kjell1979's Full Review: Final Fantasy Origins for PlayStation 1
Imagine a connoisseur of fine wine whose guilty pleasure is taking a trip to their local liquor store ("package store" or "packie" as it's named here) and picking up a bottle of Arbor Mist. That's the way you can describe me when it comes to role playing games. I can recognize flaws in stories, and appreciate a good well-rounded RPG. However, when all is said and done I pop the first Final Fantasy into my NES and have at it with Warmech or Timat just to relive old times. I am not a reflection of many modern or even old school gamers as I like to look past many critical flaws and shortcomings in a game just because I think it's fun to play. The same way I could understand a lover of fine wine spending an evening backing a bottle of Arbor Mist just because he or she thinks it tastes good.
What Is Final Fantasy Origins?
Final Fantasy Origins is yet another Playstation remake of two old Nintendo Squaresoft games. This one is a remake of the first two Final Fantasy games, which were originally developed for the NES. The treat for Final Fantasy veterans is that Final Fantasy II was never released in North America. Instead Final Fantasy IV was released under the guise of Final Fantasy II for the SNES and thus we were deprived of those two installments of the series.
The two games themselves were not as they originally looked on the old NES. Square has updated the graphics for both these games. While the game still implements sprites, the graphics are now the quality you'd expect to see on a 16-bit Super Nintendo system. Overworld sprites as well as monster sprites have gone through a complete overhaul and look much better in many cases.
In addition to the graphics, the sound and music has been updated as well. Now it has a 16 bit feel to the game even though you're playing it on a 32-bit console. The musical themes are similar but more liberties and creativity is expressed in them. This is something that was hard to do from the limited hardware in the old NES. Overall, this serves to satisfy hardcore gamers by offering more without changing too much, while trying to attract newcomers to not only the game but also the Final Fantasy series in general.
Final Fantasy
I will not go into the details of the story or battle system of the game to save space and focus on the changes for this release. For a complete look at the game including the story, gameplay and such, read my Final Fantasy review.
Final Fantasy remains intact for the most part. The story remains the same, as do the characters, locations, monsters, and bosses. However, there are some notable changes with regards to this. Although the personalities and the objectives of the game remain the same, some names have been changed in an effort to improve the translation. In many cases "r"s have been replaced with "l"s. One example is Corneria is now called Cornelia. Also Nerrick is now called Nelic.
In addition, they allocated more memory space for names. Therefore you can have more than 4 spaces for your character names. Also spells are no longer 4-character lengths either. Many locations, items, and monsters were changed to fit the Final Fantasy standard.
Besides the visual changes there are many new options. You now have the option of auto-targeting your enemies. In the original Final Fantasy, should an enemy die while one of your characters is queued up to attack it, your character would lose their turn. This was an accepted strategy for the game. Now you can tell all your characters to target a single enemy and should it die at the beginning or middle of an attack round, your team will randomly assign another enemy to attack.
Another new option is the ability to revive players in the heat of battle. This was forbidden in the original Final Fantasy, but you can do it here. Like the previous option, this was an accepted strategy among veterans of the original game. Both of these options can be toggled for those who require a more authentic Final Fantasy experience.
You now have the ability to save the game at any point in the game. On the original NES, you had to visit an Inn to be able to save your game. Here, you can save anywhere on the overworld or even in the middle of the dungeon if you wish. The caveat is that it's a quick save feature, meaning once you load this quick save game the quick save file disappears. This can be abused because once you do a quick save, you can go back into the game. A better mechanism would be to kick you out of the game, thus requiring you to load (and subsequently delete) your quick save file to resume your progress.
Inside the game there are some changes as well. There is now a shared inventory similar to that of Final Fantasy IV. While character can still only hold 4 weapons and 4 pieces of armor on their character, the rest can be put in a common stash. This dramatically changes the strategy of the game as you can use items in battle from this stash. Therefore you can keep items like heal helmets and power gauntlets without worrying about them taking up inventory space. It also decreases the overall worth of a Black Belt character because his muleing ability.
There are also two different difficulty levels for Final Fantasy. There is an easy level that is regarded as much easier than the version released for the NES. It allows you to level up much quicker and there is no level cap or a cap on how many spells you can have for a particular level. The hard difficulty level is more true to the NES version. The only difference is that the bosses now have twice the hit points as they did in the old NES version.
The controls remain the same for the most part. There is one button for confirming an action, another for canceling it. There is a button to access the sub menu and another that accesses the party order menu. There is also that addition of a button that allows you to run in towns and in dungeons. This is a useful tool that is appreciated by veterans like myself. The only problem is that I wish the run option were available on the overworld map as well. It would make traveling to places like the marsh cave or Lefein much faster.
There is another feature that veterans will be thankful for. That is the option to buy more than one item at a time in a shop. Now if you want to replenish your supply of healing potions, you don't have to hold down the confirm button for 15 minutes just to get up to a 99 count. While some purists will not like this feature, I think it's fair to assume that most veterans and newcomers will welcome it with open arms.
Another new feature in the game is that the slide puzzle is now much more interactive and profitable. The slide puzzle is a mini game that existed in the original Final Fantasy. It used to offer you a measly sum of 100 gil if you won. In Final Fantasy Origins it keeps track of your time. If you beat your old record by a certain time it can give you up to 10,000 gil. While to many veterans who spent hours leveling up around Elfland to gain enough money to buy a silver sword and those level 3 and level 4 spells will consider this cheap. However it does help to smooth over this monotonous stretch to others who are skilled enough to solve this puzzle in a timely manner.
There are some extra features as well offered with the Final Fantasy component. There is also a bestiary complete with battle stats. Along with that is a status screen that shows you your treasure hunting progress as well. Finally, there's some gorgeous concept art that was used to construct the game's original graphics. Unfortunately, you need some sort of screen capture to be able to digitally preserve the art for your own use.
Final Fantasy II
The story behind Final Fantasy II begins with the emperor of Baramekia calling monsters from the monster realm in an effort to take over the world. The only force to stop this (no pun intended) evil empire is a kingdom called Fynn. As Fynn falls, you take control of 3 youths: Firion, Maria, and Gus as you are thrown into a battle you cannot win. When all seems lost, Firion awakens and his quest begins to reunite with Maria and Gus, and eventually to stop the emperor.
The story is filled with many twists and turns. It's a change of pace from the first Final Fantasy as the story drives the game forward. Some characters develop before your eyes, while others stay rather static, as you'll notice that the most noble and the most villainous are both the most static of all characters. Still the story is an improvement, but nothing compared to the later games in the Final Fantasy series.
The leveling system has an interesting attributes, however in the end the execution of it needlessly draws out the game by forcing you to fight many battles with random enemy encounters. The leveling system advances your character based on what happens in battle. Attacking strengthens your character's proficiency with weapons, using magic increased your character's proficiency in magic, and while taking damage in battle increases the amount of hit points they have. If a character chooses not to parry each turn, then he/she will hardly advance at all. This really forces you to take on more challenging opponents while keeping all your party members active. However, the way the leveling system is balanced, you have to fight many needless battles in order to increase your characters' chance of surviving in the next area. This draws out the game much more than it should.
There was one bug in the game that allowed you to cheat in leveling up in the original Final Fantasy II that was fixed in this version. If you canceled out of an action, the battle system still counted that previous action towards your character's advancement. This means that you could essentially reap the benefits of hundreds of battles in one single battle round.
There are a couple remake-specific enhancements to Final Fantasy II. First of all, like the first Final Fantasy game there is a mini-game that rewards success with gold. The mini-game is essentially a game of memory where you match covered images by turning two over at a time. Like the previous mini-game, success has a very hefty reward. Winning the game offers enough gold to change the dynamics of the game. In the end it doesn't amount to as much of a change as tile sliding game in the first Final Fantasy as you'll be spending more time fighting monsters to advance your character and money will cease to become an issue.
Another issue is that unlike the first Final Fantasy remake, you have to unlock hard mode by finishing the game in easy mode. Easy mode is simply that, easy. You level up quicker, obtain gold faster, and defeat monsters at a quicker rate. However, this will turn off many hardcore gamers, as they'll have to spend a decent amount of time trying to finish easy mode, which will offer little challenge. Then when they'll finally enter into hard mode, they already know the story and what to do. This was a very poor decision probably based off the assumption that American gamers are less savvy with RPGs as Japanese gamers. In the process this is a huge stumbling block that will only serve to annoy people.
Final Thoughts
Despite the few flaws in this game, this remake should have a warm reception. While it won't attract many younger gamers who have only experienced the latest Final Fantasy games, it will attract many old school gamers who wish to buy into a piece of their past. On its own these games might not stand a chance, but the success of Final Fantasy on the NES helped to forge this into an interesting proposition for NES veterans. I got the game and I intend to keep it. That is unless there's another more comprehensive remake in the future. Only time will tell.
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