i received ff1 the year it came out in 1990 for the NES when i was kid. i guess i would have been around 9 years old. i doubt my parents just picked it out and thought i would like it. i can’t recall the circumstances of how i acquired certain games, but it couldn’t have been random. most likely i got hyped up about certain games thru nintendo power coverage. anyways, i was a huge fan of dragon warrior I when it came out and finished it sometime when i was in the 4th or 5th grade. despite dragon warrior’s charm, it felt like a relic compared to ff1.

i’ve always adored ff1 and probably will never get tired of playing it. it’s timeless to me, but certainly wouldn’t seem so to someone playing it now for the first time. some thoughts on playing it now:
wow, it’s a lot more difficult than i remembered. it starts out fairly easy then proceeds to get harder around the marsh cave->earth cave->and so on… even when you’re leveled up more than you need to be it can still be difficult. the caves are full of difficult enemies and all you really have is heal potions (that aren’t that useful, but still necessary) and however many cure spells you have available. i find myself using the run ability quite often to avoid enemies that can poison, petrify, or paralyze you. and also to avoid large groups of enemies in general because they seldom reward you accordingly and they take a realllly long time to kill. the battles in ff1 are super slow. the ineffective attacks when you try to attack a monster that’s already dead make them even longer. the annoying status ailments i mentioned above happen very frequently. items that offer immunity to said ailments aren’t available until nearly the end of the game. the difficulty of enemies is very unbalanced…you might be in a cave fighting enemies that do 20-40 damage and then suddenly come across an enemy that does 170 damage in one hit (and that’s not even a critical). that type of thing can really catch you off guard and you don’t get a Life spell until about half way through the game. i’ve found that just staying alive walking through the caves is a much more challenging feat than fighting the area’s boss. also when i’m in a cave/dungeon i tend to want to grab all the treasure chests while on my way to the boss. this tactic has worked fine for me in about every RPG i’ve ever played…except this one. in ff1 it’s best to go directly to fight the boss and then come back to grab the treasure (or vice versa). this task becomes much easier when you get the Exit spell. several times during the game you’ll be struggling to get enough gold to buy the super expensive spells. then around the time you defeat the 4th fiend you’ll be rolling in gold and have basically nothing to do with it.

i still love the game’s art and each quest area is diverse and appealing to look at. it has dragons, elementals, vampires, mummies, and robots! to me, final fantasy 1 may not be one of the greatest games of all time, but it definitely is a masterpiece for the NES and for the time it came out. it is a challenging game and to my utter shame…i never finished it when i was younger. i lost major progress twice while playing ff1 back then and that totally killed my motivation to play it further. i remember getting as far as crescent lake and perhaps playing portions of the volcano quest. however, as of today 12/26/11 i have completed final fantasy 1 and thus i can now sleep more soundly at night.