With the Final Fantasy franchise recently celebrating it's 13th installment, it's amazing to see how the series has grown. Whilst it's now a huge 3D masterpiece, with brilliant characters, a captivating story and cutscenes that would make Pixar jealous, back in 1987, the game was, well, a very different beast...
It's hard to imagine that this was once cutting-edge
Instead of giving you a set party, with each character having their own specific roles in the group, Final Fantasy is a lot more open, letting you create a team from scratch, and choose the jobs you want your team to have (Warrior, Black Mage, White Mage and the like), before dropping you into a forest in front of a town, without any explanation whatsoever. There's no long introductory cutscene, no easy tutorial section - you're just there, without a clue where to go.
Eventually, you'll stumble into the town, and realise it was there that you were actually meant to go in the first place. Then you'll discover the one major flaw with the game:
The battles. Or more specifically, how hard they are - especially if you haven't bought some decent equipment from the town. You'll get obliterated, then discover that upon getting a game over, the entire game restarts, so you'll need to name all your characters, again unless you saved the game in the Inn. Which it doesn't warn you to do.
And even if you do manage to survive for more than fifteen minutes, and work out where you need to go without either giving up, or smashing your controller in frustration, there's nothing really to play for, as the story's pretty much non-existent. You're left playing a game that's ridiculously hard, with impossibly difficult battles, and effectively nothing to play for
Ultimately, it's the difficulty that ruins the game. It was made in a time when people were probably a lot more forgiving about having to restart the game repeatedly because they keep dying, because it was new, it was exciting, and nothing like it had ever been done before.
You'll be seeing lots of these chaps on your quest...
Nowadays though, people have played and made much more enjoyable games, and Final Fantasy just doesn't hold up.
Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii
