Final Fantasy Origins

"A blast from the past..."

I like this game for two reasons...

It makes me realize how far the series has truly come, and how much better it is today than back in the day. Now, on to the review.

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Story: 2
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Back when I played this game as a young child, the story was somewhat good. Only after playing through it again, after playing all of the subsequent final fantasies, do I realize how simple it is. On one hand its nice to not have to strain your brain to understand everything, but on the other the story is so horridly simple it sinks to the point of being dryer than burnt toast. Go here and kill the bad guy would work if there were some actual story that went along with it instead of ''I am the bad guy who is doing *insert horribly evil thing here*. I will kill you now.'' or some variation on that theme. I fully realize this comes from back in the NES days, but if you are going to throw in some extra features and clean up the translation why not add in some extra dialogue that will flesh out the story. This goes only for part one, part two does a little better of a job (but not much).

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Graphics: 4
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I don't have any issues with part one (its a faithful recreation of the original, with some added bonuses here and there), but I have a high-def plasma screen and running part two gives me a headache. WAY TOO PIXILATED, its like looking at huge grains of colored sand running around on my screen. These were better released on the game boy advance SP. Take out the FMV's at the beginning, and it would run GREAT on that system. As it goes for the playstation, my score says it all.

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Gameplay: 0
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This is where my major problem with the game lies, and also why it makes me appreciate the newer final fantasies so much. First of all, the random battle frequency is grotesque. I couldn't walk around for more than five seconds on the world map or three seconds (these are max. times, average was about one second) in a dungeon without getting into another battle. Now, this wouldn't be so bad if the battles were fun, but tragically they aren't. In more recent versions of the series you have special skills to use (steal, etc) that liven up the battles a bit. If you get tired of beating monsters senseless than you could start stealing from them and gaining rare items, etc. Not in these games. You basically have three options, which re: fight, use magic, or run. These wouldn't be so bad if it weren't forced upon the player every few seconds. These are what brought the score down so low.

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Sound: 8
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The job that was done on the music alone merits the score. Back in the olden days programmers only had so much space for graphics, sound, game, etc, and could only do so much. I'm glad that they used some of the extra cd space to put in new orchestral scores (too bad they didn't use the extra space to better the story with more cutscenes). As for the sound, well, its back from the NES days so I can't be too hard on it, but they could have had a little touching up for good measure.

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Challenge: 1
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Were it not for the end battles or the endless onslaught of random battles these games would not be difficult at all. The only challenge that comes with the random battles lies in the extremely limited set of options that you are given with to fight (see gameplay section above for more elaboration).

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Replay Value: 0
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Why would I want to play through something that only irritated the heck out of me more than once? Its like getting more cavities on purpose just so you can go through the thrill of going to the dentist and having them filled again. Had the battle frequency been fixed I MIGHT have wanted to play through this again just to see what the challenge may have been with only four white mages or with only red mages, etc.

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Bottom Line: 2 (not an average of above scores)
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Had this been released on the Game Boy Advance SP there MIGHT be some merit for SOMEONE out there to buy this collection of two final fantasy games. As it stands being released on the playstation it is lacking in too many areas (namely the gameplay...random battle frequency). Great music is not enough of a helping hand to drag this game out of the pit it has fallen in to. Games like final fantasy VII have shown us all what this series is truly capable of. After experiencing gameplay like that its nearly impossible to subject oneself to the grinding agony that is these two games except if you are really into re-living the old days.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 10/14/03