Mad About Science: Final Fantasy

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

It’s difficult to pinpoint a video game franchise that’s had the most cultural contribution to human society globally. It’s easy to point at titles like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Dark Souls, Grand Theft Auto or Pokémon. I’d argue that if you raised your hand for any of those, you’re dead wrong.

It’s obviously Battletoads.

In all seriousness, it’s impossible to ignore the massive media juggernaut that is Final Fantasy. There isn’t a person alive in a developed nation above the age of 6 that hasn’t felt the influence of this franchise in one form or another. Famous for its staggering number of sequels and spin-offs, the crown victor of Final Fantasy’s epic reach is certainly Final Fantasy VII, released in 1997 for the Playstation game console. We’ll tackle the importance of this cultural behemoth later in this article — for now, it’s important to dive into its origins.

Much like Pokémon, the history of Final Fantasy began as a game that almost never was. Role-playing games (RPGs) weren’t very popular in Japan in the 1980s, especially on video game consoles. While America was enduring the “Satanic Panic” and Tom Hanks’ demonization of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1982 TV movie Mazes and Monsters, the father of Final Fantasy — Hironobu Sakaguchi — was pushing his parent company, Square, to develop a role-playing game. Square pushed back, certain that an RPG wouldn’t sell well enough to cover the cost of development.

Dragon Quest proved Square wrong by becoming an overnight sensation and propelling role-playing games to the forefront of the collective Japanese psyche. Released May 27, 1986, Dragon Quest went on to define how RPGs would be executed on consoles for the next decade. The presence of an overworld for your sprites to explore was chief among the developments that titles like Final Fantasy and Pokémon would draw from later. Randomized battles to play in a new perspective, and even the method in which commands were issued in battle all stuck around for at least 10 years after its release. While 10 years doesn’t seem like much in the life of a game now (looking at you, 2011’s Skyrim), entertainment technology exploded between 1986 and 1997. Storage capacities alone grew by orders of magnitude and consoles evolved from 8-bit pixel art to a blend of photorealism and polygonal 3-D models.

Dragon Quest’s success was a clear signal to Square that RPGs would sell in Japan. At this point, Square gave the green light to Sakaguchi to begin development of the first title, modeled heavily after western RPGs like Ultima.

Bonus fact: The 1997 smash-hit, Ultima Online — based on the world from the 1981 title — is still running. This makes it one of the oldest MMOs still online, beating World of Warcraft from 2004, Runescape from 2001 and Everquest from 1999.

The team behind the original Final Fantasy was quite small. Referred to as the “A-team,” Sakaguchi’s team of developers and creatives brought a unique twist to RPGs in Japan by introducing elemental weaknesses to monsters borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons. The game also notably featured the ability to freely choose the classes of your group to build your own adventuring party with a unique sets of strengths and weaknesses. Interestingly, this take was pared down in later installments by giving specific characters unique abilities and encouraging you to swap out party members to accomplish specific goals.

The irony of a game titled Final Fantasy is that it appears to have spawned dozens of sequels and continues to this day. It’s believed that the primary driving force behind the finality of the name was that Sakaguchi felt backed into a wall by Square and if the game flopped then he would have quit the industry forever. At first, it appeared it may indeed have been the sole and final installment in the series when the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin refused to review it and Square pushed to create only 200,000 copies. Something about the game spoke to Japanese consumers however, as it exploded in popularity and was translated into English for a North American audience in 1990. The first installment is still extremely rare stateside, especially in the form of an NES cartridge.

The series solidified itself in video game history in 1997 with the release of Final Fantasy VII, the first of the franchise to be released on CDs with the Playstation console. Previous CD systems, such as the Sega CD and Sega Saturn lacked the power the Playstation could provide. FFVII boasted a polygonal overworld and polygonal characters overlaid photorealistic pre-rendered artwork, something that had never really been seen before at that scale. Pair that with a phenomenal soundtrack by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu, the man responsible for the fanfare heard ‘round the world, along with a cast of lovable misfits and a combat system that was hard to put down and Square Enix had a global hit on its hands.

In 2001, Final Fantasy stepped boldly into the realm of motion pictures with the ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. There’s not much to discuss about this movie beyond the herculean effort animators made to completely render a hyper-realistic human being in the form of Aki Ross, dubbed the first “digital actress.” This experiment showcased the possibilities CGI held in reinventing cinema, which was later expanded on by titles like Avatar, and every dang Marvel movie that’s come out since Iron Man.

Though now under different leadership, Final Fantasy continues to this day with the hugely successful Final Fantasy XIV, a massively multiplayer online role playing game and one of the only juggernauts that’s reliably been able to rival World of Warcraft.

Stay curious, 7B.