The Final Fantasy Legend was a pioneering release for the Game Boy, being its first RPG. Early Game Boy games were tiny, just 128 kilobytes of data, so it was an achievement to create a complete, albeit small, RPG. The game is not actually a Final Fantasy game but the beginning of a separate series, called SaGa in Japan. Square (successfully) slapped the FF name on it to capitalize on the success of Final Fantasy.
Due to the memory limitation, FF Legend is structured around four small worlds connected via a central tower. You create a party of four characters using any combination of three races: humans, mutants (espers in the Japanese), and monsters. The game's mechanics are unusual. Firstly, there are no experience points. Each race has its own growth mechanism. You boost your humans' stats by buying items that increase strength, agility, or hit points (HP). Some weapons use strength and others, like whips and bows, use agility (which is also a defensive stat), so you decide how you want to balance these, together with HP. Money is earned by defeating monsters in random combat.
Mutants are highly random: after every battle, one of their stats may increase, and/or they may gain an ability, such as flame, ice, thunder, quake, flare, or heal. They can have up to four abilities, so any ability gained after four will replace one at random. This can be irritating, as there are more bad abilities than useful ones. It pays to save frequently (you can do so at any time) so that you can reset the game whenever a mutant loses an ability you'd rather keep. If you consider that "cheating," I recommend not including any mutants in your party. You can change your party at guild houses, though I kept the same party the whole game. You may need to recruit someone new if one of your character's runs out of lives. That's right: even though this is an RPG, each character has three lives (I told you it was unusual). However, you can buy extra lives for 10,000 gold. Or just re-load your save when someone dies!
Finally, monsters (which don't use equipment) progress by eating the flesh of other monsters, often left after battle. There is a chart, based on enemy types, that shows the laws of transformation (it is not random). This chart was printed in the Game Boy Player's Guide. It's not a terrible system (certainly less annoying than the mutants), as it's fun to experiment and see what you get. And if your monster gets nerfed from some bad meat, just hit that reset button!
Your party begins in a land locked in a stalemate between three kings. Once they have obtained three key items, they can enter the tower. Several floors up, they discover an ocean world with several islands. The third world is a sky world with a floating castle, and the final world a post-apocalyptic cityscape. Once each world's boss is defeated, the party obtains a sphere that allows them to ascend farther up the tower. The tower itself is unremarkable, a generic dungeon with monsters and treasure chests. With the help of various NPCs they met along the way, the heroes eventually reach the pinnacle, where they encounter, surprisingly, God! Or at least the Creator of these worlds and the tower. He reveals that their upward struggle has been a kind of test. The heroes are outraged, feeling used or disrespected by what they declare to be a capricious and indifferent lord. They attack and somehow kill him, allowing them to escape the world (I know not whither).
Anyway, another odd feature of FF Legend is that weapons have a limited number of uses (like in Fire Emblem). This is annoying (like weapons breaking in modern games). You buy weapons in towns, but also sometimes find them in chests. Some of the weapons calculate damage in a strange way. The martial-arts "weapons," like kick and punch, do more damage each time you use them, until they inevitably run out.
The game's visuals are basic, though not bad. The enemy sprites look great. Certainly it can't compare to Final Fantasy on the NES, but that's just the nature of Game Boy. The soundtrack isn't bad, either, for what it is. Each world has its own theme. The loops are very short, of course, due to the memory limitation.
The game is mostly fighting monsters in random combat and getting stronger (or weaker sometimes!). In-combat text appears on screen painfully slowly (you can speed it up in the modern port, thankfully). The story barely exists and makes no sense. Dialogue is short and meaningless. Writing this, I can't even remember any of it. It probably reads better in the Japanese, as the pictographic nature of that language allows conveying far more under extreme space limitations. The game is very repetitive, but also not hard (as long as you're doing the "cheats" I suggested), so at least you don't have to grind constantly. I progressed uickly enough that I never got bored. The whole game takes at most ten hours, but, again, that's a lot for an early Game Boy game!
Final Fantasy Legend is flawed, confusing, limited, and sometimes frustrating, but it paved the way for many, much better sequels. Unless you're on a retro-video-game quest like me, enjoyed it as a kid, or are a huge SaGa fan, there's no reason to play this game today. But as a Game Boy game specifically, I think it holds up all right, even though it pales next to Final Fantasy Legend II. If you fit into one of those categories, maybe give it a try. It's part of the compilation "Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend."
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| Grade: B- |
Linked Review
"The exact qualities that make Final Fantasy Legend so mystifying also make it fascinating. Its unique traits allow it to hold up better than most 8-bit console RPGs. A compact yet fully featured RPG."
— Jeremey Parish, Video Works
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