Revisiting past games I've recently acquired
Although I have to say, as far as RPGs go, the original Final Fantasy has not aged gracefully, the PSP edition (the iPhone also has a similar edition with touch controls) does polish up the graphics to the prettiest that I've ever seen and contains all the improvements added in the Final Fantasy Origins collection for the Playstation and Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls for Game Boy Advance. In addition to the pretty new 2D graphics and effects, the PSP and iPhone editions also get a bonus dungeon, on top of the four bonus dungeons added to Dawn of Souls. But the maps, the monsters, and the script is all left intact, minus the changes for the new dungeons.
Overall, many of the changes since its NES incarnation are quite good. First of all, the game is far less buggy than the original and all the spells and classes actually do something. In the original, the Thief was a useless paperweight of a character until he got upgraded into a Ninja, now he actually does solid physical damage, even if he still gets hit pretty hard. A number of spells that used to do nothing (Lock) now have an actual ingame effect too. Furthermore, there were some gameplay enhancements drawn from later Final Fantasy games that smooth this new edition, including automatic retargeting of attacks if the creature has died and the switch to MP instead of the limited number of casts per spell level, which highly discouraged casting.
And although the script has improved since the original translation, resulting in a more natural and less confusing read, the story is still the same. Fortunately, Final Fantasy is gifted with a more interesting story than "save the princess, save the world", although it includes both, having a bit of callback to the first boss fight in the final dungeon and boss, it's still a rather straightforward and undramatic affair. Fortunately, the absolute need to grind has been somewhat reduced, although you will still need to beat up creatures for their lunch money if you want to buy good gear and magic, but despite the high encounter rate, in keeping with the original, it still moves much faster than I remember. The bonus dungeons themselves are rather tedious and don't really add much to the story, just rooms filled with loot and nasty nasty creatures and while going through them makes the final dungeon notably easier, there's really nothing else compelling about them, even with some of the trickery in them.
Final Fantasy is a bit of a relic. You still can see the traces of its influence all over the design of Japanese style RPGs and could be said to be more influential than its predecessor in Dragon Warrior. However, it lacks the kind of dramatic story that later RPGs were able to create and so it feels a lot like a dungeon crawler as a result. This results in what can be quite a tedious play through for gamers who did not grow up with these old designs, made even more tedious for 100% completists due to the lengthy grindfests that compose the bonus dungeons. However, for fans of the original, this is perhaps the smoothest ride through the game yet and if you've never completed the game and want to give it another shot, the PSP and iPhone editions are the prettiest, shiniest, newest versions out there, full of enhancements and fixes. For old-school RPG fans only. 7/10.
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