A Look Back at Final Fantasy on the NES

Final Fantasy on the NES is one of the first RPGs I ever played. When I first started playing it, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I just wandered around getting into random fights and eventually died.

I had no idea that I was supposed to buy and equip weapons and armor, or what equipment was right for the different characters. I had just started playing my brother’s saved game, and turned it off after dying a few times. Finally, I was taught how to play by one of my brothers’ friends.

Like many of the early RPGs on the NES, this is a grind heavy game. You need to wander around to earn money and experience, which will help you afford the equipment and spells. While I find games like this relaxing, I can see why some people find them tedious.

TLDR: A good retro RPG that I’ve gotten a little tired of playing.

Narrative

The story for Final Fantasy is fairly simple, but it takes a long time to get to the ending. There are three main parts to the story, and no real character development for the player’s party. This is my only real criticism of the game’s plot.

The story begins with the four Warriors of Light appearing before a city. Your first job is to defeat Garland and save a princess. Once this is done, you’re able to explore the rest of the continent.

There are a bunch of mini quests you have to complete to be able to leave and explore the rest of the world. This is when the second part of the game starts. From here, you travel around to fight the four elemental friends and restore light to the four crystals.

Once that is done, you have to do a little time traveling. It turns out that Garland was sent into the past to send the four fiends into the future. This creates a time loop and transforms Garland into the demon Chaos.

There are a number of smaller plot points to this game. My major problem with it has to do with a lack of character development from the player’s party. The four of them are blank slates that depend on the player to give them backstories and personalities. While this makes everyone’s characters a little different, it makes it hard for me to think much of them as characters in a story.

Gameplay

Final Fantasy is a turn-based RPG where you form a party of four characters. There are six character classes to choose from, which offer quite a few options for the player. It lets you decide how you want to play the game and acts as a difficulty system.

When you start a new game, you’ll have to assemble a party of four characters. You have six classes to choose from:

• Warrior
• Thief
• Black Belt
• White Mage
• Black Mage
• Red Mage

About halfway through the game, you can upgrade your characters. You do this by completing a quest, which will see your party change classes:

• Warrior becomes a Knight
• Thief becomes a Ninja
• Black Belt becomes a Grand Master
• White Mage becomes a White Wizard
• Black Mage becomes a Black Wizard
• Red Mage becomes a Red Wizard

Unlike Dragon Quest and Phantasy Star, you fight groups of various enemies instead of a singular one. The boss fights only have one enemy, but they’re much stronger, which should be expected. Having more enemies on the screen makes the combat more strategic and challenging.

The most annoying parts of this game are the magic system and the inventory for weapons and armor. I’m glad that the way the first Final Fantasy did this was abandoned after this game. Both systems are awful.

Each character can only carry four pieces of armor and four weapons. While this isn’t a big deal for weapons, it becomes extremely annoying for armor. Near the end of the game, you’ll only have one or two open slots. If you try to pick up something, then you’ll have to throw things out. It would’ve been much easier if the equipment had gone into your inventory system.

The magic system is archaic. There are eight levels of magic, and characters can learn three spells for each level, with some exceptions. A character needs to be a wizard to learn the best spells for white and black magic, and the Red Wizard is limited in what spells they can learn.

I love the idea of the Red Wizard/Mage, but they’re seriously limited when it comes to the best magic late in the game. It is a character class that looks cool, but needs to be in the right party to be effective.

One other annoying part of the magic system is how you need to buy each spell. This, along with the high cost of equipment, slows things down at times. While I find grinding for levels to be relaxing, doing it for money gets a little boring.

Most of the gameplay is very good. If you like retro RPGs, then Final Fantasy will feel very familiar. You go on quests for key items, explore dungeons, and have to talk with everyone to find out what you’re supposed to do.

Overall, I like this game, but I’m a little tired of playing it at this point. I’ve been playing this game since the early 1990s. It has gotten to the point where I’ve probably played it too many times. It’s like overwatching a movie or a TV show you like. Sometimes you just need to leave it alone for a while.

Visuals

I like the graphics in Final Fantasy. Most of the game looks better than some of the other RPGs on the NES. I like the way the spells look, the variety of enemies, and how the character sprites look.

When I look at some of the other RPGs released around this time, I think that Final Fantasy has good graphics when it comes to magic. While there is some repetition in how the spells look, I think they’re better than those in other games.

I love the variety of enemies in this game. While they start like a generic high fantasy game, they eventually become more creative. It gets to the point where you don’t notice the palette swaps of the monsters, and there is a good variety of high fantasy, gothic, and robots.

There is something charming about the pixel art on the character sprites. Since I’ve recreated some of it for my YouTube thumbnails, I thought I’d bring it up here. They look wonderful, and I love that they are easy to recreate if you take your time with them.

Final Fantasy has a darker tone to its narrative, and the graphics reflect that. While there is a lot of good in this game, there are a few spots where things don’t look good. I think the battle screens are fairly boring to look at, but most of the rest of the game looks good.

Reviews

This was a little strange. Most of the reviews I’ve come across were from 2000 and on. I know it was covered in Nintendo Power, but I wasn’t sure where to find the other reviews. So, I’ll look at the Nintendo Power review and the user reviews on MobyGames.

The Nintendo Power article I was looking for turned out to be a strategy guide for the game. It appears in issue 17 of the magazine (Link). Because the game was released in December of 1987, it made things tricky. If the magazine did give a review of the game, I wasn’t able to find it.

The NES version of Final Fantasy has a 7.2/10 on Moby Games. This is skewed by the people who either hate the game or love it. With any reviews like this, some people purposely give it a low score. I think the aggregate score isn’t too far off the mark. It is an average to good game, but not the Final Fantasy game I would recommend people start with.

There are a few times that the game was mentioned in print. I didn’t find a review of the game from the time it was released. Most of the reviews were from the late 1990s and retrospective looks over the last 25 years.

8/10. This is a more user friendly RPG than some of the other games on the NES. The gameplay is simplified when compared to Dragon Quest, and I like having a party of characters instead of one. I like the game, but I’m a little tired of playing it. There are other Final Fantasy games and other RPGs that I would rather play.

Pros

• Decent Story
• Good Graphics
• Good Gameplay

Cons

• Terrible Magic System
• Grind Heavy
• Lacks Character Development

Conclusion

I used to love this game. It was one of the first RPGs I ever played, and it got me into the Final Fantasy series. Over the years, I’ve played this game way too many times. It has gotten to the point where I’m tired of going through it.

It is a better game than some of the other RPGs I’ve played on the NES, but it’s not the one I would want to revisit. Like many of the Final Fantasy games, the more I look at the story, the more things I find wrong with it.

If you like retro RPGs, this is still a fun one to play. For me, I’m looking for something new and different. This is the game that really got me into RPGs, but I’m not going to praise it blindly.

If you liked this post, please check out my other posts on retro RPGs, such as Dragon Quest and Destiny of an Emperor.