After that confusing mess of a history, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is here with as good of a shot as it's going to get on a bestselling console in the PS4 (And Vita if you're like me and find it weird playing a new Ys game on a home console after over a decade of 3DS, PSP, and Vita releases). With an unwieldy name (Lacrimosa is Latin for tears and a plot device, and Dana is a main character. Savvy?) and a sturdy action RPG formula, does the franchise still have something to offer modern gaming? Sure, all good games do, but while it's not always for the best to just follow trends, sometimes there's a fundamental flaw of franchises that come from a time when console power was measured in bits that can't be overcome without a serious reboot in concept. And Ys already sort of rebooted recently.


The Ys series follows the exploits of Adol Christin, an adventurer described as "a young man with flame-like hair and dark, pure eyes – like those of a curious child," by the art book blurb. The sad thing about that line is it covers about all there is to the character. With decades to develop a franchise leading man, Adol has never really advanced past "guy you play as." I get in role-playing, there are characters where you're supposed to slip into the role, but Adol is obviously his own person. They try to give him a backstory in Memories of Celceta, but it's all bland and forgettable. Even with new conversation options, it changes nothing about him and how others treat him. He comes out of an experience where he literally has to slay a god the same as he came in, and there's something downright weird about that. Besides his best pal Dogi, the people around him and the women he risks life and limb for bounce off an emotional bubble that never absorbs anything past pleasantness. I joked on my Twitter he has no time for other people because after wielding immense enough powers to pierce the heavens and literally saving civilization the first couple times, it became an addiction with Dogi as his enabler. However, that would at least be something to work with if that were true.

The franchise has a new focus in that Adol wrote dozens of adventuring journals and each title is one of them that he eventually uses to write books out of. This is an odd bit of texture for a series full of odd texture. It's a fake fantasy world, but the geographical nomenclature is childishly familiar. In his journeys, Adol constantly runs into the Romn empire, there is much made out of the mysterious continent of Afroca, and one of the main characters in this entry is from Greek. No, not Greece. Greek. Get with the naming scheme. So this is essentially the age of exploration where a Roman-esque empire is still in power and every single mysterious island and country has a sealed weapon/ being of mass destruction that could level continents which is at the brink of falling into the wrong hands.


In this entry, Adol and Dogi are traveling on a ship towards their next journey, not knowing fate has another location in mind. Lining up with history for whenever Adol has one of the most powerful weapons in the world from his previous adventure, he immediately loses it and has to start all over. In this case, a powerful sword from the Xandrian region of Afroca, making this just after Ys V, even though it's a game following the retconned official entry of Ys IV. You just get used to the timeline jumping after awhile. Anyhoo, the ship Adol's on gets attacked by a giant tentacle monster and sunk, causing him to lose his ace equipment and get shipwrecked on the Isle of Seiren.

As is customary for wherever Adol winds up, it is not just a normal island, but one hiding a secret that could determine the fate of the world. Nobody who has gone to the island has ever returned. Dinosaurs that have been extinct for centuries called the Ancient Species are roaming about and even the herbivores seem more than a skosh aggressive. He has dreams about a woman named Dana, a maiden-in-training to the Great Tree, a worshipped plant that grants energy which allows her entire civilization to run. While she's a troublemaker who often doesn't give a second thought to ignoring protocol, her instincts and visions have saved the capital city multiple times. While Adol is having dreams about her, Dana is having visions about Adol traipsing about the ruins of her civilization and trying to figure out how this happened to prevent it.

While exploring the consequences of Dana changing history with the castaways who are living through the results would be trippy as hell (It's more she makes things that allow them to progress), the game takes a more traditional JRPG narrative as it goes along save for the castaway village setup. Adol's job as explorer is to find the survivors from the shipwreck scattered across the island and send them back to where a camp is being constructed. The villagers each add their unique talents like farming or tailoring to the mix, and as you get more people, you can clear a path that was previously blocked, though there is a somewhat humorous event if you find a noble who gives you the exact number you need to clear a path, and then he refuses to help you, leaving you one short. Jerk. You eventually get items and extra conversations by doing subquests for them or trading for special items they like with the stranded merchant.

The castaway group also gives you main party members, and you eventually get six to switch between in groups of three. The enemies each have a weakness to three different types of weapons, so you'll ideally want one of each, and–at least for me–the rest of the party tends to fall by the wayside. They include Laxia, a noble archaeology enthusiast with decent skills at the rapier, fisherman Sahad who evolves a fighting style with a broken anchor, and Ricotta, a little girl who swings some big weapons. They're a likable enough bunch, if not doing much to break the mold. When there are swarms of enemies with multiple different weaknesses attacking at once, it can be annoying to switch between characters while fighting them one at a time.

The whole idea is to create a figurative family you get through this ordeal and grow with. The characters range from predictable and irritating (That noble guy) to off-the-wall (A 70-year-old former gladiator with abs named Silvia. Ys VIII granny gladiator for Smash!).  It's not far off to say one of the best characters is the parrot you find on the island. I won't say anything more since it's best if you simply remember to talk to the parrot from time-to-time and let it surprise you. There is an odd part to all this where Adol has a seeming harem of attached or unavailable women. They're obviously not romantic interests (The man doesn't seem much interested in sex anyway. Hey, if he doesn't want to get down, he does't want to get down), but the weird comes where the chemistry that would normally be reserved for the characters you can romance in similar titles is used here for... mothers of six who probably have romance novel heroes that look kind of like Adol and ten-year-old girls who found their first crush. Don't misunderstand, it's all perfectly innocent. Most times if you wanted to do something like Persona social rankings with Adol Christin, this is how it would turn out. Granted, before Persona 5 showed people who, GASP, were heavily implied to have sex when they reached a certain point in a relationship, the kisses on a cheek our hero receives here were like getting to second base in most JRPGs that weren't made by outright pervs.

I make fun of Ys stories because they're going to run tradition into the franchise's grave, but there is a huge saving grace to all of this. I get the feeling Falcom knows Adol is not nearly as fascinating as everything around him, and their idea this time around is having a second main character. Dana's story doesn't take nearly as much time as the trek of the present, and you'll likely spend most of it figuring out where in the winding temple and city roads to go, but this whole game is built around Dana if you couldn't tell from the title. She has a high position in her society, but she loves her people and will often betray her "proper" behavior to help them or simply be among them. She is one of the shortest people of her race, yet one of the most powerful. She is looking at her visions of a future where everything she knows is in ruin, finds she can change little things, and if this means she has to push through a group of priests and even friends who think she might be mad, she'll do so (random note: her best friend Olga's hair feels like a road sign that got molded into a hairstyle). She is the pathos and drive of the story, and by golly, she earns it.

The gameplay and music are the reasons most people still hang around this particular part of the JRPG universe, and the quality is up to snuff with the rest of the series. The interface is pretty much a refinement of Memories of Celceta with a mix of action RPG elements and Metroid exploration. You move through the great unknown trying to map out everything while looking for supplies, discoveries, and survivors. You will need to find extra abilities to fully explore the swamps, jungles, and whatever gets in your way. Some are typical like a double-jump, and some are odd Jesus powers, like literally the ability to walk across water. You get rewards for simply mapping out the area, which is a carryover from Celceta where you were given rewards for mapping the area because that what the Romn empire was paying you to do. Doesn't make as much sense here, but it adds to the idea of Adol also being an explorer on top of monster slayer.

The combat is basic action RPG spiced up enough to keep it interesting. You have your basic slash, which eventually becomes more of a device to power up your special move meter. To keep from being a complete button masher, you have to wait a second for the weapon to flash, and then you can make a hit that builds up that meter for special moves. The special moves can be assigned to the four main buttons with the assistance of a shoulder button and can be customized to your whim. They range in what they can to from dealing heavy damage to knocking the enemy out cold for easy hunting to simply allowing you to get in a better position to attack. Using these moves effectively fills out another meter that allows you to unleash an ultimate attack to be used at strategic moments. Also in play is a dodge mechanism that will eventually sends you into witch time... except it's not called witch time, of course. This freezes time and allows you to go to town for a few seconds. You can also do the same thing by deflecting an enemy attack, but this is harder to do. The dodging feels less tight when attacking, like it makes it extra punishing for attacking too often by delaing a fraction of a second more than most games do when you decide to stop attacking and start evading. It doesn't make much of a difference though, since this is one of the easiest Ys games out there.

While the system is robust and doesn't get old throughout the gameplay, the execution feels more simplistic than other entries in the series due to the difficulty. I played on normal, and only had trouble with two bosses where you're forced to use one character (And one of those inflicts the worst status effect in the game and you can't leave the area to get more items that fix it). Usually at this setting, there are a few encounters that are like bullet hell shooters where you memorize the movements of the boss to be able to take it down without being wrecked. With Lacrimosa, the bosses are far more forgiving, and healing objects are more widely available. You can have a doctor mix them, you can cook them, or many raw materials hanging around the island have enough healing properties to be eaten on their own. You can beat the bosses most of the time by mashing and occasionally dodging. If I want to be honest, I had to turn down the difficulty on a couple bosses in the modern Ys games (I'd put that era at Oath of Felghana on). That never happened here. Trading accessibility for rewarding the gamer in mastering the system is only a crime depending on individual's taste, though. I'm sure the cult of Dark Souls would whap it with a newspaper for kowtowing to more casual gamers.

Graphics are the usual effort from Falcom in which it feels like a PS 3 holdover with only a few flashes of inspiration. The textures and detail all feel out of date, but it only really matters in the instances of supposed awe in exploring the lost civilization. It would work better if the full-on views of city ruins, massive irrigation systems, and curious black holes in the earth weren't often blocked by mounds of dirt and railings meant to keep the characters from constantly hopping off cliffs. Functionality definitely cramps the style. Falcom also utilizes whatever gets the job done for their narrative cutscenes. Traditional-looking animation, 3D CG, whatever. The same location will be handled differently in the same sequence to jarring effect. Unless you're dead-set on graphic quality, it's not so much of an issue like most Falcom games, but it's still only barely up to the company's definition of par.

Now the Falcom Sound Team jdk's music, that's where the aesthetics are at. The game starts with a main theme featuring stirring strings and keeps going. Piano, electric guitar, and violin pieces for the individual areas are met with pumping beats to keep you going. It's what I've come to expect from this group, though maybe too much of what to expect. Tracks here can be swapped with other Ys games willy nilly and you wouldn't notice that much of a difference. When they've got awesome jams down to a science, it's hard to be too down of them.

In what was a weird coup, the localization was not by usual Falcom collaborators XSeed, but by NIS America. People at XSeed expressed disappointment in the turn of events as much as they could in public. It might be a sign of things in the future as Falcom's stab at being having a modern Persona-like game, Tokyo Xanadu, was published by Aksys to mixed results. The translation here has come under similar fire, causing NIS America to apologize and issue a translation patch. Now, phrasing like "Archeozolic Big Hole" is a big red flag, but maybe I've been down the Engrish rabbit hole too far as I didn't notice it too much. JRPGs often utilize such dodgy English in core concepts that it doesn't phase me anymore. If you don't speak both languages (Me, I'm at the level of, "DUH, "RI" IN KATAKANA IS 'ri' UPSIDE DOWN!"), how do you know when it's a translation issue or when it's a JRPG just being itself?  Granted, Archeozolic Big Hole in NISA's official English translation being called the Crevice of the Acheozolic Era in English on the JAPANESE version of the soundtrack probably should've been been a sign.


I must say, though, the limited boxset is beautiful. The coveted soundtrack is a decent sampling of what the music has to offer. I have no idea when I'll ever use the cloth poster or the bookends, but they're well made. The steel case is not made for the Vita version, however. The art book and the journal are fine and showcase how much thought was put into it, even if the journal is eye-crossingly boring to read. Adol, man, you gotta' get a better personality than nice guy who kills gods and then writes about the architecture of the ship you traveled on to get there.

Ys VIII is exactly the kind of game I expected it to be, maybe a little more thanks to Dana's addition. It's a well made and fun action RPG with a decent enough story to see my way through to the end. Unfortunately, it's also one I will forget in a year's time, like the rest of the Ys series I didn't grow up with. The plot eventually addresses the constant escalating of enemies in Adol's life and creates a blueprint for future adventures to make it not seem like he's tripping over ancient secrets that could end the world with no rhyme or reason the rest of his life. The only thing that can stop him from his future journeys is himself, really. I'm not asking for the gruff, world-weary Adol Christin with a beard and a thousand-yard stare, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a hero to be more than just a red-headed piece of titanium that bounces through hell and back with no damage or tarnish. Heck, even that would be more interesting.

The first moment Final Fantasy takes your breath away is some twenty minutes in. Your party of four have been introduced-classed and named by the player, and then you're dropped into a world of uncertainty, darkness, and princess kidnap, just outside the sleepy town of Cornelia. Either finding your own way, or being escorted, to the castle's throne room, you meet the local king, who, noting your quartet are bearing crystals, wonders aloud if you're the prophesied Four Warriors of Light, before tasking you to defeat turncoat knight, Garland, who, in a typical braggart move, has kidnapped his daughter, Sarah.

You travel north to a rather fearsome Gothic castle, defeat him and reunite father and daughter. An overjoyed king proclaims that you must indeed be the Four Warriors of Light and rebuilds the bridge between his small island and the north. Your heroes cross. The game freezes, then cuts to white.




And replacing the by now familiar Overworld and its theme, which you've crisscrossed a few times to level up enough to battle the despicable Garland, is a still image of your four heroes. And playing over it, for the first time, is Nobuo Uematsu's iconic theme, simply entitled Main Theme (and elsewhere, as Prologue, or, simply, Final Fantasy.) Uematsu himself describes it as " the song I'd like to be remembered by" and "the most important song in terms of everything I’ve ever done".

As the text scrolls by, that iconic theme, that unmistakable, oft replicated theme, infinitely remixed and reworked and performed theme that runs, like a lifeblood through the franchise, from its beginnings in a small team, on Nintendo's Famicom, through the Super Famicom and the one-two-three punch that is Final Fantasy IV,V and the knockout, VI, three games that evolve, perfect and refine the series to the pinnacle of the truly spectacular sixth game. It continues through a switch to Sony that may well have tipped the console war in the latter's favour, via the blockbuster linchpin that is Final Fantasy VII, the dark horse of VIII, and the farewell of the original team that is IX. Whilst it doesn't appear in the first two games, or indeed in the much maligned thirteenth installment, elsewhere, it otherwise punctuates the series, largely as a final, definite, full-stop late in each game's end credits.

The text that accompanies the music and minimalist, yet perfect visual, is pure Final Fantasy:

"And so their journey began. The four Warriors of Light felt overwhelmed by the great task destiny had placed upon them. They did not know the true significance of the four crystals they held in their hands... The crystal that once, long ago, shone with a light so brilliant. The time for their journey had come. The time to cast off the veil of darkness and bring the world once more into the light."

These themes are things that the franchise and its spin offs return to time and again-a small, plucky group of heroes, either prophesied or self appointed to save the world. We see it in Cloud and AVALANCHE, we see it in Noctis and his Kingsguard, in Lightning and the fellow people branded by the l'Cie, and even in the the series' two MMORPG outings. These heroes return the world to light, time after time, no matter, or despite the cost, often by returning the crystals to their rightful place, or power. Whilst the crystals themselves only occasionally appear, most recently in Final Fantasy XV's otherwise strikingly modern universe, other things replace them in replicating a sense of the world's purity, be it the Lifestream in Final Fantasy VII, polluted by the world-spanning mega corp, Shinra, or in Final Fantasy XII's sundered kingdom. Something is always out of balance and our heroes always restore it to that balance


What precedes this monologue is equally vital in the formation of the series. In just under twenty minutes,  Hironobu Sakaguchi and his team of seven, including Uematsu, artist Yoshitaka Amano and writer  Kenji Terada, have set the bedrock of Final Fantasy firmly in place. Crystals, that light and protect against the darkness. A realistic world, plagued with monsters and evil. Regular and almost epidemic princess kidnap. Large to ridiculous sized swords. Eloquent, more-Shakespearean-than-Shakespeare villains.

Whilst subsequent games would take steps forward in creating characters who have emotional depth, goals, interests, and their own personalities, culminating in the positive soap opera that is Final Fantasy VI's fourteen-strong cast, and graphical advances would bring the work of Amano, Tetsuya Nomura and Akihiko Yoshida closer and closer to photo realism, (belts, spiky hair, ridiculous clothing and all), Amano's flowing visual style is replicated at the cutting edge of late 1980s video game graphics.

In  short, within half an hour, Final Fantasy sows the seeds of a franchise that continues to this very day-the graphics may be closer to a CGI film than blobby 8-bit graphics, with rounded, wonderfully human characters, the music closer to a symphony than tuneful bloops and blips, the game play now free roaming rather than a static back-and-forth turn based melee, but peel back the skin and it's still, down at the bone, much the same simple story. Still Final Fantasy. Yet, whilst the entire game may rest heavily upon the mechanics of Gary Gigax's 1974 roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, down to the stats, the spells, and the monsters, the story and execution is pure and utter Japan.
This is, after all, the point; first, to give the player as close to the experience of a D&D game on a home console as possible (albeit with a sadistic and tight lipped DM) and, secondly, Final Fantasy is very much a Japanese take on a western RPG.

The music comes to an end, the spell is broken.

And I am suddenly thrown back to several points in my life, like that Proustian Madeleine, Uematsu's music awakening, or rather, reawakening, several memories, simultaneously, each note familiar, that way, that on more recent versions, the full orchestra now available to the maestro, the drum furls quietly in the background, the horns rise, the strings rise. It's a tune that I've heard dozens of times before, but never in its original context, never at the beginning of a Final Fantasy game, let alone the first Final Fantasy game, on everything from piano to ukulele.

The first memory is...hazy, I'll admit. I'm maybe fourteen to sixteen, sitting at home on a computer, a decade ago, when Final Fantasy was, very much a closed book to me, a game that other people played on other consoles-I knew a few things about it-a blonde haired scowling young man with a big sword (Cloud, I thought he was called), another man with silver hair, both of whom my mother continues to this day to compare to the late David Bowie, a film called Advent Children, another film, Spirits Within that I remember glimpsing a small section of, at a point where WH Smiths still sold DVDs and games, remember my father commenting on the photorealism of it.
I am listening to music on the nascent YouTube, and I find a full album of beautifully played video game music. At this point, Final Fantasy is very much an abstract concept, (I know there must be at least seven games, if only because of Advent Children), but I play it. 

For the first time, I fall in love with the music of Nobuo Uematsu. reduced though it is to a single, if impeccably played guitar. I play the video constantly, until, one day to my horror, I find that the video has been deleted. I try in vain to find exactly who the guitarist was (Yuji Sekiguchi, I've since learned). By now, I've been playing a few of the spin-off games; the beautifully tough Tactics Advance, and, when given a PlayStation by a well meaning uncle, I finally purchase first a battered second hand copy of Final Fantasy VI, and then, with impeccable luck, I find Final Fantasy VII in a charity shop for the princely sum of £2.50. I play both. I don't get very far, but I find them, particularly VI, an extremely charming duo of games.

I watch Advent Children, finally.

And, at the end of the tale, where Cloud Strife is not quite how I imagined him, (although I promptly set my secondary school PC account to a rather moody wallpaper of his Kingdom Hearts appearance,(not that i knew what that was at that point) now since lost to the ether of Web 1.0), there it is again, at the end of a reprise of themes. Given a full orchestra to spread out across, given an almost baroque quality, as though this is no longer Uematsu's piece, but Uematsu tapping into something centuries-old.. As though, once again, the dream is passing, this time on a grand scale, given such a strength that it brings tears to the eyes. Then,it gathers pace, until, with a final blare of trumpets, it ends, as does the film.


And I am suddenly at university, in a small, warm, cosy house, and we are playing Final Fantasy IX, the final bow of Uematsu as the sole composer, Sakaguchi's farewell before the PlayStation 2 arrives, and with it a fully voiced, awkwardly laughing world, where Nomura is well and truly the artistic driving force, belts, zipper and all. It's been four years since a main-title Final Fantasy game arrived, in the shape of the painfully linear, underwhelming Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIV is a game wracked by technical issues-the meteor which rebirths a realm still months from crashing into the world-and the remake of Final Fantasy VII is nothing more than a worn-out joke that only the hardcore believe will ever happen. Final Fantasy has passed its 25th year, I've passed my 20th.

Yet, four twenty-somethings are glued to a game that's over a decade old, as it reaches its denouement, as we send first Kuja, the brother of our protagonist, the Genome, Zidane Tribal, and then the literal embodiment of Death, Necron, packing. The day is won, the princess, (Garnet, who kidnaps herself minutes into the game) is safe, the hero returns, the world is set right. The credits roll on the first Final Fantasy game I have ever completed. Uematsu is back. The theme is back, after a song that's become one of my favourite pieces of Uematsu's music, Melodies of Life, and I finally understand.

This piece of music that opens the first Final Fantasy...is your reward. You've finished another game. You get to hear it again. It anchors the series together, perfectly. What begins the first game, now ends almost every single one too. As we tidy up, I simply sit and listen. The victory seems all the sweeter. And I am sitting in the Royal Albert Hall, a week ago, two of those same friends sitting next to me-the very man who composed the music, Uematsu himself mere yards below-the musicians spread out across the stage, Arnie Roth conducting, as Final Fantasy marches on to 30, and I pass 25. And that same piece of music is playing, as credits roll.
And I decide something, in the gloom, as the audience applaud, the orchestra and Roth, and Uematsu stand to take bows.


For so long I've enjoyed my friends, close and far, talking about these games, even been blessed enough to talk, at great lengths, about Cecil Highwind, and Firion, and Celes, and Faris, and Squall, and  the veritable horde of characters that make up the cast of the fifteen games.

I've never completed one.

Not a single game.

Despite some of these characters being cherished by myself to the point that one is probably my single favourite video game character of all time, as well as being a character I take strength and influence from, I have never seen them best evil, rescue the girl, (in the cases where girls need to be rescued, rather than being the rescuer,) and bring the world back into balance. And I decide that this needs to change. I don't set myself a deadline, only an order.



Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy XV. In short, release order. Where possible, I'll play them on the original console, but in some cases (II, III, V), this is simply impossible (私は日本語話せません), whilst others may be cheaper or easier to play on another console or on PC-I don't own an American NES or SNES, so essentially everything prior to Final Fantasy VII will, simply put, be a reissue or remake of the respective game. In every case, when I begin playing a new entry of Final Fantasy, I'll indicate what console I'm playing on-you are, of course, all welcome to suggest which version of each game is your favourite, and indeed to suggest which version (budget permitting) I should play.

Two exceptions. Final Fantasy XI and XIV, the franchise's two Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS). FFXI is now practically unplayable, with Square Enix cutting support years ago, whilst, FFXIV, despite its obvious attraction, would frankly take me years and several hundred pounds to complete. Check out the very well made Japanese Drama, Final Fantasy XIV: Dad of Light, about a son trying to connect with his father via FFXIV, by the way-it's on Netflix, and is probably the best single series about gaming, and being a gamer, I can recommend at the moment.

Replacing these two games, thus, are Final Fantasy X-2 (entering the batting order after FFX and before FFXII), and Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lighting Returns (between XIII and XV). If there's enough demand, I'll talk about some of the spin-offs, time and budget willing. But, with no further ado! Final Fantasy I awaits!


Final Fantasy I

Sony Playstation Portable (2008)

 I boot up my trusty Dissidia (a fighting game spinoff of the series squaring the heroes (the Warriors of Cosmos) against the villains (Warriors of Chaos)-branded PSP up. I've always rather liked the PSP, despite the thrashing the Nintendo DS gave it in the late 2000s. It has a solidity, a satisfying replication of the PlayStation controller, a surprisingly big screen (before, thanks to the iPhone and other smart phones, big screens were de-rigeur), and I've always quite liked the way it sits in the hands. Matt-white may not be overly practical, but I'm not one to criticize my tools.

Open the back, remove-what else-Dissidia, replace it with the UMD for Final Fantasy I. Close the back. On the PSP's menu, that familiar oscillating harp starts up, Yoshitaka Amano's art of Chaos covers half the screen, a portent of what's to come, albeit with more imagination required than most of the modern Final Fantasy games. After all, for all its interface updates, this is half of a a port of an earlier PlayStation remake, entitled Final Fantasy Origins (2003). Everything may be more polychromatic than the NES/Famicom, but it's still relatively, and charmingly retro, with sprites, no character portraits, and only bosses particularly pushing the visual constraints of even the PlayStation, let alone the more powerful PSP.

Hit X.

A ping, a prelude, an opening cut scene sporting far more advanced set of graphics than we'll see again in this game. Hit "Start". Give the party silly names. Create what I hope is a rounded party. Hit "Start" again.

Text, filling the background of the game out, highfalutin talk of crystals, a quartet of heroes, an encroaching darkness. Then the game dumps me outside a city, shrugs, and settles back into its chair, waiting for you to make the first move. It's fair to say that, for all my praise earlier, the first twenty minutes of Final Fantasy I are not the most user friendly, even updated for the 2000s. We, our party of Warrior, Thief, Red Mage, and Monk, start off, in the grand tradition of all but the most accomplished Dungeon Masters, as a party, outside a reasonably big town.

This is my first, (and at time of writing), my biggest issue with Final Fantasy I. Whilst I have never been one for overt hand-holding or linearity in videogames-and looking at the return, with a veritable vengeance, of the open-world adventure game, I;m not alone-FFI takes this to an extreme. I have no idea where to go, there's little in the way of a guide, there's not even a goddamn map. So, for a few minutes I traipse the small continent. A broken bridge, a jutting and fearful Gothic castle, a mysterious cave containing a dessicated body, and a dead end. I return to the small town, our heroes bruised but more powerful than before. And, after visiting the local inn, resting my party up, I finally head to the northern gate of town, intending to leave and head back onto the world map to gain more power.

The plot finally rears its head as I reach the city gates-there, I'm accosted by one of the town's guard, taken into the castle, and before its monarch, who finally begins to shed some light of who our mysterious quartet could actually be, noting the crystals they carry, whilst his minister attempts to downplay what many believe to be mere legend.
A quest is needed, and one is promptly given-the king's finest knight, Garland, has made off with his daughter, and both insults need to be answered with steel. If our heroes, after all, are truly the Four Warriors of Light, then they should be able to do this easily.

Thus we give chase north, our party now better equipped to fight off the repeated hordes of goblins, werewolves and other fauna that make up the monsters of this first area, our warrior now easily able to dispatch them with a single blow, the Red Mage now groaning under a half-dozen white (defense) and black (offense magic), whilst the thief and monk make for a second and third good damage dealer. We reach the castle quickly, and head inside. For Final Fantasy's first dungeon, it's remarkably simple, almost bare. Once again the game's debt to D&D is laid bare-one can easily imagine Sakaguchi sketching it out on paper late at night. Its purpose is clear-to get the player lost, and then to direct them straight to Garland.


Garland, both as a boss and as a character, is surprisingly underwhelming when I finally come face to face with him. Whilst he's full of bravado, spitting out the line above just before he engages my heroes, even at this early point he's a bit of a pushover, and is promptly dispatched. For now. Sarah is rescued and the game mercifully drops us straight back at the castle. The king proclaims that we must indeed be the legendary heroes prophesied, has the bridge to the continent rebuilt post-haste, whilst Sarah thanks us for her rescue, and presents our party with a lute.

We leave Cornelia, fully stocked with potions, antidotes, and even phoenix downs, and head the short distance north. We reach the bridge. And Uematsu's theme kicks in, all PlayStation era MIDI, loud as my PSP speakers will go. Amano's visuals join in. Sakaguchi's writing joins them. The greatest power trio of gaming stretch their creative muscles for the first time. The cutscene ends. We cross the bridge into new, unexplored lands. A quote, from Final Fantasy VII, still six games, and a decade of innovation hence, suddenly comes to mind:
"You gotta understand that there ain't no gettin' offa this train we're on, till we get to the end of the line".  To the end of the line, then, I think.