Articles tagged with: Final Fantasy

Retro Game of the Whenever: Final Fantasy III (Famicom)

seanstar on Sunday, 12 February 2012. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

The Gurgan quietly spoke...

When I was younger, I thought Final Fantasy III was an awesome game that everyone should totally play because it was, like, the the FF Tactics jobs system before there was even a FFV. Now that I'm older and wiser, I think FFIII is a game that every fan of the series should play, in its original form (perhaps modulo fan translation), for historic context if nothing else. Very nearly every feature of Final Fantasy IV appears to have been prototyped in III.

Final Fantasy I

Pixelcade on Saturday, 26 February 2011. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

Editor's Note: I'm sure everyone here is familiar with this game -- by name and reputation if nothing else. It kicked off a franchise that's still going strong today, with sequels, spin-offs, collectibles, films, concerts, and many other products all being released under the Final Fantasy brand. Pixelcade shares his memories of the game that started it all. -mossy_11


Front_BoxBack_Box

The Final Fantasy…or was it? Hello fellow gamers! This RGotW is brought to you by the year 1987 and the system Nintendo, sponsored in part by the company Square. With a helpful grant from MacScene and Pixelcade. Rather than my usual choice of some obscure game or movie or random event no one has heard of, this week I am doing a mainstream game.

So, 1987: Where were you what were you doing? US President Ronald Reagan was undergoing prostate surgery, La Bamba moved everyone's hips in dance clubs world wide, and PBS was hacked in Chicago by a man wearing a Max Headroom mask, babbling about who knows what -- it sure wasn't New Coke. Also at this time a video game that would go on to shape every single RPG to date in one way or another was developed by a little company going out of business -- Square.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom

mossy_11 on Monday, 23 August 2010. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

There’s something magical about the 16-bit era of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs). The sprite graphics had grown just enough in detail to express a wide range of emotions, while the larger capacity of cartridges for the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis allowed the creation of huge and highly detailed worlds. Moreover, the mechanics that were in their infancy during the days of the NES had matured and shed much of the baggage that previously weighed them down.

A lot remained to be done to perfect the JRPG formula, but its scope and complexity were no longer constrained by technology -- developers could at last create an epic adventure with a fully-realised story and several core characters, all tied in to a deep gameplay system. It would be some time before the arrival of the true masterpieces of the era -- Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario RPG, and a few others -- but a flurry of fine efforts kept gamers more than satisfied through the early 90s, including Final Fantasy IV, Illusion of Gaia, Phantasy Star III, and the topic of this article, Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (Estpolis in Japan), which preceded another of the 16-bit JRPG greats: Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals.

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Phantasie III - The Wrath of Nikademus

jetboy on Monday, 26 July 2010. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

Editor's note: I'll admit I knew nothing of the Phantasie games before reading this, but jetboy does a great job of explaining the appeal of his favourite entry in the series. I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me what exactly I'm supposed to do in the game, though, because I went wandering and now I'm completely lost. -mossy_11


 

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My favourite game of all time, Phantasie III, was released for the Amiga back in 1987, and I emulate it using E-UAE (in combination with a handy, legal, ROM/OS package called Amiga Forever). Since most Amiga games were distributed on floppies, I also use a utility called WHDLoad, which allows you to install the floppy versions on your hard disk and remove the nostalgic switching between 100 floppies process. This is my suggested setup if you want to play Phantasie III using MacOS as your host OS, because while there are other versions (notably DOS and Apple II), the graphics and sound for the Amiga version are unequivocally better. While I love Apple, the Apple II version is clearly the worst, and it just makes no sense trying to play it. If you really canʼt get the Amiga version going, I suggest you go with the DOS version because itʼs somewhere in the middle. [What about the Atari ST and Commodore 64 versions? -ed.]

Final Fantasy Coming to the iPhone

Niemann on Friday, 22 January 2010. Posted in News

Seems like there's just a ton of iPhone news for us over the past couple days; and now we have news that Square Enix is bringing one of the most successful RPG series of all time to the iPhone and iPod Touch.  In December of 1987 the original Final Fantasy was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Since then Final Fantasy has released twelve sequels (most recently Final Fantasy XIII for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360) and countless spin-offs.

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On Wednesday, Square Enix posted a series of screenshots to their facebook page under the title "FINAL FANTASY and FINAL FANTASY II for iPhone / iPod touch".  The only other information included is:

"Over 20 years since the original releases, FINAL FANTASY and FINAL FANTASY II are coming to iPhone / iPod touch!  Release date: TBA.  Stay tuned!"

The interface appears to be slightly modified from the original GUI elements we have seen in previous remakes of the game.  This implies that Square Enix is taking advantage of the touch screen to navigate menus as opposed to other ports and remakes which have centered around an overlay gamepad.

View more of the screenshots after the break.