How the original Final Fantasy shows us the perils of management
Final Fantasy (1987)
Final Fantasy (1987)
Sometimes I wonder how frustrating it must be to be a manager of staff. Obviously, as I’m an unambitious slacker who commands absolutely no respect, I haven’t got any kind of headcount to manage. Nobody answers to me, or looks to me for a clue.
But I do have extensive experience with the Football Manager game, which almost counts. It’s pretty handy in that game, because you can just save and reload when confrontations don’t go your way. But as far as I can see, there’s no need to overcomplicate management, because it’s a lot more simple than people realise.
Just have a think about what it’s like for sports managers, or better yet, put yourself in their shoes. You try to empathise with the players, get on the same psychological wavelength as them to make sure the big babies aren’t on the verge of bottling it; you prepare the team as well as possible, make sure they’re conditioned, that they’re fit. You lay out the full strategy and tactics against your next opponents, several times and as plainly as possible.
You’ve done your bit, then. Or so you think. Just you watch, as your players go out and act like a bunch of pilchards, doing whatever they like, and you’re left tearing your hair out. They won’t listen to any of your impassioned shouting now, and all your work on tactics is firmly out the window. The players aren’t doing the business, most unprofessional of them. But in the end, guess who gets the bullet?
And it’s no use you going into the chairman’s office and waving your arms about and swearing like a sailor, throwing your charges under the bus. You are gone, and sure, it’s not fully your fault. But someone’s got to be the scapegoat. Those players cost a lot more to hire and fire than you do, after all.
You would’ve been forgiven for thinking that you could trust those players, that they’d have a bit of autonomy and be well-drilled enough to band together through adversity. What you certainly didn’t expect was to see them fall over and get stuck, like a wind-up toy that’s still haplessly flailing its limbs.
It’s all exploded in your face, old son, but because you’re not the main asset, it’s you who’ll be getting the axe, and it’s going take an awful lot for your career to recover from this. And all because you had the misfortune of managing a group of brainless no-hopers.
That’s what it’s like in the very first Final Fantasy – not so final in the end, was it? But what prevents me from getting very far in the NES version of this game, apart from the deeply depressing overall presentation, is that when you get into a random battle, you can’t just keep hammering the A button to fight monsters until they finally go away.
No, get this: if two of your lads target the same monster, and the first fighter lands the killing blow, then when your second guy tees up his shot he’ll still target the aromatic dust where a pug-ugly goblin had previously stood. This obviously results in a timewasting miss.
There you go – that’s management for you in a nutshell: you make it as easy as possible for them, but they can’t think one iota for themselves and they take everything you say extremely literally. Result, you’re the one left looking stupid, you will be the whipping boy of all the tabloids, your P45 is in the post and they’re shaving rude words into your children’s hair.
It could have all spelled doom for SquareSoft, now Square Enix, since this game was famously their last throw of the dice before all the lads went to look for less stressful jobs, like giving massages to scorpions, or writing mission statements for “diverse” companies.
Talk about high stakes – there’s been cases of football managers having heart attacks on the touchline, true. But given the notorious Japanese work culture, I could hardly imagine the stress faced by the SquareSoft executives and business owners, on the verge of bankruptcy, staring into the abyss of professional shame.
It’s just as well for all of us that Final Fantasy went on to be a hit – apart from giving us a mainstream RPG series, it may have also saved some lives. I personally think more game companies should threaten and emotionally blackmail their customer base like this. “If you don’t buy our latest entry in the Atelier Lolita trilogy, then fine, but you’re gonna have our blood on your hands.”
The story in the original Final Fantasy isn’t a four-disc epic, of course, the technology wasn’t there. So here it’s simply about four crystals causing trouble in the world, there’s a few dragons maybe, the odd goblin or two running around. Then a troupe of lads, who never speak and have no names, appearances or skills, are tasked to save the world from evil.
A hilariously wretched (or wretchedly hilarious) translation kills some of the pathos in the NES version though, to say the least. Since it’s all monsters, swordplay and heroism, obviously people are going to get killed. That’s a given. But when the first boss tap-dances towards you and says, “I, Garland, will knock you all down!” then you can conclude that this probably isn’t the game where the infamous Final Fantasy angst kicked in.
There are a lot of magic spells in the game, but you might as well forget about most of them since they don’t exactly work as described. The Trades Description Act was already torn to shreds by the game’s title mentioning “Final”, but the wonky magic system puts the tin lid on it.
You see, all names in the game, including those of your protagonists, are restricted to 4 characters. That includes the names of every magic spell, which means you won’t have a notion of what the spells are supposed to do. I suppose that makes magic a bit of a fun, experimental tactic, so by all means head on into battle against 9 Gargoyles and try to throw out a HRM4 spell.
Of course, it will fail with the inevitability of your employees failing all their daily tasks. And then, for good measure, your team takes a hiding from the entirety of the Gargoyle Globetrotters, and it’s yet another party wipe.
Don’t get me wrong, the use of shops and menus was still fresh and revolutionary at the time, even if Dragon Quest was way ahead over in Japan, at the time. But you’ll almost feel like you’re reprogramming the game itself whenever you’re trying to sift through all of the shopkeeper’s dialogue and inventory.
All you’ll want to do is buy a better sword, which would be great if you had any way of determining if this new, vastly expensive sword was a better prospect or not. You might also be in the market for a few strong spells, the spells being divided up into a hierarchy of power levels which I’ll never understand.
Well, who needs menus when you’ve got battles? Although the repetitive battling gets pretty mutilating, naturally. But I do enjoy the fact that there is a dedicated option to DRINK on the battle menu. If the game was easier, and if I had the luxury, I’d just characterise my Ninja as a hard-drinking, jaded badass. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have time for that; he needs to get in there and dish out slaps to tree monsters, only to miss half of his shots anyway once the lads before him have had their turns.
The best option to play Final Fantasy 1 is categorically not on the NES. It’s a cool collector’s piece if you can get it, especially with the quasi-strategy guide that is the instruction manual, which is excellent to read through. You won’t find a copy of the NES version in Europe, mind. You won’t find Final Fantasies 2 through 6 here for that matter. There was a PS1 edition of the original game, part of Final Fantasy Anthology, but I wouldn’t recommend that one either – still a bit lacking in cheer.
Get Dawn of Souls, the Game Boy Advance edition that comes packaged with Final Fantasy II, or the recently released Pixel Remaster. Both of these clean the original game up a little bit. No longer will it make you target specific enemies, you’ll get a bestiary, and you’ll get a lot more hints and information on weapons and spells. It’s just brighter all round too, even on the original GBA screen. And trust me, it makes the decent first entry to this epic series a whole lot easier to manage.
26 December 2023