Heads up: this whole series is going to be spoiler-heavy. Unlike my Beyond the Beyond writeups, which were more of a chronological story walkthrough, the Final Fantasy series is going to lean into the moments that actually landed, the beats that made each game memorable, rather than cataloging every step along the way. If you’re planning to play these clean, consider this your out.
Starting a Journey I’ve Always Meant to Take
I’ve been putting this off for years. I’ve got a stack of classic JRPGs that I either never played or haven’t touched in so long that I can barely remember what made them stick with me, and every time I think about finally sitting down with one of them, something new and shiny pulls my attention away. Not this time. I’m committing to a run through every numbered Final Fantasy game, start to current, and writing up each one as I go.
A few ground rules so I don’t scope-creep myself into oblivion. I’m sticking to the numbered series, which means no Tactics (even though I love Tactics), no Crystal Chronicles, no Mystic Quest. Direct sequels are fair game, so X-2 will get its own writeup when I get there. The fuzzy ones like The After Years and Crisis Core are harder to classify, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Problem for future me.
Some of these are games I loved as a kid, some I didn’t touch until I was an adult, and some, like FF1, are games I just straight up never played. That’s a big part of the fun of this whole project for me. I get to experience a foundational chunk of gaming history for the first time while also revisiting old favorites to see if they still hold up.
Alright. FF1.
Why Pixel Remaster
I went with the Pixel Remaster for FF1, and I expect I’ll do the same for most of the pre-PlayStation entries in this series. My goal on this project is to experience the stories and the design, not to simulate the original hardware pain of grinding for hours because the XP curve was tuned for kids who had nothing better to do in 1987. The quality of life features in the Pixel Remaster make this a far more enjoyable way in, and if purist sensibilities demand an original NES ROM, I respect that, but I also want to finish this run before I hit retirement age.
One thing I didn’t expect going in was that playing through FF1 would remind me how wild the NES generation was for visual evolution. Early and late NES games can look like they’re running on completely different hardware, and as devs got better and memory mappers got more ambitious, late-cycle NES games looked like they belonged on a whole new console altogether. That’s something we just don’t really see anymore with new console generations. A late-generation PS5 game is going to look like an early-generation PS5 game with a bit more polish, and that’s about it. Getting to watch this evolution happen in real time across the Final Fantasy series is a huge part of what made me want to do this playthrough in the first place.
The Music, or: Please Make the Airship Stop
The remastered soundtrack is a great addition overall. The arrangements give the themes room to breathe, and a lot of the tracks sound gorgeous in their new form. That said, I found myself flipping between the 8-bit and remastered versions at times, because some of those chiptune originals have a character that the full arrangement just can’t quite replicate.
The one spot where the remastered soundtrack actively worked against me was the airship theme. Good lord. The tempo and composition are so frenetic that flying around ends up feeling stressful rather than triumphant, and I want my airship theme to feel like I’ve unlocked the world, not like I’m being chased out of it. Instead of an exciting new milestone, I was getting low-grade anxiety every time I took off, so I eventually just left the soundtrack option swapped to 8-bit any time I was airborne.
A Light Story with More Towns Than I Expected
The story for FF1 is about as light as you’d expect for the first game in the series. Four warriors of light, four crystals, go fix the world. The opening beats are firmly in classic JRPG territory, starting with saving the princess from a vampire in a castle, which then allows the king to rebuild a bridge so that you can continue your journey. I love that the warriors of light can vanquish a vampire and traverse vast stretches of continent, but a river? A river is apparently an insurmountable obstacle.
What did surprise me was the sheer number of towns and locations in the game. Once the world opens up, there is a lot more to see than I was expecting going in, and while the dialogue is hardware- and era-limited, with NPCs being genuinely useful about ten percent of the time and just generic flavor the rest, the towns themselves have real character and variety between them.
Pravoka caught me off guard. I had expected the “get a boat” moment to be gated behind some real progression, but instead I walked in, kicked the snot out of a pirate, and walked out with a ship for my trouble. Early-game pacing in FF1 is genuinely bizarre, because it hands you a boat within the first couple of hours and then doesn’t really give you anywhere productive to take it for a while.
Then I promptly left the inner ring of the continent, missed the next town I was actually supposed to visit, and spent an embarrassing chunk of time sailing around the full map trying to figure out where the hell I was supposed to go. Eventually, after enough aimless wandering, I found the town I’d skipped and progression picked back up. Very on-brand for this game.
Elfheim was exactly what you’d expect from an elf town and not much more, which felt like a missed opportunity for some real character development. Mount Duergar with the dwarves was more interesting, since the blacksmith there actually mentions adamantite, and he sticks out precisely because almost no NPC in this game says anything that matters. An NPC with a purpose?! I made a mental note to come back to that guy.
Crescent Lake was where I got truly stuck. I had talked to the sages before I had defeated the Lich, so they didn’t give me the canoe that I needed to progress, and I wandered for way too long before realizing that I had to go back and talk to them a second time. There’s something funny about the pacing here, because you get the big-ass boat within the first couple hours of the game, but the little canoe is the one that’s actually gated behind real progression.
Lufenia was my favorite town in the game. An accessible town that you literally can’t understand until you find the Rosetta Stone is such a neat worldbuilding touch, and it made the world feel more alive than just about anything else in FF1. There is also a little out-of-bounds shop that you have to hunt for, which is exactly the kind of weird hidden corner that I love about these old-school games. The map limitations back then forced designers to get creative in ways that modern open-world games with their big sandboxes just don’t tend to replicate anymore.
Dungeons, Fiends, and the Tragedy of the Debuff Spell
The dungeons in FF1 are mostly pretty straightforward, with fairly linear layouts and the occasional fiend waiting at the end. One weird quirk of the design is that I usually had no idea going into a dungeon whether it was a fiend dungeon or just a regular one, with the only exception being the underwater dungeon, which was pretty clearly announcing itself.
The four fiends themselves look awesome, with the Lich in particular being a genuinely great-looking boss sprite that ended up being a visual highlight of the entire game for me. Unfortunately, they all go down way too fast once you actually reach them. Every fiend fight ended before I could even finish casting my buff rotation, because my party was stacked and the bosses just didn’t have the HP to stand up to the damage.
Which brings me to the recurring JRPG tragedy of the debuff spell. Why would I ever debuff an enemy I can one-shot, and the bosses I would actually want to debuff are, of course, immune to all of it anyway. So my Slow, Fear, and Blind all sat in the spell list taking up slots and doing absolutely nothing, and I am sure this is not the last time I will run into this problem as I make my way through the rest of the series.
The Key Item That Almost Broke My Save
Key items in FF1 are scattered across dungeons with incredible casualness. The Levistone, which you need for the airship and therefore for roughly the second half of the game, is just sitting in a treasure chest that you don’t strictly have to open, and you can walk right past it and continue on your way, blissfully unaware that you have just sealed your own progression. Thankfully I did find it.
And then I spent WAY too long trying to figure out what I was actually supposed to do with it. The game expects you to head out to a random desert and plant the stone there, and honestly, I have no idea how you were supposed to figure that out on your own without a guide. Whatever hint the game is offering for this step is subtle enough that I still cannot tell you where it actually was. I eventually caved, pulled up a guide, hit the desert, and got my airship.
This is the part of FF1 that shows its age the hardest. Not the combat, not the sprites, not even the story, but the “figure out the next step” design. Modern games hold your hand too much these days, sure, but at least you can tell what game you are playing.
Chaos, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Cast Temper Repeatedly
The final dungeon is a trek and a half. You fight your way through it, and then the game sends you two thousand years into the past to break a time loop. I had missed the sage conversation that sets this whole thing up, so the time-travel reveal came completely out of nowhere for me, and I genuinely thought the game had glitched for a second. A time loop is a hell of a twist for a 1987 game, and I was not ready for it.
By the time I got to Chaos my resources were trashed, and if I had been playing the original on original hardware with no save-anywhere option, I probably would have put the game down for a while. Even on the Pixel Remaster I still got absolutely stomped. Four times, in fact, and even after going back to grind out some levels, Chaos kept on cleaning up my party with no trouble.
What finally cracked the fight for me was figuring out that Temper is additive. I had been using it like any other buff in the game, casting it once, getting a bump, and then moving on, but it turns out you can just keep stacking it. So I stacked Temper on my Warrior over and over, turned him into a boss-deleting machine, and finally took Chaos down. Felt extremely good. It also felt like I had been missing a load-bearing mechanic for basically the entire game, because I had.
Wrapping the First Crystal
Chaos defeated, time loop broken, four warriors of light triumphant, world saved. The story played out almost exactly the way I expected a 1987 JRPG’s story to play out, but with more texture and depth than I gave it credit for going in. Stuff like the Lufenia language barrier, the time-loop reveal, the out-of-bounds shop, and the bones of a real world underneath the whole thing are design choices with real ambition behind them, even when the execution shows its seams.
I’m genuinely happy with how the first entry in this playthrough went, and it was a great starting point for the project as a whole. It reminded me why this series matters in the first place, because these were the bones that everything that came after got built on top of.
On to Final Fantasy II, which, from what I’ve heard going in, is going to be a very different kind of experience.