Saturday, June 2, 2012

TEXT PLAY SIDE GAME: Final Fantasy (NES 1990/PS 2003 [Origins]): Issue #1: Getting Started


Here's one I've been meaning to get to for awhile now, and since tonight's not a good night for Legend of Mana, now's as good a time as any, I suppose.

Now, chances are, if you've been gaming for very long at all, or if you've ever known somebody who's a gamer, you've proably heard of something called “Final Fantasy”. The reason that title is so well known is that the Final Fantasy series has been one of the staples of the gaming industry for a quarter century now. I'm sure you see that I put 1990 in the title. That was the US release on the NES. The original Japanese version was released on the Famicom in 1987, a good three years in advance of the US version.

Part of the reason for that may have been that the game's developer, Squaresoft, was pretty much in the crapper back then and only had the budget to do one last game. With that in mind, they decided to have a little fun with it and made what turned out to be one of the most popular console RPGs of its time, if not ever. More importantly, Final Fantasy popularized role playing games on consoles, and in doing so, changed the fortunes of Squaresoft.

A quarter century on, Squaresoft, now Square-Enix, is something of a major player in the console-based RPG business. This is in no small part to the fourteen, I believe, games in the main series, some of which have direct sequels. And perhaps better yet, this turn of events led to there being other RPG titles and series that I may yet get to writing about in this seires.

Addressing why I'm doing this one specifically while I've still got the Legend of Mana Text Play going, I should explain why I've been meaning to get to this for awhile. See, some time ago, I'd mentioned on the County Line Gaming forums having a bit of trouble with the Final Fantasy Origins disc I bought at a second-hand gaming store back in 2010, and I've finally gotten around to trying to fix that, I've decided to see if I'd actually succeeded. And since I'm going to play through anyway, I may as well do a Text Play.

By now, I'm sure we all know the story of this game. Four heroes turn up in the kingdom of Corneria, or as it's called in the Origins version, which is the one I'm playing, Cornelia, each bearing a crystal. These crystals each correspond to a certain elemental force, meaning fire, water, earth and air. Once the four enter the village, palace guards block the exits to escort the party to the king in the castle. But first, it really pays to stock up on things as best one can on 400 gold pieces.

My party this time around is a fighter, a black belt, a white mage, and a black mage. The first three, I named after similar characters in the fourth Final Fantasy game: Cecil, Yang, and Rosa. Since there's no straight black mage in that game, at least not for terribly long, and I've always considered myself more that sort of character anyway, I named the black mage Jesse.

So, anyway, after stocking up on basic equipment, it's time to go see the king of Corneria, who basically explains who you are and what the basic premise of the game. And then he assigns us the intro quest to go rescue Princess Sara from the Temple of Chaos to the northeast of the castle.

So far, I've just been level grinding around Corneria, because that's kinda what I remember the Nintendo Power strategy guide suggesting when this game first came out way back in the day. I'll kind of be working from my vague memory of what was in that, though I haven't actually seen a copy of that in years. Fortunately, I've already been through this game a few times and pretty much know where to go and what order to go there. But one thing I'll be doing in order to refresh my memory on this is using ApplegodZMG's second playthrough on CLG.

But anyway, I'll be getting back to the Legend of Mana Text Play soon. As I said there, I'll be using a new artifact then. And in the next issue of Final Fantasy, it'll be up north to the Temple of Fiends, in this game's Nature Trail To Hell.

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