Deep Listens is a gaming podcast series I'm recording with a few of my friends. Every two weeks we pick and play a new game and then discuss it from a literary, philosophical, and game design perspective. Its kind of like a book club for video games. We try to dig as deep as we can on an individual game every episode so check it out!

In this episode, Gino, Chris "@zombiepie" -REDACTED-, and @jeffrud discuss battling the Four Fiends of Final Fantasy I, the moment when the game became trivial, and the conflict with the game's final boss. We start by responding to audience feedback and ZP hurts himself with Vienna Sausages again. We then cover how much status effects warp the difficulty curve in FFI, how the airship completely changes the game, and how the class change is the highlight of the game. We finish up by placing FFI on our definitive FF rankings.

Back to Basics with Final Fantasy I: Part 2- The Grand Final-e

Hello!

I refer a lot to an individual with the online handle Sulla, whose meticulously documented variant runs of Final Fantasy have fascinated me for years. Here's an actual link to where he houses these runs on his own website. To my knowledge he never did get around to a solo White Mage run, but he did do a Solo Black Mage in addition to four White Mages. Worth checking out if you like this game but don't want to put in the time to play thirty year old JRPGs.

@slag We read most of your comment on the first episode in this show and responded to it. Thanks for the great feedback!

@thatpinguino@zombiepie@jeffrud- I haven't listened to the full episode yet but I did get through the part where you discuss the PC gaming in that era. As a child of the 80's and 90's I would have been 9 when Final Fantasy 1 came out. During that time I had very brief interactions with PC gaming and I can tell you that as someone who didn't own but had a friend who did I can tell you that PC gaming was very complicated to get going around that time.

Purchasing a PC where I was at was a huge pain in the ass where I lived at. I did not have a computer store within 75 miles of where I lived which meant purchasing everything through mail order as Wal-Mart and K-Mart did not have computer parts in their stores at that time. They did however have Nintendo, and Sega products in their electronic sections and most of them had kiosk's that you can demo games at. They did sell PC games but they did not sell the hardware for people to play them.

So even if you had a Commodore 64 you had to know how to do everything through a series of commands as it was all console commands to play any of the good stuff. Even if you had a computer that could run Windows 3 you were still exiting out to a console to run and start anything. Also depending on your configuration and hardware there was a lot of editing ini and config files to get games working. It was a huge pain in the ass and one of the big reasons I played console games.

There were PC games I played like Kings Quest, Hero Quest (Quest for Glory), Monkey Island, Wing commander, Mechwarrior, etc that you couldn't play anywhere else at the time but the vast majority of games I played were console games due to the ease at which I could get games.. The only advantage to PC gaming in the late 80's and early 90's was the graphics as they were doing 16 bit graphics before the SNES and Sega were.

ZP is right though in that it was geographic based. Family and relatives that lived in or near big cities almost all had PCs but it was much harder in rural areas in which I lived. Computer Shopper was your friend but my family was unable to purchase our own PC until the mid 90's.

@zirilius: I can empathize with you on the geography point. Some background biographical stuff about me: I grew up an Air Force brat, but I came into this world when my military parent was very low in rank and my non-military parent was still in school. I lived in government housing my first few years, then a dilapidated farm house with bats, and then more base housing in rural North Dakota. It was there, in about 1996, that my parents put together enough money to buy the first computer in my entire extended family. Surprise, it was piece of shit Packard Bell. Prior to that, I had only seen computers in some shops growing up, or in the form of yellowing Apple IIs in my base elementary school computer lab.

Meanwhile, my parents had managed to scrape money together for a (used) NES to share between myself and my two brothers in 1992, and somehow we wound up with a model 2 Genesis in the mid-1990s as well. When my military parent got deployed to An Overseas Location in the late 1990s, they got introduced to Mario Kart 64 and when they came back on leave they bought a brand new N64 so they could play that game with the three of us before they were shipped back. Not long after that period we moved again, managed to hit "lower middle class" social standing, and could afford things like a not shit computer or even a DVD player (with Hart's War!) without the tacit understanding that we'd all be eating a little leaner for a while from it.

So, yeah, my own exposure to computers generally, and playing games on them specifically, was minuscule compared to my console gaming experiences growing up. That said, I played LEGO Island on that Packard Bell and seeing the GB crew run through that game a while ago was an amazing nostalgia trip for me.

Alright finally finished the episode and have some thoughts on the rest of the podcast. I really don't have much to say that hasn't already been said in the podcast. I agree that FF1 especially the NES version was literally nothing but a battle against RNG. What classes you bring and gear you equip help negate some of that but nothing can prepare you for the RNG boss.

I've played through FF1 about 4 or 5 times in my life. The first when I was 9 and I was able to beat the game with the help of Nintendo Power, once on GBA, once on PS1 and I believe once on PSP. There might be one other time in there but I've pretty much played every "good" and shitty iteration of this game. So I've experienced the Chaos Shrine/Temple of Fiends in all that is good and bad. I've died to Kraken or Tiamat due to bad RNG and have steam rolled Chaos. I've also had the same experience as ZP where Chaos just nukes the entire party with AoE multiple turns in a row.

With all that said I do agree that it's amazing Final Fantasy turned into the success it did here in the West but a large part of that was due to how much of a leap there was from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy II (IV) on the SNES. Square actually played that very well in my book but sales of IV were actually pretty mediocre. if I remember. Square's success can largely be attributed to the SNES because they just kept putting out hit after hit in the RPG market in the 90's. I mean you had Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars all within the span of 4 or 5 years. All but two of those games defined Square as a company but you don't have that . I think Mystic Quest and Evermore are the games that aren't to the same quality as the rest albeit still being decent quality games.

You hit the nail on the head in that Dragon Quest/Warrior releasing games on the NES after Final Fantasy IV had been released on the SNES was what caused Enix to lose faith in the NA market on RPGs. Dragon Quest V and VI I don't believe ever came to NA on the SNES.

On a final note though I can't remember who said it but Final Fantasy XIII only starts getting good after you get to Pulse. That game is too linear and tutorial heavy until you get that point. After you get to Pulse is when the game actually opens up and you can't start putting all that tutorial nonsense to actual use. Fights become less about hitting X to start auto-battle and more about actually setting up combo strings to do breaks, apply buffs/debuffs, and dealing damage. It's also the first time you start getting to bosses that are actually difficult. And whoever said the series starts getting good in Lightning Returns needs to eat a Vienna Sausage. Final Fantasy 13 is in my opinion the strongest of the three games in terms of its story and characters followed by 13-2. Lightning Returns is a hot mess when it comes to it's story and ending even if it has the best actual combat of the series.

Congratulations on getting another Final Fantasy game down! Only... 8 more to go, if we're counting the main-numbered entries. XIII isn't that bad, honestly. It's at least fairly coherent, once you figure out what the hell the made-up proper nouns everyone keeps flinging around mean. That's more than you can say about some of the entries in this series.

In regards to the podcast, I meant to write in last episode about some of your PC/Console talk, but it seems like most of what I was going to mention was discussed in this one. What I will say is that as someone who spent a good long time playing a bunch of old PC RPGs (and blogging about them on this very website) I think you'd have a similarly miserable time trying to go back and play a CRPG from 1987. Move that up a couple of years and I might be capable of giving some recommendations (Might and Magic III came out in 1991 and is surprisingly playable) but a lot of your issues with FF 1 (mean status effects, intentionally confusing dungeon design, never really knowing where to go in the main world, etc) were more-or-less endemic to the whole RPG genre around that point in time.

@arbitrarywater: Yeah, I've fiddled with M&M I, II and III at this point and decided that those three are write-offs in my back catalog. Might have it in my for IV and V, which seem rad, and Ultima from IV onward is probably in play as well. But otherwise, yeah I think there's a similarly shared punitive design philosophy that underlies both sides of the RPG coin in this era.

@jeffrud: @thatpinguino: I want the two of you to know I legitimately got food poising after the podcast ended.

@zombiepie: I told you that would happen before the podcast started.

World of Xeen is indeed rad, and I believe it's the earliest "one of those" I've actually managed to play to completion. There are a couple of other early 90s DOS-era CRPGs that I think still hold up relatively well but I'm not going to pretend that they don't have their own weird hoops and hurdles to get over.

@zombiepie: You only have yourself to blame.

I just want to remind both of you that the virtue system in Ultima IV is a nightmare and way more complicated than it has any right to be. Leveling any of the individual virtues was a pain and not at all intuitive.

@zombiepie: Yeah, my own experiences with Ultima IV did not last very long. That said, reading about the game and the way its mechanics work is legitimately fascinating. For a game that came out in 1985, it's absurdly ambitious (which I guess is a label that one could throw at most of the Ultima series.) It's just unfortunate that it's also a RPG that came out 30 years ago and might as well be in a foreign language for how distant it is from modern intuitive game design.