Welcome to Blaugust 2nd and the first day of our Final Fantasy 1 playthrough!
Garland is the first boss the Warriors of Light meet in Final Fantasy 1. Once a hero, he has kidnapped Princess Sarah and taken her to the Chaos Shrine, there to do evil things. What happened to make him this way? Our Final Fantasy playthrough starts with our party meeting this fallen angel…
(The featured image is Garland as he appears in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a mobile game with its own story that nonetheless pulls in visions of heroes and villains from other Final Fantasy games.)
Before the Warriors of Light can do anything, we have to bring them together.
Character creation in both the new Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster and the original NES version are the same — you pick four heroes from among the available jobs: Fighter, Black Belt (AKA Monk), White Mage, Red Mage, Black Mage, and Thief. Multiple characters can be the same job, but why?
The graphics are undeniably better in the new version, while staying with instantly familiar character designs. The problem is… the font. It doesn’t match the style of the rest of the game AT ALL.
We’re plopped in the town beneath the Castle of Cornelia. We’re quickly shuffled into the king’s presence, and he wonders briefly if we are the prophesied Warriors of Light, holders of the sacred crystals, that have been promised to rid the world of darkness, as warriors of light often do.
Final Fantasy XIV turned that concept on its head with Shadowbringers, where Warriors of Light are cursed by all, and beg the Warriors of Darkness to bring back the night…
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, thinks the king, and immediately sends us to rescue his daughter, Princess Sarah, who has been abducted by the traitor Garland who is, as I mentioned above, barricaded in the Chaos Shrine.
After we stop into town to buy equipment and spells, we’re off.
(The remaster gives every character some base equipment. The NES original gives none, and also gives less money. The NES version is brutal).
The chaos shrine isn’t that far away, and turns out to be an excellent place for experience. I grind up to level five or six or so in the remaster, and take him out, easily.
I didn’t even need to do that. In the NES version, I took him on with all the characters at level 1, with only the experience from the monsters I killed along the way.
The Red Mage died, but it was still a win. Garland is dead, and we rescued the princess.
(In the NES version, you also have to fight some spiders.)
It’s clear that Garland wanted to be killed. He was the greatest knight in Cornelia. He’s seen a thousand people die and watched their life drain into the battlefield. He’s seen every horror and every demon and killed them all. All his family is dead. All his friends are dead. All he wants is peace.
Maybe he thought Princess Sarah would sense in him a kindred spirit. For her days, after all, were never her own. A prisoner of the court, more a symbol for the people of Cornelia than a person. But, she never knew Garland at all. When Garland asked for her hand, she pulled away and started laughing with her maid.
Garland’s last thread of sanity snapped at that moment. If a lifetime of service wouldn’t be allowed to end in peace, then he would end it in chaos. He grabbed the princess and ran with her to the north, where the shrine to Chaos itself stood. For some reason.
Chaos demands a sacrifice. Garland intended that to be Sarah, but when the Warriors of Light burst in just behind him, he knew that he, Garland, would be that sacrifice.
He smiled, and shouted with all the bluster he could command, that he would kill them all. But in the fight that followed, he deliberately left himself open and parried only weakly. In seconds, he was dead. His light sight as a mortal was of Princess Sarah, celebrating with her rescuers.
A chaotic wind swept his shattered body away. When next he opened his eyes, he would be a very different Garland. But that’s another story.
I played the NES version of Final Fantasy on the Mesen emulator, v0.9.9. I got the ROM for the original game… from somewhere.
The pixel remaster is currently on sale on Steam, along with the remasters of Final Fantasy II and III.
Playing both together shows just how many quality of life improvements have been made over the years. Aside from the better graphics, the text has been retranslated. Since there is no real character limit, dialog can take as long as it needs to take.
Autobattling is available; it just repeats the last command each character was given until the encounter is over or the character cannot do that command. If a character’s target is dead before it’s their turn, they will now choose another target. The original NES version just has those characters swing at empty air.
The map is available at all times. Also included, a complete bestiary of monsters encountered (and where to find them), as well as quite a lot of concept art for the game. The new game is also quite a bit faster (though the emulator can speed things up a bit).
Still, the story and the encounters are the same. It’s going to be fun to see where it goes.
I was wondering if they’d updated the text in the game, so that answers it for me. And I completely agree on that font. I’d heard a lot of folks complaining about it and yeah…
Nice to hear about the autobattle and the characters switching monsters when one dies. It did add a bit of difficulty to the game to have to manage your targets well, but in this day and age, it’s also a silly outdated mechanic. So I’m glad to say goodbye to that.
My boyfriend, who is watching me play (and sometimes giving hints) says the new game’s pace is about four times faster… I’ll probably be on to FF2 before the month is out.