Year:  2021

Developer:  Square Enix

Number of Players:  1

In my opinion, the first Final Fantasy is one of the most important RPG games that has ever been made.  While it might seem a little archaic compared to other more modern RPG games, this game spawned a franchise and influenced many others.  The original NES game has been remade for the Playstation 1 and also for the Playstation Portable along with a mobile game release.  Each release has altered the game from the original but also modernized it making it easier.  After playing those versions and now the Pixel Remaster edition for PC, I can say this is the most accessible version of Final Fantasy to date.

For anyone who hasn't played Final Fantasy, the game is a party based RPG.  You start the game by creating a party of four characters from six different classes.  You can have multiples of each class on your team so you really have some freedom on how you build your team.  Do you take a more melee focused team or one that relies more on magic?  Once you create your team, you are given a simple request to rescue the king's daughter from a knight named Garland.  After this little quest, the real game starts where you have to travel the world to bring light back to the four crystals of the elements. 

You move around from a top down view and when you go into combat the game switches to a side view.  Like almost every RPG out there you fight enemies, gain experience and gold which in turn lets you become stronger and buy better equipment.  You explore dungeons and towns getting clues on what your supposed to go next and find gear to make you stronger.  The game follows a pretty straightforward path for the first half of the game and while the second half is straightforward, you have some leeway on how you want to proceed.  All of this ends with a final boss fight with a interesting twist.

The Pixel Remaster Edition for the game does tweak a few things from the original game.  First off, the game is easier all the way around.  In the original I had to do a lot of grinding to make sure I could survive most dungeons while in this game with just a tad of grinding I had no problems.  The world map is a nice addition and I liked it tells me how many treasures are in an area so I know if I missed something or have to come back later to get something.  There are other changes that were done to for this version of the game and I liked all of them.

Being a Pixel Remaster of the game I expected the graphics to look better than the original or even better than the other remakes and overall I liked the graphics in the game.  I thought the enemies and backgrounds looked really well done and while I liked the character sprites I thought they could have been a little more detailed.  The game has a gallery where you can look at some art inspired by the game's characters which was neat to look at.  The music and sound effects where also well done.  There is a music player where you can listen to all of the game's music.  I loved the battle music from this game.

This was a great version of Final Fantasy to play.  While the game was made easier compared to the original game, it still retains all the story elements and almost all of the same items where they are supposed to be.  The only issue I had with the lower difficulty was that it made the final boss harder on me since I didn't do all the grinding I normally would have done in a game like this to level up.  However,  my party composition also could have been a factor with my issues beating the final boss (I usually use a melee heavy team in this game with minimal magic usage).  With that said, I really did like the graphic changes they made with this game.  This is going to be my go-to version of the game from now on.