Aspect Analysis – Final Fantasy I and How Unintuitive Old School RPG's Could Be.

With Archdruid doing an eighties themed contest, I figured now would be the time to talk about something I've been meaning to delve into for some time, and that is how unintuitive older RPG's could be for newcomers. And when I say newcomers, I mean to those new to both RPG's and fantasy settings and games, and there is no better game to focus on for this discussion the Final Fantasy.

I was once watching my nephew start, for the first time, a game of Final Fantasy since he had an NES available. He never played an RPG before and didn't really understand the concept of classes as most gamers do, and no physical manual available. Going with the default classes since you don't know what you are doing, you end up with Fighter, White Mage, Black Mage, and Thief (It has been a while, so I may be remembered the default classes wrong. Either way though, my points stand). You take your team out of town and get killed in the first random encounter because you hadn't bothered to buy equipment.

I point this out to my nephew when he asked me about it, and he goes back in to buy equipment this time. With no knowledge of the classes, what would you buy for your characters? What can a white mage equip? You buy a sword, but for some reason, only the fighter can equip it. Why can't that white mage equip a sword? Suddenly you bought a bunch of equipment that you can't even use. This isn't even getting into buying spells that you can use.

Without having to get outside help from someone who can explain the basics to you, or go online and read guides or manuals there, you pretty much have one way to figure this out: Trial and Error. Buy a bunch of stuff and just start seeing who can equip what. It can take a bit of time and luck to figure out how the game even functions and how you are expected to handle the simplest of tasks.

This is a bit of an odd aspect analysis, because it's not something you can really avoid at this time in gaming. Gaming manuals were essential for explaining how things function because a game like Final Fantasy simply had a lot more data on the cartridge. It wasn't uncommon to leave a lot of info in manuals even for PC games at the time, many old PC RPG's even included all of the stories in manuals and the game would reference them.

And honestly, I don't think it's fair to sit here and judge a game by something that it really couldn't help because of when it came out. Final Fantasy was a game that, by all rights, shouldn't have been nearly as good as it was. It's a grand and epic release that altered the history of gaming as we know it, and it came from a group who was on the verge of collapse whose only real experience was making text adventure games that nobody liked.

At the same time, I also think that there is sometimes a point to be had when people would say these older games were too hard to get into and it kept a lot of people out of the hobby. If you were that small kid who got a hold of a copy of Final Fantasy for one reason or another and picked it up without having access to the original instruction manual, you would be at a complete loss with nothing in the game to show you what the rules even were. No internet in the average household back in that day, so that's not an option, and with gaming not being as widespread, despite this being the time things really started taking off, there isn't a guarantee you'd have a friend who happened to know about these kinds of games who could help you out. And that forced trial and error of having to find out what gear and spells different people are even capable of using is not a fun challenge, it's just annoying busy work that you have to get through before you're even allowed to enjoy the game.

I love what this game did for the genre, but I do think it's also good to occasionally look back and appreciate the things we can do nowadays that wasn't as easy to do back then as gaming was just starting to get its stride on. The in game tutorial, while a bit forced and overused (Seriously, more games need the option to skip that and make it optional, not mandatory), has probably done a lot more then some people give it credit for, and had I not seen my Nephew picking up Final Fantasy with no context going into it, it's one of those small things about gaming history I may have never taken the time to think about.