Final Fantasy: The One that Started It All
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- This is a narrative analysis of Final Fantasy for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a game that created many of the console RPG genre tropes that gamers would take for granted over the next few decades. Consider subscribing to the channel. / @michaelcoorlim
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Played with a 2x exp and gold romhack.
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Sources:
Analysis is my own as I play the videos, but here are a few sources for historical information on the development of the game:
CRPGAddict: crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/0...
They Create Worlds ep 157: podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e...
Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan
The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven Kent
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
4:53 Character Creation
7:30 Game Start
12:45 Blame Nasir for the Bugs
14:30 Combat
19:16 Temple of Fiends
22:33 "Final Fantasy"
30:26 Elfland, Land of the Elf
39:58 Sliding Puzzle Minigame
42:26 A cave full of Dwarves
51:38 Crescent Lake
54:07 Floor is Lava
58:22 Airship
1:00:46 Ordeal
1:02:20 Class Change!
1:04:28 Grindin' the Giants Corridor
1:07:42 Little Mermaids
1:10:50 Secrets of the Ancient Race
1:14:17 Time Loops
1:15:49 Analysis - Ігри
Reading a mechanics guide for Final Fantasy on GameFAQs and seeing the sheer amount of notes saying "this is bugged" is wild. But it *was* Nasir's first game, and the fact that people played it for years without thinking about that sort of thing, much less realizing something was up, is neat to think about.
Well, Nasir's first RPG. He was a legend for his action games, especially on the Apple II.
Yup. It's like modern game devs are just missing the point. I think bethesda got it when they made skyrim and just forgot. Ff7 is clearly the best game ever made to a lot of people and it's also one of the buggiest.
@@alanlee67final fantasy just has so much nostalgia for me. We loved these games warts and all. Hell I was born in 79 and pretty much grew up with ff and dw. Had older brothers who were also rpg nerds 🤓 so that helped lol.
Some of this soundtrack, most notably the fight music, to this day will sometimes pop into my head out of the blue.
Growing up in the 80's, this game set my standard for electronic roleplaying games. I played for hours upon hours, and got such a powerful sense of wonder and awe when I crossed the bridge for the first time and only then got the title screen...
Amazing.
This wasn't just Nasir's first time working on an RPG, by all accounts he had never even heard of them before and especially with the language barrier, it was very difficult to get across the subtleties of the game mechanics that they wanted.
Nasir was wild. In the Apple II days, he was known for not bothering to write out his source code beforehand, or taking any notes. He liked the Apple II because it let you input machine code directly into memory, without wasting time on a compiler or even an assembler.
One final note, he wasn't a founder of Sirius Software, but he was with them from the beginning as a fulltime programmer. Later he founded Gebelli Software, which mostly published complete garbage and folded with the videogame crash of 83.
He really was one of those once-in-a-lifetime prodigies.
I thoroughly enjoy these analytical playthroughs. The distillation, reducing a full playthrough down to key interactions and story points, allows viewers to enjoy the game, art, and story, without investing hours of watching (let alone days of playing).
Also, I am dying from the literal pronunciation of the spell names.
A friend from school claimed it was called Final Fanytasy because the graphics were so bad they thought it would be the last game. I always assumed it was just like... a spin on Dungeons and Dragons, Tunnels and Trolls, Mazes and Monsters etc. Fighting Fantasy might have been the book series he played, was very popular here in England. Made by the guy who started Games Workshop I think.
37 years later and the franchise is still going strong.
Oh, I was waiting for this.
5:18 and 23:03- A small correction here: a Kana (as in hiragana and katakana) is a syllable (or vowel in the case o a-i-u-e-o), to use your examples Sakaguchi (サカグチ) and DoraQue (ドラクエ). Meanwhile, a kanji is an ideogram representing a concept or a combination of them [flower (花) + fire (火) = fireworks (花火)].
9:55 - Wait, you didn't need to pay in order to save!? My life is a lie.
14:32 - The combat system is clunky without the auto-aim but I like it, it tries to translate the tabletop experience to a game environment. The combat is narrated (Fighter attacks IMP, X amount of damage, terminated!), and the fact that you can target an enemy who dies and you miss your turn makes it strategic, the spells-per-day system also helps with it and brings it closer to the classic D&D Experience, I like it a lot.
16:25 - One aspect from the battle music that is noticeable is that the bass intro just long enough so that you can input your commands and then it kicks in as your actions unfold. From a gaming direction point of view it's pretty neat.
22:09 - The first time I hit that Title Screen I felt like something big expected me. It's really impactful.
24:04 - Discovering the map also made me realize how far I had to go, the game seemed huge for console game in this era.
27:56 - This talking to people to discover quests and exploration is one of the things I miss from modern gaming a lot after WoW's theme park design took off. We exchanged exploration, which many times was aimless and confusing, for determined paths and fetch quests.
29:30 - Considering how notoriously litigious TSR was, it's still a surprise that Square didn't get sued or at least issued a Cease and Desist letter.
36:50 - On thing about Astos is that the game's bugs help in this fight, otherwise RUB can instakill characters, making the battle way harder when you play romhacks with bugfixes.
40:00 - Oh, that's new! Cool!
42:00 - The weapon element is a cool idea, echoing your words, it's a shame it was bugged.
50:00 - That's an important point of context, the Famicon was a phenomenom in Japan with games for all ages and public, but NES was marketed for children. In a sense, this is the kind of information (the result of your actions) that should be provided to the player.
54:26 and 56:25 - One of the things I'm glad for these days is awareness about Epylepsy, also, the sound effects of walking on lava or when poisoned is really annoying.
1:02:25 - It's really exciting. Did D&D had the concept of prestige classes at the time? I'm only familiar with the Basic set at the time.
1:13:14 - The possibility of encountering the Death Machine still keeps me on my toes whenever I replay this part of the game.
It was a nice video, thanks for your hard work
There was *sort of* a proto-prestige class in the Bard with 1e ADnD - to play a Bard you had to play a fighter to 5th, then dual class into a thief until 5th, then dual class into a Bard. And dual classing at all was restrictive - you needed a 15 in your old class's prime attribute and a 17 in the new one.
And for the record prestige classes are the 3rd edition concept, 13 years after FF1 release.
Ah, the early video game RPGs. They were more like elaborate puzzles than actual stories. There's a charm to that. Sometimes I feel that this kind of game design does have its benefits over the more linear and plot-based style that would dominate the genre in time. But on the other hand, it could be frustrating and very time consuming depending on the complexity and design of the world.
Concerning the whole background behind the name (not the name itself though, that's pretty solid), from what I heard, Sakaguchi was indeed so frustrated that he wanted to leave if FF flopped (whether he'd have actually done so is another question) and Square was just trudging along in the NES era, lacking any big success. It's not as bad as the "name myth" made it out to be, but they weren't exactly fine. Is that one of those stories that nobody can agree on, like whether Pool of Radiance was based on Ruins of Adventure or the other way round?
Also, I find it amusing that those British game books I read/played as a kid were the actual reason why Final Fantasy has its name.
Yeah that's the rumor, and Sakaguchi even said that was the case in some early interviews, though in other interviews he contradicts this and gives the origin that it's "Final Fantasy" because his first pick, "Fighting Fantasy", was already taken by a series of British gamebooks.
I had no idea the author of Kimagure Orange Road also wrote Final Fantasy. Mind blown. And the thing about 4 characters being enough for kanji?? Mind blown again.
I'm calling it - 2024 is going to be the year for your channel.
glad to have been here to help - I really like your work.
Hope you're right!
I have to push back mildly on the Final Fantasy didn't sell well in the states thing. When I was a kid this game was sold out EVERYWHERE (around my neck of the woods at least) for a significant time. I get the impression that if sales were in the low numbers it is because once again it was assumed stupid Americans wouldn't buy it in droves and they didn't really stock it.
Very possible... retailers would have to order copies for consumers to have it available. Compared to action and sports titles RPGs on the NES were very niche, so stores didn't devote a lot of shelf-space to it.
Don't forget it's also on the Wii vc, that's how I play a lot of old Nintendo games, on a crt, in proper 240p.
I see classic JRPG retrospective, I watch. Life is good.
That's a great policy.
I heard also that the name 'final fantasy' was a result of a translation mistake original meaning 'the ultimate fantasy'
I'm officially crazy. I remembered so vivid the mobs being animated instead of static sprites o_O
I remember my brother being into the FF series (I was more a Wizardry and Ultima guy). I also remember him playing FF 2 or 3 and me saying, "I guess that first one wasn't very final then, was it?"
I probably made the same joke. :D
One day the algorithm will suddenly give you 20k views. Until then, good videos are always welcome!
20k views out of nowhere would be very helpful!
Another great video. I never played the console RPGs back in the day, so these are quite fascinating.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Yay it's here! Thank you so much for doing this! ❤❤
I found myself waking up in my chair and this video play in the background, no idea how it happened since I turned off auto-paly.
I had to rewind to make sure I heard that correctly, but... At 6:10, what do you mean that you can't move your characters around in Ultima III and IV? Ultima III has the (M)odify Order command, and IV has (N)ew Order. The only thing you can't do in Ultima IV is move the Wanderer from the first party slot.
9:55, pretty sure that you have to actually pay to save the game at the inn, no? Could be misremembering, but I think that that's even shown in your video.
All that notwithstanding, as usual, an excellent video, and I'm looking forward to the next.
I don't recall moving party members around in Ultima III or IV but it's possible that it's possible.
@@MichaelCoorlim It's not often necessary, but the options are there. When I speedrun U3, I often have to change my character order around for the Floor fights, just to try to keep the healthiest combatants at the head of the party.
IM soooooooo happy you got this done very proud of you keep it up!!!!
It's here!!!!!
Thank you for this! Your work is appreciated!
i traded in Jack Nicholas Golf for this game on Christmas. It was the biggest and best F U to Santa Claus I can ever imagine.
Man that's a trade up.
Great video, as always!
Yes!!!!
Not sure if it's your cup of tea, but talking about ancient erotic RPG:s like Dragon Knight and Rance I from 1989 might make a fun video
Back in 2019 or 2020 I had a general retrogaming channel and I did a few videos on "adult games of 19xx" series where I'd cover games made for the atari 2600, bootleg nes/master system games, adult arcade games, etc and they were incredibly popular... but that meant I had a lot of people coming to my channel only interested in the "adult" content, which messed up my watch time on all my other videos.
I don't know if I could get it to work here, but I might do some analytical videos on prominent adult games if the channel gets popular enough.
What part, if any, did the narrative begin to drag during the playthrough. I know you mentioned that the player is a bit aimless at times and does not know where to go, but at what point did the story have a low point where you had to motivate yourself?
A good example for most Elder Scrolls IV fans would be the "Allies for Bruma" quest.
To be honest the points where the game dragged was the grinding. Earning enough money to buy everything in Gaia. Whatever slow points the story had were sparkling majesty compared to the dread of having to spend a few days marching the giant's corridor to earn the money for all those spells.
For a late 80s console RPG in context with what had come before it was pretty innovative. Nothing like what would come after, but nothing like what had come before.
is the Ultima series going to return?
Yes! I've got a couple two games I want to cover first and then I'll hit Ultima V.
Aaaand subbed
Commenting to feed the algorithm
Appreciated!
No ineffective attacks, not ff1.
SLEP.
Never played any of the FF games. Lord British for the win!
Console RPGs of the era take a lot of inspiration from the Ultima series, but are limited by the memory limitations of cartridges, TV screen resolutions, and lack of a keyboard.
Is the audio a bit out of sync?
It might be. Got a new PC, didn't save the settings on my old one, so Premiere's ingest settings might be off. I'll try and figure it out for the next video.
You mentioned that Nintendo did not like having Christian themes in their games. Why do you think this was?
Mostly they were just trying to avoid any kind of controversy. The US was seen as very sensitive to religious imagery, so they wanted to just avoid that kind of thing entirely.
Just pretend that FF3 is the next game and FF2 doesn't exist, if you plan to cover the rest of the retro-FF games.
ff2 is fine though
I might skip right to IV and VI and circle back to the others later, just to see if my memories were accurate regarding how strong their stories were.
@@lillyclarity9699 almost none of the game mechanics work there though. It's not the worst rpg on the nes (I think "Stargazer" deserves that title), but its often cited as the worst FF game. The Pixel Remaster is bad but playable, but the NES version... ugh.