Game Review: ファイナルファンタジー
2020-Apr-13, Monday 19:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Final Fantasy is one of the games that I've beaten on original hardware, back when I was a kid and had endless hours over summer break to throw myself against digital challenges. I never owned the game, but a friend down the street did, so I borrowed it and holed up in the basement with my party to fight forest imps. I played for a few hours, made it to the Marsh Cave, and got utterly destroyed over and over again. I had to return the game, but my failure rankled me until I went back to that same friend and asked if I could borrow the game again. I spent hours outside the Marsh Cave, killing monsters until I was hugely overleveled, and then went down into the depths of the earth and slaughtered everything in my path. I was so overleveled that none of the rest of the game was really a challenge, and I beat it a week or so later.
For the reason, and because I've beaten it a couple times in the years since then, I was originally planning to play through the iOS port of Final Fantasy and write about how I liked that compared to the original, what I thought of the changes to make to more like other Final Fantasy games and how the difficulty held up when the characters used MP instead of the original magic system, all of that. Unfortunately, I started the iOS port several years ago and played through extremely slowly, and the last update to the iOS Final Fantasy deleted everyone's saves. They recently updated Final Fantasy IX to make it unplayable, so maybe they're just trying to clear everyone's plate for Final Fantasy VII Remake?
I am immune to their tactics by virtue of not owning a PS4, so with nothing stopping me, I switched over to the version of the game I knew best.
Well, except that it's in Japanese.
Welcome to Corneria.
It's difficult nowadays to talk about the first Final Fantasy without also talking about Dragon Quest, the intertwined genesis of what would come to be called the JRPG genre. The creator of Dragon Quest, 堀井雄二 Horii Yūji, was inspired by Western RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, but wanted to make a game where anyone could beat it if they were willing to put in the time, and the result was Dragon Quest, which had dungeons and an overworld, but Japanese-style cute monsters, a singular hero instead of a party, and no fail state. Death didn't end the game--instead, it simply resulted in the hero's body being dragged back to Tantegel Castle and the king reviving him in exchange for half of his gold. In this way, anyone could beat the game eventually, with more skilled players doing it at a lower level and less skilled players taking longer but still seeing the entire game.
Final Fantasy was a response to that, and we know that because of Final Fantasy's opening hour. In Dragon Quest, the hero's mission is to rescue the princess, find the necessary items to reach her kidnapper's castle, and destroy him, winning the game. In Final Fantasy, the Warriors of Light are told that Garland, one of the king of Corneria's knights, has kidnapped Princess Sara and taken her away to his castle, so after fighting forest goblins (Eng: "Imps") for a while, the warriors cross the forests and plains to the ruined Temple of Chaos in the northern part of the kingdom, confront Garland, and destroy him, after which the king promises to build them a bridge to the rest of the continent. And when the Warriors of Light step onto that bridge, the game's opening credits roll. All of Dragon Quest is contained within the first hour of Final Fantasy!
Sure, it took four people to accomplish what the descendant of Roto could do by himself, but we'll ignore that for now.
I SEE YOU.
That is the original version of what became the Evil Eye in the English release. The Japanese says "Beholder," but if you know anything about Dungeons & Dragons, you didn't need me to translate that.
Dragon Quest had its own bestiary that's since become iconic, with the ultra-cute mascot slimes, chicken-looking wyverns, magicians, goldmen, tentacled druins, and so on, but Final Fantasy was just Dungeons & Dragons. They made some effort to disguise this in the English localization, aided by character limits that required them to condense the names of some of the monsters, but the Japanese original did not try to disguise its inspiration in the least. In addition to beholders, it's full of D&D intellectual property like mindflayers, sahaugin, remorhazes, otyughs, ogre magi, winter wolves, and color-coded dragons with appropriate elemental breath weapons. Two of the bosses, the Chaos (Eng: "Fiend") of Fire Marilith and the Chaos of Air Tiamat, are obviously taken straight from D&D. Almost all of the iconic Final Fantasy monsters go back to this original set of borrowings--bombs are beholders, ochus/marlboros are otyughs, Bahamut the eidolin is Bahamut the D&D dragon god--I could list them for paragraphs.
Chocobos and moogles don't, but neither of those are in Final Fantasy I anyway.
The centerpoint of the JRPG genre now as compared to the Western RPG genre--these are porous, overlapping labels, but bear with me here--is pre-set characters who go through their own storylines and have their own personalities. When people talk about Final Fantasy games, the characters are what they remember. I mean, the characters are definitely the reason I love Final Fantasy VI, because its systems certainly aren't worth as much praise as the game gets. But Final Fantasy has a player-built party defined entirely by their classes, in a way comparable to games like Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master, so there's no inherent characterization beyond their names. A black mage has no personality or traits other than "casts black magic spells, can't wear armor," but the dialogue system in Final Fantasy can't support more than a single text box per character anyway, so complicated conversations are impossible. NPCs tell the party their problems or thank them for their efforts, villains taunt them before battle, and that's the extent of the plot. Warriors of Light, restore the Crystals!
When the party comes back to school after summer vacation.
I went fighter, monk, white mage, black mage, which is my standard FFI party. The first time I beat the game, I played it with a thief instead of a monk, and once I played through half the game with a red mage there, but in the past I've generally been pretty conservative with my class choices. One time I tried playing through with one white mage, and I think I could have done it, but it was really tedious.
Unlike later Final Fantasy games, classes don't have any inherent abilities. There's no Cover or Jump or anything like that, just Fight, Magic, Equipment, Item, and Run. Fighters' and thieves' power is based entirely on their equipment, and monks don't even get that, since their unarmed damage and armor is based on their level and equipping anything is generally worse than punching dragons to death. Black, white, and red mages can choose spells, since every spell level has four possible spells and a character can only know three of them at a time, and they have a minimal selection of equipment, but that's it. And some spells are bugged to be useless, which reduces the choice even further! There's a "class change" halfway through the game--referred to as 称号, shōgō "title," a reference to D&D's concept of "Name Level"--but all it does is open up additional spell levels or allow fighters and thieves to learn low-level spells. It really is like early editions of D&D, where the rules cover stabbing people or casting spells on them and anything else is just a lot of handwaving.
I did give them heroic names, though, naming them after virtues. The fighter is 勇気 Yūki, "Courage"; the monk is 元気 Genki, "Vigor, Energy"; the white mage is 知恵 Chie, "Wisdom"; and the black mage is 力 Chikara, "Strength, Power."
I mentioned "spell levels," because unlike every other Final Fantasy game except Final Fantasy III, including all the remakes of every game, Final Fantasy I uses a D&D-style system of spell levels and spell slots. Every spell takes a slot of its level, and much like D&D, the end result is to completely discourage the use of magic in almost every situation. Since spells can only be restored by sleeping at an inn in town or a cabin out in the field, my pre-dungeon rituals included buying 99 potions and 99 antidotes and then having the party chug gallons of healing liquid whenever they were injured. I almost never cast any spells at all except during boss battles, instead either having my mages just attack or, once I found equipment with inherent powers on it, having them repeatedly use those to cast ヒーラ (Eng: "HEL2") or サンダラ (Eng: "LIT2").
It's not good system design when it funnels you to using the exact same tools to solve every problem. Vancian magic may be D&D tradition, but I've never liked it, and its implementation in Final Fantasy is a good demonstration of why. It's the Megalixir Problem applied to everything in the game other than just hitting "Fight" repeatedly, and that makes almost all fights the same.
There's one other element everyone remembers from the original Final Fantasy, and that's INEFFECTIVE. After setting a turn's actions, everyone attacks, and while in later games attacks targeting a dead enemy would be redirected to another target, in Final Fantasy they do nothing. This seems like it's supposed to encourage tactical thinking about whether it's better to split up attacks or alpha strike targets down one by one, but it's more infuriating than anything else. And since the system was abandoned in all later Final Fantasy games, I feel comfortable in saying that there are other ways of providing tactical depth. Like MP.
"Four hundred years ago, we had an advanced civilization. Even the void of space was within our grasp. But all of that now is beyond our reach..."
Final Fantasy I doesn't have a lot of worldbuilding other than that implied by its D&D-esque setting. There are elves--their only appearance until the MMOs--and dwarves and humans, there are goblins and ogres and wargs in the forest, and most of the world is uninhabited except by enemies. It's a points of light setting, with a few bastions of civilization here and there and danger all around them. Everything seems like it'll match up to the standard faux Renaissance/medieval Western fantasy mishmash until halfway through the game, when after traveling through the Ice Cave and fighting that beholder, the party acquires the 浮遊石 fuyūseki, "Floating Stone," brings it to the Ryukān Desert, and unearths an airship.
There are a lot of people who really don't like any crossover between sci fi and fantasy, but I've never been one of those people. I grew up reading the Dragonriders of Pern and Darkover books, and the idea of the lost hypertech civilization even while the rest of the world is a medieval tech level still resonates with me. It's part of the background in Crystalis that makes it stick with me, and so when I found the Lufenians in Final Fantasy I, I was already primed to love them. The builders of an airship, they lived in a Floating Castle until Tiamat drove them out, and while that sounds like a Ghibli-style Castle in the Sky, when the party enters the Mirage Tower that contains the gateway to the Floating Castle, they find banks of computers and still-functional robots, including both enemy sentries called "Guardians" and NPC robots that welcome the party to the tower, and then take a teleporter and arrive in a metallic structure floating, as the Lufenians told them, "Above the sky, upon the Sea of Stars."
All the remakes turn it into an actual castle in the clouds, but I'll never forget that moment I realized the ancient civilization in the north that people in the towns were talking about had built and lived in an orbital habitat.
"From the observation window, the whole world is visible...The four powers, like a mist, all being drawn together toward a single location...the Temple of Chaos! The centerpoint of the four altars!"
In contrast to a lot of other Final Fantasy staples, the series's fondness for convoluted, melodramatic plots started right here.
I have to give the designers kudos for going with a stable time loop/Grandfather Paradox plotline in a game that began with "go rescue the princess." In Corneria, you're told that the Crystals have lost their light and the Warriors of Light must restore it, and then it's maybe a third or even half of the game before encountering the first Chaos. Once Lich is beaten in the depths of the Earth Cave and light is restored to the Earth Crystal, at Crescent Lake the Circle of Sages explain the plot: four hundred years ago, the Chaos of Air drove the advanced civilization from their stronghold, two hundred years ago the Temple of Water sank suddenly into the sea, and recently in the west the earth began to rot. And just before the party arrived, the Chaos of Fire has awoken in Gulug Volcano, two hundred years early due to the warriors' defeat of Lich.
All of that is pretty standard fantasy, and the four elemental Chaoses fit well with the pre-existing Japanese idea of the 四天王 shitennō, "The Four Heavenly Kings." But the shitennō always work for someone, and after reigniting all four Crystals' light and returning to the sages, they explain that the true enemy is actually two thousand years in the past. Something destroyed civilization back then and sent the Chaoses forward in time, and it's only by traveling back in time at the Shrine of Chaos that the source of the world's ruin be destroyed, and when the Warriors of Light go back in time, they find...Garland. When Garland was struck down by the Warriors of Light at the beginning of the game, the Chaoses sent him into the past. There he absorbed elemental power and using it, sent the Chaoses forward into the future, where they could send him into the past, and so on, in an unending loop. Thus, he would be immortal.
Of course, it's never a good idea to be a villain in a Final Fantasy game. The Warriors of Light go back in time and kill Garland, even after he absorbs elemental power and transforms into Chaos, and by doing so they change the past and the future. Garland dies, so he never uses his power to send the Chaoses forward in time. Without the Chaoses coming forward, the Crystals never lose their light, the Warriors of Light are never chosen, and all of their adventures never happened. They are the only ones who remember that they saved the world, though the outro does say that a faint echo remains in the hearts of the people. It's honestly pretty courageous for an 8-bit game to tell you in the outro that there's no fanfare, there's no hero's welcome, and no one who praised you throughout the game even remembers you.
Though, I realized during this playthrough that without the Chaos of Air attacking them, the Lufenians never fell, so the world has another four hundred years of technological development starting from orbitals and robots, so when the Warriors of Light come back, Corneria probably looks like Midgar. Maybe it's better that no one remembers them.
It's a bird, it...actually is a plane.
This is the second Final Fantasy where I've said the worldbuilding is good and the systems are only so-so, and that's certainly true, but I really wanted a game that was just comforting. Final Fantasy I isn't a hard game to play, and it's not complicated, and even though I played it in Japanese it wasn't particularly hard to understand. But grinding outside the Marsh Cave, or in the forests near Onrak, or watching my Super Monk hit bosses ten times for hundreds of damage was cathartic. Final Fantasy I is still fun to play, even in its original incarnation. It's a classic for a reason, and while a lot of the series trademarks didn't come into their own until Final Fantasy II, you can still see their genesis here.
Though, if you play, play a remake with MP. The remakes have their difficulty adjusted to balance for it, and it stops the white mage from just twirling the Heal Staff for hours on end until Chaos dies.
For the reason, and because I've beaten it a couple times in the years since then, I was originally planning to play through the iOS port of Final Fantasy and write about how I liked that compared to the original, what I thought of the changes to make to more like other Final Fantasy games and how the difficulty held up when the characters used MP instead of the original magic system, all of that. Unfortunately, I started the iOS port several years ago and played through extremely slowly, and the last update to the iOS Final Fantasy deleted everyone's saves. They recently updated Final Fantasy IX to make it unplayable, so maybe they're just trying to clear everyone's plate for Final Fantasy VII Remake?
I am immune to their tactics by virtue of not owning a PS4, so with nothing stopping me, I switched over to the version of the game I knew best.Well, except that it's in Japanese.
Welcome to Corneria.
It's difficult nowadays to talk about the first Final Fantasy without also talking about Dragon Quest, the intertwined genesis of what would come to be called the JRPG genre. The creator of Dragon Quest, 堀井雄二 Horii Yūji, was inspired by Western RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, but wanted to make a game where anyone could beat it if they were willing to put in the time, and the result was Dragon Quest, which had dungeons and an overworld, but Japanese-style cute monsters, a singular hero instead of a party, and no fail state. Death didn't end the game--instead, it simply resulted in the hero's body being dragged back to Tantegel Castle and the king reviving him in exchange for half of his gold. In this way, anyone could beat the game eventually, with more skilled players doing it at a lower level and less skilled players taking longer but still seeing the entire game.
Final Fantasy was a response to that, and we know that because of Final Fantasy's opening hour. In Dragon Quest, the hero's mission is to rescue the princess, find the necessary items to reach her kidnapper's castle, and destroy him, winning the game. In Final Fantasy, the Warriors of Light are told that Garland, one of the king of Corneria's knights, has kidnapped Princess Sara and taken her away to his castle, so after fighting forest goblins (Eng: "Imps") for a while, the warriors cross the forests and plains to the ruined Temple of Chaos in the northern part of the kingdom, confront Garland, and destroy him, after which the king promises to build them a bridge to the rest of the continent. And when the Warriors of Light step onto that bridge, the game's opening credits roll. All of Dragon Quest is contained within the first hour of Final Fantasy!
Sure, it took four people to accomplish what the descendant of Roto could do by himself, but we'll ignore that for now.
I SEE YOU.
That is the original version of what became the Evil Eye in the English release. The Japanese says "Beholder," but if you know anything about Dungeons & Dragons, you didn't need me to translate that.
Dragon Quest had its own bestiary that's since become iconic, with the ultra-cute mascot slimes, chicken-looking wyverns, magicians, goldmen, tentacled druins, and so on, but Final Fantasy was just Dungeons & Dragons. They made some effort to disguise this in the English localization, aided by character limits that required them to condense the names of some of the monsters, but the Japanese original did not try to disguise its inspiration in the least. In addition to beholders, it's full of D&D intellectual property like mindflayers, sahaugin, remorhazes, otyughs, ogre magi, winter wolves, and color-coded dragons with appropriate elemental breath weapons. Two of the bosses, the Chaos (Eng: "Fiend") of Fire Marilith and the Chaos of Air Tiamat, are obviously taken straight from D&D. Almost all of the iconic Final Fantasy monsters go back to this original set of borrowings--bombs are beholders, ochus/marlboros are otyughs, Bahamut the eidolin is Bahamut the D&D dragon god--I could list them for paragraphs.
Chocobos and moogles don't, but neither of those are in Final Fantasy I anyway.
The centerpoint of the JRPG genre now as compared to the Western RPG genre--these are porous, overlapping labels, but bear with me here--is pre-set characters who go through their own storylines and have their own personalities. When people talk about Final Fantasy games, the characters are what they remember. I mean, the characters are definitely the reason I love Final Fantasy VI, because its systems certainly aren't worth as much praise as the game gets. But Final Fantasy has a player-built party defined entirely by their classes, in a way comparable to games like Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master, so there's no inherent characterization beyond their names. A black mage has no personality or traits other than "casts black magic spells, can't wear armor," but the dialogue system in Final Fantasy can't support more than a single text box per character anyway, so complicated conversations are impossible. NPCs tell the party their problems or thank them for their efforts, villains taunt them before battle, and that's the extent of the plot. Warriors of Light, restore the Crystals!
When the party comes back to school after summer vacation.
I went fighter, monk, white mage, black mage, which is my standard FFI party. The first time I beat the game, I played it with a thief instead of a monk, and once I played through half the game with a red mage there, but in the past I've generally been pretty conservative with my class choices. One time I tried playing through with one white mage, and I think I could have done it, but it was really tedious.
Unlike later Final Fantasy games, classes don't have any inherent abilities. There's no Cover or Jump or anything like that, just Fight, Magic, Equipment, Item, and Run. Fighters' and thieves' power is based entirely on their equipment, and monks don't even get that, since their unarmed damage and armor is based on their level and equipping anything is generally worse than punching dragons to death. Black, white, and red mages can choose spells, since every spell level has four possible spells and a character can only know three of them at a time, and they have a minimal selection of equipment, but that's it. And some spells are bugged to be useless, which reduces the choice even further! There's a "class change" halfway through the game--referred to as 称号, shōgō "title," a reference to D&D's concept of "Name Level"--but all it does is open up additional spell levels or allow fighters and thieves to learn low-level spells. It really is like early editions of D&D, where the rules cover stabbing people or casting spells on them and anything else is just a lot of handwaving.
I did give them heroic names, though, naming them after virtues. The fighter is 勇気 Yūki, "Courage"; the monk is 元気 Genki, "Vigor, Energy"; the white mage is 知恵 Chie, "Wisdom"; and the black mage is 力 Chikara, "Strength, Power."
I mentioned "spell levels," because unlike every other Final Fantasy game except Final Fantasy III, including all the remakes of every game, Final Fantasy I uses a D&D-style system of spell levels and spell slots. Every spell takes a slot of its level, and much like D&D, the end result is to completely discourage the use of magic in almost every situation. Since spells can only be restored by sleeping at an inn in town or a cabin out in the field, my pre-dungeon rituals included buying 99 potions and 99 antidotes and then having the party chug gallons of healing liquid whenever they were injured. I almost never cast any spells at all except during boss battles, instead either having my mages just attack or, once I found equipment with inherent powers on it, having them repeatedly use those to cast ヒーラ (Eng: "HEL2") or サンダラ (Eng: "LIT2").
It's not good system design when it funnels you to using the exact same tools to solve every problem. Vancian magic may be D&D tradition, but I've never liked it, and its implementation in Final Fantasy is a good demonstration of why. It's the Megalixir Problem applied to everything in the game other than just hitting "Fight" repeatedly, and that makes almost all fights the same.
There's one other element everyone remembers from the original Final Fantasy, and that's INEFFECTIVE. After setting a turn's actions, everyone attacks, and while in later games attacks targeting a dead enemy would be redirected to another target, in Final Fantasy they do nothing. This seems like it's supposed to encourage tactical thinking about whether it's better to split up attacks or alpha strike targets down one by one, but it's more infuriating than anything else. And since the system was abandoned in all later Final Fantasy games, I feel comfortable in saying that there are other ways of providing tactical depth. Like MP.
"Four hundred years ago, we had an advanced civilization. Even the void of space was within our grasp. But all of that now is beyond our reach..."
Final Fantasy I doesn't have a lot of worldbuilding other than that implied by its D&D-esque setting. There are elves--their only appearance until the MMOs--and dwarves and humans, there are goblins and ogres and wargs in the forest, and most of the world is uninhabited except by enemies. It's a points of light setting, with a few bastions of civilization here and there and danger all around them. Everything seems like it'll match up to the standard faux Renaissance/medieval Western fantasy mishmash until halfway through the game, when after traveling through the Ice Cave and fighting that beholder, the party acquires the 浮遊石 fuyūseki, "Floating Stone," brings it to the Ryukān Desert, and unearths an airship.
There are a lot of people who really don't like any crossover between sci fi and fantasy, but I've never been one of those people. I grew up reading the Dragonriders of Pern and Darkover books, and the idea of the lost hypertech civilization even while the rest of the world is a medieval tech level still resonates with me. It's part of the background in Crystalis that makes it stick with me, and so when I found the Lufenians in Final Fantasy I, I was already primed to love them. The builders of an airship, they lived in a Floating Castle until Tiamat drove them out, and while that sounds like a Ghibli-style Castle in the Sky, when the party enters the Mirage Tower that contains the gateway to the Floating Castle, they find banks of computers and still-functional robots, including both enemy sentries called "Guardians" and NPC robots that welcome the party to the tower, and then take a teleporter and arrive in a metallic structure floating, as the Lufenians told them, "Above the sky, upon the Sea of Stars."
All the remakes turn it into an actual castle in the clouds, but I'll never forget that moment I realized the ancient civilization in the north that people in the towns were talking about had built and lived in an orbital habitat.
"From the observation window, the whole world is visible...The four powers, like a mist, all being drawn together toward a single location...the Temple of Chaos! The centerpoint of the four altars!"
In contrast to a lot of other Final Fantasy staples, the series's fondness for convoluted, melodramatic plots started right here.
I have to give the designers kudos for going with a stable time loop/Grandfather Paradox plotline in a game that began with "go rescue the princess." In Corneria, you're told that the Crystals have lost their light and the Warriors of Light must restore it, and then it's maybe a third or even half of the game before encountering the first Chaos. Once Lich is beaten in the depths of the Earth Cave and light is restored to the Earth Crystal, at Crescent Lake the Circle of Sages explain the plot: four hundred years ago, the Chaos of Air drove the advanced civilization from their stronghold, two hundred years ago the Temple of Water sank suddenly into the sea, and recently in the west the earth began to rot. And just before the party arrived, the Chaos of Fire has awoken in Gulug Volcano, two hundred years early due to the warriors' defeat of Lich.
All of that is pretty standard fantasy, and the four elemental Chaoses fit well with the pre-existing Japanese idea of the 四天王 shitennō, "The Four Heavenly Kings." But the shitennō always work for someone, and after reigniting all four Crystals' light and returning to the sages, they explain that the true enemy is actually two thousand years in the past. Something destroyed civilization back then and sent the Chaoses forward in time, and it's only by traveling back in time at the Shrine of Chaos that the source of the world's ruin be destroyed, and when the Warriors of Light go back in time, they find...Garland. When Garland was struck down by the Warriors of Light at the beginning of the game, the Chaoses sent him into the past. There he absorbed elemental power and using it, sent the Chaoses forward into the future, where they could send him into the past, and so on, in an unending loop. Thus, he would be immortal.
Of course, it's never a good idea to be a villain in a Final Fantasy game. The Warriors of Light go back in time and kill Garland, even after he absorbs elemental power and transforms into Chaos, and by doing so they change the past and the future. Garland dies, so he never uses his power to send the Chaoses forward in time. Without the Chaoses coming forward, the Crystals never lose their light, the Warriors of Light are never chosen, and all of their adventures never happened. They are the only ones who remember that they saved the world, though the outro does say that a faint echo remains in the hearts of the people. It's honestly pretty courageous for an 8-bit game to tell you in the outro that there's no fanfare, there's no hero's welcome, and no one who praised you throughout the game even remembers you.
Though, I realized during this playthrough that without the Chaos of Air attacking them, the Lufenians never fell, so the world has another four hundred years of technological development starting from orbitals and robots, so when the Warriors of Light come back, Corneria probably looks like Midgar. Maybe it's better that no one remembers them.
It's a bird, it...actually is a plane.
This is the second Final Fantasy where I've said the worldbuilding is good and the systems are only so-so, and that's certainly true, but I really wanted a game that was just comforting. Final Fantasy I isn't a hard game to play, and it's not complicated, and even though I played it in Japanese it wasn't particularly hard to understand. But grinding outside the Marsh Cave, or in the forests near Onrak, or watching my Super Monk hit bosses ten times for hundreds of damage was cathartic. Final Fantasy I is still fun to play, even in its original incarnation. It's a classic for a reason, and while a lot of the series trademarks didn't come into their own until Final Fantasy II, you can still see their genesis here.
Though, if you play, play a remake with MP. The remakes have their difficulty adjusted to balance for it, and it stops the white mage from just twirling the Heal Staff for hours on end until Chaos dies.
