Intro: In Defense of the Antiquated
The first Final Fantasy game is… well,
fantastic.
As one of the most challenging entries in the Final Fantasy catalog, it might also rank among the most challenging JRPGs of all time. This seems like a dubious honor at first; how much trouble do you really want from a video game? Life is full of problems; I thought the purpose of games was to escape them.
But Final Fantasy I strikes a near-perfect balance between difficulty and enjoyment. Moreover, it maintains this balance from start to finish. In my amateur opinion, Final Fantasy 1 is a masterclass in game design.
It remains consistently engaging by forcing the player to make hard decisions. To allow your attention to lapse, to suspend your judgment and relax into your reflexes, is to invite disaster and death. This is not a game you can button-mash your way through; instead, it’s an object lesson in grind economics. Resources are scarce, and progress is made by a series of close calls and narrow escapes.
I often found myself sliding into home base with all my spell slots empty, my inventory depleted, and my party eviscerated.
I’m telling you, this game is brilliant.
Final Fantasy was meant to be a kids-bop version of American Dungeons and Dragons emulations like PC franchisesWizardry and Ultima. It occupies a unique position at the midway between two wildly different approaches to RPG gaming; while Final Fantasy is significantly easier than the PC games from which it took its inspiration, it is far more difficult than much of what came later.
My high praise is by no means universal. To its detractors, Stock characters, grindy mechanics, glitched spells, and a negative fun factor all contribute to a massive headache that offers the player no net benefit. Why waste your time here when there are so many better, more sophisticated, and more attractive experiences available to the modern gamer?
Allow me to introduce:
The Garland Time-Loop
The mind-blowing proportions of the story told in the average Final Fantasy game is a hallmark of the franchise, and this pattern was established early on. Final Fantasy I strides with it’s head up through abstract territory so vast and complex that, despite rudimentary graphics and simple mechanics, the player ends up feeling like they are involved in something truly epic.
Embracing technologically advanced civilizations lost to the ravages of time, sunken continents, dragon kings, unstable dimensions, and confusing time-loops installed by the God of Chaos, Final Fantasy I delivers exactly what the title promises. It was meant to be the fantasy to end all fantasies, and this tradition is still going strong today. Each successive release vies with its predecessors for the title of the most tripped-out, meta RPG experience on the market.
Panning out, none of the Final Fantasy titles appear to have much to do with one another.
Apart from a few common elements (chobobos, summon spells, behemoths, Cid, airships, Marlboros) there is little to weave these wildly different worlds and story-lines into a grand totality. This is what makes Final Fantasy I such a critical piece to the puzzle of one of the worlds most beloved gaming universes: the many vestiges of the Final Fantasy multiverse are unified in the Graland Time-Loop.
THE GARLAND TIME-LOOP!
The mission of the four Warriors of Light is a simple one: gather the four elemental crystals to banish the darkness that has engulfed the world.
But first, we need to rescue a princess.
The King of Corneria’s daughter is being held captive by the evil knight Garland in a ruined citadel to the north.
Our first mission is to defeat Garland and save the princess.
No problem. If you haven’t played the game before, you probably dive right into the battle with Garland and die horribly. After a reset you grind a little, gain some levels, kill Garland, save a princess, and move on.
Fast Forward: you’ve defeated the four Great Fiends and liberated the four crystals; now you must move to confront the wicked God of Chaos, who is ultimately responsible for the proliferation of corruption and darkness upon the face of the world.
The Chaos Shrine that serves as our gateway to the distant past where Chaos is hiding out is the same ruined citadel we fought Garland in. This is our first clue that something very strange is happening.
When we make it to the other side of the Chaos Shrine, the other side of time, Here’s what Chaos has to say for himself:
‘Two thousand years from now… you killed me. I am Garland.
Oh, you did defeat me then. But the four great forces saved me by sending me back through time! Once here, I sent the four fiends into the future… where they shall once again use the four great forces to send me into the past!
In two thousand years, I will remember none of this. But I will be reborn again here.
So, even as you die again and again, I shall return! Born again into this endless circle that I have created.'
And just like that, our entire perception of the game we’ve been playing is turned on it’s head.
Things were pretty straight-forward until this point. Krakens holding mermaids prisoner, floating cities with advanced technology where the incumbent civilization was brought to an end by three-headed dragon, an undead lich whose corrupting influence rendered the earth infertile, all this is pretty easy to deal with, but this shit.
What… what is this shit?
Let’s see if we can iron it out:
- Garland is killed by the Light Warriors, who have come to liberate the four crystals from the Four Fiends.
- The Power that the Four Fiends drew from the crystals is used to send Garland 2000 years in the past, where:
- Garland becomes one with the god Chaos.
- The Light Warriors go into the past to confront Chaos/Garland, where they die. The cycle repeats when:
- Chaos/Garland then sends the Four Fiends into the future to prey upon the Crystals and prepare for the coming of Garland.
From the looks of it, there is no end and no beginning. Time becomes a crystalline structure, a hell-prison that has folded in on itself at the bidding of Lord Chaos. Chaos is an interesting name for a being that has folded the origami of space and time into a static vessel, an obsessively ordered shape that exists solely to perpetuate the life of the demon; but he did create boundless chaos in the minds of those who have attempted to parse out the mechanics of the Garland Time-Loop, which is a classic example of the ‘Bootstrap Paradox’.
The ‘Bootstraps Paradox’ is ‘a closed system who’s preconditions logically preclude it’s origins’; in other words, it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
The ‘Bootstraps’ in the name refers to the turn of phrase ‘to pull yourself up by your bootstraps’, which was originally meant to suggest an undertaking that was not only impossible but ridiculous as well.
The real mission of the Warriors of Light, then, has always been to disrupt this causal loop that has doomed history to repeat itself. A causal loop that is renewed every time they shed their lives at the Altar of Chaos.
While it’s a plot device that the writers probably came up with during a wicked bender in the world-famous Ginza bar district where Squaresoft was head-quartered, this bit of mind-fuckery would have sweeping implications for future installments of the franchise—though in truth, these implications are largely confined to the minds of those die-hards who actually stopped to think about it.
One theory is that the entire Final Fantasy Multiverse exists within the confines of the Garland Time-Loop; and that the Demon-God Chaos has been the hidden hand behind every bad actor in every subsequent Final Fantasy title. The stress created by the unnatural contortion of space and time caused the root reality to splinter, creating mirrors within mirrors within mirrors.
None of the evidence used to advance this theory is very compelling, but it is fun to think about.
We’ll start with the rumors and speculation that have swirled around the five bats that we find flitting around Garland’s lair in the Chaos Shrine:
Garland's Bat Cave
‘Bat Cave’ is a term used to refer to bars that cater to the gothic sub-culture.
There’s a joke somewhere in here. Garland as Hades, Princess Corneria as Persephone, The Queen of The Dead, because that’s what the Warriors of Light are: they are dead. There’s no way of knowing how many times they have unknowingly died to grease the wheels of Garland’s hell-machine.
There is a fan theory that the bats in the Chaos Shrine are actually the trapped souls of the Warriors of Light, who are forced to watch themselves die again and again in the samsara of their own good intentions. But there are five bats, not four.
The bats have also been accused of being the origin point of the Four Fiends; Garland’s bitterness and resentment were so great that when he died on the floor of the Chaos Shrine, the bats went back in time with him to become the major antagonists. Once again, the math doesn’t work out. Four fiends leaves one bat unaccounted for. Which sub-boss do we want him to be? Astos, or the Vampire? The vampire, obviously.
Here’s my favorite one;
When Hironobu Sakaguchi pitched the idea for an RPG to capitalize on the recent success of Enix’ 1986 release of Dragonquest, Squaresoft founder Masafumi Miyamoto met the idea with skepticism. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy after a series of unsuccessful releases for the Super Famicom, several of which had been helmed by Sakaguchi. To date, his results had inspired no confidence, and a new console RPG was far from a sure bet.
Miyamoto did green-light the project, but under one condition: that the development team would consist of only five people.
Those bats are the core members of the Final Fantasy development team; Iranian-american programmer Nasir Gebelli, composer Nobuo Uematsu, and game developers Hironobu Sakaguchi, Akitoshi Kawazu, and Koichi Ishii. They are the ones ultimately responsible for this hell-world, and they’ve been in the room with you the whole time.
The Three Statues/ The Four Fiends
If you’ve played Final Fantasy VI, you doubtless remember The Warring Triad:
These guys were like the next- gen Four Fiends, but had identities all their own. Their powers were counterbalanced to maintain the harmony of the the world. Disrupting their arrangement unleashes incredible devastation that precipitates in a literal apocalypse.
The Gods of The Warring Triad are introduced as neutral powers and the source of magic in the human realm, but are bent toward the service of a corrupt heart and become the magical pillars of Kefka’s Evil Empire.
The Four Fiends, on the other hand, were like negative manifestations of the four elemental powers of Light. They might have been the shadow side of the four crystals, but it’s possible they were the shadows of the four Light Warriors.
The Four Fiends at the Four Corners with Chaos in stasis as the central column of the arrangement almost reads like an inverted image of the Four Apostles witnessing the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. —
The Warring Triad, on the other hand, plays on the trinity pattern.
All of these shapes have their place in the hermetic architecture of the root reality—
The Four Crystals
To Be Continued…
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