Eventually, Final Fantasy becomes a franchise… comfortable with genre-hopping. You’d never see a Call of Duty JRPG, but there is a Final Fantasy battle royale game. But for its first few years, Final Fantasy was pretty firmly dedicated to the JRPG genre. Until the late nineties, there was really only a single exception: 1991’s Final Fantasy Adventure.
Final Fantasy Adventure is an interesting oddity. The game is obviously heavily indebted to the Legend of Zelda games in its approach to action and world design. The game is often credited with introducing RPG elements — levels, stats, experience — to the Zelda formula, though 1987’s Zelda II: The Adventure of Link technically beat them to some of those elements. That said, Final Fantasy Adventure feels much more like later SNES Zelda entries than it does the two games that were already out.
So let’s dig into SquareSoft’s first attempt to grow Final Fantasy beyond its origins and into the world-conquering behemoth it would soon become. Welcome back to Fantasies Revisited.
“The Tree of Mana grows with the energy of nature.”
You are an anonymous slave in the gladiatorial pits of the Dark Lord. When one of your friends, a fellow fighter, dies, he entrusts you with a quest: Seek out Bogard. Bogard is a ‘Gemma Knight’, an ancient order of mystical knights endowed with great power to protect the lands. Only Bogard, he believes, can stop the Dark Lord from corrupting the power of the Mana Tree.
You escape the Dark Lord’s castle and find someone else, a girl who is also trying to find Bogard. Unfortunately, Bogard is old and wounded. He can’t keep you safe. He suggests you find Cibba, another Gemma Knight. There, you learn the truth: Your traveling companion is the last descendant of the Guardians of the Mana Tree. If the Dark Lord captures her, she will be able to open up the path to the Tree.
Unfortunately, he captures her immediately.
You must become the first new Gemma Knight in a generation. Can you find Excalibur, the only sword that can strike down your powerful foe before he drains the Mana Tree of its energy? And can you rescue the last Guardian of the Mana Tree before she is corrupted?
“The evil force of people makes the tree evil.”
So sure was I that Final Fantasy Adventure was led by a Zelda dev who wanted to test some new ideas that after I finished playing, I looked up director Kouichi Ishi. To my surprise, Ishi was in fact a Final Fantasy staffer, someone who had worked on small pieces of the previous games in the series. Not only that, but Final Fantasy Adventure was the first game Ishi directed.
This is an incredibly self-assured debut game from Ishi and a team of Final Fantasy vets. Unexpectedly, Final Fantasy Adventure predates Zelda‘s foray into GameBoy releases. When Final Fantasy Adventure came out in June of 1991, even A Link to the Past was not yet out. Action RPGs were barely a genre at all.
Interestingly, the game blends its RPG mechanics and traditional adventure game puzzles much more naturally than many later action RPGs. Essentially, you start the game with a sword, and as you play, you unlock different weapons: An axe, a spear, and a flail, among others. These all have distinctive attack patterns and damage values, meaning players can choose how they want to fight.
Indeed, just like Final Fantasy III let players change jobs more freely and used that to turn some bosses into puzzles, Final Fantasy Adventure does the same thing with weapons. Does the boss have long reach? Your strongest sword might have a hard time reaching it, then, while a weaker spear might make the fight manageable. Are you better off saving up during boss fights for a powerful charge attack? Or is the fight one where you need to plink away at the armor during brief spans when it is vulnerable?
These aren’t really questions I had to consider before Final Fantasy III. While I think there’s something to be said for giving players less choice in character creation, if you’re going to let players change up their abilities on the fly, FFIII and Final Fantasy Adventure are great ways to do it. Video games are in conversation with their players, and one way that conversation manifests is like a test. Platformers test reflexes and spatial awareness, for example: Can you tell where to jump next, and then can you execute that jump effectively?
JRPGs, especially ones with turn-based combat, often get a bad rap. What is the game testing? My ability to grind? Where is the challenge? To make an arbitrary number go up until I can walk past this challenge and onto the next one? And… there’s some fairness to that. A badly designed RPG is, essentially, testing your patience.
Systems like this, smartly, test other skills. By forcing you to engage with your weapons beyond “Do I like this?” or “Is the number higher?” the game pushes you to try new things. It forces you to engage with and learn its systems more deeply. The game asks you to think about how you’re approaching the problem at hand. They turn combat into a puzzle. In FFIII, they did so by pushing you to think about and change up your party composition regularly to meet the shifting needs of every dungeon. Here, they do so by giving you limited but strongly defined equipment sets that all have specific niches.
Smartly, the game compounds this strength by doing the same thing with dungeoneering and puzzles. You need axes to chop down trees, sickles to cut plants, maces to break rocks. Doing this is necessary to progress, but it can also let you find new treasure or shortcuts. Because of this, I found myself swapping weapons constantly. Rather than relying on a single, overpowered item, the game was finding ways to remind me: Hey, you have more stuff in your toolkit. Use it.
Unfortunately, the game falters considerably when it comes to items. As in The Final Fantasy Legend, your item inventory is extremely limited, and it is very possible to simply… run out of key resources. For example, destructible walls populate many dungeons. You can detect what walls you can destroy by hitting them and listening for a distinctive sound. If you find the sound, you have to get out a consumable item, a mattock, to break down the wall. It’s frustrating, and as with the game’s other major dungeon-exploring consumable, keys, makes it possible to either soft-lock yourself or face a long, tedious grind where you are trying to gets keys or mattocks as an incredibly rare drop from a single enemy in the dungeon.
“One who touches the Mana Tree gets the mighty power.”
Final Fantasy Adventure is simultaneously a complete left turn for the series and a truly excellent game. It’s no surprise that Final Fantasy Adventure spawned an entire spin-off action-RPG series, the Mana series. As a kid, Secret of Mana, the second game in the series, was among my all-time favorites. I have a lot of fond memories of playing it with my cousin. I never knew that it was related to Final Fantasy; the game was strong enough to stand on its own.
Since then, Square remade Final Fantasy Adventure repeatedly, to better align it with the Mana series. In the 2000s, more than a decade after its initial release, Square and Brownie Brown remade the game for GameBoy Advance as Sword of Mana, removing many of the Final Fantasy references in the original. And thirteen years later yet again, SquareEnix and MCF released a fully-3D remake titled Adventures of Mana for PS Vita and mobile devices. Neither game had the influence of the original, but the original was for many years difficult to track down and play for Western audiences.
Thankfully, Final Fantasy Adventure is now readily playable on the Nintendo Switch, properly contextualized as part of the Collection of Mana set. As with Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend, updates in the collection are sparse. Unlike the SaGa collection, however, Final Fantasy Adventure doesn’t really need many updates. Despite its limited graphics and dated color palette, FFA‘s clean, readable design remains effective to this day. Honestly, even the 3D remakes don’t really feel necessary. Final Fantasy Adventure remains a surprisingly vital game.
See you soon…
Somehow, we’re only three games into the main Final Fantasy series and it has already spawned two successful spin-off franchises. Next time, we return to the mainline series with Final Fantasy IV, released in the US as Final Fantasy II.
See you soon!