Final Fantasy II

So now Square had an issue- Final Fantasy had become the runaway hit nobody expected, and with the company back on its feet, they could begin developing games again.

“Hey!” Hironobu Sakaguchi (probably) exclaimed to his head designer, Akitoshi Kawazu one morning. “Final Fantasy was a hit! You know what that means? We need to make a sequel! Just think of it! We’ll make a bigger world, with more characters, more spells, more enemies! Those fuckers over at Enix won’t know what hit them! Ha-ha! Final Fantasy II will be the greatest RPG of our time! Tell your team and get to work! Don’t let me down!”

It seemed like it would work too. Except this particular morning, Kawazu had been hitting the bong pretty hard.

“Hey!” Kawazu (definitely) said to the FF2 team that same morning. “Alright guys, we’ve got to make Final Fantasy II. So here’s my plan- you know all that stuff people liked about the first Final Fantasy…?”

“Scrap it. We’re gonna change everything.“

And it just got worse from there.

Final Fantasy

Of the Final Fantasy series, the first title isn’t really one of my favourites. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to some of the later games in the series if you ask me.
My play through of Final Fantasy this past few days, my first in many years, truly hammered this home.

Final Fantasy has not aged well. This is a game that came out in 1987 and has undergone many face-lifts since then, but even with a new coat of paint and a refined combat engine, this is a game that is honestly very hard to recommend.

But let’s take a trip back to 1987, where a small game developer named Square is in the midst of a financial crisis. After a string of unsuccessful titles for the Nintendo Entertainment system, the company was looking bankruptcy square in the face, their director of planning, a man named Hironobu Sakaguchi, decided to put all the company’s money into the development of one last game- the game he always wanted to create, and since he thought it would be his final work in the industry, he named it Final Fantasy. Oh, the irony.

As I’ve said before, Final Fantasy is a game I always held very close to my heart. It was the game that introduced me to the genre so many years ago, and I had nothing but fond memories of this, the first game in a long and very enjoyable franchise.

Ah, how suddenly things can change.