Game 373: The Final Fantasy Legend (1989)

        

The Final Fantasy Legend

Japan
Square (developer and Japanese publisher); Sunsoft (North American publisher)
Released in Japan as Makai Toushi SaGa

Released 1989 for Game Boy in Japan; North American release in 1990; WonderSwan Color in 2002

Date Started: 9 August 2020

Date Ended: 12 August 2020

Total Hours: 9

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 38

Ranking at time of posting: 307/379 (81%)

      

There has never been a time in my life in which I was remotely interested in playing an RPG on a handheld device--not on Game Boys when they first came out in 1989, not on my iPhone today. I'm an RPG addict, but I don't need to have one going all the time. Having a handheld gaming console seems to me the equivalent of day-drinking. When you can't visit your dentist without taking an RPG with you, you have a problem.

    

I think my distaste for the idea of handheld gaming also has to do with the inherent reduction in complexity and immersion. I grew up playing fantastic PC games like Ultima V, Pool of Radiance, and Might and Magic. By the end of the 1980s, graphics and sound were getting authentically good. Now you want me to play a game on a tiny monochrome screen with only six buttons? That's against the very core of my personality. I want everything or nothing. Even my "laptop" is a Dell Precision workstation with a 17-inch monitor. Its AC adapter weighs as much as a Chromebook. I'll probably have back and shoulder problems later in life, but I don't care. I can install the full version of ArcGIS Desktop with 3-D Analyst, and it opens in 15 seconds. Your Surface Pro probably can't even run Morrowind.

     

But I'm giving it a shot for the sake of perspective, starting with the first game released for the first handheld platform. For once, there's no ambiguity: the first RPG designed specifically for a handheld, the first RPG offered for the handheld (if originally designed for a different platform), the first handheld RPG in Japan, and the first handheld RPG in North America are all the same thing: The Final Fantasy Legend. The game was released in Japan as Makai Toushi SaGa ("Demon Tower Saga"), kicking off the SaGa series, which is still alive today. The first three games were rebranded The Final Fantasy Legend in the west. While this undoubtedly to take advantage of the popularity of Final Fantasy (1987), it arguably has as much right to the franchise name as any game, as it was developed by Square, uses similar mechanics and themes, and features many of the same authors as the Final Fantasy series, including designer Akitoshi Kawazu, developer Keitarou Adachi, programmer Naoki Okabe, scenario designers Hiroyuki Itou and Koichi Ishii, and graphic designer Takashi Tokita.
 
I had expected a relatively short, simple single-character game, probably action-oriented, perhaps something along the lines of a single-character Gauntlet. Instead, I was surprised to find something with much of the complexity (if not the graphics) of Final Fantasy. It has four characters, towns, NPCs, full inventories, and admirably tactical combat. In my emulator window, it's really only the lack of color and more complex graphics that betrays Legend as a handheld game at all; you might otherwise think it was designed for the NES.
           

The little you get on the game's backstory.

         
Legend doesn't give you much backstory when you begin the game, just a brief bit of text about a tower in the center of the world "connected to paradise." Many people have entered the tower but none have ever returned. Your party is apparently going to try again. Character creation has you choosing and naming the main character (who cannot be replaced) from humans (male or female), mutants (male or female), and four types of non-gendered monsters: clippers, redbulls, wererats, and zombies. The choice is somewhat important, as humans, mutants, and monsters all have different ways of leveling up and have different weapon, armor, and item restrictions. The manual suggests that you have at least two humans and no more than one monster; I decided to go with two humans, a mutant, and a monster to get the full experience of the game. I know without even asking that it's probably considered some kind of ultimate challenge to beat the game with four monsters. The "monster" classes that you can choose during character creation are just their starting classes; as we'll see, the benefit of this class is that the type of monster continually changes.
         

Creating the initial character.

           
The first character starts in a town right next to a guild, and in the guild you can choose three more party members of any class and give them names, so I'm not sure why they didn't just have the player create four characters at the outset. The town also has an inn (where you fully recover health and abilities), a weapon shop, a potion shop, and a healer (solely to raise the dead).

The starting town turns out to be the "base town" for the tower that is the center point of the game. Much like Stephen King's Dark Tower, the "Demon Tower" of this game is a kind of nexus in space and time, connecting to various worlds on the way to its apex on the twenty-third floor. The basic setup is that the party wants to reach the top, but the base door is locked by magic and requires a magic sphere to open. Every few levels, you reach another locked door that requires another magic sphere, and you have to venture out into the connected worlds to find it. Inevitably, some trouble is brewing in those worlds, and you need to solve it before you can get the necessary sphere. There is naturally a boss-level enemy to fight at each of these interludes, plus plenty of random encounters as you explore the tower and the connected lands.
          

Exploring the opening land, near the tower.

        
While I was surprised at how complex Legend is, it's not as complex as the typical full console or PC RPG of its year. However, this feels less to do with technical limitations and more to do with the inherently unstable nature of handheld gaming. A player can take the handheld device anywhere but might not otherwise have a lot of external resources. Thus, the maps are relatively small and easy to navigate; the game is relatively linear; and the plot is designed to minimize note-taking. NPCs provide some lore, but the player doesn't really need to write it down. I managed to complete one segment (the fourth world) without the slightest idea what was happening most of the time. You can save the game anywhere outside of combat, and the manual suggests that there's some auto-saving going on, so if you have to suddenly shut off the device (or it runs out of battery power), you'll still be able to resume the game.

But if the game is somewhat simplified in plot and setting, it is arguably more complex than even Final Fantasy when it comes to character development and combat, introducing some elements I've never experienced in any other RPG, most of it having to do with the "mutant" and "monster" character classes. Humans are pretty straightforward: if you want to increase your strength, agility, or maximum hit points, you buy associated potions in the potion shop. Otherwise, the only thing that ever changes for them is their equipment, which is admittedly quite varied and interesting, if somewhat nonsensical at times.
          

Purchasing weapons and armor.

        
Mutants are much more interesting, and while the manual explicitly says that it does not recommend a party of four mutants, I hope veteran players will chime in with their opinions, because I don't understand why that wouldn't work. My one mutant maxed her statistics long before the two humans and ended the game with far more maximum hit points. She seemed to be able to use all the same equipment as the humans and was able to use a few things (dependent on magic) that the humans could never use. The only drawback was fewer inventory spaces and thus fewer inventory-related choices in combat, but made up for with mutant abilities.

Mutants gain their experience from combat, and slowly grow in strength, agility, and maximum health. But more important, each mutation brings an ever-shifting set of mutant abilities, some of them defensive (e.g., fire resistance, cold resistance, defensive barriers, healing) and some offensive, like mass-damage spells, poisoning, and paralysis. You have no idea when the mutant's abilities are going to shift, and towards the end of the game, the mutant is equally likely to lose an ability you'd grown to depend on as to gain a new valuable one.
        

My mutant's skills and items around mid-game.

         
Monsters are similar. On paper, they're the weakest class, I suppose, and if you were min-maxing your party, you'd probably leave one out. But they're fun in how they acquire new abilities and you have to figure out how best to incorporate them into battle. The "monster" class is not a fixed monster but more of a shape-shifter who changes forms after eating another creature's flesh. (Creatures leave "meat" almost half the time at the end of battles.) Confusingly, the monster doesn't become the creature he just ate, but rather a random creature of roughly the same level. Depending on whether you get a zombie, gargoyle, slime, dragon, or one of a couple dozen other possibilities, you'll suddenly have a new set of abilities to use in combat. Unfortunately, by the endgame none of these abilities is as powerful as a wielded item or a mutant's powers, and throughout the game, the monster lags behind the other characters in hit points. Still, I wouldn't have experienced the game without him just for the variety.
             

Late in the game, Grar eats the flesh of a sub-boss and becomes a dragon.

           
Even if you don't have mutant abilities or monster powers, you can purchase a lot of spellbooks and items that mimic them, as well as the standard progression of weapons and armor. Humans can wield up to eight items at once, and mutants four (monsters none), which means you have a host of options in combat--perhaps more than even Final Fantasy, although the earlier game did have far more spells. This is good because every monster has resistances. You have to learn most of them through experience, but they're mostly logical; for instance, demons and dragons are immune to fire. Enemies will also attack in up to three groups of one to five monsters per group, so you have to consider whether to levy group damage, concentrate on individual foes, or look to defensive options. Combat is otherwise turn-based in the usual Wizardry fashion, albeit with Final Fantasy's odd addition of having the monsters concentrate primarily on the lead character. A fun graphic accompanies your characters' chosen attacks on their enemies, with slashes appearing for swords, gouts of flames for fire-based attacks, and so on.
          

Choosing from a couple of weapons in a battle against three enemies.

And from three monster abilities.

         

I had originally written that the game was a bit grindy, but I think that's mostly the way I approached it. I grinded more than I needed to in the first world because I didn't want to leave the base town without buying everything that seemed valuable (at the time, I didn't know there would be other towns; I thought it might be like a reverse Wizardry with a single base area and then just the tower levels). About halfway through the game, I got concerned with how much time I was spending on it, and I allowed myself to look at maps to help hustle me through it. But that had the effect of not bringing me to as many random encounters, and thus probably necessitated grinding more for me than for other players.
          

Actions execute all at once after you line them up, just like in Wizardry.

           
The tower levels themselves are relatively small, but with numerous dead-ends and optional areas. Still, they take a relatively trivial part of the game's overall time. Most of it is spent in the four worlds connected to the tower, where you have to solve some quest steps to move forward. Each of the worlds has one or more towns where you can rest and re-supply. Briefly, these are:

1. The base world. A statue in the base town holds the sphere you need, but you have to return to the statue its equipment: the King's Sword, the King's Armor, and the King's Shield. Each one is in the possession of a different king, and you have to run around to the associated castles solving their various quests to get the items, return them to the statue, and get the sphere. Some creature called Gen-Bu attacks as soon as you accomplish this, and you have to defeat him to move on.
          

Opening the door to the tower is the first step in the quest.

        
2. The ocean world. This consists of a series of islands on two sides of a flat plane connected by a whirlpool. You sail about on floating islands to each of the inhabited places, ultimately assembling the sphere out of two orbs. The boss is named Sei-Ryu.

3. The cloud world. This world is dominated by a floating castle--yet another homage to Castle in the Sky--ruled by a tyrant named Byak-Ko. He hires you to find his two daughters, Milleille and Jeanne. The plot has something to do with a resistance against Byak-Ko, and Milleille betrays you in the middle of the plot only to later sacrifice herself to save Jeanne. Somehow Jeanne's tears turn into the orb you need to continue, after you defeat Byak-Ko in combat.
           

Family drama.

          
4. The ruined world. This seems to have been a technologically-advanced place, destroyed in some kind of Armageddon. Much of the gameplay takes place on a subway train and amidst the bombed-out ruins of buildings as you ride around on a motorbike. I had to take a couple breaks during this world and I completely lost track of what was happening with the plot, bumbling around from place to place until I finally defeated someone named Su-Zaku, attended a funeral for someone named So-Cho, got the orb, and got out of there.
        

I forgot who I'm demanding he let go or why we're outside a subway.

          
There are also about half a dozen small, optional worlds where you can take a rest break or find an odd item or two. I found a nuclear bomb (which I never used) in one and the sword Excalibur in another. Incidentally, the sword Masmune also makes a late appearance.

Continuing from the fourth world puts you on the fifteenth or sixteenth floor, and you still have seven more to go, with the combats getting tougher on the way up. There are occasional healing pools to help out, but you really need to carry a stock of elixirs with you, which not only fully heal but also restore mutant and monster abilities (which otherwise have a limited number of uses between resting). The final boss of the main tower sequence is someone named Ashura, and when I reached him the first time, I was completely unprepared, not having brought enough elixirs. I had to use a magic door that took me back to the base town all the way at the bottom of the tower, rest, restock, and climb the twenty-three levels again. Ashura gives you an opportunity to join him and rule a "piece of the world," but the party tells him to sod off without your input. This isn't the first place that it seems like the game is about to offer a choice but the party just has its own dialogue without you.
           

Meeting the final sub-boss at the top of some stairs.

         
Beating Ashura seems to return you to the base town, but a little exploration suggests that only the layout is the same. The NPCs are different, and in fact include many people who died during the game, suggesting you've reached some kind of afterlife. The stores are stocked with the best equipment, too. By this time, I finally had a lot more money than I had anything to spend it on. My humans were maxed at 99 in their attributes. I guess I could have kept spending money on more maximum hit points, but buying and using those potions one at a time is a pain.

From the second basecamp city, you have to re-enter the tower and climb the twenty-three levels again, although this time they're smaller. Each of the game's bosses--Gen-Bu, Sei-Ryu, Byak-Ko, and Su-Zaku--meets you at a regular interval, which offers a good opportunity to try different high-level monster morphs from eating their meat. (I think I ended with my monster as a "Tiamat.")
           

Something's a bit odd in this town.

           
The top of the second iteration of the tower opens into a new area, where an NPC in a black hat--present to offer hints throughout the rest of the game--greets you by saying, "You are the first to finish the game." The confused party demands answers, and the man says that he created the world (confusingly called Ashura) to test its inhabitants' "courage and determination." He continues to congratulate the party and offers the granting of a wish, but the party is having none of it. They're outraged that their creator toyed with them this way, apparently forgetting that no one forced them to enter the tower in the first place. I couldn't help but laugh at the associated dialogue. I don't know if it's supposed to be funny in the original, but I love how tone-deaf the "creator" is:

• IRIS: "So it was a game?"
• CREATOR: "That's right. I wanted to see a hero defeat this evil."
• AQRA: "We were all pieces of your design!"
• CREATOR: "You understand well. Many have failed the test, but it was refreshing to see courage in the face of danger. I want to reward you for your accomplishment. I will grant you a wish."
• CHET: "We didn't do it for a reward! Besides, you used us!"
• CREATOR: "What's wrong with that? I created everything."
• GRAR: "We are not things!"

                   

Grar insults his god.

            
Eventually, the Creator gets annoyed at the party and attacks. He has a ton of hit points and is capable of healing himself in the middle of combat, but his attacks were oddly ineffective. He would occasionally wallop one character, but most of the time he either passed the round or spent it casting some spell that was ineffective against characters of my level and equipment. It took about 15 rounds, but I killed him on my first try, with no characters lost.
           

Definite points for originality. Few games let you literally take on god.

         
The final scenes show the characters standing in front of a door behind the Creator. They hypothesize that it must lead to other worlds, but they ultimately decide to turn around and return to their own world. The game then shows a montage of scenes from throughout the game before ending on the screen below.
        

Not likely, but I appreciate the sentiment.

           
I thought that Legend was at least mechanically a decent game, but I found it wanting in terms of . . . I'm struggling with the right word. A lot of these early Japanese RPGs seem to lack a certain gravitas for lack of a better term. I find it difficult to truly inhabit their worlds--worlds where humans and animals seem to freely mix in towns with no explanation (I'm not sure this game had any two NPCs of the same race), where little attention is given to world-building, particularly in terms of technology level. The games seem a lot like Disney cartoons, in which no one ever stops to ask what the princess is a princess of, nor why there seem to be so many castles but no tenant farmers, nor why the king is never seen receiving diplomatic envoys or issuing decrees, or doing anything that a ruler would do. I grant you that a lot of western RPGs, particularly early ones, suffer from a similar level of abstraction, but it seems to me the early JRPGs go even further, as if we're witnessing a bunch of children acting out a more serious story they saw on television. Through some combination of graphics, fonts, use of language, and other factors, these games signal to me that their stories and worlds are just decorations around what is primarily a set of mechanical exercises. I get the impression that at some point, not only does this change, but shifts entirely in the opposite direction, with realistic narratives and characters prized more than game mechanics. I have yet to experience that type of JRPG.
       

These moments are always awkward.

        
The game still earns a 38 on my GIMLET, enough to push it into "recommended" range, doing best in the areas of character creation and development and combat (5s), worse in quests (no choices) and graphics, sound, and interface, although only for reasons inherent in the platform. If my blog were more about handheld RPGs, this category would have different considerations and would be rescaled accordingly.
     
The Game Boy offered only two RPGs in its debut year: this and Kemco's The Sword of Hope. There were nine offerings in 1990, as Sega entered the handheld market with the Game Gear and kicked off a decade-long competition. Still, the number of handheld RPGs per year hovered in the teens throughout the 1990s, until the first releases of Pokémon, plus the advent of more powerful systems, kicked the sub-genre to the next level. It's worth noting that Japan absolutely dominates the handheld RPG market; my list shows that of 620 games released for handheld devices through 2011, 556 (90%) are from Japanese developers, and a decent percentage of the remaining are Japanese conversions of games originally released for western PCs.

My understanding is that Final Fantasy Legend II (1990) is even more highly-regarded than the original. The third game came out in 1991, after which the SaGa games kept their own names when released in the west. The series has produced about a dozen games, plus a couple remakes, through 2016's SaGa: Scarlet Grace. More recently, a remake of Romancing SaGa 3 (1995) was released for western PCs and consoles in 2019. The western titles arguably make more sense, as the three Final Fantasy Legend games were the only ones released primarily to handheld devices.

From this experience, I've learned that handheld RPGs managed to skip the awkward developmental years seen in both PCs and consoles, arriving on the screen fully-featured and even capable of their own innovations. I still have absolutely no desire to ever play an RPG on a handheld device, but it wasn't such a bad experience on my computer screen.

Summer's coming to an end, and as I transition back to school, it will probably mean a hiatus for these diversions. To the extent I'll have time for gaming at all, I'll have to spend it on my core list. But I did this series primarily as an excuse to play Wizardry: The First Episode - Suffering of the Queen (1991) for the Game Boy so that a guest entry on the Wizardry series' continued life in Japan would have some context. Thus, I'll try to get at least a "BRIEF" on that game done in the near future.