Trivia / Final Fantasy

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Most NPCs do just say the same thing over and over again, but "Welcome to Corneria" isn't one of them; that was a paraphrasing by 8-Bit Theater.
• Breakthrough Hit: As mentioned on the main page, this game helped launch Square from a small company with a few minor hits to the juggernaut it eventually would be.
• Christmas Rushed: It was released a week before Christmas 1987, and there are quite a few bugs at release, several of which were game-breaking, good and bad.
• Dummied Out: The Angel's Ring item in the GBA remake onward can only be found under a set of conditions that can never actually happen, namely that you open the 10th chest on the 33rd floor of Whisperwind Cove. The only floor in the dungeon that has 10 chests is the "undead castle", which is never made the 33rd floor of the dungeon, and as such there's no way to obtain the Angel's Ring without hacking the game.
• Follow the Leader: The NES version of Final Fantasy is really, more or less, an unlicensed D&D product, and it all gets a bit breathtaking once you really examine just how much is similar. As examples:
  • Virtually the entire bestiary is lifted from 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the iconic Beholder and the elemental fiends (who are a lich, a marilith, a kraken, and dragon-goddess Tiamat); someone involved with the production was savvy enough to change the Beholder so that TSR wouldn't sue for use of an assiduously-guarded part of the D&D IP. The only truly unique enemies in the game are Chaos, WarMech, and the robots of the Flying Fortress (and the latter can feel like they're instead cribbing from other pop culture sources of the time, or the Square crew had played Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and expanded on it).
  • Almost all the classes are taken right from the D&D class list (with the exception of the Red Mage and with the White Mage losing a Cleric's heavy armor for balance purposes, though the Red Mage may have origins in Dragonlance, specifically some kind of attempt to recreate Raistlin Majere and the idea of the "red robes of neutrality").
  • The spell system and list is lifted from D&D almost entirely, with set spells-per-rest, the spell lists trimmed a bit to the most iconic spells thanks to space limitations (FIR2/Fira is Fireball, BANE/Scourge is Cloudkill, XXXX/Kill is Power Word: Kill, etc.) and only a slight bit of redesign at the top end to compensate for the missing ninth spell level, squishing or combining some spells together. The only real exception is the Cure spells, which funnily enough got reworked from the system early D&D used (two direct "cure wounds" spells and "heal") to a system ironically much more like what 3rd Edition and Pathfinder would implement a decade or more later (four ranks of Cure spells, along with a separate series of mass-healing spells distinct from the single-target direct heals).
  • Bahamut's existence as a benevolent dragon god is taken straight from D&D compared to the traditional mythological depiction of Bahamut as a giant fish. Similarly, Tiamat, Bahamut's evil counterpart in D&D, is a major boss that shares many basic components with the "source" material (being female, evil, multi-headed, etc).
  • Substantial parts of the 1e combat systems are incorporated into the FF1 battle engine, from simultaneous initiative rolls, multiple hits per attack action (which lives on to this day), attacks landing on a dead target deliberately (because you have to designate targets ahead of initiative), etc.
  • When looking at it like this, it seems a bit miraculous that TSR never took Square to court over it all. They probably would have if the Beholder had actually made it into the English release. Square probably owes its continued existence to that anonymous Nintendo of America employee who realized what a dire legal threat it posed and how that one monster made all the difference between homage and outright plagiarism.
  • It's worth noting that in the ports released after the WonderSwan and PS1 versions, the most D&D-related parts in the game were mandatorally changed to match the later Final Fantasy games (whereas the PS1 version had retained a "classic" mode): the spell charge system was replaced with MP, and attacks aimed at a dead enemy now redirect to a live enemy. The Pixel Remaster version restores the original spell charge system, but retains the redirection of attacks aimed at dead enemies to remaining live enemies.
• Late Export for You:
  • Like the other Final Fantasy games before VII, I wasn't released in Europe until 2003 when it was released for the PlayStation via the Origins remake. The original NES version wasn't released there until 2008 for the Wii Virtual Console.
  • Even the original US release took nearly three years after the Japanese release.
• No Budget: The Prelude was the product of Nobuo Uematsu being given no time budget. At the last minute, with the rest of the game basically finished, he was asked to compose something to play over the title screen in half an hour. Under such conditions, he simply fell back on basic music theory, throwing together a bunch of arpeggios and key changes because that's all he had time for. 35 years later, the tune has earned a place as one of the most iconic pieces of video game music of all time.
• No Export for You: There was a version in 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS that was released in Japan as part of a first-wave bonus deal with Final Fantasy Explorers before being added to the Japanese eShop. It's basically the PSP version of the game with modifications to assets for the 3D effect as well as actually rendering the game world itself in 3D. For reasons completely unknown, it never came to the west in any form.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Contrary to popular belief, the title Final Fantasy was not chosen because Square was about to go bankrupt. In reality, creator Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted the initials "FF" for the game, but his first choice, Fighting Fantasy, was already taken; he later settled on Final Fantasy supposedly because he expected the game to fail and had plans to retire after it released. Square still wasn't doing great at the time, especially with their "Disk Operating Group" venture ending up as largely a failure, and they hadn't yet produced a self-published title that had even broken 100,000 sales, let alone a million, but the company wasn't in utter, dire peril yet when FF1 came out.
• Port Overdosed: First, there were just the NES and MSX2 versions. Then came the Wonderswan Color remake, and suddenly, Square couldn't stop re-releasing this game. The Origins re-remake was based on the WSC version, and so were the three Japanese cell phone releases, based on the WSC version, as well as the Dawn of Souls edition on the Game Boy Advance, and the American cell phone release in 2010. Then Square Enix redrew all the sprites and backgrounds in the game and released it once again for the PSP, and this version found its way to the 3DS, and iOS, and Android. Oh, and it's on the Virtual Console, too—the NES version, that is. Did you keep track of all that? Finally the Pixel Remaster version was created as a "definitive edition of the original game". Stripping back all the extra content added to the ports, bringing back Kazuko Shibuya (the original game sprite artist) to help redraw all the game sprites from scratch to match up with the 16-bit era games style and bringing back some of the original game quirks like spell charges.
• Referenced by...:
  • A Red Mage appears as the third opponent in Brawl Royale. An expy named Crimson Mage replaces him in the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection version of the game.
  • Red Mage/Crimson Mage reappears in Epic Battle Fantasy 2, as the game's first shopkeeper. He is called a "former rival", as a nod to Brawl Royale.
• What Could Have Been: There's an old flier for the game that seems to depict an earlier build with very noticeable differences from the final game:
  • The leftmost screenshot depicts an area of the world map not present in the final game that may have become either Cornelia or Crescent Lake if it wasn't cut entirely. The geography doesn't quite match any location in the final game, and the player character in the screenshot appears to be a blue-colored Warrior. In the final game, Warriors are colored red.
  • The middle screenshot depicts the party shopping for black magic spells. Notably, Fire, Thunder, and Blizzard are all sold from the same shop; in the final game, magic shops only ever sell spells of one level at a time. As well, the Focus spell is nowhere to be seen, with a spell called シェイブ^note sheibu, "Shave" being included instead.
  • The rightmost screenshot depicts a battle with a "dragon" (named in katakana) the size of the full enemy area facing off against four warriors of light, all wielding weapons at once, and with a mage user in red robes (and this sprite makes the Raistlin comparison, hair color aside, a lot more obvious). The dragon graphic is one not used in the final product, too (its sprite is bigger than Chaos's and it looks more like enemy sprites from II or III than the ones found in I, bearing particular resemblance to II's Sea Snake enemies).
  • Also noteworthy of the battle shot is the White Mage (slightly different design) holding some kind of sword and the red-robed Wizard (possibly the early design of the Red Mage) holding an axe. In the final game the only sword a White Mage can use is the Masamune and no class outside the Warrior/Knight can use axes.
  • An early spell list included in Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive Volume 1 indicates that the game was originally planned to have a level 1 Non-Elemental attacking spell called ミサイラ^note misaira, roughly "Missira" or "Missila", from "missile" (ミサイル), all but certainly an adaptation of classic D&D spell Magic Missile, with the iconic Fire, Blizzard, Thunder spell set starting at spell level 2 and each having just two tiers instead of three. As well, the Paralyna spell was also planned to appear in the game (albeit with a slightly different Japanese name; パララナ instead of the final パラナ), but ultimately wouldn't make it into the series until Final Fantasy XI.

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