Retro Review: Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition

©Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

Platforms: PlayStation Portable and iOS
Player(s): 1

As most gamers are aware, the Final Fantasy series is a long running series that regardless of likes or dislikes, people accept has had some impact on RPG gaming. What better way to see the basics of RPG than with the original Final Fantasy.

Regardless of the age of this game, there are some flaws that need to be expressed. First let me begin with Final Fantasy. When you begin the game, you are given the choice of more than 4 classes for each of your 4 anonymous characters to choose from, enabling a level of freedom in the way you approach the game. For its time, the story was good enough to keep people interested. As it stands now, the story is quite bland. It essentially involves the player characters going on an adventure to stop an ultimate evil. It’s as simple as that. There are small lore tidbits that are peppered throughout the game for various areas, but they aren’t explored too deeply. The game used the better set of translations that have been done for over time.

There’s a certain level of joy to be had with the innocent simplicity of this game. You level up (by fighting monsters) as you go around trying to get from dungeon to dungeon doing whatever needs to be done. If you have played any other Final Fantasy games, you will notice a lot of stuff in here that is inspiration to the games later on. Love it or hate it, the game doesn’t hold your hand very much. You are given hints as to where you need to go next, but otherwise you are expected to figure things out on your own. This level of freedom lends itself to a level of openness that is impressive for such an old game. You are given a small handful of travel tools as you progress, which limits the amount of world you can explore, but beyond that there are no artificial barriers to prevent you from exploring. The bad thing about this is that you may accidentally wander into a higher level area and get mutilated. To assist in this, you are given the opportunity to save almost at any time, and in multiple save slots. 

©Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

Being a remake, I’m actually quite happy that they didn’t redo the whole game in 3D. Rather, they redid all of the artwork in HD to give the game a completely new level of depth. Everything looks absolutely gorgeous, while still preserving what gave the original NES version its undeniable charm.  Everything is more crisp and clear in comparison with the NES counterparts. While the animations and designs are fantastic, one issue with this game is that there are only a small number of creature types to fight. This means that as you progress through the game, many new creatures will simply be a re-colored version of a lower-levelled counterpart. While this adds a level of repetitiveness to the visuals, it’s unavoidable due to the nature of the original game.

The music and sound effects have also been upgraded to take advantage of the more modern hardware. Everything sounds fantastic, and is a pleasure to hear when plugging in a nice set of headphones. The sound effects tend to get repetitive after a while though, due to lack of variety. The music is undeniably amazing though.

©Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

The main quests, even if you do the occasional side-quest, will altogether take you no more than 15 hours or so. For completionists, there is a Bestiary, which means it is incentive to go exploring as much as possible to record of every monster in the game. It isn't the most exciting thing to do, but it does add a level of replay value. The real fun is in the extra dungeons, though. There are 4 challenging dungeons that are unlocked after you defeat each boss respectively (which were originally introduced in the GBA remake). To top it off, there is an extra challenging bonus dungeon exclusive to this game which revolves around the concept of solving various puzzles within a certain time limit. Depending on what you can and can’t solve and how fast you do it, the final boss of this dungeon changes slightly. Adding in those extra dungeons can extend the amount of time you get out of the game by almost double.

This is a fantastic remake, one with wonderful quality and full of satisfying extra features to toy with. If you are a Final Fantasy fan, you owe it to yourself to buy this. If you are not, then you may want to consider your tastes. If you are a fan of classic-style RPGs or at least enjoy them, then this game is worth trying. The somewhat archaic manner of the game make it difficult to recommend to all players, but those who appreciate classic will get a blast out of this.

©Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

NOTE: This review is based solely on the PSP version. The iOS version is nearly identical, but with the inclusion of touch controls. Be warned, the Android version does not contain any of the extra dungeons.

- Teepu

---

Gameplay: GREAT
Graphics: GREAT
Sound: GREAT
Value: GREAT
 
OVERALL: GREAT