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Final Fantasy Origins
  PS1Role_PlayingUC  
  opened by paleface at 01:58:34 08/18/03  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Role_Playing; reg=NA]
           
Woo, now I can start playing through all the FF games from the beginning with these nice ports of FF 1 and 2. The graphics have got a boost to SNES+ level, there's a Run button (yay!!), pretty much no load time on a PS2 with fast loading enabled and you can unlock pictures and info and stuff while playing through.
 
One curious quirk to the controls that I could have done without: sometimes as you're scrolling through the targets in combat the pointer, instead of moving just one space, suddenly hits turbo speed and scrolls through the list several times in a flash, often resulting in you selecting the wrong target. This isn't disastrous as you can back up and redo your selection, but it's annoying and not something that you'd have expected to slip through into the retail release.
 
Now if only they'd port and localize FF3...
 
  paleface 04:53:02 02/07/04
           
Finished FF1 and it was 40 hours of good clean fun. I don't know if playing it in one-hour lunchtime segments made it more or less enjoyable, but somehow despite the limited, repetitive combat and the lack of any story-developed characters, trudging through random encounter after random encounter, even spending hours at a time just levelling up, was on the whole a darn good time.
 
Although the absence of save points in the dungeons can be trying (especially if you've only got an hour to get through each one before you have to go back to work!), the experience of plunging into a dungeon as deep as I could before my health dwindled too low, the hacking my way back out to heal, restock, and go and try it again, a little stronger this time, felt very intuitive and rewarding. Hard work pays off in this game. Success doesn't come with finding stupid little hidden secrets, or exploiting some quirk of a complex skill system--you bash things, and the more you bash, the better you get, and then you go bash tougher things.
 
It helps a lot that there are no real load times and that the reworked sprites are quite handsome in their unpretentious way, and no annoying screechy kid voice actors or giant chickens to turn the thing into a damn circus as seems to be the rage with newer RPGs. This one is about power and destruction, and it demands some bleeping respect.
 
  paleface 17:12:44 02/18/04
           
I'm giving up on FF2 a few hours in to it. The experience system (where for instance you don't gain HP unless you allow your character to lose over half their HP in a battle) really is as horrible as they say. I resorted to hitting my own characters, then realized that I could instead be playing a game where my characters don't have to be a masochists in order to survive.
 
Too bad too, because the characters and story are quite a change (namely, that there are any at all) from the first game and I was interested to follow them. Not interested enough to keep "playing" as the game demands, however. Ugh.
    
downloads:
· 00_disc.jpg
· ff1spoiler.jpg
 
references:
· Final Fantasy (NES)

 
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