On Final Fantasy I - IV

I’ve been playing through the Final Fantasy games and trying to 100% complete each one in order before moving on to the next. I finally finished FFIV this morning at 12:44am (thank you Steam achievements for keeping track for me.) Partly as a way to motivate myself to carry on with what I’m doing (I really want to jump ahead to VII) I thought I’d put some thoughts on each game here. It’ll be fairly brief for the first four since I didn’t think of this idea until now and maybe the others will generate longer entries. Time will tell.

Final Fantasy (100% Completion: 02/06/2025)

The first entry in the series, so named because the creator was going to be out of a job if he couldn’t make a successful video game and thus, if it flopped, this would be his final fantasy. As we know, it was wildly successful and we’re now up to something like 20+ FF titles, not including all the expansions for the MMO FFXIV. I actually played through this game on the Nintendo Switch first and then realized that there were no achievements and steam had many, so I replayed it on Steam and then continued on from there, blitzing through as fast as I could after having just done most of the same things on the Switch the day prior. It’s a relatively short game compared to what would come later, but for being on the original NES it had a good bit of content. I blasted through with a team consisting of a warrior, a red mage, a white mage, and a black mage. For those unfamiliar with the FF classes (and I’ll try to cover them as they come up, but some will be skipped entirely) FFI had a choice of six classes - Warrior, Monk, Thief, Red Mage, White Mage and Black Mage - each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Warriors can equip the best armor and weapons while thieves can attack more times per turn with less powerful weapons and monks can get by with no weapons besides their fists but are lacking defensively. On the magic side of things, white mages heal and protect, black mages deal damage and buff, and red mages…. well, they do a bit of white and black, but can’t do it all and can’t learn any of the most advanced magics of either side, they can, however, wield a goodly amount of weapons for melee combat as well as some decent armor for defense. Jack of all trades master of none has long described the red mage. I followed a guide for all four of these games just to be able to ensure I completed everything in a single playthrough. This game was pretty easy once I realized that one spell that both the black mage and red mage could learn (Temper) not only raised the attack of a party member (the warrior) but also stacked as many times as you could cast it. This led to very few fights that posed any real danger. This was the only game in the series that used spell slots akin to Dungeons and Dragons before switching to the Mana Point (MP) system that is still in use today (with a single exception that I know of at the moment, that being FFVIII, but we’ll get to that eventually.) The longest part of this game was running back and forth in a very specific area trying to get one single kind of enemy to spawn so I could kill it to add it to the in-game beastiary - a collection that shows all enemies you’ve fought in the current game and FFI - FFVI all have 100% completion achievements for.

Final Fantasy II (100% Completion: 02/09/2025)

Ah, good ol’ FFII. The bastard rented mule of the red-headed stepchild of the Final Fantasy world. I don’t think any other title in the series is more polarizing. They tried something new with this game - no classes, instead all stats grew dynamically based on what you’ve done during combat. Lost a lot of health points (HP)? Well then you gain HP! Cast a lot of spells and used your MP? You get more MP! And each weapon type and spell type had a similar leveling method. This leads to lots of early game instances of punching yourself in the face to lose HP, casting a lot of healing magic to restore that lost HP and at the end of combat everyone is gaining HP, MP and all the other stats associated with whatever they used. You can game this system ridiculously hard and become relatively overpowered very early on. You might not even notice until you get a new party member who has 150HP and the rest of your team all has 3,000+HP. Oops.

Speaking of new party members… In the first few FF games you get to pick the name of all 4 party members you start with and in FFI and FFIII you keep that team for the whole game. In FFII you name all four characters, and the opening fight is scripted that you lose, and, when you come to, you only have three party members. A motley crew of different adventurers come and go throughout the game, but your fourth original party member is absent for about 90% of the game. This was extremely frustrating. And without a guide to tell you, the characters that join temporarily (and usually leave because they died) will leave very suddenly and if you put gear on them it’s gone. Did you just spend all your money on the best armor and weapons you could and gave them to this awesome mage with all the cool spells? Oh, he died, and all that money was wasted. Seriously, the amount of party death in this game is ludicrous.

All that being said, given the aforementioned way to increase stats to near godly levels, there’s not much here to pose a threat and again the hardest part is tracking down the last few remaining entries for the beastiary. Well, that and struggling to care when they try and tug at the heartstrings, but you’ve spent next to no time with the characters that they think you should feel attached to.

Final Fantasy III (100% Completion: 02/12/2025)

What color is your parachute? This is the first game with a job system (job == class). You’re able to freely change characters from one class to another on a whim and gain access to all the fun toys that go with it (changing from a white mage to a warrior means you lose all your magic but gain the ability to equip good armor and weapons, for example.) This sounds awesome! Until you start playing and realize that items to restore MP are so few and far between and switching from a class with no MP to one that does have MP starts you off at 0MP. And there are so many sections that more of less require a team of all mages for a specific part of a dungeon but melee for earlier parts. Also having to cast various debuffs on your own party to be able to access certain parts of the game (like casting mini so you can visit the gnomes, or casting toad on your party to be able to swim to the bottom of a lake and then having to cast it all again to undo the debuffs so you can attack again. Such a MP dump.) There are also a large number of sections that require an entire team of (insert job here) for a fight or two and then swap it all back. Each job has to be leveled independently, and there’s an achievement for getting a job from level 1 all the way to 99. I kept a single character as a white mage for the majority of the game just to hit that milestone. This took me through about 95% of the game,

The story was alright, but nothing too much that I could remember with any clarity. The amount of jobs that essentially amounted to nothing was a little disheartening. This was also the first game to feature something that would become a mainstay of the series moving forward - summons. These spells allow you to call forth a powerful entity to attack opponents for you. Most of the summons that started in III continue to exist in games today such as Ifrit who attacks all enemies with fire, Shiva who attacks all enemies with ice and Odin who attempts to auto kill all enemies but fails if an enemy is too strong (or if it’s a boss. Can’t make it to easy). Sadly, in III, the summons are rather lackluster and I didn’t find myself using them much. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the Summoner class doesn’t get unlocked until very late in the game. It did see me through a handful of fights but not enough to make a lasting impression.

Final Fantasy IV (100% Completion: 02/24/2025)

Quite a jump in time to complete given the ranges for the last three games. Partly that’s because I couldn’t play as often with work and other commitments and partly because this was the first game on the SNES which had much more powerful hardware and more memory to make bigger games. (This game has three separate maps to explore instead of the one (I, II) or two (III).) I must admit that I don’t care for FFIV very much. It tried to get into in-depth storytelling and some people love it, but I found it tedious. I didn’t like the characters with the exception of Rydia (who just happens to be a summoner! For joy! And summons are beyond useful in this game!) This game did away with the job system, you couldn’t pick a class, and your team was a rotating cast of characters up until the very last dungeon. You also couldn’t pick a name off the bat, you had to find a specific NPC to let you change names. Getting through this game felt more like a slog than anything, but that was my own inability to care about most of the characters. I realize that when this was made some of the now over-used tropes were fairly new, but man they feel rough and dated now. The row system (back row takes and deals less melee damage, front row does/takes more) has been in the game since FFI, but in IV they decided to mess with it. in I, II, III and then V-whenever, you had full control over who was in which row. In IV though, not only do you get five party members (up from four in I, II and III) but the rows are locked - either slots 1, 3, 5 are front while 2 and 4 are back, or vice versa. This sucks near the end of the game when you have 4 people who benefit from being in one row or the other, but someone has to be left out.

IV is also the first installment to feature the ATB or Active Time Battle system - instead of everyone choosing an action and the game making you take turns so everyone on your team and the enemy team all get a chance to make a move once per round, the ATB makes it so a bar fills and once full you can make an action; if you’re very fast you might get multiple actions before someone else gets one. Cool in theory but was still being fleshed out here. Some actions, like summons or casting spells may take longer than anticipated, in later games when you cast a spell it happens instantly, but in IV (and possibly V and VI, time will tell) there’s a significant delay. Sometimes a single cast may take so long that other party members move two or three times before your single cast goes off. This is especially aggravating on few boss fights that require ice magic at specific times, but it’s nearly impossible to line up those windows with the arbitrary cast times. And if you get the timing wrong, it actually heals the boss instead of damaging it. The ATB also means if you happen to be called away or get otherwise distracted during a fight, if you don’t pause, will lead to the enemy wailing on you as their ATB bars continue filling even if you don’t choose an action. This may have happened more than once as I was repeatedly killing enemies for specific items while watching YouTube on my off monitor.

Speaking of killing enemies for specific items… This game had an odd fascination with this concept. Certain summons and items were dropped by specific enemies throughout the game. I was very lucky with some and less so with others. I know parts this will pop up again in the future, but if I ever see a Princess Flan again, I think I’ll scream. For those not in the know, Princess Flan is an enemy near the end of the game. It can be farmed using an item called Siren (which is another item farmable earlier on) and drops an item that you need for the best armor in the game. If that were all this wouldn’t have been too bad. The issue is that Princess Flan casts fury on random party members. Fury takes control from you and they automatically use a basic attack on a random enemy each time the ATB bar fills. These things have roughly 20,000HP and an basic attack deals (at least for me at that point in the game) 500-3500 damage to a single enemy. Princess Flan always appears in packs of 5. Now, if you can cast the summon Bahamut with Rydia it will deal 9999 to all 5 enemies at once. However, since summons take an egregious amount of time to cast, she’d usually get hit with fury mid cast and instead be relegated to just normal attacks which would turn a two turn fight into a 30 turn fight really quickly. Yes, the armor you get for turning in the item that these monsters drop is an achievement that I needed for 100% completion. It took me roughly 85 battles to get the item. Not nearly as bad as some of the horror stories I read online (hundreds or thousands) but still greatly vexing.

Hopfully V will be better, but, time will tell.

-B