HAVE YOU PLAYED FINAL FANTASY I? WHY NOT?

It's one of my dirty little not-so-secret secrets that I have played pretty much none of the RPG "classics" at all, including the Final Fantasy series. My console gaming career only really started with the SNES, which I got from a relative, and I rarely ever bought games for them in addition to the ones that already came with it. And those were mostly platformers and jump 'n run games.
So at the time when the famous old-school RPGs were still relatively recent, I simply didn't know they existed. And nowadays, video game design has evolved so much that I just can't imagine myself enjoying most of those old games, as to me a lot of them just seem like bare-bones prototypes of good games to come. That doesn't mean I think those classics are objectively bad games - in fact, without them, games wouldn't be where they are now - but their original novelty or almost revolutionary potential that made them so special at the time just doesn't really work anymore today.

I did watch some footage of a FF1 stream about a year ago, but it bored me to death. It just looked like a huge pointless grind-fest to me, with uninteresting locations and dialogue, repetitive and RNG-filled combat, and the game giving you pretty much no incentive to keep going apart from the desire to see numbers increase. Obviously, the fact that I dislike grinding and am not a huge fan of traditional turn-based combat to begin with plays a role, too.

Before FF1, I played Dragon Warrior I, II and III. I didn't enjoy it as much because of how magic/MP worked and how equipment worked (my memory is fuzzy, but it wasn't very intuitive). I never owned FF1 back when I was a naive kid, thus I didn't have the luxury to figure it out, and I rented games I *did* enjoy instead (like Dragon Warrior II and III!). I have never really made an attempt to try it since then.

In fact, the only FFs I have finished was IV, V and VI (and IV and V were only finished a couple of years ago - it took me 17 years to beat IV!). I haven't even gotten more than halfway in FFVII (and to this day have managed to avoid major spoilers in it - I don't know how it all ends or who CLOUD really is. Though I do know Aeris dies :(

I've never played FF2, 8, 9, 10, 10-2, 11, 13-2, 13-3, 15
I've played about 30mins of FF3DS, about 5 mins of FF12 and FF13, and I played a free demo up to about level 4 of FF14 Reawakening (or whatever it's called).

I've been meaning to play FFVII. I bought it on steam a few years ago.

I own FFIV (DS), FFVI (SNES), FFVII (original PC version from the late 90s AND Steam versions), FFXII (thanks Hexatona!), FFXIII (thanks Sailarius!).

Someone should buy me the FF games I am missing. They are on sale at Steam...

When emulation became a thing I went down my checklist of "games that got away" and finished them off one after another, making abundant use of cheating, frame skip, save state and all those wonderful little conveniences that emulators gave us. It's actually why I don't rate the difficulty in some games (because I messed with it).

Among those was Dragon Warrior 4, which I got as a gift and then left the damn thing sitting on a bench and it was gone when I came back for it. But even with emulators I never got around to finishing it. I dunno, for some reason I feel like I'm not meant to finish that game... despite having rented DW3 for an entire month I never beat it either. I struggled to topple Baramos for so long and then when the game continued with another quest I had hit the 1-month limit my parents imposed on me.

Any of the FFs that I didn't play or finish (2, 3, 12 and 13) I just don't care to. My game backlog got out of hand again.

I played the NES version and enjoyed it immensely. I'm actually surprised to see that many of you didn't like it.

The those who are saying that had trouble figuring out what to do - you need to play with the game's manual, which is how it was intended to be played. Search for "Final Fantasy NES Manual PDF" and you can find scans of it. It includes maps, tips, etc and it makes the experience more enjoyable.

BlackWolf1992
"Nobody reads the manual."

We did back then.

"Reading the manual was like foreplay. It got you ready for the real thing." ~LockeZ

I distinctly remember that I stopped reading manuals around the PS1 era and then had to check it for Resident Evil to find out how the hell to manage the inventory. And then there was a magic box in the very next room LOL

I played the DoS version a year or two ago. My main gripe with the game is the RE rate. There was this cave that triggered a random battle every step (it was ridiculous). Apart from that, I managed to enjoy the game for what it was.

I don't have it. If it had a gba or symbian port (like ff2 and 3), I would've played it a long time ago. I'm sure ff1 has qualities that ff2 does not have. Better qualities, I mean. I like 2 (with all its shortcomings), so I might like 1 just as well.

Well…I have played the original Final Fantasy way back when I was a little kid when I rented it for my NES back in the early 90’s and got a little ways in before eventually returning it and picking up another game instead, but I remember feeling pretty indifferent about it at the time because it was my very first RPG that I ever played and I was pretty initially confused about what the hell was fully going on in that game. I basically picked it up to rent because the boxart looked pretty cool and I thought that the game was going to be something along the lines to The Legend Of Zelda or something, but it ended up being something completely different to what I was used to playing at the time. To this day I haven’t gone back and played the original at all over the years - which is quite a shame, and really a bit of a surprise, actually – considering once I got around to playing IV and up that I started to really fall in love with RPG’s in general and the Final Fantasy series itself. Perhaps one day.

I've never beaten a final fantasy game without cheats. :c