Final Fantasy I is a D&D video game - and I mostly really liked it

Thanks to the Pixel Remaster and the passing of time, I can appreciate almost all of this game's choices

I really value the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, not least because they provide a fantastic opportunity to experience all the 2D FF games in as modern a context as possible. Since they came to the Switch a couple weeks ago, I was looking forward to playing 1-6 in quick succession for the first time in my life, but unfortunately Tears of the Kingdom is going to monopolize my leisure time attention for a bit starting tomorrow. I did rush to beat FFI before the Zelda release, though, putting the final nail in Chaos (the only boss that ever killed me!) this morning.

I’d played FFI before in high school via the PS1 collection Final Fantasy Origins, and I recall beating it, but I might be tricking myself. At any rate, I didn’t remember much about the game besides its simplistic job system and the “cold open” encounter with Garland, so I got to experience this game with almost completely fresh eyes. And what struck me is this (and this is not, I grant you, an original thought, but I wasn’t prepared for how true it was): the original Final Fantasy is an earnest attempt to digitize the tabletop RPG experience for a solo console video gamer. And, mostly, I thought it did that in really strong and delightful ways.

I’m sure there’s a whole book to be discovered in what Final Fantasy took from Dungeons & Dragons (honestly I’d love to write it — anybody??), but here’s what really stood out to me as Square porting a TTRPG to 8 bits.

The Stats System

Final Fantasy I gauges its characters’ abilities with five key stats. It doesn’t take much of a leap at all to see how these are lifted directly from Dungeons & Dragons’ ability scores. They’re even more or less listed in the right order!

• Strength is obvious (it’s Strength!). This determines how hard you hit.

• Agility comes from Dexterity. This affects accuracy and evasion.

• Stamina affects how many hit points you gain when leveling up; this is Constitution.

• Intellect affects your magic capabilities; this is the biggest departure from D&D, combining both Intelligence and Wisdom (I guess in a game as limited in player options as FFI — you can pretty much just fight and talk — these softer stats don’t mean as much).

• Luck affects your success in fleeing from battle as well as how efficacious healing is on you. This is Charisma.

The Rigid Class Progression

Hey man… pick Monk instead of Thief, ok? Do it for me

Much like a tabletop RPG, Final Fantasy I asks you to create your characters as the very first thing you do in the game. Here, that means giving them a name and choosing their class: Warrior, Monk, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage, Red Mage. These function almost identically to classes in Dungeons & Dragons, predetermining what skills you have access to as well as how you grow as you gain levels. Other than “rolling” for hit points via your Stamina stat, it seems like character growth is pretty set at each level. This feels a whole lot like D&D’s class progression chart.

Oh, and speaking of magic… Final Fantasy I uses spell slots just like D&D. And characters’ access to slots as they grow looks a whole lot like this chart above.

The Monsters

The bestiary of FFI is a straight-up Monster Manual. I mean, there are Mindflayers. Come on!

The original Japanese release of the game even had Beholders, but these were substantially altered and renamed for all subsequent releases (a little too close to TSR’s copyright…).

Speaking of monsters, by the way, the battle system employed is strictly turn-based as opposed to the active time system of later titles where every character has an independent readiness tracker. At the top of each round, you select actions for everyone in your party, and then you hope that their “initiative” in that round (as influenced by the agility stat) is better than the monsters’. You really, really want to go before they do. Because…

Dungeons Are an Endurance Test

In the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons, dungeon crawling was meant to push your party to its limits, making players choose between pushing on to get more loot/glory or pulling back to regroup and heal. I’d never really played a Final Fantasy game that so acutely channeled that feeling before.

By the standards of later games, FFI is fairly punishing; it more or less requires you to grind to get by. An early-game dungeon called the Marsh Cave highlights this philosophy. This is a gigantic hump for the game, maybe its hardest dungeon relative to player level in the whole thing. If you’ve been moving along regularly, even carefully, and not explicitly grinding out levels or gold, Marsh Cave will humble you quickly. The dungeon map is expansive (it’s bifurcated, with two separate paths that both lead to riches)¹, the enemies are tough, and many of them inflict status ailments, especially poison, which your white mage (if you have one) will not possess a magical cure for at this point in the game.

I’m not sure if this is how everyone tackles the Marsh Cave, but here’s how I did it: I took the dungeon one floor at a time, raiding a level of all its chests, then retreating back to the nearest town to rest at the inn and buy as many potions and antidotes as I could afford with my new gold, before pressing on to the next dungeon floor. This took a long time, but — other than a couple lucky encounters where the bad guys got in some critical hits before I could do anything — I was able to get through the dungeon without a total party kill. And honestly, this was one of my favorite parts of the game. It felt like Final Fantasy was rewarding me for careful yet intrepid adventuring. It was like the solo version of negotiating with your buddies at the table — do I have enough HP left to go for this treasure room? Or do I need to lick my wounds and come back next time? This is, in my estimation, a huge upside to the unfriendly player treatment of FFI.

The Game Can Be Really, Really Aimless

And here’s the downside. Like bad D&D, there are times when Final Fantasy I seems to have lost the thread. The most severe of these, in my opinion, is the Levistone episode, which struck me as wildly unsophisticated game design; this is the one point where I felt like FFI was truly showing its age.

So, okay. Pretty early in the game, as you’re exploring, you meet a random NPC in a cave who says something like: “I sure would like this item called the Levistone. I heard you can use it to make anything fly!” Seems like a pretty clear signpost that, at some point, you’re going to find that item, and when you do you should bring it to him, right?

So a few hours later, I clear out a dungeon and my prize is, hey, the Levistone! Immediately I trek back across the world map (which takes FOREVER, because when you’re in your boat random encounters trigger like every two seconds) to talk to the guy who wanted it. You know what he says?

“I sure would like this item called the Levistone. I heard you can use it to make anything fly!”

Okay… so… I guess that guy doesn’t get your item. But what do you do with it?

I was so stumped. The next thing I thought of was to go to the game’s opening town. Why? Because there’s an NPC there who tells you at the start of the game that if you feel lost, you can talk to her and she’ll help you. I actually feel like that’s a really cool element to put in a game, ensuring that players will always have some notion of how to progress if they feel stuck.

So I go talk to this NPC and she says, I’m not even kidding, “I don’t know what to say.”

Ohhhh my god. It seems like what happens is that at some point in the game, that character stops being able to help you. In the moment, I did not appreciate that design choice.

At this point I was truly stumped. Short of revisiting every single location and character in the world, I had no idea what to do. So I did something I generally avoid: I looked at a guide.

You know what that guide told me? Walk into a desert. Seriously. Once you obtain the Levistone, you just walk into a random desert and an airship floats up from out of it. What the fuck?

Apparently, there’s a character in another town who becomes a new helper NPC at a certain point in the game. When I met him, all he said was “I’m a prophet, and when the time is right I shall tell what I know.” I have to admit, I didn’t really log that in my brain, but I guess if you go talk to him when you have the Levistone, he tells you to walk into that desert.

Fuck that, man. This sequence is the absolute nadir of FFI in my opinion. Not only does the game not really signpost where you need to go with a key item, it actively obstructs you from going there by giving you a wild red herring. If the game had ended shortly after this, I would have left with a much worse opinion of it.

Luckily, once you get the airship, this game flies like a bullet. I just breezed through the final third, and I had a blast doing it. I really felt like the powerful Warrior of Light the game wanted me to be.

The Use of Second Person

Most Final Fantasy games are celebrated for their stories, but those stories almost always involve ornately drawn characters (a couple months ago I spent a lot of time talking about how this was true for VI). FFI does not do that. It barely has characters at all. The only real player character is you, the actual player. Spiritually, this is the biggest point of comparison between tabletop RPGs and this video game.

That means that, any time there’s in-game text or narration (which is pretty spare), the game addresses you, like a dungeon master would. And this is nowhere more potent than in the epilogue text crawl, which boldly proclaims: “For you are the warrior who crossed time!”

Hell yeah I am!

Final Fantasy I’s story may seem super tropey and paint-by-numbers by today’s standards, but I have to say, I loved it. I love tropeyness in fantasy, as long as it creates a fun world to play in — easily recognizable story bits help set the table for player characters to make their own meaning. And I thought the revealed time loop plot at the core of this game was really rad; I’m a sucker for stuff like that. (In fact cyclicality and everyday people being heroes are two things that factor heavily into my Blackmore set of adventures).

I’m gonna be honest with you, I think the idea that everyone who plays this game is a warrior of time is genuinely potent. Again referencing my post about FFVI, something else I talk about in there is the most impactful teacher I ever had, Professor Schroeder. Something Professor Schroeder taught is that all of us are stuck in eternally recurring loops caused by our own unexamined patterns. Our task on our own hero’s journey is to break out of that loop in a way that leaves both you and the world better off. I guess psychologists might call what I’m talking about breaking self-destructive patterns, but Professor Schroeder was thinking about Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. And I tell you what, when the epilogue text of FFI told me that *I* was the warrior who crossed time, for a second I did really feel like a hero. It made me feel like maybe I can break a few loops in my own life like I broke Chaos’s loop in game. I mean, it probably won’t be as easy, but if I grind it out a bit more, I might be a bit better prepared.

Final Thoughts

All things considered, I thoroughly enjoyed my dive into Final Fantasy I, and I was really surprised at how unlike even the 16-bit FF games it was. There are definitely a few archaic design decisions that are absurdly frustrating for the modern gamer, but as a digitized and slightly reskinned D&D port, I thought it was largely super successful. It’ll be interesting to see how the series moves away from its tabletop influences and becomes more like itself as things progress, and I look forward to finding that out (and maybe writing about it), uh, eventually. How long do you think Hyrule is going to take to free this time?

1. By the way, I thought the dungeon design in this game was tremendous. Nearly every level had an interesting hook or twist to it. I really liked the Sunken Shrine, for instance, where you enter on the third level of six and have to decide whether to go up or down (you ultimately have to do both, but I love how immediately nonlinear that layout is).