Have you played...? The Final Fantasy Legend
After finishing U.N. Squadron, I wanted to play something I never played before. A short, old school JRPG seemed like a good choice for the next few days, so I chose The Final Fantasy Legend, released in 1989 for the Game Boy.
First things first, this is not actually a Final Fantasy game - it’s the first game in the long running SaGa ⤴ series, which was never quite as popular as FF in the west. It was rebranded to Final Fantasy for marketing purposes, which makes sense given that console RPGs were still pretty new: the first Final Fantasy ⤴ was released in 1987, just 2 years prior.
Apart from knowing this was an early JRPG, I didn’t know what to expect, I went in completely blind. The plot is that there’s a tower at the center of the world that’s connected to paradise, but no one has managed to reach the top. So of course that’s what we’ll do. 🙂
From the start, you create your main character and can choose from 3 classes: human, mutant (esper in the original Japanese version) and monster. Humans and mutants can be male or female, and it’s not clear what the difference between any of the classes are. I know that’s not fully the game’s fault and it’s how games were back then, but it’s still annoying. Maybe it was all in the manual 😄
Anyway, you start right at the base of the tower at the center of the world, but its door is sealed. To open it, you need an orb, and to get that orb you need to get 3 artifacts scattered around the land. You start alone but can recruit 3 more characters at the guild to fill your party.
One of the first things I noticed is that characters don’t have experience points like in other RPGs. So I thought, maybe the only way to make them stronger is by buying better equipment, fair enough. But then I noticed that the mutant character in my party (named “Tim”) was getting stronger after battles, and more than that: he was learning abilities (aka magic). But from time to time he was also losing abilities. Wat?
After some hours of playing, I decided to read a guide to understand what the heck was happening. So humans increase their stats with items - there are items that increase HP, strength and agility - but mutants increase their stats steadily after battles, and learn and forget abilities randomly. Oh, and strength increases physical damage, but agility increases damage of ranged weapons. That’s not very intuitive. 😅
Also, monsters are literally a whole separate class. They never improve their stats: the only way to upgrade monsters is by eating meat that’s dropped by other monsters. When a monster eats meat, they transform into another monster completely. These transformations are seemingly random, but it seems there is an underlying evolutionary graph.
There’s also affinity between classes, gender and weapon types: so male characters are better with heavy weapons like swords and axes, and females are better with lighter or ranged weapons. That’s never explained in the game and you need to experiment with them to find the right fit. Also, your character will apparently get better with a weapon the more they use it, so the first time they use a weapon it’ll do little damage or miss, but you need to keep using it so they get better. And I can’t forget to mention that weapons have limited uses, like in SRPGs such as Fire Emblem or some modern games e.g. Breath of the Wild. Oh boy, and I thought this would be a simple game!
All that being said, despite these intricacies, it’s not a complex game. The maps are not big, the fetch quests are not too bad (though you have to pay attention to what NPCs say because they leave clues) and battles are not that bad if you have the right equipment and stats, even the boss battles. Later dungeons can be quite sadistic though, so you’ll need to stock some healing items to stand a chance.
Graphics and overall world design are very basic, you can definitely see this was an early game. Battle graphics are simple, showing just the enemy sprites (one per enemy group, there can be multiple enemies of the same type) and small battle animations here and there, very much like the early NES Dragon Quests. The enemy sprites ⤴ are nicely drawn. One interesting thing is you can clearly see naked boobs in some of them. Those slipped right past Nintendo’s censorship at the time, probably because it’s so low-res.
There are not many different music tracks in the game, but they’re pleasant, nothing exceptional. Interestingly, they were composed by legend Nobuo Uematsu. According to Wikipedia ⤴, Uematsu struggled with the Game Boy’s sound hardware, which is more limited than the Famicom’s. I certainly prefer Final Fantasy I’s OST over this, but that might be due to nostalgia bias.
Another thing I have to mention is that, despite there not being a lot of text in the game, I feel the translation ⤴ was subpar. A lot of items have weird names, for example “mithril” was translated to “silver”, which means a silver mail is better than a gold mail in this game 😬 Another funny one I remember is that there’s an attack item called “butt”, which originally was an attack technique called “sandanzuki”. I know many of these problems were due to space constraints, but still.
There are also many bugs: I noticed that many times NPCs and item chests disappeared after I interacted with something else. There’s an item called the “glass sword”, which is really powerful but only intended to be used once. Every time you use it, the game says it broke, but it actually didn’t.
In conclusion, this is a rough game. I wouldn’t recommend playing it today, even if it’s short (for an RPG), clocking in around 10-15 hours. Even so, I’m happy to have finished this, it was a nice historical experience to have played the first SaGa game and one of the first portable RPGs in history.
Rating: 4.5/10
Details
- Name: The Final Fantasy Legend / Makai Toushi SaGa
- Genre: JRPG
- Developer: Campcom
- Year: 1989
- Console: Game Boy
Screenshots
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