Advent Calendar 02: The (Not So) Final Fantasy

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

I managed to remember the full list of games we played over the holiday breaks -- it's pretty much a Who's Who of major console RPGs of the time. Heavy on first-party Zelda titles, obviously, but also on Squaresoft and Enix, the two major publishers of the day. The list has a couple of interesting gaps; unlike today, where Google will show you where to buy literally anything, back in the '80s it was not necessarily easy to get your hands on a title that wasn't currently under promotion. This was doubly true for console RPGs. While you could probably find your chosen Mario game whenever you looked (or Castlevania, or Metroid), RPGs were expensive and comparatively poor sellers in the West, and so had much smaller print runs in North America and Europe.

The Legend of Zelda is really more of an action dungeon-crawler than a true RPG. You get fancier swords and shields, but Link doesn't really "level" like you'd expect, and there's no story to progress. Your only "plot" is a paragraph right after the title screen containing both your excuse to run around Hyrule stabbing things (lost princess) and how you know it's time to stop running around Hyrule stabbing things (princess found).

The games that introduced Americans to what we would now recognize as the console JRPG were Dragon Warrior (né Dragon Quest, 1989) and Final Fantasy (1990), both of which we played.

Of the two, I remember Final Fantasy the best. You got a four-person party, whom you could name, and there were four of us sitting around the TV. Dad was the fighter, obviously; Mom was a black belt; my sister and I were the black and white mages, although I can't recall which way around that went. I was probably the white mage, being a redhead. The robes worn by the black and white mages have persisted through Final Fantasy history, appearing as job costumes in Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics games (and Final Fantasy X-2, a then-rare spinoff), as character elements in Final Fantasy IX for Dagger and Vivi, and God only knows what in the most recent installments that I haven't played, because I refuse to buy a $600 specialized gaming computer just to play one thing, and Google Stadia sadly seems to suck.

Dragon Warrior was almost more traditional before the actual traditions began, borrowing much more heavily from the Celtic-influenced fantasy settings of tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, which themselves got most of it from Tolkien. Dragon Quest games in general are pretty much straight-up sword-and-sorcery affairs, where Final Fantasy games, frankly, tend to get weird at the end. Dragon Warrior ended with you journeying through a poison swamp to defeat a big ol' dragon. Final Fantasy ended with you taking your airship into a sky realm to break a stable time loop. Potayto, potahto. 

Both games came with a ton of paper doodads in tbe box. The manuals were always pretty fat, another consequence of the Nintendo Hint Line being the only place to ask questions if you were baffled by some random subsystem of the game. All of these things also came with a big fold-out map, which I think would probably be seen as cheating today. The back of it usually had a reference list of monsters or equipment stats on it, which was actually doable before there were 65 million pieces of semi-randomized craftable equipment in every game. The Final Fantasy map was double-sided, with dungeons on one face and spell and equipment stats on the other. (There was no world map. You could actually see a world map in the game, which was extremely fancy at the time.) Dragon Warrior gave you the world map on paper, and put the monster regions on the other side.

Both the maps and the manual art were sadly redrawn for the North American release. The Japanese version of Final Fantasy had art by Amano Yoshitaka (more famous now for Vampire Hunter D) and the Dragon Quest games are I think still done by Toriyama Akira (aka, the Dragonball guy).