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• Last Update: February 28, 2010, at 11:51 PM
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Retronauts 2: Final Fantasy XII - XI = I

I have bad news, Internet -- you can't write about Final Fantasy XII anymore, and it's all my fault. I didn't mean to do it, but somewhere along the way I've used up the game's entire allotment of words.

My recommendation is to ride out the next few months in mute anticipation. You won't regret it! Probably.

Final Fantasy
[ NES | 1987 (j) 1990 (u) || PS1 | 2001 || GBA | 2004 ]

Fortunately, the original Final Fantasy still has plenty of surplus words left. It's actually accumulated quite a stockpile of 'em over the past 19 years and the dozen or so different versions of the game that Square/Square Enix has released.

Remakes all, but not in the Castlevania sense where each new iteration is markedly different than the one before. No, Square's M.O. with Final Fantasy I is to preserve the basic game structure, improve a few things, and balance it out by making some other element(s) totally worse. While you could argue that most of the different versions of Castlevania have a legitimate claim at being the "definitive" vision of the game (my heart gives it a toss-up between the original and Super Castlevania IV), it's hard to proclaim any particular FF rehash the be-all and end-all edition.

The dangerous rose-tinted chunk of my brain still has fond feelings for the original FF, mainly because of what it represented. Yes, I know that Phantasy Star had already come out by the time FF made it to the U.S., but if you happened to listen to this week's EGM podcast then you already know that I didn't own a Master System to play it on. No one did, because the Master System was a heartbreakingly doomed little creation. So for the 95% of us whose idea of a great third party game was not Alf, Final Fantasy was an RPG revelation.

It certainly didn't hurt that Nintendo had honed its marketing machine to a razor edge by the time FF made it westward. The company owned millions of young eyeballs with its state-run propaganda piece Nintendo Pravda, and you'd be hard-pressed to name a single game that was promoted more vigorously in its pages than Final Fantasy. Previews, maps, hype, a strategy guide and an over-the-top contest involving real-life treasure hunting and an honest-to-god crystal ball. It was all pretty silly, really, but probably necessary to trick dumb Americans into buying a game revolving around (GASP) words and still images.

I have to admit that those still images were pretty impressive at the time. I had no idea who Yoshitaka Amano was back then, but it was easy to see that his stylish, energetic monster designed translated surprisingly well into 8-bit sprite graphics. I distinctly remember going over to a friend's house as he battled through the water dungeon; we had plans to spend the afternoon at Putt-Putt reveling in their Saturday all-you-can-play-for-two-hours arcade extravaganza, but FF looked so vivid and original that I could hardly bring myself to work up any enthusiasm for unlimited playthroughs of Super Contra and X-Men. Who wants to slice enemies to pieces with Wolverine when you could spend your day telling little midgets to shake their weapons in the general direction of motionless fishmen? Priorities, people.

(Not that FF was actually in any way original, but I had no idea what a "Monstrous Compendium" was back then.)

Revisiting FF now, it's really sort of startling how difficult the game was; your heroes lacked the wit not to waste attacks against dead enemies, the characters whiffed attacks far too often, and resources were painfully limited. Oddly, though, I don't remember the slightest bit of frustration with the game. I played it all the way through without excessive leveling or overwhelming deaths.

From this I can draw one of three conclusions: I cheated like a bastard with the NP strategy guide; I was some kind of idiot savant gamer who was undeterred by even the most savage NES games; or I've simply blocked out the unpleasant memories and chosen to selectively focus on the cool stuff, like the way Chaos slowly disintegrated line-by-line when you finished the game. Probably all the above, although I did manage to finish an awful lot of NES games that I would never have the endurance for these days, so maybe it's the idiot savant thing.

Still, the NES game is crazy dated. The closest thing to an Ultimate Final Fantasy I would probably be the PlayStation version contained in Final Fantasy Origins. Not only did it sport the nicest graphics and music ever afforded the game, Origins also did a pretty respectable job of retaining FF's fundamental gameplay.

I feel sort of bad about barely ever playing it, because it looked pretty good. But by the time Square got around to publishing it here I was already rockin' the PS2.

(In fairness, FF Origins did look and feel a lot more modern than Dragon Quest VII.)

The GBA version of the game is almost an acceptable second-best, but not really -- it's kinda crappy in places. The music was painfully downsampled, the graphics were cropped and recolored to be much more garish (and thus visible on the system's screen), and it's roughly as challenging as reaching back and giving your butt a scratch. (Please note that if you have difficulties with ass-scratching, it's not something I really need to know about.) The PlayStation edition did offer an easy version of the game, but it was optional; not so with Dawn of Souls.

One feature in particular made it a radically different game than the NES classic it was based on: the revised magic system, dumping the spell levels in favor of an MP pool, which made the whole thing a whole lot easier all around.

"But that's good!" you protest. "That whole magic spell level limitation was stupid and annoying." And yeah, maybe so. Even so, it was a change at the very core of the game, and it's not insignificant that it's a change not being made to Final Fantasy III for DS. Producer Hiromichi Tanaka told me at E3 that keeping FFIII's original design was a deliberate decision, and that losing the spells levels would undermine an essential element of the game's strategy. Frankly, I'm willing to concur. And there weren't even any moneyhats involved!

The FF series is pretty great, most of the time, but here's a dirty secret: the games don't age well, with the exception of the 16-bit titles. Landmark or not, Final Fantasy I is a ridiculously primitive RPG, with a simple battle system and a kludgey, inconvenient interface -- fair enough, as it's an 1987-vintage RPG. A coat of paint isn't enough to modernize it, and Dawn of Souls really drove that point home.

See, I had this crazy ambition when my GB Micro first arrived last fall to play through as many Final Fantasy games as I could handle -- beginning, of course, with Dawn of Souls. I managed to make it all the way through FFI before deciding the whole thing was a pretty bad idea. The GBA-exclusive bonus content was cool in principle, with lots of cameos and references to later games in the series, but really all the Soul of Chaos dungeons served to accomplish was to take a boring role-player and stretch it to interminable length. And the one thing that could have kept the experience interesting -- a decent challenge level -- was completely forsaken in favor of what has to be the most appalling nerf ever inflicted upon a game.

And I hear FFII is even worse! But that's OK, because no matter how strange future FFs may be, no matter how dated the older ones may become, we'll always have FFXII. And IV, V and VI. And Tactics. And... never mind.

P.S. Thank you, Google Image Search, for your bounty of imagey goodness. You are a godsend for lazy people like me. I almost don't even mind that you're saving my personal data to give to the FBI! Almost.

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