The Greatest Video Game That Never Was

I was a Nintendo devotee in the NES and SNES days, back when Nintendo and Sega had an intense rivalry and Sony hadn’t yet arrived on the console gaming scene.  It’s no small coincidence that some of my favorite video game series began there.  Chief among them is the Final Fantasy series, many titles of which exemplify The Way Console RPGs Ought To Be.  I consider Final Fantasy IV (sold as Final Fantasy II in America) the greatest video game of all time and the paragon of console RPGs.  Given my love for both Nintendo and Final Fantasy, you can imagine my heartbreak when the two divorced in 1997, Final Fantasy leaving Nintendo’s 16-bit SNES for another console: the 32-bit Sony Playstation.

With this change from one generation to the next and one brand of consoles to another came other notable changes in the franchise, some for the better, some for the worse.  The games began fully embracing the industrial feel that was introduced in small ways in the early games and explored in more depth in FFVI (FFIII in America).  The resolution and color, of course, improved with the greater capabilities of the next-generation console, and the rendering was changed from 2D to 3D.

The industrialization of the Final Fantasy worlds has always felt out-of-place to me.  Although right from the beginning, Final Fantasy has had airships, technological marvels such as the warmech and the computerized sky castle in which he lives, and the occasional robot, these elements were used sparingly to add a touch of wonder and other-worldliness.  Here were things that could amaze our characters just as we would be amazed by their own magical abilities and equipment were they to step into our world.  When I played Final Fantasy III American, I was disappointed to see a much more industrial world than in I or II American.  It’s been many years since I played it, but I recall that I didn’t play far beyond an encounter with a ghost train — really?  A train soiling my beloved fantasy series?  FFVII carried this trend even further, featuring guns and slums and motorcycles and trains (again), departing further and further from its fantasy roots.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with games like that.  I was just disappointed to see such a shift in a series which had originally established itself solidly as high fantasy.  It continued getting darker and grittier and more industrial, and I continued thinking “gee, this is a fun game, but what ever happened to Final Fantasy?”.

Alongside the industrialization, the graphics improved from the SNES’s resolution of 512×448 with 32768 colors (but only 256 onscreen at one time) to the Playstation’s 640×480 with 16.7 million colors — and from the older tile-based 2D graphics to a new 3D style.  Sadly, this meant losing the old-fashioned charm that comes with the tile-based model.  3D games look more realistic, but they look less like games.  Every day another game comes out that looks more like a movie and less like a game.  There’s an inexplicable feeling of nostalgic fun and joy that I get when playing 2D games that is dampened by a 3D look, and further dampened in proportion to the realism of that look.  Some games should be 3D — the Unreal series is one example — but leave my console RPGs 2D and tile-based for best enjoyment.

All this leads me to one conclusion: there was an entire era of Final Fantasy games that I would have dearly loved to play, only Square never bothered to make them: the 32-bit 2D tile-based era.  Greater resolution, richer color, new and improved, while still retaining the charm of the traditional tile-based RPG.  Games strongly rooted in fantasy, using other genres for a touch of flavor rather than the main course.  Epic swords-and-sorcery tales in the tradition of FFI, FF4j, and FFV, not dark, gritty, industrialized worlds in the tradition of FFVI. 

I came to love the Final Fantasy series because of what it was in the early days, and it saddens me that they departed so far from their roots as they went on.  I can see only one solution to this problem: learn to make games so that I can write the games I wish they had.  This is why I am studying game programming: I intend to create the games that I would have played had they existed.  My first project will be a simple role-playing game engine for the PC, which I will then use and extend and expand to create the RPGs that never were.  Watch this space for news on my progress.  🙂

(Footnote: As you can imagine, I was VERY pleased at the announcement last week at Game Developer’s Conference 2009 in San Francisco that FFIV’s direct sequel, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years will be made available in North America this year as a WiiWare download.  It’s been out exclusively on Japanese mobile phones since early last year, and since I neither speak Japanese nor have a Japanese mobile phone, I was very disappointed to be missing out.  Hooray for WiiWare!)

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