Final Fantasy (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Final Fantasy arrived in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch effort by a company that nearly did not survive to publish it. Square was threatened with bankruptcy. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game's creator, had privately decided he would quit the industry and return to university if the game failed to sell. Those twin pressures gave the title its name: the word "final" captured both a personal deadline and a corporate one. The result was a role-playing game for the Nintendo Entertainment System that shipped 520,000 copies in Japan alone and eventually sold nearly two million copies worldwide by March 2003.

  The questions the game's story raises are worth holding onto as the chapters unfold: how did a team considered unpopular within its own company produce one of the most imitated games of its era? What design choices did its developers borrow from tabletop games, and why did those choices prove so durable? And what did it take to convince a publisher to ship twice the copies originally planned?

• 2. Origins of the Team

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  Sakaguchi had wanted to make a role-playing game for years before Square gave him the chance. His employer expected such games to sell poorly, so it withheld approval. The 1986 success of Dragon Quest in Japan changed the calculation, and Square reconsidered. Sakaguchi was finally cleared to pursue his vision, one inspired by the Western computer RPGs Ultima and Wizardry.

  His reputation inside Square was a problem. Colleagues considered him a rough boss with a string of unsuccessful projects behind him, and only three people initially agreed to join the project. The final core team numbered seven staff members, known internally as the A-Team. Sakaguchi persuaded game designers Koichi Ishii and Akitoshi Kawazu to join. Kawazu took responsibility for the battle system, drawing directly from the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons and from Wizardry. Elemental weaknesses for enemies, a mechanic already familiar to Western RPG players, had not yet appeared in Japanese RPGs at that point, and Kawazu brought them over deliberately.

  The scenario was written by freelance writer Kenji Terada from a story by Sakaguchi. Ishii shaped the setting, proposing the crystals that became central to the game's premise. He also suggested illustrator Yoshitaka Amano as character designer. Sakaguchi initially declined because he had not heard of Amano; only when Ishii showed him that some magazine clippings Sakaguchi already admired were Amano's work did Sakaguchi agree to the hire. Composer Nobuo Uematsu scored the game, marking his 16th video game music composition. Iranian-American programmer Nasir Gebelli was brought in to code the project and went on to create what is considered the first RPG minigame, a sliding puzzle, added on his own initiative despite it not being part of the original design.

• 3. Gameplay Architecture

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  Four game modes organize the player's entire experience: an overworld map, town and dungeon maps, a battle screen, and a menu screen. The overworld presents the fictional world at reduced scale, and the primary method of crossing it is on foot, though a ship, a canoe, and an airship each become available as the story advances. Enemies appear randomly on field maps and on the overworld whenever the player travels by foot, canoe, or ship.

  At the start, the player selects four characters from six available classes: Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, Red Mage, White Mage, and Black Mage. That party composition is locked for the entire game, a choice Kawazu championed because he believed the fun of an RPG began at character creation. Each character's core attribute is a level that can rise from one to fifty, determined by accumulated experience points won in battle. A class upgrade option becomes available later in the game, maturing character sprites and opening access to weapons and magic previously unavailable to certain classes.

  Combat runs on a turn-based menu system where the player chooses from options including Attack, Magic, and Item. If every party member dies, the game ends and all unsaved progress is lost. Currency earned in battle is called Gil, a name that persisted through the entire franchise. Final Fantasy was the first game in its genre to place the player's characters on the right side of the screen with enemies on the left, departing from the first-person perspective that earlier RPGs used.

  Magic divides into two branches: White magic, which handles defense and healing, and Black magic, which deals damage and status ailments. Spells are organized into eight levels, with four White and four Black spells at each level. Each character may learn only three spells per level, and class determines which spells are accessible at all.

• 4. A Story Told in Crystals

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  The world of Final Fantasy holds three large continents whose elemental order is maintained by four crystals governing earth, fire, water, and wind. Four hundred years before the game begins, the Lefeinish people, builders of airships and a Floating Castle powered by wind, watched their civilization collapse when the Wind crystal went dark. Two hundred years later, violent storms sank a massive ocean shrine and took the Water crystal. The Earth and Fire crystals followed, bringing wildfires and the decay of the agricultural town of Melmond.

  The four Warriors of Light enter this world each carrying one of the darkened crystals. Their earliest task is rescuing Princess Sarah from the evil knight Garland, which prompts the King of Coneria to build a bridge east. From there the quest expands outward: liberating a pirate-controlled town, retrieving a stolen crown from the Marsh Cave, learning the Lefeinish language from a linguist named Dr. Unne, and ultimately reaching the Floating Castle where the Wind Fiend Tiamat has taken up residence.

  The game's final revelation complicates its straightforward quest structure. After the Warriors defeat the Four Fiends and restore the crystals, they travel 2,000 years into the past through a portal in the Temple of Chaos. There they learn that Garland had been sent back in time by the Fiends, and that he in turn sent the Fiends to the future, creating a closed loop that would allow him to exist forever as the archdemon Chaos. Defeating Chaos ends the loop but erases the Warriors' deeds from history; their heroism survives only as legend.

• 5. Naming Under Pressure

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  The game's original working title was Fighting Fantasy, but that name belonged to a gamebook series already in print, so it had to change. In 2015, Sakaguchi revealed that from the start the team had wanted a title that could be abbreviated to two letters in the Latin script while still being pronounceable in four syllables in Japanese.

  Composer Nobuo Uematsu later explained that the word "final" carried two meanings. One pointed to Sakaguchi's private situation: he had resolved to leave the game industry if the project failed. The other pointed to Square's finances, which were precarious enough that the game might have been the company's last release. Sakaguchi confirmed parts of this account but later softened it, saying that any word starting with "F" would have served and that the back-to-the-wall feeling, while real, was not the sole driver of the choice.

• 6. Going to Market

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  Sakaguchi brought an in-development ROM of the game to the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin, which declined to review it. Famitsu, by contrast, gave the game extensive coverage and helped build pre-release awareness. The initial plan was to ship 200,000 copies, but Sakaguchi lobbied management to double that figure to 400,000, arguing that a larger print run would create enough momentum to justify a sequel. Management agreed. The actual shipment reached 520,000 copies in Japan.

  Nintendo of America handled the English-language localization after Dragon Quest's successful North American release under the title Dragon Warrior. Final Fantasy reached North American shelves in 1990. The PAL region received no version of the game until Final Fantasy Origins arrived in 2003.

  By 1994, Square's own publicity department reported 600,000 copies sold in Japan. The North American NES release added 700,000 copies, bringing the combined worldwide total to 1.3 million by that year. As of March 2003, counting all re-releases and remakes, the game had shipped 1.99 million copies worldwide, with 1.21 million in Japan and 780,000 abroad.

• 7. Remakes and Legacy

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  Final Fantasy has been released on platforms spanning four decades, frequently packaged alongside Final Fantasy II. The MSX2 version appeared in Japan in December 1989 with expanded storage, improved music, and faster loading. A 1994 Famicom compilation added minor graphical updates. The WonderSwan Color version, released in Japan on the 9th of December 2000, introduced redrawn sprites and full background images in battle scenes.

  Three pieces of music from the original game became permanent fixtures of the franchise: the arpeggio played on the title screen known as the Prelude, the Opening Theme heard when the party crosses the bridge early in the game, and the Victory Fanfare played after every battle. A soundtrack album pairing the original score with Final Fantasy II was released in 1989. The webcomic 8-Bit Theater, a sprite-based parody by Brian Clevinger that started in March 2001, built a following in gaming communities by drawing on the game's characters and premise. Characters from the original game, including Warrior of Light and Garland, have appeared as playable figures and bosses in the Dissidia series of fighting games, and both Chaos and the Amano Warrior of Light appear as bosses in the Final Fantasy XIV expansions Stormblood and Shadowbringers respectively.