Shopping Guide
It has been almost 26 years since the start of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy (FF) series. The well-known RPG series has many players, both gamers and not, and is one of what’s called the “Big Two RPGs” in Japan, alongside the Dragon Quest series from the same company. As of May 2013, the numbered titles of the series go up to 14. Out of these 14, debates among FF fans as to which game is the best have been going on for years, and opinions vary with each player’s age and personal taste. However, as someone who has played every single game from the series starting with the first on the original Nintendo, I would like to put forth for consideration the three games released on the SNES in the 1990’s, FFIV, FFV, and FFVI.
FFIV, FFV and FFVI each managed to evolve and avoided having the popularity of the previous games cause any complacency.
It all started in the year 1990. Released in 1990 on the Nintendo, FFIII already included the major game features of the FF series, such as an adventure involving four “crystals” scattered throughout the world, “airships” that allowed you to quickly fly around the world map, cute birds called Chocobos you could ride that look like ostriches, large, summoned monsters that offered a big advantage in battles, and a “job change system” that allowed players to change their characters into fighters, monks, various types of mages, and other jobs at any time. The quality of FFIII as a game is a reason many older fans in Japan believe this game to be a perfect specimen of the series. However, with the transition from Nintendo to Super Nintendo and the advances in game hardware it brought about, rather than having FFIII be its peak, the FF series continued to show dramatic advances.
The first game of the series to be released on the Super Nintendo in 1991, FFIV, did not betray the high expectations of its players. One possible reason for this was that the playable characters in the game were given personalities, something that was rare for RPGs at the time (it was popular for playable characters in RPGs at that time to not have personalities). The pixelated characters who gave performances filled with laughter and tears as though in a stage play on the TV screen were a shocking sight no Nintendo player had ever seen before. Also, FFIV was the first game to introduce the Active Time Battle (ATB) system, which has been used in the series ever since. Putting time limits on the actions of both enemies and party members in battle, this ATB system was a revolutionary system that brought the fun and tension of an action game to RPG battles, which until that point had not been carried out in real time. In this way, as well, it can be said that FFIV is the first of the modern FF games.
Released the following year in 1992, FFV widely expanded the job change system that was popular in FFIII. Although the number of jobs didn’t change much from FFIII, FFV replaced some old jobs with new ones - such as the Blue Mage, who can remember enemy attacks, the Beastmaster, who can attack by controlling enemies, and the Dancer, who attacks enemies with dances that have special effects - and also had more depth than FFIII when it came to using job choices as a battle strategy.
It wasn’t just battles. FFV fascinated players by adding refinement to the staging of scenes and events beyond those of FFIV, having both good and bad characters alike acting out the well-known scenes.
Then, in FFVI, the characters’ personalities were emphasized even more than they had been in FFIV and FFV. Up through FFV, the stories had focused on a few major characters, but FFVI had up to 14 different characters acting out the game’s enticing story. Whether it was Cyan being separated from his dead wife and child on the platform of the magic train to the afterlife, or the scene of the night when the narcissistic Edgar uses a two-headed coin to decide the successor to the throne for the sake of his brother Sabin, or seeing how Locke the thief was unable to protect his former fiancée, by the end of each piece of the characters’ stories, the player was drawn into the point of view of that character. As for the battles, they featured special commands for each character, including a unique attempt at using timed button sequences similar to those in fighting games, which were popular in Japan at the time, for Sabin’s “Blitz” command.
Why are the three games FFIV, FFV and FFVI classics? One reason is that, although each game from FFIV to FFVI was inheriting the already successful aspects of the games before them, they were still able to insert new elements and make revolutionary advancements. Many people may think that making advancements and improvements with each game is to be expected. However, with each new game, the hurdle that is player demands becomes even higher, and it becomes very possible that the next game won’t be able to meet these demands. This is especially true of series that continue on for five or six games. Looking back, the fact that, in that situation, these games were able to gain the support of so many players in both their stories and their battle systems shows that these have to be called classics, even with whatever criticisms people may have. Video games have been around for over half a century, and these days it has become rare for a game to feel completely new. However, I believe that when it comes to the FF games, the expectations players have from here on are going to be betrayed, and I mean that in a good way.
Square Enix’s Official Site:
http: //www.jp.square-enix.com/ (Japanese)
Final Fantasy IV:
© 1991 Square Enix Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Illustration: © 1991 Yoshitaka Amano
Final Fantasy V:
© 1992 Square Enix Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Illustration: ©1992 Yoshitaka Amano
Final Fantasy VI:
© 1994 Square Enix Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Illustration: ©1994 Yoshitaka Amano
This is a Tokyo Otaku Mode original article.
*This article was written by Daisuke*
