I didn't know what an rpg was until I played FF8 at my cousin's ok? So I didn't get to play FF1 until they did the gba release.
And you may remember that the gba version had bonus dungeons. I didn't know the game, so I didn't know which dungeons were bonus and which weren't. And I got lucky and made it through the first 2. But I got stuck in the third.
Genuinely stuck. I couldn't defeat the boss but no enemies in the dungeon gave any useful xp.
So I got the switch version of the Pixel Remaster and finally defeated Chaos today.
Insofar as it's worth it to "review" it: I liked it. Obviously there's barely a plot and no characters, but it's fine, the remastered pixel art looks great and both soundtracks are amazing.
I used the money boost for most of the game, full disclosure. But I didn't use the xp boost much until the end, discounting a few times I had to grind extra to get the Thief to catch up to the rest of the party.
I did get to Chaos at level 33 with no issue. Something I've seen some others say online since. No trouble with bosses, nothing. Then Chaos ruined my day. So I paced outside his door with the boost set to max and got 20 levels.
Now on to 2, which is I think universally reviled.
I regret to inform the world that I like Final Fantasy 2.
Or, I like the pixel remaster of it. I would not play the raw NES game unless someone paid me to do it, and in that case it would most certainly feel like a job, as bad as any corporate grind.
Let me try to set out, from my own experience and what I looked up, how the leveling works in this game.
every single stat is tied to use, so you only increase intellect by casting spells. Which sounds ok, except HP and MP are also calculated this way. Fuck right the fuck off.
What this leads to is that the best way to grind HP is to hit your own characters with attacks you're reasonably sure won't down them, or at any rate be in a situation where you know you can get Life off in time. The same with MP, and this is even fucking crazier: you have to sap your own party members from full to zero, win the fight, go to town, rest to get MP back, and repeat.
The game knows this, by the way, I'm pretty sure, because the first bonus party member (more on that below) is a White Mage tricked out with tons of highly-leveled spells, including Sap.
The spells and weapon skills also level up through use, but honestly that isn't crazy, it's just perhaps too slow in the default game.
This is the bad stuff, this is what everyone is thinking of when they say the game is shit.
However, it's also, as @pontifus said this weekend, the game that actually invented the Final Fantasy plot. Instead of vague directionless nonsense where you go to a town just because an npc mentioned it exists, in the previous town, this one has a clear and linear line of things you're doing. You find out the empire is working on a war machine, so you go to destroy it. You find out the princess has been kidnapped, so you rescue her.
There are chocobos, ultima, and several series classic monsters like Leviathan and Behemoth (and Iron Giant? I missed fighting one apparently but there's concept art for it in the extras).
The characters aren't deep and detailed but they're present, and fun, and the game does enough to make me feel sufficiently sad when they die.
Once I got used to it, I even liked the way that only 3 members of the party are permanent. You get a rotating cast of fourth members, and I liked most of them, even if the final fourth member, Leon, Maria's brother, who somewhat inexplicably sided with the empire and became their fearsome Dark Knight, sucks by the time you actually get him and have broken the game over your knee in the meantime.
I've already begun 3, so we'll see how that goes I guess.