My first experience with the Final Fantasy franchise

There are a few very famous gaming franchises that have been around for a very long time. Some come and go, some werent there at the start but emerged as a powerhouse later in the game, and some of them have been around the entire damn time. Not many can claim to be part of the last club, but Final Fantasy is one of them.

It has been many years but I still remember the very first day I got to know FF and except for some of their most recent games that I don't really care for, I feel as though it has been one of the strongest franchises in gaming, EVER.

But there was always that first day and in my particular situation it involved a bit of near groveling in order to make it happen.

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if my friend did manage to hold onto the box it probably looks something like this these days but there was a time that it was wrapped in plastic and featured inside of a jewelry display case at a now defunct department store that was called Montgomery Ward's.

Getting involved in various video games wasn't so easy to do back in the early 90's. We didn't have internet and we would find out about games by renting them from Blockbuster, borrowing them from friends, or by reading about this in video game magazines.

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In this particular situation me and my friend didn't have access to any of those things because not everyone was a gamer and my buddy, who just happened to be a neighbor and I met him randomly because of RC cars in the street one day, well he was a super-nerd and didn't really have any friends other than me as far as I could tell.

He did have a driving license though and he also had parents that would give him money periodically for a new game. My parents did no such thing.

Our intention driving the 10 miles or so to the mall that had Montgomery Ward's in it that day was specifically to score him a new game and as we were looking at all the games in the display case it was me that singed this one out for possible selection.

I had been a D&D player many years prior and to me, this game looked like a streamlined D&D sort of experience but without the need dice and pencils and little books. I really had no experience with what this game was and I knew nothing of Squaresoft the company.

It was totally my friend's call and he was not a table-top gamer like I had been in the past and when he was looking at the box he said something along the lines of "it looks lame." It did look pretty basic considering that the SNES was a pretty big step up as far as graphics are considered.

I recall him basically threatening me when he did agree to get it (probably due to lack of other options because Montgomery Ward's was not a huge story) and I recall him saying that if the game sucked, he was going to make me pay for it. He was never going to actually do that but that was just the way we spoke to one other.

We got back home, went to his gaming cave in the basement and fired it up.

When the opening screen fired up and we heard what would later become one of the most famous songs in all of gaming history, we weren't exactly mesmerized and the silly and rather basic looking story intro was less-than-amazing also... but it was a mere 6 minutes long and then we get thrust into the turn based combat which to both of us, was a rather new notion seeing as how there weren't a great many RPG's that existed on any previous system. Sure, we had both played Dragon Warrior on NES, but I was much more of a fan of it than he was.

Final Fantasy though, it kind of changed the game for everyone. The amount of options, the amount of teammates that you could have, and the genuine strategy that was necessary for victory.

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Looking back the graphics were very basic and the animations that would happen during combat were only a couple of frames but this, and i Didn't realize it at the time, was kind of a sign of things to come decades later.

When the industry became increasingly focused on more and more realistic graphics, many titles focused on this to the point of basically ignoring a coherent story or even controls that simply worked. Final Fantasy themselves would end up being one of the biggest violators of this in a game called Final Fantasy XV where some segments of the game were so focused on realistic graphics that the actual gameplay was pure nonsense. I recall one particular water boss of sorts where it feels as though the devs were trying to figure out how to make this all work given various things like processing power and the immense size of the arena and then just said "screw it, just make it impossible to lose" and that is exactly what they did.

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I loved Final Fantasy 2, I kind of loathed FFXV even though I did finish both of them.

I have played in one way or another, every single Final Fantasy release and there was a time, from SNES-PS2 that every single one of the games was solid gold. These days, IMO that is more often than not the opposite opinion that I have of FF games. I don't really even pay much attention to their release anymore.

But there was a day, and it was standing with my high school nerd-pal at the makeshift gaming counter at Montgomery Ward's that the journey all began. It started with my friend doing me a favor and seriously holding it over my head about the game being quality or not and later would turn into both of our favorite game that we had ever played in our lives.

Funny how a little happenstance thing like a minor store only having 5 or 6 titles in stock can completely change your gaming trajectory huh?

It is undoubtable that without that day both of us would have ended up playing Final Fantasy anyway because it became one of the most popular franchises of all time... But our story does have a beginning with modest roots completely devoid of any advertising influencing our decision... and this is the reason why it stands out so much in my life.

I don't often speak to that friend anymore but when we do, that fateful day in Montgomery Ward's always pops up. It's a big part of our mutual history.

Got any random gaming stories to throw back at me? I always like to hear them.