Final Fantasy I. The one that started it all. The one that was supposed to be the Final Fantasy for creator Hironobu Sakaguchi as he planned to retire from video game development, but instead it became a huge hit and he turned the game into a spectacular series. Why? Well, back in 1987, once you knew that you could take the warp pipe to world 4, then the warp pipe to world 8, and with enough practice you could beat Mario in fifteen minutes, you start looking for a game you can play for hours and repeatedly. What I'm getting at is that Final Fantasy I is not a wonderful game today, but in the early 90s? It's unbeatable. Don't let the rating for this review or my negative comments deter you. I'm comparing this game to the games that are out today, which is totally unfair.
     First off: the story... And that was that! Whew. Good discussion, guys. But seriously, the plot is very basic. To the point that you really don't know what you're doing or where you should be. You just have to see what you can reach on the map and go there. And talk to everybody in town, just in case. I strongly recommend using a walkthrough for this game, even if you don't normally use them or whatever. The people tell you like "Go Light Warriors!" and from that you're supposed to just know that they want you to go to the city to the south and talk to that guy in the upper left corner that looks like every other guy in the whole town. It's pretty bad, but whatever. With a walkthrough it's tolerable.
     Onto the characters. To start the game you simply pick four characters and use one of six classes for each one. There are good choices like the fighter, and bad choices like the thief. You can use more than one of each, and for a good team balance, it is fairly beneficial to have more than one fighter. My team this first time through was two fighters, a red mage, and a white mage. It was pretty dang effective. A word to the wise though: the teams do not come with set names, so you must name them all (in four letters or less). It's best if you don't name them all Butt, Butt, Butt, and BUTT. It's really hard to tell them apart. Trust me. Games should never allow four letter names. Too many good words are four letters long. Like butt.
     The ability system in this game is pretty crummy, but it gets better as you go. For the first few dungeons, it's pretty useless to have any mages. You only have a few spells you're able to cast and the only thing left for them to do is attack. The one thing white mages, black mages, and thieves suck at is attacking. However, later in the game you start getting some more spells, which makes them more helpful. In addition, you start getting equipment that you can use in battle infinitely many times. It's hard to explain, but here's the gist of it:
     To start, the game has a unique system for carrying equipment. Each character can carry four weapons and four armors. This is a nice system for weapons because each person carries their own weapon and three others, which adds a neat sense of realism to the game, despite the 99 potions in the invisible sack they carry. With the armors, however, you can equip: body armor, helmet/hat, gloves, and a shield. For most of the game your fighters are the only ones that have all four types of armor even available, so the remaining characters become your pack mules for extra equipment. The problem with this system is that if all four of your guys have all their equipment on and you find or try to buy new armor, you can't carry it! You have to ditch something old to pick it up, which is really hard because if you find new armor you just get a message saying "You can't carry anymore" so you don't even know what/if you should drop something. It's a neat system to carry your own equipment, but there needs to be a bit of stock equipment still.
     Onto that battle equipment I mentioned earlier. In battle, you have five commands: fight, magic, drink, item, and run. Fight, magic, and run should all be familiar to any Final Fantasy player. Item should too, but it's different here. The drink command is the command we all know as item. With it you can use potions and antidotes on your teammates or yourself. The item command brings up a list of the four weapons you're carrying and the four armors. For a long time, I had no idea why we needed a battle command to see our equipment, but it's because certain items hold awesome powers. Some items can cast a certain spell when used, such as the Zeus Gauntlets cast Bolt 2 on all enemies and the Healing Staff casts a spell the slightly heals the whole party. With magic so limited in this game, these magical items are very useful. So it's pretty helpful for your white mage to carry some items for healing or magic attacking so you don't need to actually tell your white mage to attack and do the 1 damage they always helpfully provide.
     Let's talk battles now. The magical equipment I mentioned? It doesn't come into play until over halfway through the game. It's a short game, so it's not horribly long, but the first half of the game you'll be either sitting in a forest leveling up or just... dying. The random encounters in the game can be very painful. The game reuses old, weak enemies as you go through, but they like to use them in bulk. Sometimes you'll fight up to nine enemies. Oftentimes the number of enemies is randomized, even with the tough guys. For example, you'll fight a specific fight to open a treasure box, and that fight will have powerful sorcerers. The number you'll fight, is random. If you're lucky: one or two. If you're unlucky: six. Luck is huge in this game. The thing that really makes battles difficult is that for the first couple Final Fantasy games, you don't change targets if your target dies. So if three people are set to attack one monster, and the first guy kills it, the other two guys attack air. Take that, air! So getting into fights of six to nine enemies can be really annoying. Will my one fighter kill this guy alone? Should I have two people attack it? I might need my other guys to hit other ones, but if he doesn't kill it, I need it dead. It's... annoying. 
     As you go through the dungeons you'll fight some really tough random encounters. To the point that you're trying to find whatever you're in the dungeon for and get the hell out. Problem is: you still have a boss to fight first. The random encounters wear you down, so then you get to the boss at 1/4 your normal health with no more magic spells. Wonderful. Then the boss uses some powerful spell and wipes out the entire team and you're back at the last inn you saved at. Even if you do manage to kill the boss, the exit spell is really late in the game, so now you have to go back through the killer random encounters, and your mages? Probably dead. Fighters for the win! By the way, the exit spell? You get it at about the point where the game gives you teleporters at the end of the dungeons to warp out of the dungeon... I'm still looking for the logic in this too.
     So unless you work up a lot, you'll find yourself struggling through dungeons. Some of the weaker enemies love to poison you, and lemme tell you, poison sucks. It doesn't hurt that much, but it's really annoying. You don't get an antidote spell for your white mage until about halfway through, and even when you do you have to level up enough to have more than one use of that spell. So you have to buy the expensive antidotes from the store. Oh, and sleeping at an inn doesn't cure poison. Knowing this, can you see why a fight with nine really easy enemies that can poison when they attack can be annoying? Nine poisonous snakes attack you enough and soon you're reaching for four 75 gold antidotes (for the mathematically impaired, that's 300 gold total). For that you can get some good equipment early in the game. In addition, when you are hit with a status effect like poison or petrify, at the end of the battle your group is rearranged for you to put the affected party member at the back of the party. Aww, how nice. But it's not! In this game, your order is important because the first person gets attacked the most, while the last gets attacked the least. So moving a poisoned member down is helpful to keep them out of harm's way, but if one of your damage absorbing fighters is poisoned, they'll swap him with your white mage. White mage + physical damage = very ouch. Don't let your mages lead the party. Just... don't. If a fighter gets poisoned, go to your menu, cure the poison, and move him back to his original position.
     There are more things to mention, but they're all just stylistic things. Like when somebody dies, until you get life (waaaay late in the game), you have to go to a magic store that's not even in all the towns to revive party members. The music is NES and nothing worth mentioning. I don't think I would've made it through this game without an emulator's speedup button because things like battles are so slow. It's a very basic game and it's fun to see how Final Fantasy started, but if you're that curious, just read 8-bit Theater. It's more entertaining. 
     Final Fantasy I gets my lowest rating of the series, but basically if I were suddenly warped back to 1990, I'd end up playing it a lot, that's for sure. But here in the present, there are many better choices. Only play this if you're hardcore FF masta.  

Goatbob's Rating: 
2.5/10 Lamps