This is the very first role playing game on the Game Boy (that I can find), and is perhaps my very first role playing game experience. I still remember playing one of the Final Fantasy Legend games at a friend's house on his Game Boy, as I can distinctly remember eating the meat to transform my monster into a new one. I'm not sure if it was the first or not, but I did have most of my experience playing the first game in high school, after obtaining a copy. I never beat it, though, and am really trying my best to clear out my oldest backlog last and this year (you're up next, The Legend of Dragoon).
The next few weeks of playing this game was an absolutely delightful mess that one would expect while programming the very first portable RPG. Taking pieces of Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II with a revolutionary new concept and making it handheld could not have been easy in the slightest, and was so different that in Japan this game has no ties to the Final Fantasy brand at all, but is actually the first game in the SaGa series, to which I have little exposure beyond this game.
The story revolves around a world dominated by a dictator, Ashura, whose four fiends are terrorizing the world. The world itself is a fascinating and original concept, with a tower that rises up into the sky, with worlds at certain levels of the tower. Thus the bottom floor is a world with three kings struggling to be the strongest, while another is a watery world, and a third is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi wasteland. The story and setting to the game are remarkably adept for a game as date as The Final Fantasy Legend, and are really a high point for the game.
The music is one of the best early Game Boy sound tracks, composed by none other than the legendary Nobuo Uematsu, who composed the music for all of the early Final Fantasy games. I feel like it's not quite as good as his work on the NES or Super NES, but for a first outing on the Game Boy with its very different sound hardware, it can be considered a standout among its peers.
You control a character who you can name, and can recruit other members to your team from three races, humans, mutants, and monsters. This is the most original and distinct element to the game, because it not only is the case that the capabilities of the races are different, but also that how they grow is dramatically different. Mutants grow in a manner similar to that in Final Fantasy II, that is to say, incrementally by taking certain actions. Getting hit by an attack, thus, might increase your max health or defense, while using a magic scroll will increase your magic power. Humans grow by the purchase of potions which can increase several of the stats, but they never get any sort of magic power, relying entirely on physical attack. Monsters don't grow at all, but rather can eat the meat of defeated monsters to turn into new ones. I didn't use them at all this run, and really wish that I had, because it's a very fun mechanic.
Battle functions most similarly to Dragon Quest in terms of its interface and controls, although there is a small wrinkle added in which each weapon has only a limited number of uses, making your grinding capabilities limited to the amount of remaining weapons you have, and makes supplying yourself before setting out on a new leg of your journey vitally important.
I really enjoyed this game, but it is remarkably messy in a lot of ways. Much of what I just told you about the way the game functions is stuff I had to figure out from internet research, as there is absolutely no way to figure out how the various character archetypes grow in game. It's possible it existed in the manual, but I don't have that, so prepare to do a bit of a deep dive into the mechanics of the game before you begin. For example, on my first run through in high school, I had a party of two mutants, a monster, and a human, but I never figured out that you needed to buy stat boosts for the human, making him pathetic by the end, and making killing the end boss nearly impossible with one useless character. This is why I never finished it, and needed a fresh run as an adult to finally knock it off my list.
The translation is frankly terrible. The dialogue is dreadful at times, but hilariously so. For example, if you get stuck running away in battle, but fail, it will tell you that your character "do nothing". There are probably 50 excellent moments of hilarious Engrish in the game, and while I wouldn't tolerate it now, in the context of burgeoning 80's scene of translating Japanese games to English, it's more amusing than distracting.
There's also definitely a sense that more care was given to the earlier worlds than the later ones, with far more detail being given and far fewer throwaway areas with nothing in them.
There are also a lot of clunky, old school kind of RPG elements that The Final Fantasy Legend adheres to simply out of a kind of path dependent default, just because no one had done them before. For example, the inventory space you get is painfully low, and in a game in which it is really important to carry backup weapons due to their limited uses, this can be extremely challenging. Also, it's got that old school annoyance that if you tell a party member to attack one character, but that character dies, they won't do anything that turn. These tiny irritations are numerous, but also easy to excuse for a game this groundbreaking and early.
The most important thing about the game is the groundwork that it laid, similar to my reviews for Super Mario Kart and Super Mario Land. If any of those three games came out today, I'd be a little upset. They'd need a lot more polish and there were too many risky choices made that didn't pan out in the long run. But for the time, they are absolute titans of their genres, setting up a foundation for greatness down the road. If Miyamoto learned from and built off Donkey Kong and perhaps Pitfall to make his masterpiece Super Mario Bros. that finally ensconced all of the established rules of the genre, then The Final Fantasy Legend can consider one of the games on the ground floor for later and better handheld RPGs like Pokemon. So warts and all, I'd highly recommend that you check out the granddaddy of one of my favorite genres, the handheld RPG. I'll give it a 8.6/10.
Next up for handhelds, I'll be playing the second game in the SaGa series (Final Fantasy Legend II), at least until my next Amazon package arrives, at which point I'll be switching to the following game, which I'll tease below.
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment