
If you die, you must trudge all the way back from the last town you visited, and that's assuming you remembered book a room.

You might think, "No biggie, I'll just respawn at the save point." Did I mention that the "save points" here are inns? No, you don't save on the world map and there are no campfire sites in dungeons. Perhaps the worst feeling in the world came when you perished in battle after spending an hour or more slogging through a dungeon. Basically, your warrior ends up chopping at the space the creature used to occupy, probably feeling about as smart as the corpse before them. It also didn't help that your attacks could be rendered "ineffective" if you send someone to strike a foe and it perished before you took a swing.

Additionally, you had to be sparing with your MP and consumables, which was tricky when the game regularly wore you down. Each tier bears four white and four black spells, but mages can only learn three spells per magic level, forcing you to choose wisely. Your mages didn't acquire the ridiculous amounts of magic points they receive nowadays, instead only earning up to nine points per tiered level of magic. Plot beats dispensed of less chatter and dialogue than the franchise's later installments, consisting mostly of townsfolk filling in the world's lore while guiding you through your quest.Īnd as with some of the early D&D video games, this one was ruthless. For the most part, you find your way from one dungeon to another, scotching D&D-inspired beasts in turn-based combat while earning experience. You assemble a quartet of warriors, each with their own class, and voyage together to save the world from the aforementioned villains and their mastermind. It's more like a simplified, single-player D&D campaign. The original one doesn't play out like your contemporary FF titles. My party crawled slowly through dungeons, took eons to end encounters, and ground for what felt like months just to feel worthy of even glancing at one of the campaign's major bosses, the Elemental Fiends. Over the years, though, I had a difficult time getting back into it mainly because of its sluggish pacing. I played FF on my old NES back in the day and enjoyed it well enough. I only hoped that the devs would preserve the classic's best parts while tossing in some QOL improvements.

Honestly, visuals were the least of my worries in regard to the premier entry of this series. They repackaged the game once more, except this time with "remastered pixels" so its presentation didn't look like cat puke on HD screens. I told myself I would never again play a "new" version of the original Final Fantasy (henceforth called FF because I'm lazy).
