"C'mon Everyone, Let's Mosey" - Introducing The Final Fantasy Journey
Cid of the Lufaine, Final Fantasy Dissidia.
The first moment Final Fantasy takes your breath away is some twenty minutes in. Your party of four have been introduced-classed and named by the player, and then you're dropped into a world of uncertainty, darkness, and princess kidnap, just outside the sleepy town of Cornelia. Either finding your own way, or being escorted, to the castle's throne room, you meet the local king, who, noting your quartet are bearing crystals, wonders aloud if you're the prophesied Four Warriors of Light, before tasking you to defeat turncoat knight, Garland, who, in a typical braggart move, has kidnapped his daughter, Sarah.
You travel north to a rather fearsome Gothic castle, defeat him and reunite father and daughter. An overjoyed king proclaims that you must indeed be the Four Warriors of Light and rebuilds the bridge between his small island and the north. Your heroes cross. The game freezes, then cuts to white.
And replacing the by now familiar Overworld and its theme, which you've crisscrossed a few times to level up enough to battle the despicable Garland, is a still image of your four heroes. And playing over it, for the first time, is Nobuo Uematsu's iconic theme, simply entitled Main Theme (and elsewhere, as Prologue, or, simply, Final Fantasy.) Uematsu himself describes it as " the song I'd like to be remembered by" and "the most important song in terms of everything I’ve ever done".
As the text scrolls by, that iconic theme, that unmistakable, oft replicated theme, infinitely remixed and reworked and performed theme that runs, like a lifeblood through the franchise, from its beginnings in a small team, on Nintendo's Famicom, through the Super Famicom and the one-two-three punch that is Final Fantasy IV, V and the knockout, VI, three games that evolve, perfect and refine the series to the pinnacle of the truly spectacular sixth game. It continues through a switch to Sony that may well have tipped the console war in the latter's favour, via the blockbuster linchpin that is Final Fantasy VII, the dark horse of VIII, and the farewell of the original team that is IX. Whilst it doesn't appear in the first two games, or indeed in the much maligned thirteenth installment, elsewhere, it otherwise punctuates the series, largely as a final, definite, full-stop late in each game's end credits.
The text that accompanies the music and minimalist, yet perfect visual, is pure Final Fantasy:
"And so their journey began. The four Warriors of Light felt overwhelmed by the great task destiny had placed upon them. They did not know the true significance of the four crystals they held in their hands... The crystal that once, long ago, shone with a light so brilliant. The time for their journey had come. The time to cast off the veil of darkness and bring the world once more into the light."
These themes are things that the franchise and its spin offs return to time and again-a small, plucky group of heroes, either prophesied or self appointed to save the world. We see it in Cloud and AVALANCHE, we see it in Noctis and his Kingsguard, in Lightning and the fellow people branded by the l'Cie, and even in the the series' two MMORPG outings. These heroes return the world to light, time after time, no matter, or despite the cost, often by returning the crystals to their rightful place, or power. Whilst the crystals themselves only occasionally appear, most recently in Final Fantasy XV's otherwise strikingly modern universe, other things replace them in replicating a sense of the world's purity, be it the Lifestream in Final Fantasy VII, polluted by the world-spanning mega corp, Shinra, or in Final Fantasy XII's sundered kingdom. Something is always out of balance and our heroes always restore it to that balance
What precedes this monologue is equally vital in the formation of the series. In just under twenty minutes, Hironobu Sakaguchi and his team of seven, including Uematsu, artist Yoshitaka Amano and writer Kenji Terada, have set the bedrock of Final Fantasy firmly in place. Crystals, that light and protect against the darkness. A realistic world, plagued with monsters and evil. Regular and almost epidemic princess kidnap. Large to ridiculous sized swords. Eloquent, more-Shakespearean-than-Shakespeare villains.
Whilst subsequent games would take steps forward in creating characters who have emotional depth, goals, interests, and their own personalities, culminating in the positive soap opera that is Final Fantasy VI's fourteen-strong cast, and graphical advances would bring the work of Amano, Tetsuya Nomura and Akihiko Yoshida closer and closer to photo realism, (belts, spiky hair, ridiculous clothing and all), Amano's flowing visual style is replicated at the cutting edge of late 1980s video game graphics.
In short, within half an hour, Final Fantasy sows the seeds of a franchise that continues to this very day-the graphics may be closer to a CGI film than blobby 8-bit graphics, with rounded, wonderfully human characters, the music closer to a symphony than tuneful bloops and blips, the game play now free roaming rather than a static back-and-forth turn based melee, but peel back the skin and it's still, down at the bone, much the same simple story. Still Final Fantasy. Yet, whilst the entire game may rest heavily upon the mechanics of Gary Gigax's 1974 roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, down to the stats, the spells, and the monsters, the story and execution is pure and utter Japan.
This is, after all, the point; first, to give the player as close to the experience of a D&D game on a home console as possible (albeit with a sadistic and tight lipped DM) and, secondly, Final Fantasy is very much a Japanese take on a western RPG.
The music comes to an end, the spell is broken.
And I am suddenly thrown back to several points in my life, like that Proustian Madeleine, Uematsu's music awakening, or rather, reawakening, several memories, simultaneously, each note familiar, that way, that on more recent versions, the full orchestra now available to the maestro, the drum furls quietly in the background, the horns rise, the strings rise. It's a tune that I've heard dozens of times before, but never in its original context, never at the beginning of a Final Fantasy game, let alone the first Final Fantasy game, on everything from piano to ukulele.
The first memory is...hazy, I'll admit. I'm maybe fourteen to sixteen, sitting at home on a computer, a decade ago, when Final Fantasy was, very much a closed book to me, a game that other people played on other consoles-I knew a few things about it-a blonde haired scowling young man with a big sword (Cloud, I thought he was called), another man with silver hair, both of whom my mother continues to this day to compare to the late David Bowie, a film called Advent Children, another film, Spirits Within that I remember glimpsing a small section of, at a point where WH Smiths still sold DVDs and games, remember my father commenting on the photorealism of it.
I am listening to music on the nascent YouTube, and I find a full album of beautifully played video game music. At this point, Final Fantasy is very much an abstract concept, (I know there must be at least seven games, if only because of Advent Children), but I play it.
For the first time, I fall in love with the music of Nobuo Uematsu. reduced though it is to a single, if impeccably played guitar. I play the video constantly, until, one day to my horror, I find that the video has been deleted. I try in vain to find exactly who the guitarist was (Yuji Sekiguchi, I've since learned). By now, I've been playing a few of the spin-off games; the beautifully tough Tactics Advance, and, when given a PlayStation by a well meaning uncle, I finally purchase first a battered second hand copy of Final Fantasy VI, and then, with impeccable luck, I find Final Fantasy VII in a charity shop for the princely sum of £2.50. I play both. I don't get very far, but I find them, particularly VI, an extremely charming duo of games.
I watch Advent Children, finally.
And, at the end of the tale, where Cloud Strife is not quite how I imagined him, (although I promptly set my secondary school PC account to a rather moody wallpaper of his Kingdom Hearts appearance,(not that i knew what that was at that point) now since lost to the ether of Web 1.0), there it is again, at the end of a reprise of themes. Given a full orchestra to spread out across, given an almost baroque quality, as though this is no longer Uematsu's piece, but Uematsu tapping into something centuries-old.. As though, once again, the dream is passing, this time on a grand scale, given such a strength that it brings tears to the eyes. Then,it gathers pace, until, with a final blare of trumpets, it ends, as does the film.
And I am suddenly at university, in a small, warm, cosy house, and we are playing Final Fantasy IX, the final bow of Uematsu as the sole composer, Sakaguchi's farewell before the PlayStation 2 arrives, and with it a fully voiced, awkwardly laughing world, where Nomura is well and truly the artistic driving force, belts, zipper and all. It's been four years since a main-title Final Fantasy game arrived, in the shape of the painfully linear, underwhelming Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIV is a game wracked by technical issues-the meteor which rebirths a realm still months from crashing into the world-and the remake of Final Fantasy VII is nothing more than a worn-out joke that only the hardcore believe will ever happen. Final Fantasy has passed its 25th year, I've passed my 20th.
Yet, four twenty-somethings are glued to a game that's over a decade old, as it reaches its denouement, as we send first Kuja, the brother of our protagonist, the Genome, Zidane Tribal, and then the literal embodiment of Death, Necron, packing. The day is won, the princess, (Garnet, who kidnaps herself minutes into the game) is safe, the hero returns, the world is set right. The credits roll on the first Final Fantasy game I have ever completed. Uematsu is back. The theme is back, after a song that's become one of my favourite pieces of Uematsu's music, Melodies of Life, and I finally understand.
This piece of music that opens the first Final Fantasy...is your reward. You've finished another game. You get to hear it again. It anchors the series together, perfectly. What begins the first game, now ends almost every single one too. As we tidy up, I simply sit and listen. The victory seems all the sweeter. And I am sitting in the Royal Albert Hall, a week ago, two of those same friends sitting next to me-the very man who composed the music, Uematsu himself mere yards below-the musicians spread out across the stage, Arnie Roth conducting, as Final Fantasy marches on to 30, and I pass 25. And that same piece of music is playing, as credits roll.
I'm going to complete every single numbered Final Fantasy game.
For so long I've enjoyed my friends, close and far, talking about these games, even been blessed enough to talk, at great lengths, about Cecil Highwind, and Firion, and Celes, and Faris, and Squall, and the veritable horde of characters that make up the cast of the fifteen games.
I've never completed one.
Not a single game.
Despite some of these characters being cherished by myself to the point that one is probably my single favourite video game character of all time, as well as being a character I take strength and influence from, I have never seen them best evil, rescue the girl, (in the cases where girls need to be rescued, rather than being the rescuer,) and bring the world back into balance. And I decide that this needs to change. I don't set myself a deadline, only an order.
Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy XV. In short, release order. Where possible, I'll play them on the original console, but in some cases (II, III, V), this is simply impossible (私は日本語話せません), whilst others may be cheaper or easier to play on another console or on PC-I don't own an American NES or SNES, so essentially everything prior to Final Fantasy VII will, simply put, be a reissue or remake of the respective game. In every case, when I begin playing a new entry of Final Fantasy, I'll indicate what console I'm playing on-you are, of course, all welcome to suggest which version of each game is your favourite, and indeed to suggest which version (budget permitting) I should play.
Two exceptions. Final Fantasy XI and XIV, the franchise's two Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS). FFXI is now practically unplayable, with Square Enix cutting support years ago, whilst, FFXIV, despite its obvious attraction, would frankly take me years and several hundred pounds to complete. Check out the very well made Japanese Drama, Final Fantasy XIV: Dad of Light, about a son trying to connect with his father via FFXIV, by the way-it's on Netflix, and is probably the best single series about gaming, and being a gamer, I can recommend at the moment.
Replacing these two games, thus, are Final Fantasy X-2 (entering the batting order after FFX and before FFXII), and Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lighting Returns (between XIII and XV). If there's enough demand, I'll talk about some of the spin-offs, time and budget willing. But, with no further ado! Final Fantasy I awaits!
So the curtain rises! Perfect!
Kuja, Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy I
Sony Playstation Portable (2008)
Open the back, remove-what else-Dissidia, replace it with the UMD for Final Fantasy I. Close the back. On the PSP's menu, that familiar oscillating harp starts up, Yoshitaka Amano's art of Chaos covers half the screen, a portent of what's to come, albeit with more imagination required than most of the modern Final Fantasy games. After all, for all its interface updates, this is half of a a port of an earlier PlayStation remake, entitled Final Fantasy Origins (2003). Everything may be more polychromatic than the NES/Famicom, but it's still relatively, and charmingly retro, with sprites, no character portraits, and only bosses particularly pushing the visual constraints of even the PlayStation, let alone the more powerful PSP.
Hit X.
A ping, a prelude, an opening cut scene sporting far more advanced set of graphics than we'll see again in this game. Hit "Start". Give the party silly names. Create what I hope is a rounded party. Hit "Start" again.
Text, filling the background of the game out, highfalutin talk of crystals, a quartet of heroes, an encroaching darkness. Then the game dumps me outside a city, shrugs, and settles back into its chair, waiting for you to make the first move. It's fair to say that, for all my praise earlier, the first twenty minutes of Final Fantasy I are not the most user friendly, even updated for the 2000s. We, our party of Warrior, Thief, Red Mage, and Monk, start off, in the grand tradition of all but the most accomplished Dungeon Masters, as a party, outside a reasonably big town.
This is my first, (and at time of writing), my biggest issue with Final Fantasy I. Whilst I have never been one for overt hand-holding or linearity in videogames-and looking at the return, with a veritable vengeance, of the open-world adventure game, I;m not alone-FFI takes this to an extreme. I have no idea where to go, there's little in the way of a guide, there's not even a goddamn map. So, for a few minutes I traipse the small continent. A broken bridge, a jutting and fearful Gothic castle, a mysterious cave containing a dessicated body, and a dead end. I return to the small town, our heroes bruised but more powerful than before. And, after visiting the local inn, resting my party up, I finally head to the northern gate of town, intending to leave and head back onto the world map to gain more power.
The plot finally rears its head as I reach the city gates-there, I'm accosted by one of the town's guard, taken into the castle, and before its monarch, who finally begins to shed some light of who our mysterious quartet could actually be, noting the crystals they carry, whilst his minister attempts to downplay what many believe to be mere legend.
A quest is needed, and one is promptly given-the king's finest knight, Garland, has made off with his daughter, and both insults need to be answered with steel. If our heroes, after all, are truly the Four Warriors of Light, then they should be able to do this easily.
Thus we give chase north, our party now better equipped to fight off the repeated hordes of goblins, werewolves and other fauna that make up the monsters of this first area, our warrior now easily able to dispatch them with a single blow, the Red Mage now groaning under a half-dozen white (defense) and black (offense magic), whilst the thief and monk make for a second and third good damage dealer. We reach the castle quickly, and head inside. For Final Fantasy's first dungeon, it's remarkably simple, almost bare. Once again the game's debt to D&D is laid bare-one can easily imagine Sakaguchi sketching it out on paper late at night. Its purpose is clear-to get the player lost, and then to direct them straight to Garland.
Garland, both as a boss and as a character, is surprisingly underwhelming when I finally come face to face with him. Whilst he's full of bravado, spitting out the line above just before he engages my heroes, even at this early point he's a bit of a pushover, and is promptly dispatched. For now. Sarah is rescued and the game mercifully drops us straight back at the castle. The king proclaims that we must indeed be the legendary heroes prophesied, has the bridge to the continent rebuilt post-haste, whilst Sarah thanks us for her rescue, and presents our party with a lute.
We leave Cornelia, fully stocked with potions, antidotes, and even phoenix downs, and head the short distance north. We reach the bridge. And Uematsu's theme kicks in, all PlayStation era MIDI, loud as my PSP speakers will go. Amano's visuals join in. Sakaguchi's writing joins them. The greatest power trio of gaming stretch their creative muscles for the first time. The cutscene ends. We cross the bridge into new, unexplored lands. A quote, from Final Fantasy VII, still six games, and a decade of innovation hence, suddenly comes to mind:
"You gotta understand that there ain't no gettin' offa this train we're on, till we get to the end of the line". To the end of the line, then, I think.
The journey, from Final Fantasy I-XV, has begun.
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