Gaming’s Best Moments: Final Fantasy I

It is all too tempting to make meta meaning out of this essay by highlighting the first part of the first game in the series. I shall fully yield to this temptation. It’s just too perfect to make the first entry in this series about the first part of the first Final Fantasy game.

Here we are waking up as our avatars, standing upright on the surface of World A, that Bahamut may love us. We see the nearby town and castle of Cornelia digesting us within the belly of its dim gray monotone and leading us linearly along its axis directly to the throne room of the King himself, God save him. We are beseechingly entreated by a desperate father to rescue Her Royal Highness from the clutches of one Mssr. Garland (model inspiration for FFIV’s Golbez?) an insider threat to the kingdom’s security ecosystem, who’s absconded with the princess to the Chaos Shrine. While we are acknowledged as warriors true (whether or not our party actually technically consists of them), we are forewarned that Garland is a capable swordsman in his own right and that we’d best be prepared before we go traipsing into his spider’s lair. The king seduces us with promises of much-needed infrastructure investment should we succeed, almost as if a king would be promoted in the role of pontiff (the word “pontiff” is derived from the Latin ponti facere, meaning, though not literally, “bridge builder”). His Royal Cornelian Majesty sends us off, without even two mules for Princess Sara (I’ll assume most of you are too young to get that reference, but I assure you it is a quality one!).

Then our intrepid heroes sally forth onto the world map, wherein they will become gamekeepers on a safari range with a bestiary of assorted specimens, each titillatingly quantified in all the right places, from HP to XP and Gil rendered. However, there’s no culling these herds. We may rest well-assured they will be supplied—fully grown organisms at that with all the common local types represented—at a replacement rate at or above a rate at which we can surplus kill them. Take solace in the fact we needn’t bother with placing any open air species on the endangered list.

Once we’ve double-slashed our way to our destination, we enter the sepulchral keep wary of what dangers lie within. Come what might in May, we must yet press on. After just a bit of (clothing) optional exploring, we are ready to join Garland in his inner sanctum, which appears to be suffering from a terrible chiropteran infestation. That he brings a delicate strumpet like the princess to such a dreadful place supports the contention that he be charged with attempted regicide in addition to kidnapping, false imprisonment, and multiple code violations that could only be characterized as grossly negligent.

After besting Garland in a totally fair four-on-one contest and with our fair maiden in hand, we return to the accolades of the lords and laity of Cornelia and a grateful King. We can only imagine a prominently displayed and not at all premature “Mission Accomplished” banner awaiting us, draped over the battlements of the towering keep of Cornelia Castle and rippling ever-so-gently in the wind with the ostensible texture of an aqueous solution.

Prima facie, it may seem it is a bit too early in the symphony for a punctuated crescendo. But this opening sequence of FFI is an important moment. It is a microcosm of much of the primitive fantasy narratives that have come before it, almost toying with the clichéd notion of a merry band of heroes of goodness and light fulfilling their destiny by rescuing a princess from the wicked clutches of their syzygous antipode. This gives it the feel of being the end of a full fantasy quest, yet it is only the harbinger of the great work before us. This is a message to the player: this fantasy story begins where its primogenitors end.

There is, of course, much fault to find with this now ancient game—this primary source document of history that served as a genre-shaping prototype of the JRPGs to follow it. We cannot defenestrate the crystalline baby with the heavily pixellated bathwater, however. We cannot fairly look back on it with the eagle-eyed hindsight we now possess. Rather, we must gently lower the rose-colored spectacles onto the bridges of our olfaction apparatuses and see it as we might’ve then, ensconced in our youthful dotage. We are gallery viewing a masterpiece in the digital museum, looking at the momentary locus in quo we first found it. This is a profound statement that has been made. We are on the start of a fantasy journey that would span oceans and decades in our own world. We have played the expectation-confounding first sands of the hourglass of a Final Fantasy that would prove to be anything but the former term in the duet of words that form its title.

Think about this and let your mind’s eye smize...