Final Fantasy I - Gaining My Online Independence

Final Fantasy XVI will be with us before you know it. While I'm not as enamored with the series as I once was, a new entry still feels like a significant event, and one worth celebrating. So that's what I'm going to do, by writing about each mainline entry in the lead up to 06/22. I won't write reviews, provide in-depth analysis, or even attempt to explain why VIII is the best one. Instead I'll write around these games, using them as inspiration to cover something related. Hopefully something you haven't read before.

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A hairy ballsack, peaking out from the start menu. A prickly pair of nads. That was how I accessed Final Fantasy (1987).

I first played Final Fantasy I via the NES emulator, NESticle, a crudely named and widely-used freeware program that ran without issue on the out-dated PC that I took to university.

I left home in the autumn of 2001 for higher education. Freed from the shackles of the family PC and dial-up internet, I was excited to have my own computer and the privacy to use it as I saw fit.

We'd had a family PC from the mid-90s; an internet connection came a year or two later. We used it for very predictable things - Windows 95 things. Word-processed homework, Encarta-browsing long before Wikipedia was a thing; an NBA trivia disc that commemorated the NBA at 50, and enhanced music CDs that ran impossibly poor quality videos. My horizons were expanded slightly once we got the internet, but my surfing habits were fairly conservative. Check the NBA scores, log on to the Final Fantasy Shrine Forums, and print off some pages from GameFAQs.

As for PC games, I hardly touched them. Age of Empires and Virtual Springfield were about the extent of it.

Having moved to a uni dorm, and having my own PC, I finally had my online independence. And what did I do with that freedom, you may ask? Well, I watched that video of a woman giving birth to an American football, obviously, as well as other peak-early-2000's shock clips. But it wasn't all just porn and tasteless videos. Napster opened my eyes to a whole new world of music, and new ways of enjoying and archiving tracks. I was downloading Final Fantasy soundtracks, soul B-sides, and live rock albums, and was encouraged to try out new artists and genres. Napster didn't replace CDs - I kept buying physical copies of albums until the mid-2010s, before succumbing to Apple Music. Rather, it complimented them.

MSN Messenger taught me how to communicate in an online-world. I learned new parlance, forged new connections, and through trial and error learnt how online communication could enhance, or ruin, real-life relationships.

It was 2001, I was 18, and I was figuring stuff out. The internet was new-ish and exciting, and we were all learning how it would fit into our lives.

And then, of course, there were video games. On the recommendation of a JRPG-loving friend - sorry for the bad word - I downloaded NESticle. I felt like some kind of criminal, unsure of the legality of such software. But whatever, I figured, there were far worse things on my hard drive than NES roms. 

And that's how I first played Final Fantasy (1987).

I came to the series with FFVIII in early 2000. By the time I went to uni, I'd played VII-IX, and had also imported and enjoyed FFV, VI and Tactics. I was thoroughly smitten by these games, my first taste of RPGs. Lavish worlds, character development like I'd never experienced before, beautiful scores, stat-tinkering, and of course the main appeal for any gamer of that era: stunning CG cut-scenes that necessitated multiple-disc releases. If your RPG wasn't on at least two discs, I wasn't playing it! 

Living in the UK, there was so much of that series, and the RPG genre in general, that I simply couldn't access. At least not without expensive imports and a grasp of the Japanese language. FFVII was the first of the series to be released in the PAL region, it took decades for Dragon Quest to show up, many of the 16-bit classics skipped us entirely, and some core-texts like Xenogears have still never been released. 

NESticle was an 8-bit solution, and one that I was keen to explore. As excited as I would've been to have access to early FF, I don't recall putting much time into FF1. It felt very lacklustre compared to what I was used to, and it didn't hold my attention for long. It struck me as something I should play, rather than something that I was going to enjoy. I spent maybe a few hours on it, but I was satisfied that I'd done my bit and that playing every mainline FF was now an achievable goal.

A few years later, Square Enix saw fit to release FF and FFII on a late-in-the-day PS1 compilation: Final Fantasy Origins. This 2003-release was how I played it start-to-finish, encouraged by improved graphics, a remixed soundtrack, and of course newly created CG cut scenes. An underwhelming experience, all in all, but one that I was glad to have under my belt.

When I moved to Japan in 2005, I almost immediately bought a pristine, Famicom copy of Final Fantasy, despite not owning a FC to play it on. I still held that game in high regard, more so for what it represented rather than the content of the game itself.

It was a relic, to be cherished but not played. The start of something very special.