Final Fantasy (1 comment)
While the PS2 was busy gathering roses, I cleaned out my NES and got to playing Final Fantasy (the original). It's been about fifteen years since I first played through the game, so it was a very different experience this time around. This time, I had the internet on my side.
It turns out that fans have poked around at the game running in emulators to verify suspected bugs. There are spells that don't work, support spells that only work when cast on enemies, and a nice variety of magically-enhanced swords that don't actually have any magical enhancement. All of that was fixed in the re-releases, but I wasn't about to postpone my rose collecting and play the PS1 version just to avoid some bugs. It may be broken, but it's no Battletoads.
And there's always something cute about hasty translations, from the first boss' "I, Garland, will knock you all down!" to some guy in Melmond saying "I'm a farmer." and nothing else. But the plot itself suffers in that it doesn't make any sense. Here's a quick rundown:
- The world sucks: there are problems with the earth, the air, the water, and fire.
- Your party of four warriors arrives, as foretold by prophecy.
- You beat up a guy named Garland, who has kidnapped the princess.
- As you beat up up the elemental fiends who are causing the world's problems, it's revealed that Garland went back in time after you beat him up to create the fiends and sent them from the distant past to the recent past.
- You go back in time.
- Garland reveals that the fiends pulled him back in time to be their master, which directly contradicts the story thus far.
- You fight Chaos, an amalgamation of the four fiends.
- With Chaos defeated, the course of history is altered and your adventure never happened.
I'm sure it was a clever time-looping tale in Japanese, but the initial North American translation has a few chicken-and-egg-style paradoxes that leave the player guessing as to what the original story might have been.
Good game, though.