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Sitting dust-covered in a box in my basement is a copy of Final Fantasy for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I convinced my parents to buy it for me at a garage sale when I around five or six. It must have been cheap enough because they agreed to it, and home I went a happy kid holding what I had determined from the cover art would be just like The Legend of Zelda, a game which I had rented numerous times by that point but strangely never purchased until I was fourteen. The cartridge was in rough shape. It seemed that the person whom we had purchased it from had had the misfortune of their dogs using it as a chew toy one day and the plastic was covered in bite marks.
I was not impressed with the game initially. My original assessment of it as a Zelda clone (I say clone loosely as I'm sure I had no idea what one was at the time) turned out to be dead wrong and I could not begin to fathom why the developers had chosen to make fighting a process of clicking on words rather than using the weapons myself. My older brothers played the game however and being at the time that type of boy who hung annoyingly around his elder siblings I watched them work their way through it and eventually began to play it myself.
It was a difficult game to say the least. For those versed in the lore of the series know the original Final Fantasy is a game known for its rather stringent difficulty. I can't count the number of times my party found itself laying flat on their faces having just been slain by ogres or even worse the wizards in the Marsh Cave. Buying things in the game, especially in mass quantities was always a pain. To buy ninety-nine heal potions (that being the limit) meant purchasing each one individually until the shopkeeper was kind enough to tell you that you couldn't carry anymore of them and I won't even begin to describe how difficult the whole idea of stats was to comprehend for me at the time.
Flaws aside, the game was a wonder and one of the few titles of that era that I really look on with nostalgia. Perhaps my increased love of the series over the years has something to do with that. I said at this piece's start that I thought Final Fantasy would be something like Zelda, but over time the Zelda games, though excellent, fall more to the rear of my favorites whereas the RPG's crafted by SquareSoft (or Square Enix as we must now call it) have held my interest long after the first initial play through. I can't count the number of memorable moments I've had with these games. Some of them are of the dramatic sort (a la the incredible opening of Final Fantasy VIII which has yet to be topped as far as I'm concerned). Meanwhile others are more subtle; anyone who has played through the NES version of Final Fantasy can tell you about the tense stretch of walking where you face the chance of meeting WarMech, which could easily tear even a well-leveled party to pieces.
Every time I play one of these games I rediscover something about it that touched, moved, or influenced me in a way that has shaped my gaming hobby most profoundly, and in some ways I think it's a shame that much of that charm seems to be disappearing. There are some titles I have yet to beat. Final Fantasy IX and Tactics are still works in progress, and I have yet to make it all the way through Final Fantasy V for GBA. Final Fantasy XII was the first one I ever sold back to the store with zero interest in completing it. I have read many complaints about the game from people who disliked it. Much has been said about the new battle system and its flaws, but honestly for me it was the total lack of heart in the game.
The characters had no appeal to me, they were almost lifeless and while the serious tone of the game was somewhat refreshing at first, it soon lost its appeal as I discovered that is all the game seemed to offer. I have never been so bored playing any RPG in my life. More worrisome I feel than the failings of one game however, is the seeming exploitation by Square Enix of the franchise for financial purposes. I understand that Square has some money to remake. The ill-fated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a disaster for them and from what I understand was largely responsible for their merger with Enix. This said, the rampant way in which they have been diverging from the formulas that made the series great have been irksome to me. I enjoyed the Final Fantasy games because of the way they tell a complete story. In my opinion, none of them have ever needed a sequel and yet a number of recent and future releases in the series are exactly that.
Worse than that I feel is the growing trend towards remakes. Perhaps the management of Square Enix has come to the conclusion that their best work is behind them and that is fair, but we do not need a countless slew of shiny updated versions of already great games. I have the remake of Final Fantasy for GBA and it was far too easy. The remakes of I and II for PSP are equally ridiculous in my opinion, as is the impending remake of Final Fantasy IV for the DS. I will admit, I have been intrigued by that game. They seem to be doing interesting things with it, but the fact remains the GBA version has barely been out for more than a few years. A new one is far from necessary. The only one I think deserving a remake was Final Fantasy III and that is simply because many of us never got the chance to play it at all. What's next, a remake of V or even VI which was just released last year and is in my opinion far more beautiful in 2D than it could ever be in 3D?
My advice to Square Enix would be to stop working on selling us different shades of the same product and work on recapturing that spirit that drew us in the first place. Things like the Ivalice Alliance, the constant milking of FFVII and the entire series that is seemingly emerging from FFXIII are insulting. But I suppose I can't blame Square Enix, after all, we're all probably going to keep buying this stuff, no matter if it becomes schlock or not and what more encouragement does a profit focused business need than that?
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