The Final Fantasy Legend

Originally posted on Facebook on 18 September 2022

Oh, I completely forgot to make a post about it, but a few months ago I did in fact play through yet another classic JRPG. So I guess I'll just make a post about it now!

I played "The Final Fantasy Legend" for the Game Boy. In Japan it is called "Makai Toushi SaGa", and is in fact the first game in the SaGa series... and therefore it's not actually a Final Fantasy game. It's a SaGa game that Squaresoft just decided to sell under the name  "Final Fantasy" because that was better for marketing back in the day ...just videogame things, you know.

Anyways. I played this game on Nintendo Switch in "Collection of SaGa", which thankfully is a version with a 2x speed option. Always nice to see modern releases of old RPGs have options to reduce time spent grinding.

Anyways, the game is rather interesting. It has ambitious mechanics, but a very rudimentary presentation that I feel doesn't do its interesting mechanics justice.

When you begin the game, you are prompted to create your party. There are three races to choose from - Humans, Mutants, and Monsters. And you have four available party slots.

- Humans can only be upgraded by buying new equipment and stat boosting items, and cannot use magic.

- Mutants can use magic and a limited amount of equipment, but their stat boosts are applied randomly, and their available spells will change randomly, so they are rather unreliable.

- Monsters seem to be literally the same as the enemy monsters encountered throughout the game. They have pre-set stats and movesets, and cannot use items at all, but you can transform them into better monsters as the game progresses, including some pretty powerful ones. 

My party was two humans, one mutant and one monster. This feels like a pretty balanced team, however buying all the upgrades for two humans proved to be pretty expensive later in the game. Some grinding for money was needed.

My mutant actually became abnormally powerful, seemingly by chance. I've read around online that mutant characters often struggle to get decent HP, but my mutant had managed to get itself maxed out 999 HP by the end of the game. So I was pretty pleased with how that turned out.

My monster however didn't seem to be very useful at all. I found its inability to use items a hinderance, and it never became as strong as the rest of my team, even when it turned into one of the stronger latergame monsters.

If I were to play this game again, I may very well decide to make a team of one human and three mutants... One fewer human to need to spend on, and I guess I'd just hope to get lucky with the mutant stat randomness.

One interesting aspect about the game is the limited lives system. If one of your party members dies three times, they are considered permanently dead, and you must recruit a new party member to replace them, wasting all the effort you spent levelling them up. Thankfully you can buy extra lives in the shops, so this never happened to me. But it does make dying a little bit more scary in this game!

So what is the game like?

The goal is to reach the top of the tower, and along the way are four mini RPG worlds to complete. Each world usually has a couple of towns, a couple of dungeons, a boss at the end, and some puzzles along the way. It's like solving four mini RPGs in a row, it's pretty cute!

The game is very light on its story - the focus is definitely on the RPG gameplay aspect, and not so much on any kind of storytelling. However there are a few cutscenes here and there, and also some miscellaneous NPC dialogue to help with the worldbuilding.

This game is rather relentless with the encounters, but amazingly it gives you the ability to save anywhere, so it was much less of a struggle than it otherwise could have been. Dying mid-dungeon is no problem if you can also save mid-dungeon. However, since you can save anywhere, (and a full party death forces you to reload the save), it certainly is possible to get yourself trapped deep within a dungeon with low resources... in which case you may have to employ the tactic of "move 1 tile, save the game, move 1 tile, save the game..." in order to escape. That's just how old games are sometimes! You gotta be mindful of these things.

The four areas are rather distinct - you have the castle kingdom world, the ocean world, the sky world, and finally the ruined city world. And they each provide a nice amount of variety - I especially liked the ruined city world in particular. But in between the four worlds you have to climb the tower in the middle, which is its own bizarre maze that I find rather confusing. I managed to get a good handle of how the four main worlds are laid out, but the layout of the central tower is still enigmatic to me.

The limited inventory system is a huge huge hassle in this game. You are constantly finding new items which you are always running out of space for. You need to hold healing items, status-healing items, spellbooks, quest items... and your weapons have limited uses, so you always need to be carrying spare weapons too. It's a pain. I would have liked a little more leeway in this regard, but it's possible to manage if you plan well.

The overall presentation of the game feels very primitive, especially during combat. When encountering multiple of the same kind of monster, there is only one sprite on screen, and you aren't able to select which one to target.

And the way the monster's attacks are conveyed is just through a very simplistic text scroll, with very little in the way of animation or sound to make anything feel distinct. I find it difficult to keep track of who's taking damage each turn.

This isn't helped by the fact that the party's order is shuffled whenever someone gets hit with a status effect. It seems the game wants to put the healthiest characters first, but I get even more confused if my team isn't in their normal order, so this feature just ends up being really annoying. 

Overall, combat is okay - there's a decent variety in weapon types, status effects, spells - it's all there, and most of it works, however the wonky presentation really makes it difficult to appreciate it all. I find myself just wanting to get the combat over with as quickly as possible, and then heal up whoever needs healing afterwards. The presentation outside of combat is fine, but nothing too special either. It's standard tile-based retro RPG fare.

Overall, I enjoyed the game for what it was. I felt like it had some unique ideas, but it feels a bit too unpolished for me to be able to truly lose myself in this world. 

Collection of SaGa does include "The Final Fantasy Legend II" and "The Final Fantasy Legend III" too, so I'm definitely curious about what the sequels have to offer. ...whenever I get around to them.