My thoughts on Final Fantasy I & II
Heya!
So, I've recently taken up the hobby of playing every mainline Final Fantasy game in order of release.
Mainly, this is because I've played Final Fantasy 14 for... Oh god, 4700 hours already. So, it felt a bit silly to not know anything about the series of games its a part of. It's obviously not required to have played any of the other games to understand ff14, seeing as Final Fantasy is an anthology series... But still, I'd like to get some of the references to older Final Fantasy games.
Anyways, I just recently finished Final Fantasy I and II, and I have opinions on them.
FF1 was actually, suprisingly, quite good! I kept hearing people talk about how its not a great place to start the series, but i honestly had a lot of fun. Sure, the combat isn't exactly complex, and the story is basically an afterthought, but its some nice, simple RPG fun. I hadn't really played any proper JRPGs before this one, so it was a welcome introduction to the genre. For veterans, it might seem a bit bland, but being basically a newcomer to the genre, I had fun.
A guide is basically required though. You're not exactly given lots of instructions on where to go. Once you have a guide however, it's a great time. There's plenty of good ones out there.
One thing that surprised me was how the beginning of the game felt sort of like a survival game. The random encounter rate in the overworld is fairly high, and they drain a lot of your resources. In the beginning, you can't stray all that far from the town you start out in. I had to make a couple trips back and forth, trying to reach the first dungeon, before I had leveled up enough, and had enough gil for consumables, to be able to make it there with my party in somewhat acceptable condition.
Later on then, you get a boat, which lets you traverse the map more quickly, thus encountering less enemies along the way. Sometime after that, you'll accumulate enough gil for consumables to basically be a non-issue, allowing you to explore for as long as you want, only having to go back to towns very, very ocassionally to stock up again, because you can only carry a limited amount of each item. Finally, near the end of the game you get an airship, and you no longer get any random encounters while riding it.
I hadn't really been much of a fan of random encounters before this, mostly due to my main JRPG exposure being pokemon games, but this whole approach kind of changed my mind. It's a really fun sort of secondary power progression. It really makes you feel like you're gradually taming this dangerous world, becoming the true Warriors of Light.
Now, there's one caveat here. The final boss is honestly kind of bullshit. For some reason, the Pixel Remaster version, which are the versions I'll be playing for all the games that they're available for, buffed the Final Boss's health. For some reason. In the original game, Chaos had 2.000 health.
In the pixel remaster, he has 20.000.
He also has a 3% chance every turn to completely heal himself.
Unsuprisingly, this makes for a pretty bullshit fight.
It's definitely beatable, but all the guides on this boil down to some version of "buff one of your party members a ton and then one shot chaos because theres no limit to how many times certain buffs can stack" - which is what i ended up doing, mind you. But, that's just... kind of bullshit i feel. It seems a tad anticlimactic to end things that way, with you doing nothing for like 5 rounds only to kill Chaos in a single blow. Anyways, still a good game. Get a guide if you wanna play it, but other than that, great fun for the most part.
Now, Final Fantasy II. It's... an interesting game. It has a lot of very interesting mechanics. There's no classes, for example. Everybody can learn every spell and equip every type of gear. There's also no traditional level ups. Instead, you level up individual stats and even skills, by just using them in battle. The dialogue system is also rather interesting.
Instead of just selecting from a list of premade questions, you can learn words for NPCs, and then can ask any NPC about that word. Effectively this still boils down to just selecting stuff from a premade list though, since most NPCs this works with only respond to maybe one or two words. Still, all of these mechanics are quite interesting, and for the most part feel rather modern for how old a game this is.
Albion Online, an MMO released a good 29 years later than ff2, prides itself on the uniqueness of being a classless RPG. FF2 is a lot more primitive than Albion when it comes to the execution of that system, but still. Impressive stuff.
The story is also a lot more... There. The first game barely really had any story. It was a generic "save the world" sort of plot, and none of your characters really had any actual character. I dont think any of them ever actually say anything. The second game has an actual plot, with towns getting destroyed, dramatic deaths, the whole 9 yards.
There's even some decent comedic moments, with one of your party members, guy, revealing that he can talk to beavers in a scene which is genuinely quite funny. Even still though, it's not the most complex story in the world. But, well, it's a story. You could barely say that about the first game. I enjoyed it, for the most part. Except for the ending, where the evil bad guy just sort of... comes back from hell after you kill him. With no explanation as to how or why really, he just sort of does that. It felt a bit silly in the moment.
As for the gameplay... Yeah, it's a lot worse honestly. The stat leveling system is interesting, but leads to characters you haven't leveled being borderline useless, even moreso than in regular RPGs. Near the end of the game, none of the new party members that temporarily join you along the way have anywhere near enough HP to survive even one battle. So, you either have to stop and grind up their HP stat, or you just have a mostly useless party member.
And while the whole classless system is a fun idea, in practice it just ends up with everyone feeling about the same. You can give everyone every spell without any real downside, the only difference really is what weapons they'll be using. It's boring, and I don't think really improved the game.
The dungeons, especially later on also really drag, and have way too many random encounters. I turned off random encounters for the last couple bits of the final dungeon, because it was genuinely getting on my nerves. The Final Boss is also kind of trivially easy if you have the blood sword, though i suppose that's better than the annoying slogfest of the first game.
So, overall, despite the improved story I'd still say Final Fantasy I is a better game. I wouldn't really recommend II unless you're playing all the games in order, like I am. It's not horrible, I had some fun playing it, but it really does just feel like a worse version of 1 in some regards. There's not much reason to play it if you played that game.
Anyways, those are my thoughts for now. I'll make another post once I've beat some more Final Fantasy games. We'll see how my thoughts on the series evolve. For now, my favorite game (besides 14, of course) is FF1.