Intro: In Defense of the Antiquated
We should get this out of the way up-front;
I think 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.
Every dungeon run requires meticulous planning, and 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.
I turned one of my attempts to cross from one village to the next into a sort of mock journal entry to hopefully give you an idea of what playing the original Final Fantasy is like. Because you cannot take success for granted, a routine JRPG task like walking on the world map becomes a dynamic experience; you have to be vigilant, you have to be invested, otherwise you won’t make it.
Journal Entry: From Corneria to Pravoca
‘ After rescuing the princess from the evil knight Garland, the king of Corneria commissioned a bridge to be built that would allow us to cross the river separating the Dream City from the Frontier. Immediately upon embarking on this next leg of our journey, things started to get heavy.
We encounter two ogres attended by three of these lovecraftian, slimy fucks. Common enemies and an ordinary battle lead to the death of both Kate and Locke, with Jinn at 30 hit point and Jack at 48. That's less than half our life-total. It's a good thing we weren't too deep in the shit, and that Jinn is a thief. Thieves are often considered a useless class, but they can run better than anyone.
We ran... We had to duck three more encounters on our way back to Corneria. It's a good thing we had a few potions on us, to help us survive all the sucker punches. The bad news is, they were our only potions, and we didn't make any money while we were busy running from all our enemies.
Back at Corneria, we resurrected Kate and Locke, rested at a hotel, and gutted our wallet buying four heals and one tent. Crossing the bridge to the frontier again, we set out in search of the next town. Things were going good; we encountered two ogres, and Jinn helped us run. Seconds later, a lone ogre is fool enough to come at us. We sense an opportunity to make some money, and decide to engage. Several turn cycles pass before we finally manage to fell our opponent. I can't believe we tried to take two of these guys on at once.
At the end of the battle, we all reach level four. It feels like all the stat upgrades are taking actual minutes to get through. The option to play the game at six times its regular speed comes preloaded on most emulators and honestly, it makes this game a lot better. We wander continue to wander through the dense woods until we happen upon a purple cave at the northern edge of nowhere. Inside, we meet the witch Matoya. She tells us nothing of value and we continue our blind wandering, where we meet six wolves lead by one Great Wolf. Oh, fuck. That's too many wolves. They are only doing one damage per attack but it's a lot of mouths, and we only have four heals. Good ol' Jinn helps us run from them.
As I am considering how goofy it is that we just outran an entire wolf pack, who should we meet but... six wolves lead by a great wolf. “fuck it,” I say to myself. “Engage!”
By the end of the four minute ordeal Kate and Jinn are dead, Jack and Locke are at less than half their health... and I should mention that fenix down's aren't really a thing in the first few Final Fantasy titles. They are extremely rare, and you definitely can't buy them anywhere. Dead is dead, until you reach a high enough spell tier to learn the 'raise' spell. But we have come so far. To flee back to Corneria might be as dangerous as forging blindly ahead and hoping the next town is just around the bend. We have lost our thief. And what do I lose, failing this quest? Well, 20 minutes of my life, and all of my patience for this bullshit.
Thankfully, we brought this tent. We rest and save our progress. When we rise, it is in the hope that before the sun sets on this day our friends will also be raised. And so we forge ahead... into a complete dead end. Turning back, we encounter an unknown enemy; a large green Iguana. How strong is he? We waste two turn cycles trying to run, in which time Jack has been brought very near to death. Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit. Two more hits and he is dead, leaving only the Red Wizard.
We attack, and smote our foes ruin upon the peninsula. Using our four heals to bring Jack back to full health, we start moving south. Here, the land is overrun by mad ponies. We are forced to take two of them down before we are in sight of the next town. We are out of tents and potions; this battle causes us to spend the Red Wizards last 'cure' spells. We encounter two more mad ponies just outside the city walls, but manage to dispatch them without dying ourselves. I'm glad it was just two of them. We slide into home base utterly depleted, narrowly avoiding disaster and riding on the backs of small miracles in full gallop.
The challenge Final Fantasy I represents might be ninety percent of what makes it such a rewarding experience, but I know the formula isn’t that simple. More difficult does not necessarily equal more rewarding. It seems like the developers performed the miracle of capturing lightning in a bottle, here. As with many works of genius, it’s not a success they could easily replicate; the next few Final Fantasy titles prove this. Each successive release tweaked the formula a bit with, results ranging from brilliant to disastrous.
Final Fantasy II is a good example; it retained the difficulty of its predecessor, adding new mechanics and narrative elements that should have made for a delightful follow-up. But the grind-to-fun ratio was skewed so far in the wrong direction that the rich, ambitious story did nothing to make up for an otherwise tedious, groan-inducing experience.
Final Fantasy was meant to be a kids-bop version of American Dungeons and Dragons emulations like Wizardry and Ultima. In retrospect, it seems to occupy a unique position at the midway between two wildly different approaches to RPGs. 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.
I know that my high praise is by no means universal. The franchise has come a long way since 1987, and common attitudes toward the first title range from ‘it belongs in a museum’ to ‘it belongs in the dumpster’.
To its detractor, 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?
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. The first game strides through bold territory so vast and complex that, despite its rudimentary graphics and 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 title vies with every other, contending for the title of the most tripped-out and meta RPG experience available on the market.
But if we pan out, none of the Final Fantasy titles appear to have much to do with one another.
Apart from shared elements like chobobos, summon spells, behemoths, Cid, airships, and Marlboros (and most of these aren’t even in the first game), there is little to weave these wildly different worlds and story-lines into some grand totality. This is what makes Final Fantasy I such a critical piece to the puzzle of this strange universe. Allow me to introduce:
THE GARLAND TIME-LOOP!
(*If I’ve hyped up the game so much that you are stoked to download an emulator and get to work, you should back out of this article now because I am about to spoil the whole game for you.)
(**On the subject of emulators, I know they are technically illegal but there is no other way to play the original distribution of the first Final Fantasy game without buying an NES and a game cartridge. I’ve tried two of the remakes; sure, they fixed the glitched spells— but they also nerfed the difficulty. It isn’t the same game anymore.)
The mission of the four Warriors of Light is a simple one: gather the four elemental crystals and banish the darkness that has engulfed the world.
Of course, being a hero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In this troubled world, everyone needs the services we are offering. One such individual is the King of Corneria, whose daughter is being held captive by the evil knight Garland in a ruined citadel to the north.
Our first mission, then, is to defeat Garland and save the princess. No problem. We do that, we kill Garland.
After defeating the four Great Fiends and liberating the four crystals, we move to confront the wicked God of Chaos, the agent held responsible for this proliferation of corruption and darkness.
The Chaos Shrine that serves as our gateway to the distant past turns out to be the same ruined citadel that we fought Garland in; this should have been our first clue that something very strange is going on.
Here’s what Chaos tells us. This short piece of in-game text is probably is probably what gave Chaos his namesake;
‘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 Paradoxs’.
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 in 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
So, ‘Bat Cave’ is a term used to refer to bars that cater to the gothic sub-culture.
There’s a joke somewhere in here. A niche meme, something. 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.
This observation has spawned 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 standing. 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 him 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
and a new console RPG was far from a sure bet.
Miyamoto did eventually 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 entire 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 are like the next- gen Four Fiends, but they have identities all their own. Their powers were used to counterbalance each other, maintaining the balance of the world. Disrupting their harmonious arrangement unleashed incredible devastation upon the world that precipitated in a literal apocalypse.
They are introduced as neutral powers and the source of magic in the human world, but they are bent toward the service of a corrupt heart and become 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 equally 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.
But all of these shapes have their place in the hermetic architecture of the root reality—
