Is The Final Fantasy Legend (1989) actually a Final Fantasy game? No! Technically, The Final Fantasy Legend is only the English-language title. In Japan, the game was known as Makai Toushi SaGa, the first game in an entirely different franchise of JRPGs. It was renamed for American release, in part because Final Fantasy was so popular over here, they thought this would be an easy way to market a broadly similar style of game that the audience may otherwise have no familiarity with. This was a recurring issue for early JRPGs trying to find a Western audience.
If it’s not a Final Fantasy game, though, why am I writing about it today for Fantasies Revisited?
Final Fantasy is one of the best and most iconic video game franchises of all time. It is also a franchise that has so many cash-grab tie-ins, spin-offs, and cheap ploys under its belt. There are terrible mobile gacha games, and even worse mobile racing games. Irrelevant tie-ins are an essential part of the Final Fantasy story.
And to think: It all began here.
“It has been said that the tower in the center of the world is connected to Paradise.”
The Final Fantasy Legend is, even by the standards of early RPGs, ‘story-lite’. In it, you play someone who wants to climb a tower in your hometown. Rumor has it that Paradise lay at the top of the tower. Unfortunately, for you and folks like you, the tower is sealed. Thankfully, the key can be gotten. All you have to do is a series of side-quests — help a king here, overthrow a king there — and defeat a demon. Easy as can be.
Unfortunately, the path to Paradise isn’t quite that easy. After climbing a few floors, you come across another locked door. Exiting the tower, you find yourself in a water world, with new oceans, new towns, new everything. How is this just a few floors above your old town? It doesn’t matter. As with before, there are problems to solve, quests to undertake.
But something is wrong. The tower doesn’t make sense, and the world doesn’t hold together. Will ascending the tower lead to Paradise? Or will it simply reveal the machinations of a cruel and uncaring god?
“Dreaming of a life in Paradise, many have challenged the secret of the tower.”
Final Fantasy came out two years after Dragon Quest. In that time, you can pretty clearly see what JRPG mechanics and tropes had begun to harden, and what was still evolving. The Final Fantasy Legend came out two years after Final Fantasy, and boy does it try to reinvent the wheel. I actually find some of what it tries to do fascinating, even as I admit that the way it actually does those things is not terribly interesting.
Take one of the most basic elements of RPGs: Leveling up. One core element of the genre is that, over time, your characters get stronger. Some of this is by accessing new weapons, but often this is by gaining new skills and getting more health. Final Fantasy II shook that formula up a little bit; The Final Fantasy Legend blows it up.
The Final Fantasy Legend presents three different ‘species’ with which you can fill your party. These species’ take the place of classes or jobs from other games in the series. And, intriguingly, each species is defined not by its capabilities but by its progression mechanics. They level up in different ways.
Humans are in some ways the weakest species. Fighting doesn’t make them stronger in any way. Instead, humans have two benefits: Potions and inventory. Humans, with no innate abilities, can equip more items than anyone else. They can equip a full suite of armor and multiple weapons and still have some room for other things. What’s more, potions available in every item shop let you permanently increase your stats. Humans are incredibly expensive to maintain, but capable of becoming the most powerful.
Mutants, on the other hand, do level up in battle. As with Final Fantasy II, they level up based on what they use. This means that your mutant party members naturally get stronger very quickly, and cost very little to build up. Unfortunately, a number of their inventory slots are taken up by innate abilities, which limits the amount of armor they can equip. Many of these innate abilities rotate regularly, so they aren’t dependable, and few of them are as strong as a good, traditional weapon.
Monsters are even stranger. Monsters never truly improve. But they are, uh, cannibalistic. After battle, if you let your monster feast on the meat of whatever you killed, you may spark a transformation. These transformations completely change your monster’s HP, strength, and agility, as well as their abilities. This means monsters are good at navigating dungeons, as they can heal themselves after battle by changing into a new monster, but are hard to control or build to a specific strength.
I love this system… conceptually. It works world-building into the level-up system in a way I find intriguing. Humans are the weakest of the three, but overcome this with technical know-how? Neat! Monsters are well-built for long stretches of exploration but too volatile to be dependable? Mutants thrive in combat but have few strategic options? This is a cool system, and one I don’t really recall seeing much outside of The Final Fantasy Legend.
Unfortunately, this is a 1989 GameBoy game. You have limited inventory space, and nothing stacks. So, lets say you want to increase your human’s Strength 10 times. You have to purchase ten separate Muscle potions. This likely takes multiple visits to the shopkeeper, as your inventory only has ten spots total. Then, you have to individually select and use each potion. It’s time consuming and boring in its existing format. Near the end of the game, I spent a solid thirty minutes just… clicking on potions. Over and over again.
Meanwhile, the time spent grinding gold to buy your fragile humans their precious potions will wildly overlevel your mutant party members. Early in the game, it’s not uncommon for mutants to hit 5-10x harder than anyone else in your party. This makes most combat the wrong combination of time-consuming and trivial. As with Final Fantasy II, it’s a system that counterintuitively increases the grind.
Still, conceptually, this is an interesting detour. Mainline Final Fantasy games would never really go down this direction again, though there’s some sort of parallels to the series’ fascination with job systems, each of which often comes with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. I’d love to see more RPGs play around with progression mechanics like this. Beyond that, I’d love to see progression mechanics become more incorporated into the world of the game.
RPGs, moreso than most genres, often completely separate the game’s ludic and narrative elements. Narratively, a character might be a trained soldier with decades of experience — but when he joins your party, he’s still just a level 1 fighter. And no amount of training will help him overcome the soccer twink or scullery maid who is also on the adventure, as they level up just as quickly.
I appreciate when RPG stats, classes, and abilities reflect something about the character or the world. Too often, we rely on them as static markers. I am this strong, therefore I can fight monsters that are that strong now. Some later Final Fantasy games would flirt with using progression to tell a story about a character, but even decades later, it’s pretty rare to see a system that is this tied into the world.
The Final Fantasy Legend doesn’t incorporate the two well, but I appreciate that it tries something genuinely novel. That said, as with Final Fantasy II, interesting does not necessarily equate to enjoyable.
“But no one knows what became of them.”
The Final Fantasy Legend is… interesting. It’s not a good game, particularly by modern standards. It’s deeply unbalanced, and even by the standards of early JRPGs it doesn’t always do a great job of signposting quests or even items effects. The recent Nintendo Switch re-release is, likewise, fine. It makes some small adjustments for modern sensibilities. But for The Final Fantasy Legend to shine, it would need a complete rework, I think.
And yet, I also get how it launched a fairly popular JRPG franchise in its own right. There are two more Final Fantasy Legend games in the Switch collection (SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu and SaGa 3: Jikuu no Hasha in Japan), and then fourteen more SaGa games, some of which are genuinely great. The SaGa games are often more experimental than the Final Fantasy ones, playing around with story structure and JRPG mechanics in ways that often don’t fully land but still make them stick out.
Because of that, I actually would love to see a remake or update of games like The Final Fantasy Legend. There are plenty of good ideas here. Each world feels distinctive, with specific gimmicks that are neat and never overstay their welcome. Except for Su-Zaku. Su-Zaku absolutely overstays his welcome.
Su-Zaku can get fucked.
The recent Switch port does make some feints at making the games more playable. Just being able to speed the game up (walking, text, all of it) feels a thousand times better. I can’t imagine completing this game normally. But I’d love to see a more robust updating to the game. Expand the inventory a bit. Let me stack items, and use multiple items at once. The changes necessary to making the game really pop are relatively minor.
The recent Pixel Remasters of Final Fantasy I – VI made those games more approachable. The remake revitalized classics without sacrificing the core of what made them special. The Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend Switch release doesn’t do that. These are deep cuts for hardcore fans, and will remain such. It’s neat to see, for trivia purposes, the first time a Final Fantasy game let you kill God, but the ride to get there is pretty rough.
“Now, there is another who will brave the adventure….”
Thanks for reading another installment of Fantasies Revisited! We’ll be back in a couple weeks with another mainline entry, 1990’s Final Fantasy III.