Replay Two Classics for One Price! FINAL FANTASY I & II: DAWN OF SOULS

Author's Rating:

Pros: Classic stuff, very cheap, gameplay, TWO games    

Cons: Dated, FF2's battle system, not a whole lot of replay value    

The Bottom Line: 
Very recommended for RPG fans who want to find the series' roots, but probably not as exciting for non-FF fans. 

Author's Review
Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls is a ported remake of the first two Final Fantasy games, which was released on the Gameboy Advance in 2004. This was clearly Nintendo's attempt at making these games accessible to their fans who didn't catch the games when they were first released in the eighties as well as to renumber their own Final Fantasy properties as they'd re-release 3-6 in the next few years. Two games for one price, baby!

Final Fantasy I

I didn't own the original Final Fantasy game released on the original Nintendo and I didn't get the chance to play it years back when it was released as Final Fantasy: Origins on the PlayStation, so this was my first time playing through it and my first experience at its gameplay. That said, I was a little disappointed with the results. Then again, what can you do with a game that was originally released in 1987?

The story is very shallow with you taking control over four characters of your choosing (though you can't choose their names) while you pick out which character classes you want be it Fighter, Monk, Black Mage, Red Mage, or White Mage. From there you start your game as the Four Light Warriors who must go through the countryside and put the light back into these four crystals, which have been darkened due to these fiends in order to save the world. There's literally nothing else to it.

What sucks is that the game doesn't really tell you where to go or what to do. You can talk to all of these non-playable characters in towns you visit and sometimes hints are dropped, but for the most part I was just wandering trying to figure out where to go next. There aren't a lot of places to explore and the towns all look fairly similar with magic, item, and weapon shops everywhere, but you're able to operate a boat and a canoe later in the game as well as an airship (which has been hugely important to the series ever since).

There are a handful of dungeons you visit where battle from floor to floor and collect items before the big bad boss fight and these places, while varied in the traditional sense ranging from fire to ice caverns and all that stuff, are a little boring. There were many places I found boring actually and more than that the enemies you encounter are all derivatives of each other. A troll? How about a sea troll? There's also a complete lack of difficulty to the game save for the end where I obviously needed to grind through a few more levels before the final boss fight. All of the mazes are very simple and there aren't really any puzzles to speak of in the dungeons that were too hard to complete. I will say that the random enemy encounters were well balanced so that you aren't fighting monsters ever tile on the grid.

The original game was made on the 8-bit NES system so they updated it for this re-release on the GBA to 32-bit, which makes it look like it's a port of a Super Nintendo game. I've examined a lot of screenshots from the original game and can tell you that these graphics are much different with areas that are much livelier and filled with more color. The graphics are very good for being a GBA game, but still isn't up to snuff with some of the ones created solely for the system. However, unless you're a purist, I think you'll dig the changes and how much the developers cleaned everything up. I will say that some of the character designs are still very dated, though.

Speaking of dated, the music is certainly that. Composed by series mastermind, Nobuo Uematsu, the original soundtrack has been remixed for this release and I have to say that I'm not a big fan of either themes. The sound effects are wobbly, but the music isn't very exciting or hold any impact on the experience. In the back of my head I do have to say that it might have been really amazing for the time period, but it hasn't aged very well to the ears I currently own.

The battle system is also very archaic, but is still easy to grasp and use efficiently. Your Mages learn spells via buying them from magic shops, but they're limited by what they can buy--three spells a level of magic. These spells are just like how they are in later games where you have offensive spells like power of the elements as well as more defensive spells like making your party quicker in combat and healing abilities. Anyone who's played a turn-based RPG will feel right at home here because of the familiar system that really started the whole RPG craze and though it's not really deep, it's works all the same and was clearly a big inspiration for all that came after.

I completed my game in just shy of 20 hours and I have to say I was a little disappointed with the experience. I dug parts of the game and I had fun leveling up my characters (which happens quite quickly) as well as fighting some of the optional boss battles (Omega Weapon!) to get better weapons and all that, but other aspects of the game were really boring from the story to some of the dungeons and the Monk character is completely useless until you gain a specific weapon for him. It's still a fun one, though. I mean, you've got to respect where the series came from right?

Final Fantasy II

The second game was released in 1988 and updates the game with some new innovations and things, which break new ground for the genre as well as build upon prior techniques. There's an actual story to Final Fantasy II even if it is a little hokey. You lead a band of four characters who are part of a rebel alliance against an army sent by the evil Emperor. That's pretty much all there is--there's a lot of death and characters you meet along the way as you build up friendships and race to defeat the Emperor before he overtakes the world with his...evil. At least the story this time around had more meat on the bone and actually influenced many other games to develop actual stories around their gameplay.

There's a huge change as far as gameplay is concerned in this game, which I wasn't a big fan of. They got rid of the leveling up system and instead took the route of "you use it, you win it". The more damage you take the higher your hit points will become (the same with magic points). The more you attack with a certain weapon the more damage you'll cause with it. There's a good selection of weapons for you to discover or purchase at the various shops you come across as well as the ability to dual wield or use a shield for added defense. 

A revamped magic system is also implemented where you come across and purchase these tomes where your characters can learn the spells and gain powerful new levels as much as they use them. Leveling up is really disastrous in the beginning before you reach a proper momentum...and it actually gets better as you continue playing, but I still wasn't very hot on the idea because it makes grinding levels much more tedious than it already is and left me a little under prepared at some points. I also hated how you only had three static members and a fourth member of your party that kept switching so you couldn't develop them as efficiently. 

What I really dug was that there was a much better variety of enemy encounters in this game. Some were pretty difficult like the Gigas, but some made you really rely on strategy to take them down. The battle system is very similar to the first game in this turn-based way of facing off against foes from the right side on a fixed plain and the enemy encounter rate was significantly higher than the first game's. There's not a whole lot of exploring to do on the over-world, but there seemed to be more areas to visit than Final Fantasy I. The dungeons are all pretty easy, but I hated all of the chests you had to discover via hidden walls.

The graphics in this game are very amazing, too--clearly they spent a good effort with the GBA's hardware to give the game a better look. There are added moments of action that look pretty amazing such as your ship, at one point, being sucked into a whirlpool as well as the various spells looking pretty amazing. Again, this looks exactly how it would if it were on the SNES, which is okay by me as it looks quite amazing. The sound is also pretty good for what you can get out of the GBA speaker, but there weren't many songs that really stood out to me a whole lot. After a while I just listened to my own music or podcasts while I was playing.

I finished this game in about twenty hours as well and there's a bonus sort of chapter when you complete the game called "Soul of Rebirth" where you can complete a few more hours worth of challenges. I wasn't a humongous fan of the added content because it was very unwarranted and had this "who cares" quality to it, but it's a nice little bonus for completion to eek a few more hours out of the game. I actually liked the first Final Fantasy more than this one as I was disappointed by this for a majority of the experience mainly because of the battle system. However, I did like some of the other things such as the story and how you actually knew what you had to do via the keyword system they utilized.

I bought my copy for about ten bucks online and for about forty hours worth of gameplay and completing two classic games of a series I've loved since I was a kid...I would say the price was extremely worth it. Regardless of the fact that they've aged pretty poorly at times and how archaic everything seems there's this great nostalgia that goes with it. Granted, I never played these as a child, but you clearly note the building blocks they set down for future RPGs and they are still playable and fun. However, if you already own Final Fantasy Origins or the other port (an anniversary edition) on the PlayStation Portable than I think you're all set. This may even be much easier than the regular games, from what I've heard, so if you want a challenge I would track down the original games, which I believe have been added to the Wii Virtual Console rather recently. As for me, I'm good with these--it was a good experience...pretty average I guess...now I'll go on with the series.

© Jason Haskins, 2011



Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy Chronicles


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