘Ne’,
‘Ri’, which is very hard to correctly
pronounce, what I’ve said isn’t exactly
right but it’s like a mixture between an
‘r’ and an ‘l’ and a ‘d’, and
then finally ‘a’. This is why translation
and localisation is so interesting, because
going by the Japanese, we find out that the
initial translation of ‘Coneria’ isn’t
actually that wrong, even though in comparison
to Cornelia, it definitely sounds worse. Part
of this is the letter ‘r’ in Cornelia
acting in place of the lengthened syllable
at the end of the ‘Ko’ Katakana, making
the word’s pronunciation more natural and
fluid. Something I don’t see enough in the
general discourse around games is discussion
about language, and how important the role
it plays actually is. Immersion is one of
the most important parts of game design philosophy,
especially when it comes to fantasy, and how
legitimate and believable the language feels
plays a massive role in that. Another example
from this opening town is the phrase ‘Light
Warriors’, which gets bandied about for
the entire duration of the game. Technically,
there isn’t much wrong with this, it makes
sense, but suddenly feels a bit iffy when
compared to the much more natural ‘Warriors
of Light’ you see in the PSP version. This
is because from a syntactic standpoint possession
can work pretty differently in both English
and Japanese, with Japanese using a particle
that goes after the noun it qualifies, for
example ‘Hikari no’, with ‘no’ being
the possessive particle, and English sometimes
reverses this structure, using the preposition
‘of’ before the noun. In translation studies,
this kind of thing is referred to as a ‘calque’,
when translation is too literal or too word-for-word,
and doesn’t focus enough on being idiomatic
in the target language. But again, why is
this actually important? Aside from the immersion
I mentioned earlier, the other main reason
is for the sake of clarity, considering how
this game conveys its information.
A few minutes back I mentioned that Final
Fantasy didn’t have much story to fall back
on, and that the narrative thread that binds
everything is thin, which is something I’d
like to explain a bit further now – most
stories that you get told in video games nowadays
are of a more passive variety; the word passive
does slightly imply negativity but it isn’t
actually negative at all – almost all visual
media tells its stories passively, but video
games can allow something different, a slightly
more active style of storytelling. How much
you get out of FFI’s narrative is basically
up to you, and how much you’re willing to
engage with the world. Optional NPC interaction
makes up the heavy majority of story progression
and world-building, and although it can sometimes
seem unclear, every piece of information you
would need for the context of the story, and
where you need to go next, is technically
available. You just probably need to note
down what every single NPC you speak to says,
and sometimes you also need an uncanny ability
to translate dodgy localisation. Soon we’ll
get into an example of one these wee NPC quest
chains, but before that I think it’s time
that we move on with the story a little bit,
yeah?
So, when you head into the castle and chat
to the King, you find out that Garland has
kidnapped the Princess. That’s about all
the info you get from him, but if you go and
ask around, you can find out that Garland
‘used to be a good knight’, and that he
‘holds the Princess in a temple to the northwest’.
Already the intrigue is building, the game
has started with pretty high stakes, with
betrayal and kidnapping. So you mosey on over
to this temple to the northwest, called the
Temple of Fiends by the way, and there you
find Garland – now, this is totally personal
preference bleeding in here but something
about the sentence ‘I, Garland, will knock
you all down!’ is just incredible. In the
PSP version, even though they gave him more
dialogue for the sake of exposition, they
kept this particular sentence exactly the
same, and I think that was the perfect choice.
There’s something about the wording of it,
the confidence exuding from it, the weird
choice of verb, that succinctly introduces
who this villain is. Garland is cocksure,
brash, wields his superiority complex like
a weapon, and you can tell all of this just
from this one proclamation. The writing in
FFI often leaves a lot to be desired, but
honestly, this is one of my favourite pieces
of dialogue in the whole game, if not my favourite.
In a shocking turn of events though, beating
Garland is a piece of piss, and you kill him
pretty quickly for four randoms with seemingly
no battle experience. Might seem a let-down
now, but it kinda makes sense later on. We’ll
get there. But for now, Princess Sarah takes
you back to the castle, and the King rebuilds
a bridge to the northern continent, so you
can continue your quest. When you cross it,
you see this screen, and this wonderful piece
of music begins to play:
 
In wanting to talk a bit about the music from
the game, I’d be very remiss to not discuss
the Main Theme of Final Fantasy. If you’re
a fan of the series like I am, then you will
understand just how important and powerful
this song is, and the reaction that it can
inspire in you when you hear it. This song
has gone on to feature in most (although not
all) future main series Final Fantasy games,
and the impact it has whenever it plays is
just palpable. In a conversation with IGN
about his own work, Uematsu stated this:
‘The theme from Final Fantasy is basically
the song I'd like to be remembered by. I think
it's very soft and warm, but there's a strength
to it. It’s appealing and I think it's the
most important song in terms of everything
I’ve ever done.’
Well you’re not going to hear me disagreeing
with him. We’ll discuss some of the future
iterations of the theme in later videos, but
for now all we need to know is that this song
sums up what Final Fantasy is. I know that
probably sounds like really bullshit analysis,
and it kind of is, but I promise you that
after more of these videos, as we go further
into the series, it’ll make more sense.
Now that we’re past the introductory stage
of the game, I’m going to step in and briefly
explain what our modus operandi throughout
Final Fantasy I actually is, because I haven’t
done that yet, and the game doesn’t do the
best job of explaining it either: in the fictional
universe in which Final Fantasy takes place,
there are four forces that govern the natural
world; Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind/Air. These
concepts are represented physically through
Crystals, which is probably the most ubiquitous
JRPG trope that exists. If you cast your mind
back to the opening screen of the game, it
did say stuff like ‘the sea is wild’,
and ‘the earth begins to rot’ – this
is because the power of the crystals has been
diminished by these creatures called the ‘Four
Fiends’. For some reason which I don’t
really know, your party members all start
the game holding a darkened crystal, one of
each aforementioned element, and your task
is to defeat the Fiends and return the crystals
to their former glory. In the NES version,
these crystals are called Orbs, which is bizarre
because the Katakana in the original version
does spell out ‘Crystal’:
Whether this truncated translation was decided
upon as a result of cutting down on letters,
or because the crystals in the menu are definitely
spherical, I can’t say, but for the purposes
of this video we’ll be referring to them
as crystals.
So, if the aim of the game is to restore these
crystals, what are you going to be doing in
the interim? What makes up the bulk of the
playtime? The answer is combat. A lot of it.
As you travel through the overworld, or through
dungeons, enemies can pop up and attack you
– random battles like this were the staple
in JRPGs for a long time, but the system has
fallen out of favour slightly as the medium
has developed, being found much less frequently
in modern games. As for the battle system
itself, Final Fantasy made use of, and pioneered,
the permutation of the turn based battle-system
which plopped the enemies on one side and
your party on the other, as opposed to a first-person
view, which was more common in other JRPGs
at the time, like Dragon Quest for example.
Nowadays this is seen as normal, but it was
definitely novel in 1987. This battle system
was created by Hiroyuki Ito, who explained
his creative process in an interview with
1UP:
‘Basically, there's no one inspiration that
I got that battle system from. It was just
a logical process, where I thought, "How can
I create an efficient battle system for a
role-playing game?" That's the answer that
I came to. At the root of it all, though,
there's a basic kind of system that comes
from professional sports...’
He was then asked which sport in particular
he was referring to, and he said:
‘Yeah, the NFL. [American] Football is probably
the closest thing.’
Contextually, this totally makes sense; the
engaging concept of ‘back and forth’ he
mentions from American Football is an almost
universally consistent feature amongst the
world’s biggest sports, and is part of why
turn-based combat worked so well after its
inception, and in my opinion still works really
well. Basing a battle system off a pre-existing
social paradigm that everyone understands
pretty inherently is genius, because it means
that the initial barrier standing between
you and understanding the idea behind the
combat almost doesn’t exist. The notion
of ‘you have a go, then they have a go’
is found in almost every variation of games
and play that there is. This might seem like
a really obvious point, but Final Fantasy
struck the balance perfectly between innovation
and recognisability. The battle system in
Final Fantasy I is super accessible and easy
to comprehend, which is definitely one of
its largest strengths. This is more from a
conceptual perspective though, rather than
from an actually hands-on perspective. Combat
in this game isn’t necessarily the most
intuitive in practice, partly because of hardware
limitations which we’ll speak about soon,
but also in part because of the battle system’s
other largest influence, alongside sports:
Dungeons and Dragons.
Now, if you’re watching this and you know
this game well, this will not at all come
as a surprise to you. If you’re a big D&D
fan who doesn’t know much about this game,
you’re going to find yourself in familiar
territory pretty frequently. Final Fantasy’s
nascent battle system takes a lot of inspiration
from tabletop RPGs, and here are the two main
ways it does; first and foremost, Final Fantasy
pretty much straight-up nicked the Spell Slots
system from D&D – most future entries in
the series use some form of the more well-known
MP, or Magic Points, system, but the original
Final Fantasy works off the basis of having
a set number of spells that you can use up.
Magic works in levels, so there are 8 levels
of spells, with the spells within each level
becoming stronger as the level gets higher.
So for example, Fire is a level 1 spell, but
Nuke, the strongest Black Magic spell in the
game, is a level 8 spell. As you level up,
your capacity for more spells increases, maxing
out at 9 charges per level before you would
have to go rest up at an Inn to regain them.
This is kind of hard to explain, I hope it’s
making sense. Some later versions of FFI changed
this system to the MP system that I mentioned
earlier, which is why you can see charges
in the NES version on screen, but MP on the
PSP version.
The second way in which inspiration was taken
pretty heavily from D&D was that almost every
enemy monster in the game, even the Four Fiends,
can be found in either the 1977 or 1983 Monster
Manuals, which if you don’t know are supplementary
books which give additional info about the
monsters used throughout Dungeons and Dragons.
This is pretty interesting because Final Fantasy
and D&D share something in common here, closely
overlapping in this game but separating more
as the games go on, which is heavily basing
their monsters and worldbuilding on things
from history, mythology, or folklore. We’ll
go into this a bit later in this video, and
analysis of this will make up a fair chunk
of the content to come in this series. Anyway,
this crossover from D&D is why a lot of the
elements in FFI come across as more stereotypically
western, which is something that doesn’t
apply as much as the series progresses and
finds more of its own identity. In this case
however, a lot of it is definitely a copy-and-paste
job. Nowadays if you wanted to create a bestiary
and a battle system for your fantasy world,
you’d have a bit more inspiration to draw
from, but at the time there was little better
to base your burgeoning fantasy franchise
off – I mean, looking at Final Fantasy I
now, in a lot of ways it almost comes across
as an attempted video-game adaptation of Dungeons
and Dragons.
All this doesn’t mean that there isn’t
a level of original charm and nuance within
the battle system though, because there is
charm and nuance, even though it’s sometimes
hard to find under the rampant issues and
glitches pervading the game’s combat. A
lot of the enemy and boss sprite work is actually
really impressive, especially compared to
some other games at the time, and manages
to pretty accurately convey the ideas put
forward by Yoshitaka Amano’s concept art.
There are also smaller aesthetic things like
individual weapon animations depending on
what you have equipped, which give the battles
a lot more character and variety from a visual
standpoint. However, if we were going to try
to describe Final Fantasy I’s combat in
one word, say, and we were trying to be kind
about it, we’d probably end up at something
like ‘deliberate’ – it is pretty slow,
arduous, and challenging, and you really have
to make each hit count. Something we maybe
take for granted nowadays in JRPGs is that
if multiple party members attack an enemy,
and the enemy is defeated before all party
members had a chance to attack it, the game
will automatically redirect any remaining
attack to hit another enemy. Because, well,
obviously, right? Final Fantasy I does not
do this. There’s a bit more kindling we
can add to this fire of inconvenience; unfortunately
some of the spells either do not work as advertised,
or pretty much do nothing at all – the spell
Temper, for example is meant to raise an ally’s
attack stat; it just doesn’t do anything.
The Intelligence stat, shortened to INT, is
meant to be used to factor in how much damage
a spell will do, or how much health a spell
will heal, but the game never uses it when
taking that into account, so it’s pointless
having it. Combined with the charge system
that hinders the overall utility of magic
and mages in the game, this doesn’t make
too much of a convincing argument for using
a mage-based party. A lot of the weapons are
supposed to have secondary effects, too – a
few examples are the Coral Sword, which is
meant to do more damage to sea-based creatures,
or the Dragon Sword, which, you guessed it,
is meant to do more damage to Dragon-based
enemies – none of these secondary effects
actually have any effect in the game, for
any weapon. Alongside balancing issues, all
of this culminates to there being a weird
sort of artificial difficulty all the way
throughout the game – and one of the best
instances of this is found on your journey
to rid the world of the first of the four
Fiends: Lich, the fiend of Earth.
Doesn’t come as much of a surprise but the
Lich fight takes place in the lowest floor
of a dungeon called the ‘Earth Cave’ – given
that the game is based around defeating these
four immensely powerful monsters, you’d
maybe be surprised to find that beating the
Lich is honestly not really difficult. You
know what is difficult? Getting there. You
have to go into the Earth Cave, beat a mini-boss,
then backtrack out of the Earth Cave, go get
an item to help you get further into the cave,
then go all the way back to the mini-boss
area, and then down another wee while before
you get to the boss. Outside of this frustrating
way in which they’ve lengthened the game
by making you do this dungeon twice, also
bear in mind that Phoenix Downs don’t exist
in this game. The only way to revive a dead
character is either by going to one of the
churches you can find in towns and paying
to be resurrected, or by using the Life spell,
which at this current point in the game, you
would likely have very few charges of, if
you had it at all, and all of that is assuming
that you have a White Mage in your party.
Getting ambushed by a large group of enemies
is par for the course throughout the game,
and you’ve just got to really hope that
they don’t attack your weaker characters,
because it happens relatively frequently that
you will enter a battle with a good amount
of health, be ambushed, and just die. One
helpful feature that you can use to your advantage
is that the position of your party members
actually determines the likelihood of them
being attacked – there’s a 50% chance
of enemies attacking the first person in your
party, the one at the top, which is why it’s
always a good idea to have a Fighter in that
spot, because they have the best defensive
capabilities. But having discussed a wee bit
about the Earth Cave and the Lich fight now,
haven’t we missed a bit out? How did we
get there? The last plot point we discussed
before this was when we crossed that bridge
right at the start. I think this is the perfect
time to bring up a bit more about how FFI
gives you the information you need to proceed.
We’re gonna imagine ourselves right at the
beginning again, just as we’ve defeated
Garland, and we’re preparing to head out
into the big scary world. In Cornelia, assuming
you talk to everyone, you can find out that
there’s a place called Pravoka to the east,
and that there’s someone called ‘Matoya’
to the north and that she needs the ‘Crystal’
to see. In the PSP version it’s elucidated
that this is a ‘crystal eye’, and that
she is blind without it. That’s two possible
avenues to explore - if you go and see Matoya
to the north, you can find out that someone
has stolen her ‘crystal eye’. Now if you
head to Pravoka, that town to the east, you
can find out that ‘the Elves live across
the sea. Matoya’s HERB is the only thing
that will wake their Prince’ – by now
you can see the pieces of a puzzle starting
to form. Earlier, in Cornelia Castle, we were
told by someone that this ‘mystic KEY’
was given to the Prince of ElfLand for safekeeping.
So, if we can get Matoya’s ‘crystal eye’
back, she might give us the ‘HERB’, or
‘Jolt Tonic’ in the PSP version, to wake
up the Prince and get this key. Looking at
the game from a distance, the entire narrative
is made up of these small NPC-interaction
based microcosms, each one helping you progress
further and influencing the way you interact
with the world. Getting the Mystic Key allows
you to progress further in the game to the
point where you can reach the Earth Cave,
and take on the Lich fight. It’s relatively
non-linear in structure, in the sense that
it’s an open world that you can pretty much
explore at your leisure, but the game isn’t
actually that big, and there aren’t really
any places that aren’t relevant to some
sort of story thread, or relevant to getting
some kind of item to help you progress, so
even if you have absolutely no idea where
you’re going or what you’re meant to be
doing, you will eventually be able to indirectly
figure it out by process of elimination. That
being said, figuring out what to do next with
the available clues is genuinely super satisfying,
and makes the game pretty fun to play in a
lot of ways. Knowing that every piece of info
you receive could end up being vital down
the line is exciting, it makes you pay attention,
and actually try and problem-solve.
So, how about we move onto the next of the
‘four Fiends’? After you beat the Lich,
you can actually go and do any of the remaining
three boss fights in whichever order you want,
and in the footage you might notice that I
do actually do the boss fights out of order,
but for the purposes of this video we’ll
discuss them in order, which means that next
on the agenda is KARY, the fiend of Fire,
and the boss fight that confuses me more than
anything else in this whole game. Why does
it confuse me, I hear you ask? Convoluted
battle mechanics, maybe? Is it an insanely
hard fight? It’s neither of those. It’s
her name. I just don’t get it.
In every other version of the game after the
original NES release, Kary is called Marilith
– a Marilith is a fictional creature from
Dungeons and Dragons loosely based off Hindu
mythology. That’s all fine. Knowing that,
you can actually look at the name ‘KARY’,
and figure out that it’s meant to be ‘Kali’
– Kali is the Hindu goddess of death and
destruction (among other things) who shares
some physical characteristics with Kary or
Marilith, mostly in the sense of having multiple
sets of arms, and wielding scimitars. So,
knowing what we do now about the localisation
in this game, with what we saw in the Cornelia
‘mis-translation’, the name ‘Kary’
must just be a localisation error too right?
Based on the potential ambiguity of the ‘r/l’
sound when translating back into English right?
It turns out, no. In the Japanese version
of FFI for the NES, she was called Marilith:
For years I had just assumed it was simply
a localisation error that led to Kali being
misconstrued as Kary, but it turns out that
there is absolutely no discernible reason
for the mistake. As you’ll see later in
the series, Final Fantasy is not a set of
games that shies away from pretty oblique
and obvious references to mythological figures,
so I don’t see any reason why this obfuscation
of her name would be deliberate. The chances
are that it was some sort of really bizarre
inexplicable oversight, but nonetheless I
find it really interesting that in a game
where almost all obvious localisation issues
can be pretty easily understood by checking
the original Japanese, this stands out as
the exception to that rule.
Anyway, let’s move on from that nonsense.
At least partly – at the beginning of that
previous segment I did allude to the non-linearity
that the game affords you in its second half,
and now I’d like to go into what it is that
makes this possible. The Airship. Again, if
you’re a fan of this series you’ll know
that airships are one of the most established
and essential components of the overall Final
Fantasy experience. The freedom that you finally
get to feel for the first time after attaining
the airship is always an unforgettable moment
in each Final Fantasy playthrough, regardless
of which game in the series you’re playing.
So, obtaining the Airship does end up being
a requirement for beating the game, but you
start getting clues for how to obtain it a
fair while before it’s actually available.
Think back to the wee quest line from before
involving Matoya, the Elven Prince, and the
Mystic Key. Getting your mitts on the Airship
follows a relatively similar structure – back
in the Dwarf Cave, an area you get to shortly
after obtaining the Mystic Key, one of the
dwarves mentions something called the ‘FLOATER’,
with which he could float anything! This seems
like pretty innocuous drivel at the time but
ends up being pretty important. When you reach
Melmond, the town immediately after the Dwarf
Cave, someone says that ‘ancient people
used a stone to make their ship float’.
So, we know now at least that if we can get
our hands on this floater, which was called
the ‘Levistone’ in future editions by
the way, then we should be able to make a
ship airborne. Later on, if you head back
to ElfLand and chat to the locals again, you’ll
get two more vital pieces of info – firstly
that a cave north of a volcano is where you’ll
find the stone, and the place you need to
use that stone is in the desert south of the
crescent, which refers to the town Crescent
Lake. With these four pieces of information,
you have all the knowledge you need to acquire
the Airship. I usually find that the whole
‘piecing-together-information’ thing can
be a really fun aspect of the game, but this
particular instance is one of the best examples
of it because the reward feels more tangible
than just about any other that you get throughout.
Most other questlines in this game, despite
being decent pseudo-puzzles, do feel somewhat
arbitrary, and even with the active role you
play in figuring out what you should be doing,
it ultimately never ends up feeling like you’re
doing more than a few glorified fetch quests
only to be able to go to another area and
repeat the process. The journey there is often
better than the destination. But getting the
Airship is different. Exhilarating is perhaps
too strong a word, but getting in it for the
first time and zooming around is definitely
a thrill, and the only thrill of its like
in the whole Final Fantasy I experience. It
almost feels like you’ve been given a break,
in a way – FFI is a pretty intense game,
not always the most user-friendly, not always
the fairest, not always the most fun; but
getting the Airship? That’s some top-notch
stuff. I imagine it was this feeling that
led to the Airship becoming such a series
staple, which leads me on to my next point,
and something you may have noticed if you’re
a series fan who hasn’t played this particular
entry – maybe you’ve asked yourself: ‘Where’s
all the classic Final Fantasy stuff?’
This is a pretty fair question. It’s actually
a bit weird to start this series with FFI,
even though it was the first and makes sense
chronologically, because Final Fantasy I is
in many ways one of the biggest outliers in
the whole series. A lot of the most beloved
and recognisable tropes and features throughout
the FF series are unfortunately absent in
this game. Chocobos and Moogles are nowhere
to be found. Cactuars and Tonberries? Nope.
There’s no character called Cid, unless
you count the blatant retcon you can find
in this line of dialogue in the PSP version.
Biggs and Wedge don’t appear for a while
yet. A lot of the more common thematic ideas
that connect some of the later games are missing
here because the series hasn’t taken off
its narrative training wheels yet, but the
core idea of heroes defeating evil is still
present in this first entry, which we’ll
dive into deeper at the end. There are still
things from this game that have endured throughout
the series though, of course – the Airship
we’ve just spoken about being one of the
most obvious examples, there are some Sci-Fi
elements later in the game that definitely
laid some of the groundwork for future entries
in the series going down that route, and probably
most importantly, a lot of the playable character
classes are still super recognisable, the
White and Black Mages in particular. I mean,
you’ve probably noticed but I’m pretty
keen on the Black Mage design – I main a
Black Mage in FFXIV, my channel icon is a
Black Mage, and Vivi from FFIX, alongside
Laguna from FFVIII, is probably my favourite
character in anything, ever. I wouldn’t
have any of that if it weren’t for this
game, and this specific design. Although a
lot of what makes Final Fantasy Final Fantasy
didn’t stem from this game, there’s enough
here to still get across what kind of enduring
legacy Sakaguchi and co were starting to set
up.
One more thing you might recognise, although
Summons don’t feature in this particular
entry, is a certain King of the Dragons. The
fan favourite Bahamut does appear in this
game, but not in the manner in which we’re
most acclimatised to – he’s an NPC. If
you manage to find him, he will ask you to
provide him with ‘proof of your courage’,
as vague as that is, and if we do so we will
receive the ‘honor due true warriors’.
Chatting to another nearby dragon tells us
that the place we ought to do this is in a
castle in the northeast. This dungeon isn’t
actually very difficult, but it does make
me want to discuss the game’s overall dungeon
design for a sec. The reason I’m bringing
this up at this particular area, funny enough
just about the only place in the game which
isn’t actually required to complete the
story, is because of how ahead of their time
some of the ideas underpinning the design
were. The first floor you have to make your
way through is a memory puzzle, essentially,
where you have to keep guessing which path
is the right one to take, and if you’re
wrong, you get sent back to the start. Playing
this part always makes me think of Sabrina’s
gym in the first generation Pokemon games,
because it’s pretty much the exact same
concept. I’ve always found the dungeon design
in FFI to have some impressive moments of
innovation, all in all, despite it not always
working perfectly, or despite it sometimes
still being a bit primitive. In Mt Gulg, the
dungeon where you fight Kary, or Kali, or
Marilith, whatever, you often have to walk
across lava to reach your destination, with
each tile you step on doing a tick of damage
to you, which obviously builds up over time.
The Ice Cave has the same concept, with ice
instead of lava. Although this sounds like
a kind of irritating wee gameplay mechanic,
I’m gonna explain why I think it’s actually
a pretty good idea – you see, FFI’s dungeons
are marred by two big problems. One is the
overabundance of random battles, and the other
is a lack of variety in map layout. It depends
on the floor and dungeon in question of course,
but a lot of FFI’s dungeons have branching
paths, most just dead ends, and one correct
path, which ends up often being not that far
away from where you start. If you end up exploring
dead ends for ages, being beaten into submission
by enemy ambushes, that’s pretty shit; if
you just find the exit to the floor straight
away, not really much of a dungeon, is it?
That’s where these damage tiles come in,
because they add a different element to the
floors they’re on, a bit of balance that
is desperately needed – the main thing is
that although the tiles damage you, you can’t
get random encounters on them. You’re finally
forced to consider your options, and make
the decision that you think is best. Sometimes
it’s mandatory to cross over the damaging
tiles, but take a look at this floor: this
is floor B2 in Mt Gulg. It has a lot of what
I mentioned earlier – a lot of potential
paths, some dead ends, some treasure chests
too, but most importantly, the very bottom
of this map has a straight path across to
the next floor, without taking the long way
round. You can, with very few random encounters
just skip most of this floor, for the price
of taking a wee bit of damage. But you’ve
gotta consider things like ‘is getting to
the next floor with guaranteed damage taken
better than risking it with enemy encounters?’,
and ‘should I access the next floor as soon
as possible, even though it means missing
out on some potential goodies from the chests?’.
I personally found that the floors with these
damaging tiles on them were consistently the
most interesting areas in dungeons from a
design and layout perspective, and added much
needed variety and player consideration into
what was otherwise somewhat stale dungeon
planning.
Anyway, let’s backtrack a bit – the reason
I brought all that up was because we were
heading to that castle to bring back proof
of our courage for Bahamut. When you get to
the end and open up the chest, what you find
inside is an item called a ‘TAIL’. Looking
at the other editions of the game, we get
the clarification that it’s actually a ‘rat’s
tail’. One of the dragons near Bahamut did
say that ‘the proof of your courage might
be anything’, so I guess we can’t be too
surprised, but it does seem a bit out of left
field – I think the idea of the item seeming
arbitrary, but representing something larger,
is a pretty nice idea which I can definitely
get behind. Kind of like a ‘the strength
was within you the whole time’ deal. The
reward you get for doing this is second only
to the Airship though – Bahamut rewards
you with an upgrade to each of your classes,
with the Fighter becoming the Knight, the
Black Mage becoming the Black Wizard, and
so on. This allows each character to use a
wider variety of equipment, and in some cases
gain the ability to learn a bit of magic.
It’s a really cool idea, and one the series
adapts slightly into the Job system that we’ll
see in future episodes in the series. Funny
enough, the series also recycles the Rat’s
Tail item too, often being used as an item
that seems innocuous, but ends up being pretty
valuable or helpful. Again, we’ll come across
them later down the line.
Anyway, that’s been quite enough mucking
about – how about we go and take on the
third of the four Fiends? This time it’s
the fiend of Water: the Kraken.
If I’m being totally honest, there is not
too much interesting to say about this fight.
So, I’m gonna be a bit cheeky, and segue
it into talking about something a bit different,
something that we’ve not spoken about yet.
What I’m talking about is this song:
This is the Victory Fanfare, possibly the
most recognisable jingle from the whole Final
Fantasy series, and maybe even one of the
most recognisable from games on the whole.
Some permutation of this tune is used in most
about every Final Fantasy game to signify
the successful end of a battle. But why is
this song important? The basic reason is because
you hear it repeatedly, just over and over
as you play the games from this series, and
after a while, I think everyone who plays
these games falls victim to at least a little
bit of subconscious conditioning. The victory
fanfare is essentially an auditory way of
providing you with repeated positive feedback.
Like a dog being given a treat after sitting
and holding out its paw, or something like
that. It says something to both this idea
of conditioning and Uematsu’s composition
that I have been playing these games almost
nonstop for 20 odd years, and I am yet to
ever get sick of hearing this wee tune. It’s
genius, because it just makes you instantly
feel a sense of accomplishment, and not to
get too deep with it, but at the end of the
day isn’t that why we’re all playing games,
really?
So, I know we’ve skipped over the Kraken
slightly, but that does mean that we only
have one Fiend left – there’s just one
small problem though. We need to learn a language
first.
As with everything in this game, this all
starts with another questline. In Onrac, the
town from which you enter the Sunken Shrine,
the place you fight the Kraken, two NPCs will
give you some pretty esoteric information:
Firstly, that this guy called Dr Unne could
teach this language if he had the SLAB, and
that when the Shrine sank, many treasures
were lost, including a cryptic stone plate.
Now this is understandable, but instances
like this make me glad that I chose to use
the PSP version to cross-reference – we
find out that Lefeinish has been changed to
Lufenian, that the SLAB is meant to be the
Rosetta Stone, and that we can definitely
find it in the Sunken Shrine. I’ll be calling
all this stuff by its PSP nomenclature, by
the way. Anyway, the Sunken Shrine is a slightly
different dungeon to some of the others because
you start on the middle floor. The Kraken
lives on the bottom floor, so we’re going
to head to the top. This is where we find
the Rosetta Stone, and also loads of mermaids.
It doesn’t really add much to the story
or overall game, but I found the dialogue
pretty interesting in this area – more than
one of the mermaids talks about turning into
bubbles and disappearing, and in the PSP version
we can see that more specifically they’ll
turn into sea foam. This was actually a really
helpful clarification because it makes it
much more obvious that the game is trying
to allude to Hans Christian Andersen’s original
story of the Little Mermaid, in which mermaids
turn into sea foam and cease to exist when
they die. Again, although this doesn’t do
much for the overall story, it’s still noteworthy
because it’s a small insight into how the
worldbuilding process went for this game – like
with basing monsters off mythology and folklore,
this isn’t much different. Final Fantasy
I has gone all in with the fantasy tropes,
with dwarves, elves, dragons, and now that
they’re also dropping mermaids into the
game too, they’ve taken inspiration from
probably the most well-known mermaid story
of all time to build up a bit more background
and realism into that ‘part of their world’
– anyway, that was a truly dogshit joke,
and I’m sorry. Way to take the emphasis
out of that point.
But now that we have the Rosetta Stone, we
can take it back to Dr Unne, a scholar we
met earlier in the game, and we gain the ability
to speak Lufenian in just a few seconds. Pretty
jealous of that retention rate to be honest.
Anyway, our group of polyglots now all head
over to Lefein, or Lufenia in later versions,
a secluded town hidden away from anything
else, now with the ability to speak to the
locals. What I find way more interesting than
that though, is what the Lufenian people were
saying before you get the Rosetta Stone. It
turns out, it’s not that much: in the NES
version, they exclusively say ‘Lu…pa…?’,
and in the PSP version they all say ‘Lu…pa…gamhi…dho?’.
Now this honestly does my head in. I like
the idea of recovering a lost language to
connect with these new people and proceed
with the story, but something about what they
say before you speak to them just eats away
at me. By all accounts, this ‘Lu…pa…?’
is just gibberish, and doesn’t actually
mean anything. Think of it as a dialogue placeholder,
until you can actually speak with them. Then
why was it added to in later versions? Look,
I understand they might have just added more
gibberish to make it seem more like an legit
language that has more than just two syllables,
and I get that that’s probably the case,
but a part of me can’t shake the idea that
it’s somehow meant to mean something? I
can’t find any etymological basis for these
words that would make contextual sense, but
if you have any theories about this, however
wild or baseless, please leave them in the
comments. I’d love to know. In terms of
linguistics that we can actually solve though,
I’d like to look at the name change from
Lefein to Lufenia that we’ve seen a few
times now. Again, we’re going to get our
old friend Katakana out for help:
This is technically the most confusing Katakana
we’ve looked at yet because of this small
‘e’, but what this basically ends up being
translated as is ‘Lufein’. This ends up
being about halfway between both of the English
translations we’ve seen in game, and if
anything, is a smidge closer to the former,
just like with Coneria/Cornelia. So, what’s
with the change? There are likely two main
reasons why this was adapted; firstly, to
make the name of the language sound a bit
less forced. In English there are a few common
morphemes that we use to denote that something
is a language, with ‘ish’ being one of
the most ubiquitous. However, having the language
be called Lefeinish is a bit like Finnish
being called Finlandish, or Swedish being
called Swedenish. Doesn’t sound great. Many
language names act more of a cross between
the country name and one of these morphemes,
which is why Lufenian works; it fits comfortably
into our real-world examples too – Romania
speaks Romanian, Bulgaria speaks Bulgarian,
Lufenia to Lufenian. This change helps the
English translation just sound a bit more
natural. The second reason is simply Lu because
Lufenia sounds much more like an ethereal
and mysterious fantasy location than Lefein,
right? If you had to guess which of those
was more likely to be in a fantasy setting
like this, you would totally pick Lufenia.
Or at least I hope you would, or this point
doesn’t end up doing much for me.
So, with this language learned, we manage
to obtain the item that lets us into our final,
sci-fi inspired dungeon, the Flying Fortress.
One thing you’ve probably noticed throughout
this video is that I haven’t spent much
time at all talking about the boss fights
themselves, and the unfortunate reason for
this is just that they aren’t actually that
interesting. They’re all relatively short,
not too difficult compared to the toll it
takes you to reach them, and none of them
have any specific mechanics or tactics that
make them noteworthy. Unfortunately, this
all also applies to Tiamat, the fiend of Wind.
The fight is more challenging than any that
have come before, but still not really remarkable
as an isolated incident. However, most of
these dungeons contain something interesting
or worthwhile, and Tiamat’s Flying Fortress
is thankfully no exception to that. One of
my favourite things to do in future FF games
is hunt down ultimate weapons. I absolutely
adore the concept of super powerful hidden
weapons existing that you’ve got to somehow
try to unlock, or discover, or whatever, and
the origin of this concept can technically
be found in Final Fantasy I. In the Flying
Fortress, you can find an item called Adamant,
or Adamantite in the PSP version. Bear in
mind, this is one of the very last dungeons
in the game. Before you even do the first
Fiend fight against the Lich, you can talk
to one of the dwarves in the Dwarf Cave who
says he can make you a legendary sword, but
he would need some Adamant. If you manage
to keep this one random bit of dialogue in
your head all the way up to finding this item,
you can take it back to him and be rewarded
with Excalibur, which is up to this point
the strongest weapon you can come across by
a distance. And again, with Excalibur you
can see the folkloric influence that Final
Fantasy draws from so heavily, with the inspiration
being from Arthurian legend this time around.
As legendary weapon quests go in the Final
Fantasy series, this is very rudimentary and
only really has one stage to it, but this
game is more about sowing seeds that later
games are going to reap to great effect. It’s
hard to bash it too much, being the very first
instance of it within the series.
But yeah, there we have it! The four Fiends
are defeated, so the game is over right? Wrong.
In the Flying Fortress you get the opportunity
to look through this window, through which
you can somehow see the whole world. It makes
it a bit clearer with this small animation
in the PSP version that the four Fiends you’ve
fought all existed at four separate corners
of the map, and their energies all converge
at one central point. The Temple of Fiends,
or the Chaos Temple depending on which version
you’re playing – what makes this important
though, is that this is the very place that
we fought Garland right back at the beginning.
So here we find out that everything else that
we’ve done in this game so far has actually
been building towards a little bit of story
to close things off with, but it’s a bit
of a mindfuck, so I’m going to try and explain
it as best I can. After restoring all four
crystals or orbs, you can head back to the
town Crescent Lake, and these sages on screen
will give you some info about what you need
to do now. One of them tells you that ‘the
time has come to destroy the source of all
evil’, and another asserts that ‘with
the four orbs shining again the Time Gate
can be broken. The true enemy is 2000 years
in the past’ – I’m sorry, but what?
Are you taking the piss? Up to this point
the game had not even given you the slightest
indication, not a single iota, that we were
gonna be ending this off with time travel,
of all things? Another guy says that ‘Time
is repeating. In order to break the time-loop
you must eliminate the enemy who controls
from 2000 years in the past’, and someone
else says that ‘someone travelled to the
past, and sent the fiends forward in time’.
Who’s the final boss in this game meant
to be, fucking Jonas Kahnwald or something?
Let’s be honest, this time-loop stuff has
really come out of nowhere, but the basic
premise is that Garland, the pushover you
mess up at the beginning, is actually the
big bad boss, and was sent back in time 2000
years by the four Fiends. From 2000 years
in the past, Garland, now able to transform
into Chaos, some sort of super demon, sends
the four Fiends back into the future, to make
sure they send him back into the past, and
continue this time-loop eternally. Look, I’m
gonna be honest, I’m not really into this.
It’s a cool idea, yeah, but the execution
of it is so muddy that it ends up adding little
but confusion to the end of the game – yeah,
the story ending where it starts is cool,
everyone’s a sucker for a good old-fashioned
cyclical narrative, but I think the story
of the game culminating in this way makes
it seem kind of incongruent with everything
before it. As usual, the ideas underpinning
this game are often more interesting than
what it actually does, and this leads me into
my final proper tangent of this whole video
– the four crystals.
Earlier on I mentioned that four elemental
crystals governing the natural world is about
the most clichéd JRPG trope you could ever
find, and I’m gonna stand by that. What
I didn’t talk about at the time, is why
that simple concept has endured so much throughout
both the lifespan of Final Fantasy, and JRPGs
as a whole. It comes down to an ancient notion
that we would most likely call the ‘classical
elements’ – these are typically earth,
water, wind, and fire. This is an idea which
exists in various guises and forms all across
the world, and has done for eons, and you
can recognise it in modern media all the time,
too. Specifically, though, considering this
game is Japanese, I’d like to talk about
how this applies more explicitly to Japan.
In Japan there is a concept called the ‘godai,
which literally translates to
‘five great’, and refers to the five elements.
Now you’re probably thinking something along
the lines of ‘I’m not sure this guy can
count, he’s added an extra element’, but
hear me out – within the godai, four of
the elements are as we previously stated,
earth, water, wind, fire, but there’s also
a fifth element, most often translated as
something along the lines of ‘void’, or
‘aether’. Whilst the previous four elements
are more tangible, the fifth element here
refers more to that which is empty, or made
up of energy – the intangible. So, why am
I bringing this up in reference to a game
which has four crystals? I’ve got a surprise
for you. There’re five crystals! In order
to enter the time-loop in the Temple of Fiends
you have to shine the light of the four crystals
onto what the NES version calls the ‘Dark
ORB’, or the ‘Black Crystal’ in the
PSP version, and open the portal to 2000 years
ago. I’m pretty sure that this Black Crystal,
or whatever you want to call it, is meant
to represent this fifth intangible element
of the void. Although the creative license
has been taken to make Dark Crystals often
synonymous with evil throughout the Final
Fantasy series, it isn’t so much like that
in reference to the original godai context
– void is just an opposite, if you will,
it’s space, a lack of anything else, and
from a thematic perspective this perfectly
sums up what Final Fantasy I is actually about.
The four elemental crystals represent order,
and in turn goodness; the antithesis of this
tangible goodness is most easily represented
by an intangible evil, which is where the
fifth, untouchable, and most arcane element
comes into play. Final Fantasy is using some
of the oldest human concepts surrounding nature
to frame its good and evil story, and this
is fantastic because it’s so simple. Final
Fantasy represents evil as an absence of light,
as all-consuming emptiness, and makes the
concept of goodness physical to emphasise
the difference between you and your enemy.
It’s fantastic, and ends up being the foundation
on which Final Fantasy develops its entire
identity.
So, with that, we go back in time, absolutely
batter Chaos, and sever the time-loop once
and for all. Given that time-loop stories
are always super clear and obvious, the game
ends by re-explaining everything that just
happened. The main takeaway from this whole
ending can be seen here, as it states that
everything that you’ve just done in the
game now pretty much won’t happen because
you broke the time loop, so the events in
the game technically never took place. It’s
a weird, pretty thankless ending, apart from
this one other screen that confers upon you
the honour of ‘truly being a LIGHT WARRIOR’.
But otherwise, that’s it. Final Fantasy
I is over. So, let’s have one final wee
chat about it, eh?
I basically said it at the very beginning
of the video, but the Final Fantasy series
is my absolute favourite thing in the world.
I cannot adequately express, no matter how
hard I try, just how much I care about these
games. It just wouldn’t ever be enough.
Final Fantasy I, the first game in the series,
is not one of my favourites. It is a fascinating
game though, one of the most important and
influential games in video-game history, and
puts in a lot of the groundwork that allows
the series to flourish later on. It’s a
game that deserves attention and analysis,
and I really sincerely hope that I managed
to do this mammoth of the genre even the slightest
bit of justice.
If you’ve followed me for a while , you
might know that I’ve been working on this
video for a very long time, and I cannot express
how relieved and pleased I am to finally release
it. This has been a labour of love more so
than anything I’ve ever created – in case
you don’t know, I have a chronic illness,
a problem with my spine, and it’s really
gotten in the way of making this, so I am
beyond ecstatic and immensely proud to be
able to finally share this with you. And I
can’t wait to share the rest of the series
with you too, because the best that Final
Fantasy has to offer is definitely yet to
come.
Just one more thing - I know this is a little
bit cheeky, but I’ve just recently launched
a Patreon account, and if you enjoyed this
video, or maybe feel like you learned anything
new, it would mean the world to me if you
would perhaps just check it out. Of course,
this is by no means an obligation, and I won’t
ask any more than just having a look.
And there we are. Thank you all so so much
for watching this video, I cannot adequately
articulate how grateful I am for your support
and patience, and I hope I did you all proud.
If you enjoyed this, please consider liking
the video, or subscribing to the channel if
you aren’t already. You could even follow
me on Twitter if you want more frequent updates
from me, the link to that is in the description.
I would love to hear what you have to say
in the comments, and if you could also share
this video around, with anyone who you think
might be interested, that would be absolutely
brilliant. Thank you everyone, and see you
next time.
