thanks to the Pixel Remaster showing up on consoles, i've been going through each game in that collection one at a time in sequence, alongside my roommate, as a sorta... weird book club. i'd never beaten a lot of the initial six -- i've only tucked away IV when it came out on the Playstation as a part of the anthology collections, and VI I managed to complete when it released on the SNES Classic -- and some of them, I barely touched, like II and III.
so, as a game design enthusiast, i figure i'd jot down my findings from these games... specifically, what i feel works, what doesn't, and what the series owes to them.
this post is just gonna be about the very first game
oh look, it's the one everyone hates! buuuut since content in FFXIV just added some major references to II, it is still absolutely worth checking out, because as we get deeper into these games, we realize: every single final fantasy is cobbled together from previous final fantasies
just
not yet
bias alert: ffiv was the first one i ever got really invested in, so i get to present a story about how I acquired it and what i went through prior to actually playing it. it's a special one for me.
it's also easily the longest one i've written of these, and reads much more like a personal essay for, like, half of it, so if you like these posts, uh, this one's a little different.