everyday gamer

In a little less than thirteen weeks, the thirteenth game in the venerated Final Fantasy series will be released in Japan.  Final Fantasy Thirteen.  The thirteenth game of a series best known for its unmatched quality and presentation, rabid fan base, and helping to bring the niche genre into the mainstream.  To celebrate this occasion, I figured I would write up sort of a retrospective on the series and step through the Final Fantasy games in the unconventional order that I played them in.  Enjoy!

My obsession with the Final Fantasy series began with the fourth game – the second one localized for western audiences on Nintendo platforms and the first on the Super NES.  My previous role-playing game experience was the original Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in the U.S.) on the NES, a highly touted and revered game to most of the world – except me, of course.  That’s not to say that Dragon Quest wasn’t a good game: several millions of fans spanning generations of gamers would angrily disagree otherwise.  Still, there was something about the game that I just couldn’t relate to.  Other contemporary games made it relatively easy to follow along with the story – both the Mario Bros. and the Mega Man series were both relatively successful in progressing their own plots along for the player.  While there wasn’t much in the way of actual text in both of these games, the experiences were both linear and directed – making it easy (for me at least) to build up a plot in my head to follow along with.  However with Dragon Quest the player had to work just a little bit harder to get that next tidbit of the story, a consequence of the game being a less directed, more open, and more abstract experience than other games at the time.  Sometimes that extra little bit of work became a lot of extra work – the player could only slay so many happy slimes before it became a chore and the player lost interest.  Which I did.

With my first experience with RPGs spoiled by an impenetrable plot and level grinding ad nauseum, it was a great surprise that I even gave Final Fantasy II a fair chance.  Maybe it was because I was because I was a little older at that point.  More likely, it was because of the fact that 16-bit cartridges actually allowed for a more comprehensible story with actual character development.  While the natural grindiness inherent to RPGs were still there in Final Fantasy IV, it was as if the more developed and mature storyline lessened the impact of that grind: because the characters all had names, personalities, history, and relationships, I actually cared about what was happening to them and where they were going.  As a result, Final Fantasy IV was the first game I could really sink my teeth into and get completely absorbed into the world.  It wasn’t just Cecil Harvey’s quest for redemption that kept me interested.  It was also Palom and Porom’s self-petrification to save the heroes from moving wall trap.  It was Sage Tellah’s revenge-fueled to cast the forbidden spell of Meteor in an attempt to stop the man responsible for the death of his daughter.  It was Monk Yang’s selfless decision to remain behind to try to stop a super cannon.  And then there was the final trip to the moon on a whale-shaped space ship to stop the embodiment of hatred itself.

Nowadays this would all sound very contrived – just another story about a handful of plucky adventurers try to save kingdom-land from becoming a bad world filled with evil.  But to my twelve year old self, Final Fantasy II was absolutely mind-blowing and made me realize that games were capable of evoking emotion – hell, Palom and Porom’s sacrifice actually drove me to tears.  Video games didn’t have to be limited to running and jumping and shooting; they could also be works of art.  And it is because of this that Final Fantasy II/IV will always hold a special place in my heart as the game that opened up the Final Fantasy floodgates – no matter how many times it gets re-released, I will always be along for the journey to the moon.

Next time: Final Fantasy First – the reason why I should have played the Final Fantasy games in order.

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