My Life and Final Fantasy: Part I

In case you didn't know, Final Fantasy XIII is due out in the US this March...finally.  I've been excited for this game since I beat FFXII.  I honor of the event, I figured I'd write a little about each Final Fantasy and how it affected me, my gaming life, and what my experience was.  I feel like I may be in a minority because I seem to love the installments that enrage others, and be a bit disappointed in the installments that others love.  Oddly, I didn't know how the general public felt about each game until pretty recently with all the "Best of the Decade" lists going around.  Largely, I think the Final Fantasy series, at least the main intallments I-XII, can do no wrong, though there was one game in particular I was less happy with than the rest.

So hit the jump for the first installment...Final Fantasy.


Oh, and in case anyone reading may have not played these games, and are still planning on it, there are spoilers ahead.

I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, so any experience I had on it came from going to my friends' places and playing their systems.  Because of this, I never actually played Final Fantasy.  Instead, I spent God know how many hours at my friend, Rob's place, watching him play.  I could watch it for hours.  We had a spreadsheet with all the enemies.  At the time, we thought the new promoted characters looked amazing, so much cooler than the dinky fighters they were before.  I remember in the Fire Giants' Cave, we (and when I say "we", I guess I mean "Rob") were thrilled at the amount of opal armor that was in chests.  When he finally opened the chest that had something like 10GP, we all facetiously started yelling out in excitement at about 2 o'clock in the morning.  We had to shut ourselves up after that.  I guessed the ending, too.  I remember seeing a blacked out picture of Chaos in a magazine, and thinking he looked a bit like Garland.  Kind of snowballed from there.  I played it again on my GBA years later, but the experience wasn't the same.  That's right.  For me, I had more fun watching someone else play Final Fantasy than actually playing it.  I think this is the only game I've experienced, at least fully experienced, this way, watching as a bystander rather than taking part in the action.

I still have never seen the Warmech enemy on the bridge.  This seems more like a cruel joke on the developers part, though.  There was an enemy in the game you almost never face but shows up in one spot for unlucky travelers.  Facing this enemy would almost certainly result in death, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it...if it happened.  He had an attack that could destroy your whole party in one hit, the first in a long line of near impossible, without level-grinding for hours, enemies to inhabit Final Fantasy.  Thankfully, they made them fully optional later (hello, Ruby Weapon!).


Stay tuned for the next installment.



-dp