I have a complicated relationship with the gods. On the one hand, I appreciate a good mythological framework. Raise a temple here, slay a monster there, deliver some precious cargo to appease Zeus’s divine whims, sure, I’m down. But on the other hand, when my entire fate hinges on the fickle roll of some brightly colored dice, I start wondering whether the Oracle and I are due for a bit of a heart-to-heart.
The Oracle of Delphi is Stefan Feld’s answer to the question: “What if a Feld game wasn’t about points?” That alone made me raise an eyebrow. I mean, his middle name is practically ‘point salad’. But in The Oracle of Delphi, there are no points. Only tasks. 12 tasks, to be specific, and none are more important than the other. The whole game is just ‘first to finish all their chores and get back home to Daddy Zeus, wins!’
If you’ve been around the board game block, you’ve likely played a couple of games by Stephan Feld. And if you’re reading this, I’ll bet you’ve played at least The Castles of Burgundy. So the premise of a Feld game, a master of Euros, that doesn’t feature points at all, should have you intrigued. Perhaps even more so when you learn it’s a pickup and deliver, action efficiency game. And early on, it is exciting! The map is modular and sprawling, dotted with tasks of inequal importance. You’ll set off in a little ship, ready to collect offerings and erect statues, your mind dizzy with the things you want to do quickly, while procrastinating some of those harder tasks. It feels whimsical and exciting when you start playing.
Then, the dice come out.
Every round, you roll three custom dice. These are your “oracle dice,” the divine guidance you’ve been given from on high. The Oracle of Delphi sports an impressive 12 different actions, most of which are affected or dictated by what colour dice you’re using. You want to move to a blue spot? You’ll need a blue dice for that. Want to load or unload a yellow cube? Hope you rolled a yellow. Want to slay a red beast? I think you know where I’m going with this.
Now, to Feld’s credit, this action selection system isn’t a total crapshoot. There are a lot of mitigation factors available here. From divine favours, to various god powers rendering a specific colour as wild, to a deck of dice cards that you can hold in your hand until you’re ready to use the specific colour, there’s a suite of clever ways to wiggle around the fate you rolled for yourself. But the core tension remains: this is a game about action efficiency, but it’s full of randomness. You are never in full control. You are managing chaos, politely negotiating with the gods for efficiency.
The Oracle of Delphi does have its charming moments. The round where you roll the colours you need, fly across the board, complete two tasks, use a god ability to fly to another spot, and use one of the dice cards to complete a third task. When the game flows, it’s awesome. It helps that the objectives are clear and obvious, nothing is obfuscated or difficult to figure out how to get it done. The only question is how do you get it done, quickly?
But when the fates decide to play against you, your game grinds to a halt. You’ll be stuck in a corner without any of the right colours, or you’ve invested 6 fate tokens into monster-slaying and still manage to roll a miss, The Oracle of Delphi can be maddening. This is doubly frustrating because the game is a race. You’ll have a clear lead, but one bad turn can put you several actions behind. It sucks feeling like you’re the clear winner, only to have your turn absolutely stymied by a bad roll, then your opponent managing to roll perfectly and rocket on past you.
It’s also a bit dry. Thematically, it sounds like a mythic journey, from erecting statues and temples to slaying beasts. But the gameplay really is just an optimization puzzle with some thin divine window dressings. The description on the back of the box casts all these actions as heroic acts, but most of the time it feels like you’re just figuring out what set of actions your dice will allow, and figuring out how to spend them most efficiently.
And while I’m being negative, the potential to lose a whole turn exisits in this game. Like, straight-up skip-your-turn punishment. I think this aspect his here to be a push your luck element, do you make a mad dash for your objective, or waste an action clearing these injury cards. If you happen to have 6 cards total, or 3 of a single colour, you spend a whole turn not playing. For a game that’s already built around pacing and tempo, this feels like a brutal punishment.
The Oracle of Delphi is a strange, bold detour in Stephan Feld’s career. It ditches his usual point-based mathematical intricacies for a pickup and deliver race. It has an air of chaos at its heart, and that chaos can be thrilling. Choosing to push your luck while holding 4 injury cards so you can hit the ultra efficient action can make you feel like a genius if you pull it off. But the luck in the game can also leave you utterly stranded and frustrated.
I’ve enjoyed my time with The Oracle of Delphi. The puzzle is compelling, the pace is generally brisk, and the game system rewards clever planning. But every play leaves me wondering if I won because I played well… or because the gods just tilted the scales to my favour.
Then again, maybe that’s the point. After all, no mortal reaches Olympus without a little luck.
Whenever the topic “What’s your favourite Final Fantasy?” comes up, I’ve always had a single answer. Final Fantasy IV. On the SNES as a kid, it was my first JRPG, and I just remember the music, the story, and the characters really speaking to me. It inspired me to seek out dozens of JRPGs over the years until that genre became a part of my identity.
I’ve replayed portions of Final Fantasy IV over the years. I’d usually get to the part where Cecil becomes a paladin, or even as far as Palom and Porom turning to stone, but generally I’d be playing on an emulator on my phone or something else non-ideal, and I’d end up dropping the game before too long, so I was quite eager to reach this entry on my Final Fantasy playthrough.
The Story
Final Fantasy IV begins with The Dark Knight Cecil Harvey on an airship. Having just completed a raid on the village of Mysida and claimed its crystal at the behest of his king. He fulfilled his duty, but his internal monologue has doubts. Some of his men express doubts, but being the loyal leader that he is, he silences them quickly. Suddenly, monsters attack, although The Dark Knight dispatches them with ease.
Upon returning home to Baron and handing the crystal to the king, Cecil asks if the force is necessary. The king admonishes Cecil for questioning his rule and strips him of his rank as commander of the Red Wings as punishment. Cecils childhood friend, the dragoon Kain, stands by his friend’s side, and receives a similar admonishment. Cecil is then tasked to deliver a package to the nearby village of Mist, with Kain to accompany him.
In the moments that follow, you’re also introduced to Cid, the excitable engineer, and Rosa, Cecil’s love interest. She tries to comfort Cecil, but he’s emotionally closed off from her. The next morning, Cecil and Kain go to Mist, slaying the Mist Dragon guarding the pathway to Mist. Upon arriving in the village, the package is revealed to be a bomb ring, sending bomb monsters to raze the village. Cecil and Kain, horrified at the attack, rush to save a child, crying over the body of their mother. They quickly learn that the mother didn’t succumb to the bomb attack, but fell when her summon, the Mist Dragon, was slain. Cecil and Kain try to get the girl, Rydia, to safety, but she panics, and summons Titan, who causes an earthquake and landslide, cutting Cecil off from his path back to Baron.
When the dust settles, Kain is nowhere to be found, and Cecil is alone with Rydia. He carries her to a nearby inn, and vows to keep her safe. Even when Baron guards appear at the inn, dispatched to finish the job of slaying the summoners, Cecil fights back.
What follows is a tale of redemption. Party members come and go, from royalty of destitute castles, to magical prodigies, to old friends, characters come and go from Cecil’s quest, each one lending unique abilities to help him overcome his trials. Cecil himself travels to Mt. Ordeal to cast off The Dark Knight moniker and become a paladin instead. Cecil’s task of gathering the crystals is taken over by a fearsome foe named Golbez, who has some ability to control the minds of others, as he manipulates Kain to torment Cecil. Cecil, however, forges alliances with people all over the world to fight back against the forces of darkness.
The Generational Jump
The jump to the SNES was obviously significant for the Final Fantasy series. The expanded hardware gave the team more of everything to utilize. From sound, to colours, to just the number of pixels you could use to create a character, everything was expanded. While still restrained and limited in certain areas, like how most sprites are unable to physically interact, instead opting to just have characters stand next to each other, and perhaps raise an arm or two, or to just have a sprite spin in place to show excitement, Final FantasyIV manages to convey a surprising amount of emotions within these constraints, except for the one moment where Rose and Cecil embrace, which switches to a specific sprite for that moment. It was surprisingly powerful, especially when you’re used to emotional moments having fully animated cutscenes.
I find it quite fascinating that moving from Final Fantasy I, to II, then III, there has always been an emphasis of freedom in how you build out your party. You could always choose to have a very rounded team, or a brute force squad, or even make every party member a mage if you wanted to. Final Fantasy IV removes all of that freedom. For the entire game, your party is based on which characters are with you, and each character has a defined role, including specific abilities and equipment that cannot be swapped between characters. The most jarring part of this adventure for me was when the white and black mages Palom and Porom are in your party, and then you’re joined by the Sage, Tellah. Having such a magic forward party is generally not my preferred way to play, but in Final Fantasy IV, you have to work with what you get.
I can’t say that having teammates locked to certain equipment or skills is such a negative, however. If you’re new to JRPGs in general, it does give you an easy on-ramp to typical character archtypes and builds. The characters flowing in and out of the party works for the story too, as generally, a character leaves your party by sacrificing themselves, much in the vein of Final Fantasy II, although here, most of the characters miraculously survive, even when leaping from an airship holding a ticking bomb, which can undercut some of the dramatic moments. As always in media, if you don’t see the body, you can’t assume they actually died.
The difficulty in Final Fantasy IV is generally pretty easy, and I give partial credit to having the party built for you, and built for each specific dungeon. There were a few moments where my whole party got wiped out, particularly reaching the moon for the first time, or getting totally paralyzed by gold dragons. But I never felt like the difficulty spiked particularly badly. There’s also a much less emphasis on equipment here, with most characters only having 4 or 5 different weapons throughout the entire game. No longer are you buying a new sword in every town, you really just pick them up in the dungeons as you go along, and wouldn’t you know it, the chests in the dungeons contain loot specifically tailored for your party.
The magic system has been overhauled as well. You’ll never need to buy spells from the towns, instead each character learns spells as they level up. It’s a fine system, but it, again, feels like it’s stealing freedom from its players. These characters will learn their skills at their pace, and you just have to accept it.
The real big change in Final Fantasy IV is the Active Time Battle system. instead of queueing all of your attacks at the top of a round, and them having them execute one after the other, then take an enemy beating, now each character has a timer. Faster characters will act more frequently, sometimes twice as often as the slowest enemies. It made the battles feel much more dynamic and exciting. Especially during the battles where I was desperately waiting for my healers bar to fill up so I could revive or heal someone else that was close to death.
Conclusion
Final Fantasy IV is the first time I’ve really felt like I’ve been playing a Final Fantasy game since I started this little adventure down memory road. Perhaps because characters and story have become such a mainstay of the series, that the first 3 games felt like empty shells rather than the full Final Fantasy experience I was expecting. Final Fantasy IV has its problems, namely the lack of freedom in building your party, railroading the characters in your party, the lack of side quests or optional dungeons to really test your mettle, but it’s still a great game. I think that Final Fantasy IV is the best place for someone to start if they wanted to experience Final Fantasy for the first time, or even JRPGs for the first time. It delivers an emotional story while taking away some of the nitty gritty details of party building and inventory management. Players won’t be looking up class guides to min/max their stats, and rarely will they even need to look up directions. I loved my time with Final Fantasy IV, I almost never felt frustrated or lost. I was happy to be back with old friends, re-experiencing a tale of redemption that has been buried in my psyche since I was a child. As of now, Final Fantasy IV remains my favourite Final Fantasy experience, but only time will tell if it’ll hold onto that honour.
When it’s late, brains are fried, but nobody really wants to stop just yet.
There’s a magic moment at the end of game night: the heavy hitters are back in their boxes, but you and your friends aren’t quite ready to call it quits. You want something light, fast, but still full of those exciting decisions and euphoric “aha!” moments that leave you buzzing. The real trick is finding the games that hit the sweet spot between being quick play and genuinely fun.
I’m here to help! Here are five of my absolute favourite games to close out game night on a high note:
1. For Sale
The slickest property deal you’ll ever make in 20 minutes.
For Sale is the filler game that earned its spot on the shelf. It’s fast, funny, and somehow, always exactly what the group needs. The game starts with players bidding on properties using your limited stash of coins, and then you’ll immedately turn around and use those properties to earn cold hard cash in a blind auction. It’s two clever little auctions in one deck of cards.
It’s quick, compact, super easy to teach, but it offers just the so many meaningful decisions. I’ve never gotten tired of it, and I’ve never had someone shrug their shoulders after a game.
For Sale is the perfect palate cleanser after a rules-heavy euro, no matter the crowd. For Sale always delivers.
2. 6 nimmt!
Lightweight, lightning-fast, and occasionally rage-inducing
This little box hides a world of tension. In 6 Nimmt!, players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and place it face down. Everyone reveals their cards, and they’re all added to the rows in ascending order… unless their card would be the sixth card in that row, in which case they must scoop up the whole line and take those nasty points. It sounds simple, and it is, but the simultaneous reveals create pure magic.
The excitement I feel when we reveal our cards and find that we’ve all jostled for the same row, leaving one person holding a whole bag of points always gets the table erupting with laughter. The simultaneous reveal is so exciting and hilarious.
There’s something wonderfully cruel about a game that punishes you for trying to be just a little too clever. 6 Nimmt! is fast, addictive, and endlessly replayable.
If you want to learn more, check out my full review by clicking here
3. SCOUT
No rearranging your hand. No theme, either.
SCOUT is a quirky little ladder-climbing game that starts off feeling restrictive. You cannot rearrange your hand of cards, but it quickly reveals its genius. Every turn is a puzzle: do you improve your hand by scouting, giving points to your opponents, or or try and strike with your best hand? With dual sided cards and a simple scoring system, SCOUT rewards creativity and precision in equal measure. For me, it always ends up being an exercise in hubris
Whether you’re shedding your way to victory or stockpiling cards, SCOUT always leaves me smiling.
If you want to learn more, check out my full review by clicking here
4. So Clover!
The word game that turns your group into mind readers. Or questioning each other’s sanity.
Imagine the wildly popular Codenames, but fully cooperative, and without the severe downtime. In So Clover!, everyone simultaneously jots down clue words to connect keyword pairs on a big green clover, then the whole group works together to decode what the heck everyone else was thinking. It’s hilarious and blessedly low-pressure.
So Clover is a warm, inviting game that’s perfect when the group wants to wind down and share a few last laughs before packing it in. As a bonus: you’ll definitely derive a few inside jokes out of someone’s completely off the wall connection.
5. The Crew
Just one mission. Okay, maybe three. Fine, the whole campaign.
Trick-taking goes cooperative in this brilliant little space puzzle. Each mission gives players individual objectives, like “Bigfoot must win a trick with the yellow 2, but Otter has to win the green 4, first”, then you try to make it all happen… without being able to talk. The beauty is in the slow build. Early missions are a breeze. By mission 30, you’re cursing out your captain, even if they had no hope of leading the team to victory.
At first, The Crew is just a quick filler game. Then it’s 2am. It’s dangerously addictive. It’s the perfect closer that somehow… keeps going. But hey, what’s one more mission? How desperate are you really to get to bed?
Conclusion
Closing out a game night doesn’t need to feel like a let-down after you’ve lost the big game of the evening. These five games deliver fast fun without sacrificing great moments, which is perfect for winding down while still feeling like you’re making interesting decisions. Whether you’re after laughs, puzzles, or a little competitive zing, any of these games I’ve listed are guaranteed crowd-pleasers.
Got your own go-to nightcap games? Drop them in the comments, because let’s be honest, there’s always room for one more game.
I’m never quite sure whether I prefer reviewing light games or heavy ones. Light games get to the table more often. They’re easier to teach, quicker to reset, and rarely leave your brain excited. But sometimes I wonder what is there to really say about them? Then I play something like Juicy Fruits, and I’m reminded that simplicity doesn’t always mean shallowness.
Juicy Fruits, designed by Christian Stöhr and published by Capstone Games in 2021 under their Family Game line, at first glance looks to be a simple, childish game, with its bright art, the fruity theme, and chunky wooden pieces. But what lies beneath the friendly exterior is a satisfying tactical puzzle that the whole family can enjoy.
Each player starts with their own little island grid, blocked in by boats and populated with five fruit-crate tiles. The core mechanic is basically a slide puzzle: move a crate in any direction a number of spaces equal to how far it slides, then collect that many fruits of that type. Use those fruits to either fulfill shipping contracts (by sending those pesky boats away) or build shop tiles that grant points, bonuses, or the ability to deliver ice cream for mega-points!
At first, you’ll feel accomplished when you manage to squeeze just 2 or 3 goods in a single turn. but as you send those pesky boats on their way, earning 4 or 5 goods every turn will seem trivial. What really makes Juicy Fruits feel satisfying is that every turn feels like you’re building towards something; that sense of incremental progress. You’ll send a boat away, giving up two of your bananas, and you’ll combine your extra banana on your next turn with the grapes you just picked up to send another boat away, all the while opening up your board to chain into your next tile slide to earn more fruit to earn more points. The action chain is what gives Juicy Fruits it’s bite.
As you spend resources to send boats away, your island gradually begins to open up. What started as a 3 x 3 grid now has some 4 or 5 square rows and columns, giving you the opportunity to make some real big slides. I tend to focus on sending those boats away as I like having an open playing field, but the big points lie in either delivering ice cream, or refilling your island board with large, point scoring attractions.
The only interaction between players comes in the form of a race. The first player to deliver ice cream or milkshakes will earn the most points. In one of my games, a player manged to deliver 5 of the most valuable ice cream in a single turn. It took him most of the game to set up for that turn, and that represented most of his points at the end of the game, but he managed to come in second overall. In some games, I’ve won by clearing out the island, while in other games that strategy leaves me in the dust as the other players rush building contracts and force the game to end early.
While it might look friendly, Juicy Fruits has a special kind of tension. It starts mellow and chill, turns fly by, but there’s an undercurrent of pressure that builds steadily. Players achieve more with every passing turn, and suddenly you can feel when the pace is about to snap. That moment when someone suddenly starts clearing boats or spamming shops and you realize: “Oh no. I’ve got, like, three turns left, and I have so much left to accomplish!”
The player scaling can feel a bit off. At two players, that race-to-the-end vibe is very palpable. More than once I’ve found myself able to rush the game’s conclusion with minimal resistance, and win, not because I was really the better player, but because I saw the machine my opponent was building, and decided to crash the game before their plans came to fruition.
And while I’m being honest, the game does show most of itself in just a handful of plays. That core loop, while satisfying, is really all there is to Juicy Fruits. It doesn’t have a ton of replay variability, especially once you’ve tried the solo mode and the played with the Juice Factory mini-expansion. It’s not a dealbreaker, not every game needs to be eminently replayable, but if your shelves are already crowded with gateway titles, Juicy Fruits might not elbow its way into regular rotation.
Juicy Fruits features simple, satisfying turns. The actions are easy to understand, and the ramifications of your decisions are obvious and apparent. Once players are in the flow of the game, it manages to move along at a decent clip so you aren’t feeling bored in-between your turns. There’s enough tactics and strategy for avid gamers to dig into, but it’s also accessible enough for kids to play alongside the adults. Juicy Fruits won’t change your life, but a game only takes 30 minutes, making it a perfect choice to wind down with after something more complex, or as the starting experience during family game night.
Final Fantasy III didn’t make it over to the US the same way the other Famicom Final Fantasy games did. It didn’t get a Wonderswan remake, which means there was no basis for a PSP or GBA port. It wasn’t until 2006 that a 3D remake was released stateside on the Nintendo DS. I’ve never had access to this game before, so I was actually kind of excited to play it. I’ve at least tried almost every other mainline Final Fantasy game, even if I’ve dropped them after only a handful of hours. Embarking on a wholly new story was an exciting prospect for me.
I made it half-way through Final Fantasy III, about 15 hours in total. Then I suffered a total party KO against the Fire Dragon boss, and apparently the last time I saved my game was when I was barely 2 hours into the game. I’m sorry, Final Fantasy III, I’m not replaying 12 hours of a game I didn’t like to catch back up to my progress.
But let’s back up. I’m still playing on my Retroid Pocket 4, which is not an ideal Nintendo DS emulator, on the account of only having 1 screen, but it was serviceable. Final Fantasy III doesn’t really use the second screen very much anyway, so having one of the two screens much larger, and a button to swap screens is totally serviceable. The 3D models are laughably ugly, but I was able to smooth that out by upscaling the game 4X, which was a wonderful improvement.
Final Fantasy III brings back the class system from the first game, allowing you to specialize your partys abilities to suit the challenge of the moment. Unlike Final Fantasy II, where everyone was a jack of all trades, now if you want to use a sword, you’ll need to be a warrior. If you need magic, someone is going to need to change classes into a black, white, or red mage. As the game progresses, you unlock more classes, apparently 22 in all, but when my adventure ended 15 hours in, apparently I was on the cusp of unlocking the next set.
Unlike the 2D games, the number of enemies you can encounter has been reduced from 9, to 3. To offset this, the power of each enemy you face has been scaled up, including bosses, who also get to attack you twice per round. Should you fail and experience a total party KO, you’re kicked back to your last save file, whenever that was.
The games story begins with the main character, Luneth, as they plummet into a cave from above. You walk him out, then pick up your friend Arc from the nearby town. The next town over, you encounter Refia, who was hiding from her father because she didn’t want to be a blacksmith, but in doing so, narrowly avoided a curse that rendered the whole town as a ghost. A little further on, you pick up the knight Ingus, and thus, the party is formed. Each of these characters are orphans, who have been choses to be the 4 heroes of light. Throughout your adventure, you’ll pick up some guests who will follow behind you and aid you in battle every few rounds, which is delightful. Each guest also has 2 or 3 lines of dialogue that you can view to give their characters a little more flesh.
While bringing back the class system, Final Fantasy III, the magic system has also been changed from a pool of MP, to a spell charge system. Spells are broken into tiers, and each character can cast a certain number of spells per tier. I actually like this system a lot. Usually with MP systems, I reserve all of my MP until I get to a boss so I can unleash my wrath upon it, meaning for the majority of the encounters in a game, my black mages are just spinning their thumbs and bonking baddies with their staff for minimal damage. This spell charge system encouraged me to use the tier one spells throughout the dungeon, taking advantage of the mobs elemental weaknesses, while saving the tier 3 and 4 spells for the dungeon’s final encounter.
Final Fantasy III wants you to swap the classes on your party. Some dungeons have gimmicks, like requiring you to cast Mini on your party, rendering physical attacks nearly useless. The game is pushing you to have a party of mages at this point. From what I’ve read, a few other bosses later in the game also encourage you to build out your party in a specific way. One downside of this class system, however, is that all of your classes start at level 1. So swapping into a class that your character hasn’t touched yet, means grinding up the job level so they can be used effectively. It’s an ambitious system with fun ideas, and having different party combinations make each dungeon feel quite a bit different, but the penalties for switching made it more frustrating than freeing.
While I’m glad the characters have names, and little snippets of dialogue, the interactions between them are still fairly flat. Arc’s only character trait is that they’re a little cowardly. In the first 15 hours, none of the characters really grew beyond what you learn when you first encounter them. Even with names and small bits of dialogue, Luneth and friends never really grow or interact in meaningful ways, Which kind of leads me into the retrospective part of this journey.
Final Fantasy I, II, and III were all released on the NES between 1987 and 1990. The first game had a staff size of 5, the second had 8 people working on it, and III had 18 professional credits listed. For a small team to pump out 3 games in 4 years is a feat in itself, but each one of these games feels unique and distinct. Each one an adventure with turn based battles, but each game features wholly district systems and features that wildly shake up the experience. It’s fascinating seeing the lessons they took from each game and how they applied it onto the next one, making each one feel unique, and not just the same game with a new coat of paint.
While Final Fantasy is an epic tale, telling a grand story of a world about to fall into ruin and the heroes who save it, I’m left disappointed by the story in each of these games. The main characters are all nameless, faceless protagonists, save for a few lines of dialogue each. None of these characters experience growth or are fleshed out in any meaningful way. The villains, are much more interesting, from Garland being thrown back in time to become Chaos, who sends the four fiends forward in time, creating a time loop paradox, to The Emperor, who when defeated by the heroes, conquers hell itself and comes back with a vengeance.
I recognize and realize that I’ve been playing remasters and ports, and not the original games. I know there were significant limitations on these games that aren’t apparent when playing a remake, and that I have the benefit of 35 years of hindsight here. But if I were talking to a new JRPG or Final Fantasy fan in 2025, I wouldn’t suggest anyone start their Final Fantasy journey at the beginning. These are games I’m glad to have played, not ones I’d readily recommend, and that difference has defined this early part of the Final Fantasy journey.
Young’uns might not inherently know this, but back in the day, video games came with instruction manuals. These manuals included a ton of information that are not found on the cartridge themselves, as well as including concept art. It’s fascinating to see the inspirational artwork for a video game, compared to the pixels it gets translated into. This goes doubly so for Final Fantasy, as the concept art is beautiful, high fantasy art, evoking feelings of melancholy and terrifying battles against monsters of epic scale. But when you encounter the situation in the video game itself, it’s just another little beast for you to smack your sword against.
I wonder if I’m playing these games wrong. I wonder if the real charm of Final Fantasy I and II come from the imagination, and sitting with a game for longer than a week at a time. Again, back in the day, there were much fewer video games, so when you managed to get your hands on a game, it ended up being the only game you played for months. Then you’d swap cartridges with your friends, and talk about the adventures you both experienced. When you sit with a game for a long period of time, you start to impart weight and importance on specific moments of the game. Like walking across the bridge to challenge Timat. As a kid, that moment would have had my heart in my throat, after the weeks of working towards the battle, the set-backs of more than one total party KOs forcing me to reset to my last save to try again and again. On my modern device, I have save states and 2x speed to smooth out and rough edge, as my time is more valuable than replaying a dungeon just because I forgot to save before getting jumped by a mob of cockatrices and my whole party succumbed to stone.
Another aspect I’m left wondering if I’m missing out on, is the imagination. Like going to a dungeon and seeing the grey tiles, and imagining metal walls. Seeing the black background with blue specks and the NPCs talk about seeing stars or the earth below, and really imagining the situation. I’m reminded of playing Pokemon on by Game Boy when I was 10, and drawing some of the most exciting battles as they happened in my head during class, talking with my friends on the playground about the secrets we found, and piecing together where to go next from all of our collective knowledge. Having that time and space between play sessions for my imagination to fill in the gaps of the story are important, and something that is really missing from my life right now, which makes me think that my Final Fantasy experience isn’t as magical as it should have been. Just something to keep in mind while playing old games with a modern mindset.
I will continue on my quest to play all the mainline Final Fantasy games, they are entertaining at the very least. The next entry, Final Fantasy IV, I’ve long held in my heart as my favourite Final Fantasy game. It’s the first game that was developed for the more powerful SNES, and by this point in Square’s life, Final Fantasy had become a crown jewel franchise, meaning more and more resources were poured into each game. I’m quite excited to see how well this entry holds up.
