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Final Fantasy (1987) review
Meh
by Njbwitch

Frustrating as all hell to play lol. The story only got decent towards the end. But I guess how can you complain about the very first one...

Other reviews5

Very basic but the PSP version is still a fine RPG
I can't recommend this nowadays. If you are EXTREMELY patient (and I'm talking about the NES version) you may be able to endure it through, but it's torturous. It's grindy, slow and the music isn't even as good as it gets later on in the series.
This is by modern standards, though. So when it was released it was pretty amazing.
This game probably has more story than most of its time, and well it's still not much.
If you want to see where so many JRPGs got their mechanics and inspirations from, check it out, but don't expect something genuinely fun.

Overall, rating out of 100:
Story: 30
There's a LOT more story than most games up until this point.

Gameplay: 0
Slow, grindy and boring.

Graphics: 10
Overworld isn't really attractive, but the enemies sprites are cool.

Sound/Music: 15
Victory song.

That leaves Final Fantasy with the final score of 55 out of 400! I'm going to take a nap.
In a series as reiterative as Final Fantasy, it's important to note how original the first entry is. Final Fantasy, along with Dragon Quest, really created the format for JRPG's for years. Most of the features commonly found in a modern JRPG can be found back in 1987 in Final Fantasy. What makes Final Fantasy interesting is the areas where it strays from the modern dogma of design. The slower, more deliberate combat, when combined with the heightened difficulty, gives the game a more tactical sense. That isn't to say the difficulty is all positive. The seemingly endless glitches, along with cheap enemy mechanics, can make this game feel just ridiculous. For example, I chose a thief at the beginning, only to find out later that the speed mechanic was broken to the point of nonexistence. Thus, I was starting this already difficult game with a practically useless party member. The cheap instakill enemies made some of the dungeons unbearable. Despite all that, the game still maintains its status as a fun and rewarding adventure. 
«Constantly dying and enjoy it»
This is a review of the Origins Ver. I never played the NES version but for what I read is very similar just taking out of the way some annoying things, that being said... At least for the first 15 hours (took me 32) there was a lot of boring mindless grinding, the problem is that feels unbalanced, some enemies were very difficult but gave almost as much exp as other ones that weren't as hard, but either way, the exp they gave was so little.

Another thing that feels very unbalanced was the boss fights, it took a lot of time and grinding and backtracking to get to the boss's room but once when you get there it was very easy compared to all the stuff you need to get through. Another thing that was so frustrating was the random encounters, especially in the final dungeon (it was like 6 steps and bam! random encounter), they were so frequent and thanks to that and the mindless grinding I almost quit this game a lot of times... Which I'm happy I didn't because on the other hand there's a lot to like in this game, the music and the writing are charming, they're not great but have a lot of soul, the thing I liked the most was the sense of wonder, what kind of town will be the next, what kind of characters will be there, the dialogue is short but always good and important for your advance, so you better make some notes.

When the time the epilogue was rolling and the story took a nice twist, I have this nice feeling that maybe FF I wasn't a goodbye letter but a promise letter, a promise that there's a lot of ideas and stuff that can be made in this universe given the opportunity, and as flawed as it is I think is worth your time,, just make sure you have the right mindset and time. Oh and whatever you do, have a Warrior on your party, there were a lot of armors and I think the most powerful weapons are only available to this class, I know because I couldn't use any of those.
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«Oh God i managed it»