Final Fantasy Pixel Edition: A Worthy Remake or Another Flop?
After the success of Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in the West) Square Enix, who was known as Squaresoft back then, decided to create a game for the JRPG market.
So, in 1987, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi. Final Fantasy was created and became a hit which was to be Sakaguchi’s magnum opus before he left the company. However due to its popularity it led to numerous sequels.
With the pixel edition coming out on steam that remakes the first six games, it is time to look at the past and see if these remakes are worth the money.
The bundle is available on Steam for around £50 and includes Final Fantasy one to six.
The first game in the series and since it was made in 1987 where the idea of stories in RPGs were limited to ‘you good, monster bad, kill monster’. The story is basic but good for the era. Evil is stalking the land and corrupting the four elements, you play a party of four heroes picked from six classes:
Fighter: the archetypal RPG warrior class, it’s your primary physical damage dealer, leading from the front.
Black Belt: in later FF titles, this class becomes the Monk. They miss quite often, and are challenging at lower levels, but the higher level they get, the more devastating they become.
Thief: a defining class for the series, the Thieves are held back by their choice of weapons - which kinda sucks. However, the Thief has the highest chance at escaping from battles, which is really useful early on.
Black Mage: the archetypal mage, later in the game it’s promoted to the Black Wizard. It can learn all of the black magic spells in the game. It’s multi-target attack spells can help you to quickly mop up large enemy mob groups in random encounters, while powerful spells can blast down bosses. Just be warned it’s the squishiest class, with the lowest HP.
White Mage: unless you’re doing some sort of novelty run, a White Mage is a must-have for your class, as they’ll be your primary healer. As well as healing and buffs, the White Mage can use their spells to annihilate undead monsters.
Red Mage: a jack of all trades but master of none, the Red Mage can use both Black and White magic, plus some heavy armor and weapons. They’re all-rounders, a combination of the two mages and fighters, but not as good in any single area as any of the three.
So, with your four characters, each one has a shard of a crystal that corresponds to each element and their quest is to defeat the monsters and restore the elements. As interesting the adventure was it wasn’t without its bugs. Weapons didn’t work as they should have like the werebane sword not working against were creatures. Some of the spells were bugged as well with spells like evasion lowering the caster’s speed as opposed to raising it.
Despite all that, the most annoying feature was the ‘hitting air’ feature where if two characters focused on one monster than if the monster was killed by one character the next character would hit the air instead of moving on to the next monster.
So, what has changed? The fact that the game is over 30 years old it should be no surprise that the game should get a major overhaul and Square Enix has not disappointed. The artwork and graphics are well drawn and improved considerably. Nobuo Uematsu’s musical score is digitally remastered and is more of a treat for the ear. But how does it play?
All the bugs have been removed and that annoying ‘hit the air’ feature it used to have has been removed. Also, the difficulty spike has been lowered. If you wish some day to take a trip down nostalgia lane but want an easier time of it than you cannot go far wrong with Final Fantasy. However, the basic story and simple quest may not appeal to everyone.
I give it three Longswords out of Five and I will be here next time when I review the pixel edition of Final Fantasy II.