Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 70: Final Fantasy I

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

Chris Kohler and Sam Claiborne join up for another single-game exploratory session, this time centered around the original Final Fantasy. More like Final FantasTIC, right??? Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, I, Jeremy Parrish, will knock you all down. the bi-weekly-ish-weekly video game podcast about old video games by old people and sometimes by new people. It's bi-weekly curious. Oh, my goodness. It just doesn't know which weeks it's into. I bet this will be episode 64. I don't know.

Old reference. I'm sorry. Okay. Oh, is that like the Nintendo 64-K? Yeah, I think that's what he was going for. I didn't actually want to scream and hurt all you guys, so. No, no, that's a good one. I appreciate it.

Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Parrish. As I announced at the beginning, as I prepared to kill the light warriors, and with me this week. Similarly to the episode we just did on The Legend of Zelda, we have... Hey, I'm Samuel Claiborne. I maintain the one-up database at IGN.com. I am

Chris Kohler, video games editor at Wired. And I am Bob Mackey, and I got to say, four white mages, no items, final destination. Oh, okay. I thought you were going to start rapping because you're like, I'm Bob Mackey, and I've got to say. I don't need four white mages in a major way. I've stopped

introducing myself like that. I find it alienates people. I got something for you. I never played with a white mage, so when we talk about that. Oh, not even one, not even one? Never even tried it. I always took two fighters. I was a weird kid. Did you ever try four thieves?

I've heard that it is impossible. Yeah. But it'll pay off eventually if you can get there. So anyway, this week we're talking about Final Fantasy. Probably just Final Fantasy One. The best Final Fantasy, right? We all agree with them. Maybe so.

This is the first in a series I'd like to do of really, really deep dive. into a few key Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles. I probably should have started with Dragon Quest, but we just did that, I just put together that Uwematsu episode, and it was so good. I was just like, I need the excuse to play through Final Fantasy and listen to this music. So that's what I've been doing.

So speaking of which, as a touch of housekeeping, because we were going to do the Uyematsu slash Mitsuda episode a few months ago, right, and people think that we're going to do the Mitzuda episode immediately and that it's just like on the way, no, no, no. No. Well, we're going to do it. Retronauts is a process. Yeah.

It's geological. It takes, it takes aeons. So be patient. You probably won't see it until summer. Just keep contributing to our Patreon. And eventually, after you've sunk a whole lot of money into the show, we'll give you what you're waiting for. So basically, this is retronauts is like a slot machine. No, it's more like we're holding that episode hostage.

Okay. All right. It's really more of a, I mean, it's going to be good. You're going to love, you're going to love us. It's very Stockholm syndrome-ish. Yep. It's like the chrono cross-a-range album. It's vaporware.

It's vaporware. Eventually, it'll make it out. That still hurts. Before we get too deep into Final Fantasy, I just want to say it's really cool being under with Chris Culler because I used Chris Culler's book, Power Up, to write an essay about Final Fantasy in college. Look at that. And I used it in my bibliography.

Now, you might say, Power Up, when will I ever get to read Power Up again? And the answer is that in 2016, August of 2016, Power Up, we back out on store shelves with a new chapter, but mostly old material. Did Andy Edit it read it? Yes, I had Andy Eddie write a new chapter. That would be funny. I would love to do that one day. That's a game over joke.

Yeah, it is. It is. Really. And I actually peeked back at it to study it for this episode. You interviewed so many people for that book. I did interview a lot of people. Chris, is there a new power up on the cover? Maybe a fireflower or a star man.

As of the time that we are recording this episode, we have not made any announcements as to what may or may not be on the cover. But as a retronauts exclusive, I will tell you. You're going to use my Game of the Fisherman's Wife image, right? So not to get too far off topic. That is how I initially envisioned the cover of Power Up like in 2004, being like a Japanese

woodblock print with video game influences. That is what they did for the cover of the Japanese version of Power Up. They didn't even ask me that that was what I wanted. It's just like Final Fantasy. Their covers are always better. The Final Fantasy 8 cover, the unofficial one. That was definitely an idea

maybe with fewer boobs. But, and honestly, like, that the fact that you did that, oh my God, that was one of the things I was thinking of for Power Up. But it is a totally original and new idea done by someone that Retronauts fans will be familiar with. But we haven't shown it and we haven't announced it yet. So I can't say nothing, but you're going to like it.

Like Square? Did you take card submissions and then choose somebody at random? Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. And Koichi Sugiyama wrote it. Right. Yeah, yeah. Is it really him?

Don't try to guess because you might actually guess it and then it'd have to get really cagey. Okay. So anyway, Final Fantasy. A little bit more about my book. Your book, which talks somewhat about Final Fantasy. It does. So, yeah, we talked a bit about Final Fantasy, actually, in the Uyematsu episode. Because that was really kind of his big breakout.

And really, everyone at Square, that was their big breakout. Because before that, Square made a lot of really crappy games. And that's why it's called Final Fantasy. Except for Rad Racer. Red Racer's great. Rad Racer's cool. They were on the edges of, like, good games sometimes. Yeah, like, sometimes they flirted with good games.

I just think it's cool. Highway Star in Japan. Highway Star, yep. It's a better name. Anyway, so, yeah, Final Fantasy. It was called that because, let's bring out the hoary old chestnut. Please don't, Jeremy. It's a metaphor.

Oh, okay. Are you shaming that chestnut? I'm sorry. Is this how Sauguchi ordered a pizza and took a slice out of it and was like, that's Final Fantasy? Was this how they ran out of 100-10 coins? and then that their final coin was the Final Fantasy. Yeah, and Final Fantasy was actually the name of their warehouse manager.

Right. And then later on, Robin Williams named his daughter, Final Fantasy Williams. We've discredited ourselves completely now. You can feel free to stop. But please don't. So I didn't think, I bet you didn't realize this was a comedy podcast, but there you go. So yes, Final Fantasy called such because Square made a lot of really crappy games and lost a lot of money and was about to go out of business. And so they decided as their final game to make an art.

RPG, and they called it Final Fantasy because it was the make or break. It was going to be their final game. And then it was a huge hit. And so they didn't have to go to business. But I also, I think you even wrote about Sakaguchi wanting to leave, and that him just calling it. Yeah, he was going to call today and get out of there. And so it's

his Final Fantasy no matter what. Right, right. It was like, they definitely felt like either way, like whether the company went out of the video game business or whether Sakaguchi quit and, you know, did something else. Like, this is probably their last roll the dice. Right. Yeah. And Final Fantasy is a more appropriate name for the situation,

but originally I believe he wanted to call it Fighting Fantasy, but there was a pen and paper RPG or something. But that could be, that could be true. I haven't heard that. I didn't stop him from taking everything else from kind of paper books. I read, man, I cannot find the source for this, but I read somewhere in a Japanese book that like, oh yeah, we like the idea of like the acronym being FF. I read that too, yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Great. Okay. Yeah. So, but like the Pac-Man story, like you know, you want to Honey did not take a piece of slice of whatever pizza, Pac-Man. But now he says he does.

If you ask them now, like, what's the origin of Final Fantasy? Like, oh, well, you know, we knew it was going to be our last game. Well, this anecdote dates back from, like, 1998, 99. It was in an episode or an issue of Next Generation magazine. And I remember this really well because I got that issue with my subscription. And at the time, I was, you know, contributing and hanging out with the gaming intelligence agency people. and I went into the chat and I was like oh hey I just got the latest next gen

and it has this really cool anecdote about Final Fantasy which of course the site was all about and they were like oh what was that and so I gave them just like this quick description of what he said and I thought they were going to maybe write a story about it but and they did but they just took like the broken half sentence chunks that I pasted into like you know that I

my abstract and quoted those verbatim I was like guys if you were going to do that I would have actually you know used real sentences in actual human language? I don't know about that, but I was definitely responsible for getting in a small way for putting that information on the internet very, very badly.

That's cool. That has stuck in my memory just because of that one connection. But yeah, there's probably other anecdotes about it. But you have to keep in mind that Square at the time wasn't necessarily going to be a video game creator for the

long term. Square was created as like an offshoot of an electric company, electric utility company. Yeah, in Japan. This was, everyone was doing that and the Japanese bubble, the Famicom bubble, they both overlapped, and any company that had even like

the vagus connection to things that involved electricity or televisions was like, let's make some video games. And they usually turned out really badly. Here all the leather companies got into it. Yeah, right, right, right. No, I mean, there were a lot of companies

that had other origins in America that, like, established video game division. because, like, if you could, you did. Yeah, it was the Wild West. Even in the East. When you find out what those developer names stood for, it always is surprising, like, Vic Tokai and those things. It's like, oh, you're just a part of another

organization where you were, yeah. Yeah, Kempco was part of Kodibuki system, which was, I don't even know. Say, go to service games. Yeah. Enix is some made-up word from the ENIAC. Eniac and Phoenix. Yeah, but anyway, so there was no guarantee that Square

was going to be for the long term. And like most companies that were just kind of created to cash in on the Famicom boom, they mostly released really bad games. They really kind of jumped in on the Famicom disk system with a spin-off. They had their own subsidiary called Disc Operating Group, where they would publish other developers' games for the disc system. Dog. Dog, which is appropriate, as Chris has said many times,

because those games were pretty much universally crap. So you're a cat person is what you're saying. I am, actually. 3D World Runner, in there. Yeah, and that's okay. Right, right. As Space Harrier rip-offs go, it's better than attack animal Gakuin.

Yeah. Wait until it returns to Oculus. Then you'll understand how much 3D can bring to a game. Yeah. They did do the 3D gimmick. They also had Rad Racer, which Nintendo published over here. They did. But without the shutter glasses.

And Red Blue doesn't work in that game at all, so I don't even know why they even made a 3D world in it. They published a version of David Crane's Little Computer People as Apple Towns Story, yep, yep. Yeah, which was a very influential game on things like the Sims. Yeah, that's probably the most notable thing they did on this system. Yeah, for sure. They released just some clunkers.

And as a result... Kings Night looks like Final Fantasy if you see it in screenshots, but don't buy it thinking it's some kind of proto-Final Fantasy. No, no, no, no. It does have Oematsu Final Fantasy-esque music. It has one monster jam, right? The whole game, I think so, yeah. It's kind of like CBS.

And then towards the end of the disc system's life, they actually produce two games that you could only get by having them written for you on a disc writer in a store, Moonball Magic and Aku Sinkidaijin. Cool. Yeah. Are they any good? They're really rare.

They're really rare. And so, and so. And then. Square said, well, we got to pack it out. So they made one last desperate attempt, and this being sometime in 1987, they said, what's hot right now? Roll-playing games.

Everyone was making a final, a Dragon Quest clone. Let's make a big expensive game. Yeah, they were like, let's make a Dragon Quest clone. So they did. And the crazy thing they did was they didn't just do a straight clone of Dragon Quest. They drew on, you know, kind of the influences that created Dragon Quest. You know, they looked to Ultima.

They looked to Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, boy, did they look to Dungeons and Dragons? Half the Bestiary comes straight out of the Montres Compendium. Yes. Copyright infringement is just flying all over the play. It's not cute. You know, Dragon Quest, everything Dragon Quest is so cute. Yeah.

Yeah, so they made some really interesting creative decisions. They couldn't get, you know, Koichi Sugiyama to do their music, so they were just like, Uwimatsu, you do it. But instead, they got a really well-regarded illustrator to create all the monster designs and all the packaging art, Yoshitaka Amato. Yeah, sorry, I talked over you. Yoshitaka Amano. And he had not done video games prior to this point.

He was best known for his work in Ones. He did the character designs for Gatchaman, which was better known here as, not like Gatchapone. It was better known here as Battle of the Planets, right? I think so. I don't think it was known here at all. Battle of the planets came out pretty early in the 80s, and I'm not mistaken. But yeah. He had done anime, and then he really had his own style, which ironically had absolutely, there was no way that any of that was ever going to get translated into a pixelated video game.

Because he had this extremely extraordinarily thin line, billowy, wispy, sort of style. Right, yeah, like very sketchy, very watercolory. Yep, yep. So how do you put that into big chunky pixels with primary color? Start with a black background. Well, you know what you do is you just be like, you know, whatever. We'll just do it. But no, they did a really good job of translating his wispy, creative monster designs.

They basically handed him the monster's compendium and were like, can you draw Carl's crazy your style versions of these? Yeah. And so you get this really unique version of kind of the standard

fantasy bestiary. You know, you have that with Dragon Quest and that was a big part of the appeal was Akira Toriyama drew these little, you know, monsters like slimes, you know,

instead of making a gelatinous cube, he made this little onion drop slime with a big smiley face. It's so, so cute. This golem was, you know, just kind of this imposing stone man reaching out for the players. Like everything had personality.

Amano's approach was a bit different, and everything was more like, you know, like the cover of a fantasy novel or a heavy metal album, especially when it was translated down to, you know, four colors and 32 pixels square. Now, the two things you just said, a heavy metal album is really what the art ended up looking like in America, which was so bad. The kind of the airbrushed, crappy cover of Final Fantasy here, and the poster and all the... The cover of Final Fantasy here was like the... It's nice. It's just like the logo. It has a sphere and has a castle. Yeah, it's like very minimal. Yeah.

Are you talking about the Nintendo Power? The strategy guide, yeah, yeah. That doesn't count. It's so cool. It looks like it's just really dumb. Yeah, it's like four dudes in a tiny airship. It's like, you know, ridiculous. Yeah, there's a lot of art.

There's like big, full pages of art. But certainly Amano's work, they really put Amano's illustrations front and center and all of the marketing materials and the box cover and the strategy guides, you know, were these beautiful things because they were filled with these illustrations. The Japanese game box looks like no other

game box before it. It's this really clean white and then it has this watercolor night holding a saber. And then it has the logo which is in English Final Fantasy.

And the tiny kind of kind of beneath it, Final Fantasy. So why did they take that out for the U.S.? I really have never really understood? It doesn't look specifically Japanese. It might have been too wispy.

I don't know. Also, there is something weird about that, the katakana that you mentioned, which of course, whenever anybody says, oh yeah, Final Fantasy, it must be finite of Fantagie. Nope, it's G. Yeah, it's G. I don't know what's up with that. Not sure.

Sounds cool. Languages are weird. Yeah, so I don't know. I feel like maybe the change to the American box art was because, you know, Nintendo had such great success with the Legend of Zelda's minimal box art. When you got games like that and in the U.S., you know, published by Nintendo, they tend to take the same approach. Fazonadoo.

The Japanese box was like this little model. Dragon Warrior. Yeah. Well, Dragon Warrior actually has a painting on the front. It's a really bad painting too. But Final Fantasy is much more minimal.

But it's not character. It's not characters. It's things. It's objects. It's things like that. And that's how they kind of localized rather than anime art. And rather than try to do a, you know,

Frank Franzetta airbrushed, you know, version of the characters. They just did more photorealistic renderings of logos. and objects and things like that. It was much more like, this is, you know, special, this is classy, this is unique. This was a concerted effort by Nintendo

to get us into RPGs because it didn't work for a Dragon Warrior, correct? Were they putting a lot of force behind this? Yeah, I mean, they pumped this sinister phase two. They had a contest. It had its own issue of Nintendo Power. You just didn't get Nintendo Power one month. You got a strategy guy.

Yeah, like, hey, buy this. Wasn't that when Nintendo Power was bi-monthly and they started doing like these interim issues that were strategy guides? Yeah, I'm not really sure, quite sure why they did that, but yeah, they were just like, oh, yeah, it's going to be, it's now going to be monthly. Or Ninja Guyton 2.

It was Mario players, Mario 3, Mario 3, Ninja Guide 2, Final Fantasy, and then the four player extra, and then they said, we're just going monthly. Yeah, yeah. And they started doing independent strategy guides, separate strategy guides again. Yeah. So, yeah, like, it was just kind of in that weird space, but they really pushed that game hard.

They had, you know, features for several issues in a row. They had this big contest where you could win your own crystal. Again, RPGs were the genre in Japan, and they sold millions of each RPG that came out. Like, they realized there was a market opportunity or they thought there was a market opportunity because these games sold peanuts in the U.S. So it was like, how can we get Americans to buy RPGs?

Let's try it with Dragon Warrior. Didn't work, Kail. Let's try it with Final Fantasy. Let's try it with Mother. Actually, let's not. Final Fantasy worked, actually. It did really well. It was a hit for me.

It was not proportionally popular, though, too. If you look at the population of Japan, No, but it was a bigger hit than Dragon Warrior for sure. Yeah, I don't think Nintendo would get the impact they wanted until Pokemon came out. That was the RPG that got Americans into the idea, I think, after Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy 7 and Pokemon at the same time. Sure, I mean, that's the point at which it became a big thing. Yeah.

But Final Fantasy did really well for an RPG on a console of that era, enough so that, you know, Square was like, hmm, we should start rebranding games that aren't Final Fantasy as Final Fantasy. So you've got the Makaitoshi saga games as Final Fantasy legend. And, well, Final Fantasy Adventure was subtitle Final Fantasy in Japan. I actually keep telling you. It is a Final Fantasy.

I know it is. But it wasn't called like Final Fantasy Saken Dinsets. It was Sake and Dinsets' Final Fantasy Guide in. So it was like the subtitle, but here they just called it Final Fantasy Adventure. Right. They didn't call it like the Holy Sword, the Final Fantasy story. It was not the merging of two totally distinct things.

But legend is a distinct thing. It is. It's an offshoot of Final Fantasy 2. in a spiritual sense. Right, exactly, exactly. But anyway, yeah. In the spiritual sense. Square jumped into it.

And a sorry, Kowazu, you can't make Final Fantasy games any more sense. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, they started making the Final Fantasy legend or, you know, releasing games under that name.

They released Final Fantasy 4. They skipped two and three because, really, they were too far behind the curve because of the localization delay. But, of course, Final Fantasy 2. Was localized. Was localized. No, first pass.

It was a first pass. Oh, yeah. They do the first pass, then they go and clean it up later. They never got to that. You know, there's marketing materials where they have Final Fantasy 2 and 3 being promoted for. They were going to do, Square was going to do precisely what Enix did, which is the game, Nintendo publish is the first game, and then Enix went on and published Dragon Warrior 2, 3, 4.

Square was going to do that with Final Fantasy 2 and 3 on the NES, but they decided, and, you know, this is the difference between Square and Enix also, like, Enix likes to stick with the old technology, but Square really likes to leap ahead as quickly as it can and leapfrog everybody. You know, so they got Final Fantasy 4 slash 2 out on the Super Nintendo, while Enix. was still, you know, messing around with Famicom. Yeah, and, you know, it clearly was something that Square had a lot of faith in. To the point that they said, you know, we can make Final Fantasy a big deal in America. Let's make a really just stupid Final Fantasy game for stupid Americans and give it to the babies.

With really good music. Really good music. It was basically like a Final Fantasy Adventure or Final Fantasy Legend 3, the spinoff. Can you tell you about Mystic Quest? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so back to what I was saying about Amano is that his artwork, even though it didn't show up on the packaging, didn't show up in the promotional materials in America, it was still very integral to the game.

And, you know, you kind of had this weird visual disconnect in the game where you had your four little chubby sprites lining up to attack. But then the monsters they were fighting were really detailed and elaborate. I remember beating the final boss for the first time, chaos. And it like fills half the screen. I mean, probably it doesn't actually, but that's how it seemed at the time. It was just this massive, giant drawing of this huge demon.

And when you defeat it, it dissolves. Like, it disappears a line at a time. And it just was like, wow, I just did something incredible. I just saved history itself. It's crazy. And your white mage got to attack because you had that tiny dagger,

the massive man. You know, I didn't really understand how the game worked at that point. I didn't know about, like, using weapons as items and what you could do. I don't know how I beat Final Fantasy because I was really clueless about RPGs

at the time, but I did. I kind of bounced off it too. I tried using items. I tried to using weapons in battle because I played adventure games so like use sword and nothing happened. Like what? No, equip fooled us all.

Yeah. And nobody, that was not a concept at the time. And you could go buy stuff in the original castle area, but you had to, there was no way to figure that out, except you finally open up that 72-page manual that you get in with it and it walks you through so much of that game.

Yeah, I think I rented it and I did not get that manual. Yeah, that would be very difficult. I basically cannot. I've never played Final Fantasy 1 in its NES incarnation past the Marsh Cave because that is the point of which, it's not even so much that that cave sucks. It is that, it does suck. But you, it's like, oh, buy 99 cure potions. It's like, okay, well, I can buy one at a time.

time. So, okay. All right, now I'll buy 99, what is it, pure, the heel potions that cure poison. Okay, well, I have to buy one at a time, but I can't even just hold down the A button for this because it's the second option on the menu. So I have to press A, A, A, A, A, A, A down, and also the game runs so slowly that I literally just have to sit there in this

menu buying all this stuff that I had to generate all this gold for, and it took hours upon, hours upon hours. You've got to fight those creeps and giants just to get your stats out. I have never played that game past that. Wow. I've beaten it on the PlayStation One and the Wonder Swan actually. We played it all the way through on the WonderSwan. You know what's crazy about that same tape? And really enjoy playing it because

they had just, they just, you know, polished it up just enough. The WonderSwan of PlayStation games, they're fast. You know, fast, fast, fast, which is nice. We can talk about best versions. I guess we could do that now. The PlayStation 1 version is the best version of Final Fantasy. Yes. The later versions of the game, they took out like the actual original difficulty level. Yeah. So you can just steamroll that game.

I played it on GBA and it was just like a joke. I was like, wow, am I, I can just be asleep. But PlayStation 1, they gave you the easy mode, but they also gave you the original difficulty. And if you play it that way, it's like, you know, a pretty tough RPG, pretty unforgiving, but not impossible. And it cleans up all the stupid little interface frustrations

of the original game. So you can buy, you know, 99 items at once if you want to. And unlike current Square remakes, it doesn't look awful. No, it's great. It looks good. It looks really nice. And you guys were saying it was too slow. That's because each spell hits each enemy one at a time.

Yeah, everything about that game just takes for freaking ever. You don't notice that when you're nine. Yeah, well, I mean, that was very much in sort of like the mode of RPGs at the time where it gives you, like, you know, Dragon Quest was the same way. It gave you a little explanation, a little bit of flavor text for everything you did. You don't have to walk up and choose eight things every time you do. Yeah, I mean, Dragon Quest was a much more streamlined game. Final Fantasy was trying to be a more complex adventure.

And they brought in the genius Iranian programmer and Assyra Gabley, who did a lot of Squares early work. He programmed Radracer in 3D. Like, he was kind of a legitimate phenomenon as a programmer. But I think this game was maybe, I wouldn't say beyond his capabilities, but I think it was something he had never done before. So there's a lot going on in this game

and a lot of kind of weird errors. I know there's all kinds of stats that don't actually do anything. I think there's some spells that just don't work. Yeah. One or two of the spells just don't work. I think you're talking about there's an ice sword and a fire sword

and those don't actually do the extra damage just might be what you're talking about. Yeah, so there's a lot that's trying to happen under the surface and it doesn't always work out. But you know,

you have to admire just the the fact that this company was like, this is our last-ditch effort, let's just put everything into it. It's like a team of four or five people and they made this huge RPG it was much bigger than any other game I'd play it on NADS at the time.

I love the way the game begins because it feels very much like, oh, yeah, very dragon warrior, very dragon quest. Like, you go and you talk to the king and he says, ah, my daughter's been kidnapped, I'll build a bridge to the mainland for you if you save her. So you're like, oh, okay, this is going to be like... He doesn't even say I'll build a bridge if you save her. He says, my daughter has been kidnapped.

I just played the PS1 version and he says that, but yeah. They changed that. They might have, I think they changed the script. I think they did, yeah. Yeah, because they changed like Cornaria from Cornelia to Cornelia. Oh, too Cornelia. So they did a lot of tweaks to the PS1 version. But yeah, he pretty much just says, my daughter's been,

So you think, oh, this is going to be like a big part of the game. You know, Dragon Warrior, Dragon Quest, it takes probably, I don't know, six to ten hours to rescue the princess the first time you play. No, no, no, I don't, well, I think it takes a lot less than that, probably. The first time you play? You got to fight some imps, and then you just walk a couple blocks. No, no, Dragon Quest. Oh, Dragon Quest, which came out here and in Japan before Final Fantasy.

I thought you were just talking about that first boss. No, no, first hour. This is what I'm saying is, like, if you have your expectations set by Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior, you're like, oh, this is going to be like the big main part of my quest. It's going to take a long time. It's going to, you know, be really involving. No, you level up to like two or three, go straight north of the palace,

kill the guy, the Garland, who proclaims he's going to knock you all down and then goes down like a chump. And you've saved the princess. And then the game actually begins. And there's this really great cutscene. It's not a cutscene, but like a scene, like EGA graphics. Yeah, a title screen. Well, the game's title screen is not, yeah.

It's the silhouette of your game. heroes and the bridge and like the landscape beyond and Final Fantasy and the adventure begins, there's a text scroll. And it says, and so their journey begins. Like it's like, oh, I get it. Wow, okay, so that was just like the introduction. This is not a game about saving the princess.

This is a game where saving the princess is like the first hour and then it starts. Also, the positioning of the title screen, I mean, you know, this is what I wrote a lot about in Power Up, but like, this was the beginning of like making Final Fantasy like a little movie. Oh, for sure, yeah. So, I mean, the fact that, like, it kind of starts in the middle of the action and then later the title screen appears and there's a credit role at the beginning, you know, to really pump you up.

But that kind of movie making that, like, we're not going to show you the title until you're already sort of bought into what's going on. Yeah. And, of course, that, and then they would just roll from there. Yeah, so again, like a really ambitious game. And I love how off the wall the story is. I mean, it seems like a pretty fantasy or pretty standard fantasy type story at first. Like, you start traveling around the world.

Each character is holding a crystal. Like, that's kind of their proof of identity. They're the light warriors because they've got the crystals. But you find out that, you know, the elements affiliated with each crystal have been rotting and, like, basically, dying. And the world is dying because of this elemental imbalance. And so your mission is to go in... You can find that out from brooms mainly.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's like, it's like a Fantasia, basically. Like, you go to a witch and she has little talking brooms. But you go around and you're trying to restore each element, and you fight an elemental fiend, and then you get to the very end. Those are the coolest-looking enemies, by the way. Yeah, yeah, the fiends are great. The fiends are amazing-looking.

So full-color, just like that skull fiend, and then for the earth, and then there's like the fire guy. So, they're scary-like. So, I mean, that right there set the idea of, like, the main elements in Final Fantasy, the crystals. But then, you know, once you beat them, then there's the real Final Fantasy boss at the end, who is kind of behind everything, and he's just this dude who wants to destroy everything. He's chaos.

Like, literally, that's what he's about. He just wants to see the world burn, you know. And so your mission is to stop him. And you have to fight the elemental fiends along the way again. And you get to the end and you discover that chaos is actually Garland, the guy you fought at the beginning. Like, you know, at the very beginning, he is like, yeah, go to the shrine of chaos and fight Garland.

When he had 100 hit points. It doesn't really occur to you. But, yeah, you go back in time 2,000 years to fight Garland, who has somehow become chaos by through his defeat, traveling back in time to become chaos and try to destroy the world that way. So in the end, you go back in time, destroy Garland, aka Chaos, and the story never happened. You never, like, you closed a time loop. And so your heroes are like, they leveled up for nothing. Like, no one knows what they did. They just kind of disappear anonymously into the either.

It's very Like the kind of balance of fantasy And science fiction in the game Is very reminiscent of the early Ultima games I know Ultima 2 had like space shooting sequence Yeah, so weird Yeah, like it had that same kind of off the wall element Yeah, Ultima 1, the original Ultima

I mean you You start out in its medieval fantasy And then you go to space and then you Yeah, right. Yeah, so there's Final Fantasy 4 Yep Well I mean there's that in here Kind of one of the last palaces you fight

where you fight the fiend of the air, is this ancient floating palace that's like... It's super futuristic. Yeah, it's ancient, but it's actually super high tech. And, you know, this is the first wandering super boss in the series, too, the war machine. Oh, yeah. Or Warmec or Death Machine, whatever you want to call it. It's also a robot.

Yeah. So, I mean, yeah. Yeah, and it, you have, you know, it's launching nukes at you. Like, literally, that's the name of the skill. That's not the name in Japanese. Right, right. But, you know, basically. Yeah, like, it's nuclear, using nuclear annihilation against you.

So all of a sudden, you know, you've gone through this whole adventure and it seems like, you know, there's the elves and the dwarves and the goblins and everything, but, oh, by the way, here's this, you know, futuristic ruin from long in the past, what's going on there? Yeah. They never really explain it. No, but, you know, that all of the groundwork now

for the Final Fantasy series, except Chocobos, has now been laid down. And Sid. It makes guns and swords possible. There's always a Sid. There's no Sid in one. There's always a man. They added sit in the remakes, the GBA remade. So you guys, you have beat Final Fantasy one, but only in the remakes.

Only the remakes. No, I beat it on any of us. Okay. I think one thing about Final Fantasy, you know, what a version you get to is you need to get to the airship in that game, because the game has a Zelda moment where you can just go out and go anywhere. And it becomes nonlinear, a lot less linear briefly, where you can touch down in anywhere that has green. And that's a lot of places, suck. It's back where you came from.

It's little corned-off areas. It's where you're supposed to go and many other places. That's the airship moment of the Final Fantasy games. Love it. The Dragon Quest games do that, too. You know. Do they? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, okay. No, Dragon Quest One didn't. Oh, but Dragon Quest one didn't. Oh, but Dragon Quest. I think that's Final Fantasy's innovation. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I mean, it's so, you know,

it's so important in all the Final Fantasy games going forward until they became sort of leading your corridors. Yeah, so there were a lot of, other ideas that sort of began in Final Fantasy and became Hallmarks of the series. The game begins with you rolling your own characters. And it's not like a super in-depth RPG system. It's not much of a role.

No. By role, it's like, I want this character, or I want this class and this class and this class. You have six classes, four characters. But, you know, that is an element of customization. You have to make a choice. Like, each character class has distinct advantages and disadvantages, and you can,

you can pretty much try to beat the game with any party you want. There are a few that are impossible. A few that are crazy hard. Yeah. But there's characters you have to leave behind. You have to decide immediately. Like, I'm not going to bring these two characters in.

And you make kind of a long and short-term choices. You can get a red wizard. And they're amazing in the first part of the game. But then you get to the second half of the game and realize, oh, they can't do anything. They're generalists. Yep. And they can't do anything exceptionally well.

So the Nintendo Power had a... Third page of it is a chart that says, this is what these characters turn into. I started Final Fantasy over at that point. Because it was so cool thinking that I could have a lame character that becomes much more powerful. Now the fighters say great, Black Mage, whatever. Yeah, the monk, or the, I guess they call,

is a black belt. Yeah, black belt in the English version. He starts out like a joke. He's like, like, he has a cute punch. He goes, bam bam, bam. Yeah, but his fist attacks do nothing at first. I've been replaying this. And like when you start out,

he's doing one hit point of damage. But after you level up a little bit, his strength stats starts to rise. In a weird way, because he also gets multiple hits. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. He can get like 64 hits in a turn, and each of them is doing a little bit of damage,

but that adds up times 64, and he's doing crazy amounts of damage. But you may not realize it because he can also equip nunchucks. And at the beginning of the game, you really need the nunchucks to do any damage with him. But if you keep them on, then your strength doesn't rise as much, right?

I don't think it's a stat thing. I just think you don't punch as many times. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't get as many hits. Gotcha. And it really does kind of have that. So basically, Houston Unchucks in the beginning of the game,

but then you take them off pretty shortly after. Yeah, this game really... Like, after you fight the pirates, you take them off. Yeah. This game really kind of plays with the whole Thacko concept. You know, like, it's how many actions you get, how well you evade. Like, you can boost your defense,

but maybe it's better to use something that helps your evasion so you're not taking as much damage. Like, taking as many hits, so you get more damage per hit, but fewer. hits. Since we're talking about glasses, though, I do want to commend Square in their flagrant rip-off of Orko. Was that Thundercats

or is that He-Man? Yeah, the Black Mage. You never thought about that. It was He-Man. Okay, so if you look at the Orco character, it is the Black Mage, but a little bit uglier. They made the design better, but it is such a flagrant rip-off. Like, I like that idea. That's mine now. But I have to commend them. Original character do not steal. Exactly. I think that's one of the best designs

of a character in a square game, like one of the most iconic designs. And it's not theirs, but I think they did a little something better. with it. Yeah, something that's really interesting about Final Fantasy 1 is that the, like the spell system uses this kind of, instead of like a collective pool, you have different levels of spells and you can cast spells from each level so many times. And that's something that showed up in Final Fantasy 3 and then it was abandoned forever. So even though that mechanic changed,

what didn't change and what was laid down right here was the different spell classes and the spell naming system. You got fur and lit? Four character limits. Let's not talk about the Aneas version. Like, in the original version, in Japanese, you have, you know, Thunder, Thundara, Thundaga. Like, right from the start, Kura, Kira, Aga, et cetera. Like, all of those things are in place, and that has remained a constant element through every Final Fantasy game except two, because it was weird.

Yep. Sam was talking about those, I mean, they had to really work with four characters. Like, as spells got more complicated, there was like, A-Rub. What does that mean? A-Rub. Is that a slur? Help me out here. Well, a lot of that prevents you from being rubbed.

Okay. Yes. There's cockatrises that can rub you. Right. Yeah. Don't want to get rubbed by a cockatrice. In the canoe section of that game, which, again, canoe section, win. The one now?

The canoe section. What's the canoe section? You can get in a canoe and go down on the rivers. Oh, yeah. And you're a little silhouettes in a canoe. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that is really cute. Not as good music as the ship.

Yep. So there were like three means of transport in this game. Yeah. Dragon Quest only had one by this. You actually get the pirate ship before the canoe. The canoe is important for kind of taking voyages into the continental interior and going to places you can't with just the airship or the boat. The circle of sages?

Yeah, there's lots of really great moments in this game. Totally memorable. Yeah. The mirage palace. Sage Lucan. Yeah, there was no filler in Final Fantasy. It was all. It was just hit to hit to hit.

But it feels big. Except for that rat tail. That's a little weird. Go get this rat tail first master. Well, that's optional. That's optional. You don't have to do the character. You don't have to do that.

You don't have to be a minute's quest is, if I'm not mistaken, it's optional. Man, and you can try to beat the game with, like, the lower ranked characters. It's probably really tough. I love how metal everyone looks after they get upgraded. Totally. They all got, like, they have shoulder pads? Yeah, they're long hair. Bare sleeves. Yeah, it is really weird.

And then you're like, oh, wait, the white mage isn't a girl. Okay, never got me too. There's no girls. It's all, like, tough looking. I named your Rosa. No girls. Because I played Final Fantasy 4 before I played this. Now it's Rosa the Ripped dude.

Rose of the Ripper. It's probably got a real complex about that. You should have gone with A-R-R-O-S. Yeah, A-R-O-S. Yeah, a lot of the spell names are consistent in Japanese and have been. I can't remember if all of them were in place. Like, Esona, which has become kind of the standard

curative, not curative, but like. The heel, the heels all status effects. Apparently, Esenah means status null, S-N. Get out. Nope. That's so far. Yes, status null. I don't remember who told me that, but I was like, oh, my.

Yeah, but was that like, I think it's, I think it's supposed to be S-N, status null. They probably took that from D&D, and we're like, Esu-na. Yeah, right? Okay, back to the show. I do some research. I'm pretty sure that whoever told me that was not bluffing me. If they were, I buy it completely. It works.

Can you tell us where harm came from? I think, yeah, wasn't that the man from uncle's enemy? A lack of imagination. That's the one spell the white mage can use to hurt people. Right, which is actually holy, right? Oh, I don't know, is holy, or was that fade? You can use cure on dead enemies to hurt you. Yeah, there's Daya, which hurts undead enemies.

Daya, what's Daya? I wonder what the equivalent is. Oh, maybe that's harm. And then holy is fade. I think so. I think so. And then nuke, I think, is actually Medio. Oh, really? Oh, it is. Yeah.

Or something like that. It's like non-elements or attack spell. But it's like, again, like the spell names were already kind of... That was one where the localization was actually better. Like, nuke. Yeah, you get nuke as your final fire spell. Yeah. When you see that, you know what that is. Yeah.

You know what that's going to do. Yeah, you go back to the goblins in the first area and nuke them. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's what this was for. Except I think it's just a single attack, like single target spell, isn't it? So you only can nuke one goblin at a...

CC drop a nuke in your stuff. It's a really great use of your limited spell casting. I guess. Getting left and hitting a bunch of things at once is the best feeling once you get fire to and everything. Right. It's the best. So much more useful. Yeah, I mean, going back and playing the NES version, it has a lot of weird inconsistencies and frustrations. Like you said, with the purchasing stuff in stores, which is terrible for items, and also the way when you attack an enemy, like you have to set your target at the beginning of a turn because it's all turn-based by side.

And if you kill an enemy And you just attack his shadow Someone else is targeting it after And they move after you They whiff, they just hit empty air But that happened in Dragon Quest after there was a party system? I can't remember, I think it did I think you could whiff on enemies

That no longer existed It's a terrible animation Yeah Just two hits and nothing I think that the NES The lighter NES Dragon Quest did that And they've taken that away I think the magic actually retargets

But other stuff doesn't is that right? It could be, I don't know Maybe it's had a dream about that kind of a while since I played any of as Final Fantasy. So much for a deep dive. God. I think it's funny that you guys think it's so flawed. I didn't get that at all playing it.

I just loved it so much. And now I'm thinking about it more because... Well, no. I mean, it did stuff that I never seen... I thought it was a polished Dragon Quest, if anything. I think Dragon Quest is a mess. I'd never seen anything like that game. I had a friend who I borrowed it from,

and he was super into PC RPGs. So he might have had a different perspective. But I know he loved Final Fantasy, too. Like, I remember going over to his house a few times, and he was just, like, engrossed, fighting through the water shrine or whatever. I was like, hey, I'm over here too. Which, you know, I've done that to people too, so what can I say?

I was that friend. Yeah, I was the jackass friend. Which friend? The one who just played the video game? Well, actually, I did have a friend similar experience for Final Fantasy 4 or two here. I just going over to somebody's house and just waiting for them to be done with Final Nestle, but also being enjoying watching. Kids playing video games are assholes. I've really kind of learned this by watching young nephews and cousins playing video games.

I'm like, wow, it really kind of brings out the jerk in you. But I was the same way. It's just, you know, no social skills yet. It's okay. But, yeah, like, I didn't realize that it had flaws at the time. It was only, you know, in hindsight, looking back over the inconveniences that become obvious when you've played more refined later games.

You know, being able to use the shoulder buttons on the Super NES to toggle between party members and the menu screen. Like, wow, what a great innovation. Of course you couldn't do that on NNES. but, you know, it's just lots of things. The series got better as it evolved. You don't realize all those things until you make one. Right.

Oh, right. This would be really convenient. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this was a groundbreaking work. Absolutely. You know, for a company that couldn't find its own... Couldn't find its own ass with his right hand.

Right. Asshole in the ground. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Yeah, I mean, it's really quite amazing that it turned out as well as it did. Yeah. It was...

released, I think, the same week as Fantasy Star in Japan. Both of them were sometime in December, 1987. Anything in 86 and 87, any game was released the same week as three other major. Mega Man also came out the same week, I believe. It was just like, oh, let's just revolutionize video games, why don't we? Over and over again. I've got nothing better to do this week. It was a great time.

Do you know if it was immediately popular? Because we talked about Dragon Quest, how it wasn't. It took like a campaign. I think Final Fantasy was pretty successful right away. It was successful out of the gate because the RPG had already been established. Dragon Quest kind of did the John the Baptist thing. And Dragon Quest 2 was out by that point. So people were...

And that was where it really started to snowball. To the point where, you know, when Dragon Quest 3 launched in 1990, was it 90? Or was it later? I believe it was... Dragon Quest 3? I think that's 90. Yeah. Maybe it looks like tail end of 89.

Maybe. But when that launched... No, I think Dragon Quest 4 was 90. Oh, you know what? I think it was 86, 87, 88, and the 90s. Yeah, Dragon Quest 3 is 88, which is crazy. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, by the time Dragon Quest 3 launched in 88, like people were lining up and there was, you know, the infamous mob mentality over that. So Final Fantasy definitely benefited from...

I can see a Japanese-style mob mentality. Right, a very polite mob, standing in a line. Organized lines, yeah. With someone in the megaphone shouting where they need to stand. But you absolutely did start to see, I think, newspaper. stories at that time about kids having their copies stolen from them as they like walked home from the story. Yeah, you wrote about that. Bullies taking Dragon Quest copies

from other kids. Right, right, right. And then there's a parliament, parliamentary action or something? You know, this always gets misconstrued. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it came from something. It definitely came from like, you know, mayors or, you know, some heads of government, like asking stores to

not sell the games on school days or something along those lines. But, it grew into like the prime minister issued an edict that no Dragon Quest game may be sold within 100 yards of a school or you know that it's right.

We've talked a bit about the kind of weird balance between inventive ideas and sort of fantasy standard tropes, D&D lifting. Final Fantasy was still kind of finding its personality at this point. I mean, of course. But it's interesting to see all the elements that showed up in this game and that were kind of deprecated out. Like were there elves in any other Final Fantasy game? or like like elves like characters

you meet that are elves yeah like NPC is a town full of elves probably somewhere but you're right that it was definitely taken away like those guys

disappeared right away and then dwarves stuck around dwarves hung around but they became a dwindling population it's really interesting there's like this arc

you could almost see like the Final Fantasy series taking place in the same world with the dwarves slowly dying off Final Fantasy 4 added Hobbits yeah

yeah Halflings? Halflings. Yeah. Final Fantasy 4? Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

I'm confused too. I believe so. Yeah. Yeah, there were halflings. Yeah, little people. Oh, you're right. Like the micro-sized people. Yeah.

Those weren't hobbits. Those were like pixies or something. They were pixies. But no, the dwarves like, I can't remember how much they play a role in two and three. But in four, there's just like a single city of dwarves remaining underground. Final Fantasy five, there's like three dwarves in the world. World, Final Fantasy 6, they're gone. They're like Gorons in that way.

Like, they just died out. There's like a graph for Mughals take over and dwarfs go. It's no coincidence. No, I mean, they increasingly kind of... But they added Yetis, so... That's what they added... They added a Yeti. The best Yeti.

Eddie the Yeti. He was my favorite. Is that U-Morrow? Is that sort? Yeah. But you shouldn't rename him Eddie. But you're right in the main... Or Chubaka. Yes, it started out as a world of many races, just like, you know, the Lord of the Rings and Duches of Dragons.

Yeah, Tolkien races, basically. And then it got winnowed down to humans, yeah. And I don't know how much of that is just, you know, them saying. And now it's just four guys you drive around in a car. Yeah. Yeah. And they're all, yeah. There's a dig at Dragon Quest in Final Fantasy, too, right?

Only in the U.S. No, it's not a dig, but it's a reference to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but that's just the U.S. version. Japan is Link who's in that grave, right? Oh, really? I think it's supposed to be, like, a silly, like, we're taking on another game.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it was meant as a dig. I think it was just like, oh, oh, we love this game. Please be nice to us, Nintendo. Return of Gannon. Please publish our game in America. There's a professor that gives you a stone. That's in every game, right?

Yeah, I mean... It's not. The... Is it a professor or... He's like translating a stone. Yeah, yeah, okay. He was... He's like, get the Rosetta Stone essentially.

And it's just floats. Yeah, the floating... The float stone. The float stone. It floats. Yeah, so I mean, that's kind of a little... You don't need a code in other games. see the map. Oh, yeah. Push B Select, right? Is that it? Yeah. No, push B Select. When you look at the

map, which is like the select button or start button when you're in the airship, if you push B select, doesn't that give you the tile game? Yeah. I thought that was you have to... I think it reveals the map. Yeah, I thought the tile puzzle was much more convoluted, like a ton of button entries to get to that, yeah. Oh, man, it's been a while. The broom just says push B select and it brings up the map. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So what happens if you just push select? Nothing.

No, I think you changed the... Yeah, that's right. That's much more important than bringing up the map. I'm glad they put that on a single button. A bruner? And the map on a combo. I don't think it does. No, you do take more damage in that first spot.

Yeah, yeah, you do. Yeah, you never want to put like a black mage in the first spot. Oh, really? Yeah. Never knew. I mean, I always put a fighter there. Enemies will attack your back ranks. But yeah, it's much more of, like,

Does it say this in the instruction booklet? It says it in the strategy guide, I just looked at it. Oh, yeah, okay. So this game does not have rows, does it? No, I didn't think so. It doesn't. It basically just has an order. Yeah, yeah. So your fighter, your first slot dude is, you know, standing in front of like everyone

behind me. But he's not standing in front. A black wizard in which is like, behind me. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of abstraction happening. So what would you guys, if you were to start a game of Final Fantasy and you didn't really, you were just going to play through and you wanted to just pick

Like, what are the four best characters to play through Final Fantasy with? You want to hear my super team? Yeah. It's Fighter, Fighter. Ooh. Black Mage, uh, Black Belt. Whoa.

So you forego healing. Because if you just have a lot of attack, you get through that Marsh Cave. Interesting. I was gonna tell you earlier, in the Marsh Cave. You can get to the bosses, which is just like, I think they're called Spectors or Ghosts or something. They're really scary, really difficult Emmys,

and they can kill you in one hit. Yeah. You either hit, like, three of them or seven of them. Yeah. And it's random. It's like the pirates. So you're going to get more than five pirates. But you could get seven or eight.

It's really weird. Right. And the way I remember beating it was like, finally I got there and there was like three of them. It was so much easier. Yeah, mine is boring. It's just fighter, black belt,

white mage and black mage, which I think is a standard Final Fantasy load out, yeah. So nobody does thief? Thief eventually pays off when you get a ninja, but waiting for that to happen is a nightmare. At least in the early, at least in the NES version, I never tried a thief in the,

the remix. So the monk to black belt, basically, like that's just a better character throughout. Just huge damage, yeah. And you don't have to pay for your weapons. Whereas the fighter, that's actually an advantage early. If you have two fighters, especially, you can just buy two silver swords and they're really powerful.

They're 4,000 gold. Yeah, things are really expensive. And you're not buying any white magic at all. No. So, yeah. And you can buy those cures one at a time. Yeah, that's what you have to do if you want a cure. Yeah, there are a lot of different strategies

to play through the game. Someone who contributes to their posts on the Talking Time forums did an attempt to do single character runs with every party. So he would let everyone else except the lead character die

and just leave them dead because your characters don't come back to life in an inn, you have to go to the house of healing or whatever. Oh, like literally single character runs. Yes. So he would have a single character and he made it through with everything except a thief.

And the thief, I think, can't beat the dark, the dark elf. Oh, just can't do it. It's just impossible. Just the war of attrition. Yeah. So that's like the one character who's kind of worthless. Kind of like you said, Bob.

Until he's of a ninja, he's kind of useless. Yeah, interesting. The thief can't steal, though, can he? No. Isn't that weird? That's the frustration. Like, this game would be, I think, more interesting if your thief could steal. Yeah.

And that would be a great way to get extra stuff instead of buying it one at a time. Now he just doesn't do anything. He's just like a guy who has no advantage. It kind of reminds me of the goof-off class in Dragon Quest. or the clown or whatever, because you do wait until you get to level 30 and then you become the ultimate class, a sage. So it's kind of similar idea in Dragon Quest 3.

My final plug for fighters, when you turn into a knight, you can heal because you can get the cure. That's true, but it's just like a low-level cure, though. Yeah, yeah, it goes up to two, if not just one. But, I mean, it just exists. It's nice. Nice to have.

Yeah, yeah. They have big shoulders. So no one plays like a party of all red knights or red mages. No, I had a friend who did a white mage run. Red mages. Red would be cool. I think those are the dumbest looking characters. They've got a feather in their hat.

They were the save points and the four heroes of light games. They're very fancy lads. They are. I mean, two H's own. I respect them. I'm not going to criticize the way they dress. I like that the visual designs of so many of the classes became sort of standards.

The very specific design of the Red Mage shows up throughout the series. They're all over the libraries and Final Fantasy. and like I said, they're the save point dudes and Bravely Default, which I guess is in a Final Fantasy Evil, whatever it is. Bravely Default or Four Heroes of Light? Both, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Unless I'm misremembering. No, they're in both. Yeah. They're the sequel. Bravely Default, the sequel to Four Heroes of Light. Yeah. Oh, maybe that's where that FF thing came from because, you know, Flying Fairy.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Bravely Default Flying Fairy, they were like, yeah, it's going to be Final Fantasy, so. It's not really, so we call it FFF. Every element of that game is just winking at you. Like, we wanted this to be Final Fantasy, but apparently the brand is poisoned now. You wanted the last half of the game to be fun,

but we decided no. Well, yeah, there's that too. Yeah, but yeah, the white mages with the white robes that have the red chevrons, or not chevrons, but what are those? Just like triangles, the sawtooth look? Yeah, like that's become... Bronze triangles.

No, they have like the... Sawtooth. I'm not sure if the fighter is as iconic as all the other characters. No, he just is kind of like a red dude. Yeah, but he's like the Final Fantasy dude. It's like, you know, and in Final Fantasy 2, like the main character, it just looks like the fighter. Yeah. I guess it didn't stick around that.

There's nothing very memorable about that design, I don't think. Right, right, right. Yeah, he looks kind of mean and surly with, you know, the upgrade. Are airships from Final Fantasy? like what are other games in RPGs that had that or any games? I mean,

where does that idea come from? It's not from D&D. I mean, as, as far as, yeah, it's like a sympunk element. But like that's strange,

I think. I think it's a weird concept. Yeah, I mean, it's not from Final Fantasy, but certainly the, um, the original like implementation of it

in a popular video game was, was Final Fantasy. I mean, Super Barbarers 3 had ships with propellers that kept in the law. Yeah. So, I mean,

I actually can't think of like where did the idea of the idea of, airship come from? Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure. Trying to think of any other pop culture things that had basically ships for water in the air. Yeah, in the air.

I don't know. I don't think Dragon Quest ever had an airship. They had like a hot air balloon and a bird. There was never an airship. A bed. Yeah, oh, a bed. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, so I kind of want to keep this episode short.

We don't need to belabor the point. There's not that much to say. What? There's not that much to say about the original Final Fantasy. And clearly, since we've all played, like, random different versions, we don't really have sort of a uniform, consistent vision of it. It's been 25 years since I've played Final Fantasy one on NDAS. I spent a lot, way too much time just fighting the eyeball and the Wonder Swan version, because the eyeball was the end of one of the dungeons. It was the end boss, but every time you stepped on the tile, you fought the eyeball.

And I was looking at a fact of Final Fantasy one, the NES version when the Wondersponderspond version came out, which was the first remake. And it was like, oh, you can really grind and level up by just fighting the eyeball over and over and over again right here. So I'm like, oh, I'll try this in the Wondersponderspond version. Yeah, it worked real well. I got everybody just ridiculously stupidly overpowered.

Because it was just on the Wonderspon because I'm like doing something else while I'm playing it. And I'm just, it was so easy to kill it after a little while. and it was like, do, do, do, do, do. You know, a couple hours later, and I will do this on any portable RPG if I find a good grinding spot. Yeah.

Yeah, and then everybody was, like, ridiculously superpowered, and I just breezed through the rest of the game. I remember discovering grinding in Final Fantasy. I had never heard of this concept, knowing anything about it, and Nintendo Powers Guide had a, just this little breakout box that said,

Fight the Giants outside Elftown. Yeah. And then you can afford whatever you won there, because they give you a huge amount of gold. Yeah. And you do that, and you become stronger and stronger, And then later on it says, hey, when you're in the, you know, I think it's the, either the fire, I think it's the fireplace, the fire, not fireplace. What's it called? Fire cavern. Fire cavern. Mark Golg. Yeah. Or you fight lich or something. No, that's the earth one. Yeah. Anyway, there's a green version of those same ogres called giants. And they're peppered through it. This one thing. And every step you take, you fight one of them. Yeah. And in there, you grind for that second part. You know, what these strategy guides never said that it took me a long time to.

figure out was like grinding is a really important part of the RPG experience. Yeah, it's not recommended. It's required. Because the strategy guys tell you like, okay, go to this town. Now do this. Now do that. Now do that. And then I find myself like I can't do the next thing. This game is too hard. But really what you're supposed to do is start Final Fantasy. Kill imps until you're level three. Then go fight Garland. Then come back. Then cross the bridge. You get to the next town. Then kill the stuff around that town until you go up like four levels. The guy's a level as desire. Like you're always are also the sharks are going to wipe you out. A, B, G, always be grinding.

Like, that's how you get through the game. And that's the same, I mean, that's the case. But like, Mother, you know, I started playing, when Earthbound Zero, the ROM got dumped, I started playing. It's like, oh, my God, this game is ridiculous. But, like, I played it on the Wii U virtual console, and I just mentally, like, this is a game about grinding. So go outside of your house, prepared to spend, like, an hour grinding,

and then just grind and just look for places to do that. And then you'll be able to kind of go on. But, like, that was something I really had to learn, you know, a lot. The hard way. The hard way. Yeah, just getting stuck and me, like, what do I do? It's weird. Zelda 2 is like that also.

We have the word grind today. I don't know when that word entered our lexicon on terms of my RQs. I think that's totally wow. MMOs, yeah. Yeah. It was a wow. There was no simple way to explain it. If you say grind, like immediately, okay, yeah, I know what you mean.

But I think it was like a harder concept to like. I think we used to call it level up or a level. Yeah. Power level. I'm like, well, yeah, I know you have to level up. you know, as you go through the game, you level up, yeah. I think they called it power leveling. Oh, power leveling.

But, you know, I've never really been a fan of grinding in RPGs. I really hate playing like that. Me neither. No, I mean, it's something I actively try to avoid. So I'm wondering how I beat Final Fantasy because, like, I don't remember spending a lot of time just, you know. How old were you? farting around, I don't know, 14, 15. I mean, honestly, the fact.

That's the difference. You had the time. But no, I don't remember, like, making all dude every day. I don't remember, like, making a conscious effort to do that, and I don't do that in RPGs now. So, I don't know. I think I just bumpled through and got lucky or something. Maybe you were thinking, like, I want to buy all this new gear.

Yeah, that's what I was going to get the money. I will grind for gold sometimes, yeah, like to buy stuff. Yeah, you don't notice the experience as much as the money in Final Fantasy. Like, that game, you hit a money wall where you want to buy level two spells in Delftown or silver weapons. Yeah. And you have to get gold for those, and you realize right outside. Instead of grinding, what I normally do is I will go to the next area and try to fight through as far as I can until I'm like, I'm not going to make it any further, so I better back out.

So I guess that's a kind of grinding, but I feel like I'm making progress too. And that's probably why I like Entry and Odyssey so much because that's how that game is designed. You go into the dungeon, you make some progress, you map out a little bit, and then you leave and rest up and try again and get a little further. That's how I've always approached RPGs. now that I think about it. So, yeah, that works in Final Fantasy, too. Like, you go into a cave and you get your butt kicked for a little while, and you're like, okay, time to back out.

Oh, look, I can buy, you know, a better sword. I can buy some better armor. Right. All right, let's take another go at it. Right. But some games really are about the idea that you would just, like, kill enemies until you become powerful enough to get all the armor and then move on an arc. Yeah, I tend not to like those as much.

No, no, I totally agree. I actually don't really like it as a play mechanic, and I think games should try to design so that you don't have to do that. Yeah, Final Fantasy 4, introduced the spell that lets you warp out of, out of dungeons. And for me, that was a godsend. I was like, yeah. Yeah, I can fight right until the point of absolute death and just like, I'm out of resources, then take off and try again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love that. Yeah, and those are good places to grind. You know, I mean, it's better to go into the dungeon because those are probably

the more powerful enemies that are going to get a few more experience points. Anyway, I was playing like Earthbound, who I have on Super Nintendo, you know, when you clear a sanctuary and you leave the sanctuary, all the enemies run away from you. And that's part of the design. No matter how powerful you are, they just run away from you in that sanctuary. And I always used to go, oh, thank God they're running away from me and I'd leave. But no, you want to take

that opportunity to go up behind all those enemies and get the extra because then you can grind like crazy on those enemies because they're running away. And then sometimes you get level up to the point where the enemy just dies. And because if you get, if you get the, if you hit an enemy from behind,

like you, it actually calculates like, oh, you're going to kill it in this first round because it's not even going to have the chance to. So then you can get tons of experience points and having something on a portable system. Like if I were to play Final Fantasy on the NES, I would want to play it either on the 3DS or the Wii U virtual console,

which is not out on yet. Yeah, well, you know, as a bonus, pre-release bonus for Final Fantasy Explorers in Japan, they had a 3D remake of Final Fantasy One. What? And that I was positive I was going to come to the, U.S. and it didn't and I'm so angry. That would be great. I would love

that. That's lame. I'm so sad now. Why did you tell us? I know. Why do you find this of that? I'd seen that and then forgotten about it. But I would say the best way to play Final Fantasy 1 is to download the PS1 version. Oh yeah. I'm played on the Vita. Yep. And that is the perfect nexus of

like a difficult Final Fantasy a smoothly refined Final Fantasy and a portable Final Fantasy. You get that triangle together. It doesn't have the original swings. And again, When you're grinding... It's not original sprites. It's 16-bit, like, embellished versions of the sprites.

But to Bob's point, not terrible. Not terrible. They're really nice. No, they're not. It looks like Final Fantasy 4. They're the lower resolution. They're like, you know, 322.40, so it's a low-res game. They're brought over from Wonder Swine.

Yeah. But they're nice. They're nice. And yeah, I mean, just not having it taking up the entire television means that I could just sit and grind for like four hours while, like, watching TV or otherwise engaging with people. Yeah, the second screen is great. And you're the WiiU audience.

If you buy it digitally, you won't be tempted. tempted by Final Fantasy 2. Yeah, which I've never played so, I'm curious. Never. I'm too curious. I like Final Fantasy 2. The NES, the Famicom version, don't play that, but the PSP version, you know, where the PSP version of Final Fantasy

1 is way too easy. The PSP version of Final Fantasy 2 makes it pretty approachable. It takes out, yeah. I've tried every time this game has been re-reli-release. You just don't have the love of Kawazu in your heart. I'm on Team Chris. We haven't accepted him into your life as our Lord and Savior.

Yeah, apparently not. But it does have everybody's favorite thing, a battle you can't beat that you don't know about, right? Well, yeah, no, I do love that, like, Final Fantasy 1. Final Fantasy 1 begins immediately rise, right? Like, it starts, like, with the action already happening. Final Fantasy 2 kicks that up even more because you get past the little crystal theme, you know, the prelude

screen, and boom, we're in a battle. It's like, what do you mean I'm in a battle? Oh, my God, I'm dead. What is this game? But you're supposed to lose it, and it's like, oh, cool. And then you reset forever and never realize it. Yeah. Well, some people have done that, I think. Wow. That's such a sad thing to have to happen. It would be sad. Yeah. It's like, oh, I lost. It's not good enough.

Final Fantasy, too. Man, video games are so hard. But the idea of a battle that you're supposed to lose and the idea of beginning the game in a battle. Like that's so pushing so hard against all the conventions. There was a lot of really cool stuff in Final Fantasy 2. There was a lot of broken stuff too. Final Fantasy 2 was the first, you know, story-based

Final Fantasy were all the keyword item system, like an adventure game. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The characters in your party were were each individual people with names. One of them dies, like you have a party member who dies in the middle of a dungeon. With all your stuff. And that becomes a big deal. Yeah, like that became in the Final Fantasy series going forward.

Lots of great stuff. It had a credit sequence and a beautiful end game credit sequence that was really masterfully done. Lots of really, it had chocobos for the first time. Yeah. You know, it was so influential. I just can't ever play it.

Well, it changes up a lot of things about the series. It totally changes the spell system. It gets a word of experience levels altogether. You gain stats by performing actions, so you become a specialist, no matter... That's how you get by. And it definitely instills a lot of bad habits in players. Encourages them, really.

Almost requires them, like beating up your own party members. Right. The first thing you have to do in that game is beat up your own party members for an hour in order to use certain effects. In the Famicom version, there's a bug where you don't actually need to go through with the command, just actually entering the command and not going through,

we'll give you that. There's a lot of bugs in the game. There's a really great bug. If I'm not mistaken, you can turn the final boss into a toad. Because you know, each spell you use, as you use it, it levels up individually. So they can level up from 1 to 16.

There's no cure, Kura, Kura, Kura. It's Kure, Level 2, level 3. So if you take the toad spell and you grind that throughout the game, it can turn anything into a toad. And if I'm not mistaken, you can turn the emperor or at least like the next to last boss

into a toad and kill it. I think you've earned it by that point. You really have. It's kind of like the chainsaw from Final Fantasy legend. Or the fishing pole and Zelda. I'm all for the idea of people creating games that are like ridiculously complicated

like that, that have just a million moving parts. But that game was super complicated in a space where it actually really needed, if anything, to be simplified from Final Fantasy 1. Yeah. And it was not. I really admire it. I really admire Akitoshi Kawazu, the lead designer on it.

And, you know, I asked him when I interviewed him a few years ago, like, you know, did you intend, like, you know, the character development element of Final Fantasy 2, like, was that something that you really thought out? And he was like, no, I had no idea people would just attack each other. That wasn't supposed to happen at all. Right. So, you know, he admitted that he was just. The problem is, when you make something that complicated that it has a million different exploits, people are, this is a game design philosophy. Players will play your game in the most convenient way.

And if that is boring, they will blame you for making a boring game. Like, that is absolutely true even today. So you have to figure out what are players going to do if they will take the most convenient path towards anything. Yeah, I don't think that really, that understanding existed. No, oh, certainly not. Also, I don't think anything like QA testing existed either. Like, they were churning out these games on a yearly basis. There was no time to sit down and say, hey, let's find some use cases and change the game based on this.

No, they had to get a sequel out, God damn it. Yep. And they were, I mean, it was a team of whatever, five, six people, and they just made the game. And as soon as they were done, I was like, we're done. Yep. Nobody, there's no focus testing. And there's very little oversight. I mean, they go to their bosses and they're like, we made a video game.

They're like, yeah, is it good? Yeah, it's great. Okay, we'll publish it. So anyway, Final Fantasy 2, it's an acquired taste, and you really have to want to like it, I admit. Oh, my God. But Final Fantasy 1, I think, you know, if you play the PS1 version, it holds up really well.

Yeah, it looks primitive, and it's very, like, very simple story. Though it does have a really cool plot twist at the end that I totally spoiled for you, but I think it is still a fun and interesting RPG and, you know, has a level of challenge and depth that a lot of RPGs today really lack. So I really highly recommend that everyone go back and spend some time with Final Fantasy One.

It's kind of a relic of a bygone era, but a good era and a really well-done relic. Great music, great sprites. It's just a pleasure to take in when you go back to it. All right, so I think that's it for Final Fantasy One. We'll do a Final Fantasy Four deep dive at some point. I don't know, two and three necessarily merit it. Sorry, fans of it.

of those games. We love you anyway. Anyway, so that's it. Final Fantasy. Thanks for listening to this episode. Chris, Sam, thanks for coming in. Great to be here. As usual, Retronauts can be acquired from usgamer.net fromretronauts.com and at iTunes. And also you can find cool stuff about the podcast, mainly like,

hey, a post just went up at Twitter and Facebook and so forth. So check us out there. And of course, please support the podcast through Patreon, because I have to fly out here and talk to people in a sweaty room and that's just not going to happen without. The sweat makes all the difference. I'm not paying out of pocket for this privilege.

Exactly. Sorry. So, anyway, thanks. Sam. Calls about yourself. Sure. You can follow me at Samuel underscore IGN on Twitter, which is not an easy handle.

Or you can find me fixing pinball machines at Free Gold Watch at Hate and Stanyan in the Hate Ashbury District. Have you ever come to San Francisco? Long time Retronauts listeners will know that I can be found on Twitter at Coboon Heat, K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T, is my Twitter handle. I love that you're still using that handle. Yeah, me too.

Well, you know, that reference is like 15 years out of date. I know, but, like, you don't really, it's tough to change your Twitter handle. You know what I mean? It's easy to change, but then you've lost your identity. But then everything I've ever told people how to find me on Twitter is totally impossible. It's your brand, Chris. It's more important than you. Yeah, exactly. I don't really care at this point. You know, it's, it's a mess.

Yeah, so that's where I mean, I can give you my L-O name, but, you know, I was going to Want to find me on that. Oh, dear Lord. And if I gave you my Nintendo network name, they'd ban me because I don't think you're supposed to be able to identify anybody from their Nintendo network names. So all I can do is the Twitter handle. Yeah, Coboon Heat.

And, yeah, that was a website back when Toasty Frog was a website. And Jeremy's abandoned Toasty Frog, but I'm clinging desperately to this. No, I'm still Toasty Frog on NeoGap. Oh, yeah. Because they created an account for me. We're like, you should have a Neogap account. Here you go. I was like, I'm trying to get away from the Toastie.

Oh, come on, guys. What about Toasty Frog 2D? So, anyway, yeah, that's how you can find me. Wired.com is where you find my articles and musings about video games. And, yeah, that is sufficient. And finally. And you can find me, Bob Mackey, on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also do other stuff for something awful, and I write regularly for usgamer.net.

And you can check out my other podcast Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. You can find that at laser time Podcast.com or just by searching Talking Simpsons in your iPod or podcast device. Zunes. No Zunes. We don't support Zunes. That's right. Sorry, soon. And then finally,

you can find me at Twitter on as GameSpite. Also, other social media. You can check out my YouTube channel Toasty Frog. I still use it there. Hey! Ah, there we go. And of course, I write for usgamer.net And have little projects like Gameboy.org. And they're neat. So go read

all of those sites. It's cool. Anyway, next week we'll be back with a tiny episode and then a full-length Bob episode two weeks after. No, the one week after, two weeks from now. Right. Yes, Final Fantasy. Good deal. Goodbye. You know,

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to I'm going to be able to be.