The best video game intro of all time

When I’m walking the streets, people in clown outfits often spring out of nowhere, pointing a gun and screaming “What is your favorite introduction to a video game?!”. It is a question that I’ve thought a lot about over the years. The perfect video game intro should be able to establish its tone immediately, it should grab your attention, as well as memorable.

There’s a lot of potential candidates out there. Any Metal Gear Solid game is a good candidate. So is Uncharted 2, or Final Fantasy VII. However, there’s one game that I believe achieves the 3 aforementioned goals better than any of those…

Final Fantasy II on the Famicom.

Now, Final Fantasy II is not a good game. In fact, it’s a strong contender for the worst mainline entry in the series. It’s difficult to hate, though. Designed by Akitoshi Kawazu, it decided to change up the formula set by the first game by revamping the leveling system. FF1 used the standard leveling system of the party gaining upgrades in all their stats whenever they got enough XP. Kawazu decided “fuck that” and changed how it worked drastically. Now, the more a stat is used, the more it increases. So attacking would increase your attack stat, using magic would increase your magic power, and HP by enduring enemy attacks. For the time, this was downright revolutionary — How you use your characters will directly affect their stats, so they will end up filling the niches you set for them naturally. This stat system has been seen in plenty of other games, from The Elder Scrolls to The Sims, but Final Fantasy II did it first.

Trouble is, being the first in the game industry to try something is a bit like being the first soldier to attempt traversing a mine field. You’re probably just going to blow up so that other soldiers know what not to do. The leveling system in FFII is…unpolished, to say the least. The most notorious part of the whole system is getting HP: Since HP is obtained through taking damage, wailing on your own party members in the middle of the battle is a perfectly viable strategy. As such, Final Fantasy II has went down in history as “That one where you level by wailing on your own party.” and understandably so. However, the problems run much deeper than that: Magic is leveled up on a per-spell basis and takes a ludicrous amount of uses, stats can go down, shields decrease physical and magical attacks, spells intended to be extremely powerful are buggy and useless, and none of the mechanics are explained. It’s the video game equivalent of being kicked in the nuts by a ghost.

To be fair though, brutal, tedious and soul crushing difficulty is rather fitting. Final Fantasy II is not a happy game. Characters die like they’re suicidal red shirts, just about every town is in ruins by the end of the game, and there’s a overwhelmingly bleak atmosphere to the whole affair. Pretty ambitious for an 8-bit Famicom game.

Which brings me to the introduction, which I’ve managed to write 5 paragraphs without talking about. As I noted, it needs to be memorable, attention grabbing, and most of all, establishing. In Final Fantasy II, as soon as the main characters are named and the player pushes start, they are greeted with this.

That’s right. No opening cutscene, (outside of the text scroll at the beginning) no build-up. First thing that you see is your party getting murdered by 4 black knights before getting resurrected at the castle. This pleasingly bullshit free opening sets the tone perfectly. It’s perhaps one of the rawest, most honest introductions in any form of media. Final Fantasy II might be a dull, tedious and depressing slog, but they go out of their way to warn you right up front as to what kind of game this is.

Unfortunately, future ports and remakes of the game spoil this wonderful opening sequence by including a lengthy intro cutscene before it. By doing this, it manages to completely ruin what makes the opening as effective as it is. It’s not that it’s just an impossible battle — plenty of games do that, after all — It’s that it’s so sudden. By having it be the first screen in the game, the player’s very first impression is that it’s not going to be a pleasant road. With that cutscene, it’s like any other game opening.

In the end, while Final Fantasy II sold and reviewed well, it’s gone down in history as a complete mess. It’s a well deserved reputation, unfortunately. The bizarre nature of the leveling system meant it was a poor fit for Final Fantasy’s more mainstream appeal, and Kawazu ended up getting kicked upstairs to work on the SaGa series, where his increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible ideas couldn’t harm Squaresoft’s big money maker. But Final Fantasy II’s opening distills his game design philosophy into a few seconds, and that philosophy is “Fuck the player, I make what I want to make, and I don’t care if they hate me for it.”