playoldgames

First Released : 1987

First Played : 1999

Recently Played : 2024

This is the first review I’m writing, and I thought this would be a great place to start. This is a game that is almost entirely shrouded in nostalgia for me, it’s hard to write about it and remove myself from that bias. One of my earliest memories in life is finding this game in my dad’s NES collection as a kid, plugging it in, and getting completely lost. It’s a game that I’ve played countless times, on different consoles, different versions, different balancing.

For a game that came out in 1987, it still packs quite the punch. I recently played the Pixel Remaster on PS4, and I honestly have to say that to me, it might have aged the best of the original 6 games. The simple combat and lack of long narrative stories make the game easy to pick up and play. The fighter attacks, The thief is fast, the black mage uses black magic. What you see is what you get. The story is simple, and that isn’t a bad thing. It’s a classic fantasy story.

When I play an older game, I try to look at ideas or features that I think might have been impressive at the time. When you look at the original Final Fantasy, the thing that is most impressive about it is probably that it was made and put onto the NES. While Dragon Quest released a year earlier in 1986, the NES had incredibly limited hardware to make an RPG, computer systems at the time were putting out more technically impressive things such as Wizardry or Ultima. The guy who pushed to have this game made, Hironobu Sakuguchi, had to fight quite the uphill battle to convince Square executives that making an RPG for a console was a good idea. Needless to say he was right, it’s probably the best idea that the company has ever had.

Is this game worth playing? Yeah obviously. This is the gaming equivalent of listening to the Beatles, it might not be the most interesting thing in the world, but it’s pretty important to understand just how big of an impact this game has had. There is very little about the game that has explicitly aged poorly, especially if you are playing a modern remake of it. If you are not interested in playing a modern remake, I highly recommend the Dawn of Souls GBA remake, if you want a middle ground between old game jank while still retaining some difficulty.

It’s very hard to rate this game. If you were to ask Claude to Vibecode an RPG, it would probably spit out something incredibly similar to Final Fantasy 1. But that’s actually representative to me of just how iconic it is. In reality, I think it’s like a 7/10, especially if you played it when it came out. But for me, I use this game as a baseline for how an RPG should be. This game sets the tone for what an RPG should be to me, and I want to enjoy a RPG at least as much as I enjoy this one.