Another Final Fantasy Post; This Is My Story

As I've been on sort a Final Fantasy kick for the past few months with my first ever playthrough of the NES classic and the Wiiware sequel to the fourth entry, I've decided that I'm going to finally buckle down and finish the game that turned me onto not only Final Fantasy, but a whole genre of games I probably would have never touched. I'm speaking of Final Fantasy IX, which if you catch me on the right day, I'll say that it was the one that finally hooked me.


My memory is sort of blurry as to which Final Fantasy was actually my first. I remember playing Five and Six on an early build of Zsnes, back before the sound emulation was good enough to make the wind in Six's intro sound like wind rather than some godawful noise. I thought Six was really pretty at the time, but it was actually Five that stuck it's hooks in me. I played what was either an early version of the translation or what was meant to be an improvement over the other that was never finished. I say this because around the time that my party had found it's way to Jachol, there were no discernible english words at that point. I still fought my way up until after the Earth Crystal, but eventually the lack of English really hampered my enjoyment.

Around the time when CD burners got somewhat cheap, my uncle gifted me the PC version of Final Fantasy VII. Although I appreciated the offer, I found the game to be too difficult for my tastes, as I hadn't played a whole lot console RPGs at the time. I played up until right where the PSX demo ended before my computer refused to let me go any further. It kind of saddened me a little bit, but it wasn't any huge concern of mine as these weren't legit copies that I paid for. It wouldn't be until around 2003 that I actually got around to playing the game the whole way through after I had found a greatest hits copy in an electronics store that had a going out of business sale.


Final Fantasy IX was essentially a birthday gift to me, this time though, it was a legitimate copy that I should feel no sort of guilt when I think back. The presentation is what captured my heart right away. Although I hadn't played enough Final Fantasy to get all the winks and nods to the previous titles nor had I played enough to get hit by what I see now as a nostalgia onslaught, I connected with all the characters and found the plot to be intriguing. The difficulty was pretty insane for me at the time as I didn't really get the whole level grinding aspect of most RPGs. Looking back at old save files, I found that I was extremely underleveled on pretty much every save.

My avoidance of the random battles is what made me percieve these games as some of the most difficult games I had ever played. The biggest example I can think of was probably when I played through IV for the first time. Around the time where all the sidequests open up and you can descend into the final dungeon, the highest level character was level 24. I just couldn't get past any of the enemies in the Lunar Subterrane and had to figure out a way to get better quick. I then spent around 10 hours level grinding in what I see now as probably the least useful spot in the game. For whatever reason, I decided the the save point in the Sylph Cave was the best place to be. Now, the experience was okay and everything, but the combination of the Toad Mages and Malboros made it a very tedious ordeal. Now as bad as that kind of sounds, I still look back on my days of staying up until 3:00AM farming toads with rose-tinted glasses. It was a good feeling to go from being completely trounced at every turn to being able to decimate most enemies before they even got a hit in.


Due to my complete avoidance of enemies, I didn't beat any of the Final Fantasy games until X. I had played through the first few hours of the game when I was staying at my cousin's house and actually hated every minute of it. Between the lack of ATB, the odd Zanarkand swimfest and horrendous voice acting, I just couldn't see myself liking it. A couple years later I had finally bought myself a new PS2 when the price dropped to $150. Being broke at the time, I went through the Greatest Hits section and couldn't find anything interesting aside from X. Grudgingly, I decided to give the game another shot and finally saw it for it's merits. 80 hours later, I had beaten my first Final Fantasy and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. What I really liked was the moment you first get access to the Calm. You could go on and fight the few difficult bosses like Seymour Flux and Yunalesca, or you could go do sidequests like the Omega Dungeon or start making the super bosses to thoroughly destroy yourself. Despite the lack of ATB, I found the CTB system or whatever they called it at the time to be quite enjoyable.


I've beaten quite a few of them by now, although it took me a little bit of time to actually get around to doing it. Like I said above, X was my first and then I beat VIII, VI, VII, IV(DS), V, I and just last night, I booted up my old Final Fantasy IV save and beat Zeromus. I had awful gear and I was a little underleveled, but with Cure4 and the Sylph summon, I just barely scraped by with Kain's jump command dealing the final blow. It was quite the victory for me, as I had never actually beaten the original version of the game, only the DS one(which is much more difficult).


I put IX on my PSP today and I'm going to be playing through that on the side and I think I'm going to start XII again since I don't think I gave that game the look that it deserves. A Million people like it, why shouldn't I?