Revisiting/reviewing the Final Fantasy series
Back in the late 90s, as I was entering my teenage years, kids in my town were starting to get their new Sony PlayStations. While I don't remember too much about the specifics of the adverts, I just remember this image of it being sort of edgy, cool and arguably more importantly for the time, 3D... I'd not long been able to persuade my parents to upgrade me to a 16-bit console - a Sega Mega Drive with a handful of games that my dad bought from someone who he worked for, I guess because they weren't using it or something similar. Either way there were a bunch of games that had existing data on that almost gave them a character of their own. One day I might go and try digging them out of my parents' attic and see if they still work. But for now, we're back to the PlayStation...
There were a seeming plethora of cool games coming out, at least to someone who'd not seen the like before, but after seeing people speak about it and seeing it for myself, Final Fantasy VII stood out as this sprawling huge story, which people who'd played it would speak about for hours on end. By what must have been in the next year, it had been released on PC, and I remember seeing a review for it in a PC gaming magazine that a friend had, and it was reviewed super highly, praising the scale and beauty of it.
For the next what must have been year or so, I'd hear people talking about it in passing, not being able to really contribute or be involved, but I remember it sitting there as something I wanted to try. Looking at timescales and release dates, it must have been getting into 1999 when I finally got the chance to go round a friend's house who was playing it, and watching them go through what I now know to be the end of the Disc 2 Midgar sequence. Everything seemed so cool, sort of sci-fi, but also reasonably grounded, and then when the fights started... I can't remember the specifics, but clearly they had a few summons gathered by that point, and those animations, which were just mind-blowing visually for the time... I knew I wanted it.
With a birthday and Christmas coming up, I decided to set out my stall and see if I could get them combined into one present - a Playstation, and the all new Final Fantasy - Final Fantasy VIII... Folks at school would be talking about it from when it came out, but I knew if I held firm until Christmas, I could probably be able to play it in the holidays and then talk all about it in the new year. Plus my friend said I could borrow VII afterwards, which was a win, given I didn't really have the resources for both. I would eventually buy it on the platinum release for PSX, and then multiple times after on varying platforms...
But anyway, that Christmas came, and as promised, a brand new PlayStation, with a Dual Shock controller no less, and Final Fantasy VIII! The rest of those holidays were heavily structured around working through that game, and I distinctly remember seeing in the millennium after putting down somewhere on Disc 3 for the night to join the family in the celebrations.
It's almost more of just a feeling now, but a one that brings some joy reflecting back on it, when it felt like the world was a better place, I guess? Years away from so many of the once-in-a-lifetime events that have made the last quarter of a century such a challenge in some ways. There was space to make those core memories and enough hope and possibility that the characters and themes could inform the sort of person I was growing up into.
Over the years since that time, I've been a devoted fan, fitting in playing Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII between my GCSE exams and my university exams respectively, and getting the rest of the main line single player games as they came out. I also tried to go back and play through some of the older games, but the only one I ever finished was Final Fantasy VI, I think probably because it was easily available on PlayStation at the right time, and also had a Final Fantasy X demo that I was super keen to get too...
When I was a teenager, and looked back at the series, I always assumed that I'd work back through them at some point, and I'd probably have them all checked off and played to the same degree as those classic PS1 and PS2 titles. But it never quite happened. I finished school, then went to university, then went to work. And while I did often find some time for games, and for media in general, it just never quite was the same. I developed a love for film at university, with friends doing media courses with knowledge and expertise, but these days, I struggle to find the time or energy for 90 minutes of a focus on a story. That's not to say I won't put a long form video essay on YouTube instead, but that's not the point here...
So in 2025, the one thing we have going for us is that everything so much more available, mostly because it turns out companies want to sell things. Ideally multiple times. So now we have the Pixel Remaster versions of FF I-VI available digitally into our homes. With that in mind, I think I'm going to go and fulfil that assumption from my teenage years. I maybe didn't expect to be doing it in 2025, but it's at least getting done. Teenage me will hopefully be proud. And hopefully not disappointed.
I have a level of realistic expectation that even if there's quality of life improvements, a game that was designed and released in the mid-to-late 80s on the NES isn't going to be quite of the same scale as something like those FF games from my childhood, but I suspect they'll have their own merits, and perhaps also leave more to be interpreted by the player, which could be a boon in the sense that I'll have a lot more to interpret with than I did when I was 16...