Coneria Needs Your Help

The original Final Fantasy is one of the most remade games in existence. We’re not just talking rereleases here, such as the port of the game for the Classic NES mini-console Nintendo produced. These are true remakes, taking the ideas, story, design, and layout of the original game and redoing them in a new engine, with “improvements” that alter the experience and update them for the current audience. Square started really messing with the original Final Fantasy back in 2000, releasing an updated version for the WonderSwan Color, but porting it over to the PSX, GBA, PSP, 3DS, and, now, an even newer version for all modern consoles.

Named the Pixel Remaster series, the first six games of the franchise have all been updated and modernized, ported to the same engine and given all the spit and polish SquareEnix desired. These are remakes that maintain much of the fidelity of the original games while still bringing in some of the ideas and additions from later versions. While the changes seem small for games like Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, the older games are changed a lot to bring them in line with the later titles in the collections.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in this first remade game of the series. Owing to the fact that it came out early in the NES’s run (1987 for the Famicom edition, which was only lightly bugfixed for the NES edition in 1990), at a time when game makers were still trying to figure out how RPGs could work on consoles, the original Final Fantasy is a tad rough around the edges. It’s short, it’s cruel at times, and it expects the players to do a lot of grinding just to get through the game. It spends a lot of its time wasting your time because it has to pad out the experience and make gamers get their “money’s worth”. Many of these issues would get fixed in later sequels, especially once the series moved over to the SNES, but here in the early days console RPGs didn’t know what they were doing.

To “fix up” and get Final Fantasy in line with the later games, a lot had to be changed. Cut-scenes are added, items from later in the series are included here, spell and gear names are changed to what the series eventually settled on as the “standard”. None of these changes are bad, per se, but they can be jarring at times. Seeing LIF2, the second life spell, become Full-Life kind of makes sense, since that’s what the spell does – revive you and bring you back to full health – but it’s also a change that ruins a touch of the charm. The old, goofy spell names were fun, in their own way, and that bit of 8-bit silliness is lost.

That said, most of the updates do make the game prettier and fancier. While the inclusion of cut-scenes that you can’t skip does annoy me, a player that has gone through the original game many hundreds of times (thanks to Final Fantasy Randomizer), I can see these being nice to have for newer players. The original game didn’t have much in the way of presented story, instead expecting players to read the manual that came with the game and talk to every NPC to piece it together themselves. The game has a full, fleshed out story (thanks to all the remakes that came before), and the Pixel Remaster edition presents it all. You will watch it, the game says, and you will like it.

I do love the new graphics for the game. They’re very pretty, with lovely, detailed graphics clearly based on the original NES artwork, just updated. There are bits and splashes of detail that couldn’t have even been done on the SNES, like the glinting of light as it reflects in the water of the ocean, or the massive, pretty, spells that the players cast. There’s a lot that shows this is a modern, gorgeously rendered game, even if it is still playing adjacent to the NES pool from days of yore.

With that said, not everything is right in Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster. The inclusion of items, for starters, does drastically break the balance of the game. The original Final Fantasy has a punishing design philosophy. When you go into a dungeon, you do it just with the health and heal pots you’re carrying and whatever magic charges you have at the ready. Run out of magic and you’re just out as the original game didn’t have items or other means by which you could restore your magic. The Pixel Remaster edition, though, brings in a bunch of items from later games, and just being able to use ethers to restore your magic within a dungeon completely breaks apart the game.

Take my dive into the final dungeon. In the NES version, I know that I’ll have only so many spells. A few level 2 and level 3 spells, a handful of charges of FAST and TMPR with which to buff my party, and I have to get through five bosses in a timely fashion to get it done. I’m conserving, or rationing, I’m working to make sure I have the spells at need when they matter most, trying not to waste a single charge if I can help it. It’s nerve-wracking, but that’s also the fun of it. The challenge makes me think, and then when I beat it I feel like I’ve earned it.

I didn’t feel that way in the Pixel Remaster edition because I had ethers. After each boss I healed up with a massive stack of potions and high potions (the latter of which also wasn’t in the NES version) as well as ether. Each new boss I face, then, has a refreshed party of heroes with all their magic and all their abilities on offer. I was never worried during my dive into the last dungeon. I actually looked over at my wife during the battle with Kraken (which should be one of the hardest in the game) and said, “my brain has shut off entirely.”

Now, some of that could be because I also had a party that was level 64 going into Chaos, the final boss, where the original game had a level cap of just 50. Some parts of the classes were rebalanced to take into account a level 99 cap, so my characters had shallower health growth. Other parts were not, though, so all my spell charges were ready before I even hit 50, and my Black Belt was punching enemies down for over 1000 dmg even before the final dungeon. It was dumb, and easy, and I really didn’t have to think at all.

I got to that high level because I had the built in EXP and Gold boosts set to their max in game, 4 times the original. Some might argue that it takes away from the experience to set the boosts that high, but I will reply that the original NES game was far too grindy, wasting too much of my time, and I wanted to enjoy my experience and just let it ride. And the thing about Final Fantasy, the original game, was that it was devilishly hard until you got levels under your belt, and then it was stupidly easy. All I did, by using the boosts that are built into the Pixel Remaster, was take the grinding part out of the equation and get to the part where my guys were ready for a fight. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. RPGs are best experienced when you’re a god among men, slapping everything down.

This all leaves me of two minds about the game. On the one hand, I love the presentation, the ease of getting in, the fact that I could have a breezy time of it. On the other hand, a bit of the difficulty of the original game is gone and I’m actually not certain how you get it back. Final Fantasy is balanced on a knife’s edge and it’s really easy to make the game too easy or two hard. I think the Pixel Remaster makes it too easy, but it’s not unenjoyable all the same. It has its own charms, and it’s a fun and simple experience that I could see revisiting once in a while.

If you’re a fan of the original game and you want to play it true and proper, I suppose you could just ignore all the new items and never use the boosts. That would get you ninety-nine percent of the way to having the original game with these spruced up graphics (although, for those in the know, don’t go to the Peninsula of Power as you’ll be left disappointed). A true purist won’t like that though but, then, would a true purist even play this version of the game?