Unlike Dragon Warrior, the first RPG I ever played, Final Fantasy required magic users to buy spells from a store. The half mile walk back home never went so fast! In the back of his vast game stash, he dug out Final Fantasy on the NES for me to borrow.

Everybody wants to visit an old classic now and then, but what happens when the new versions, while more accessible to modern gamers, lose something of the original’s vim and vigor? It’s an awfully fine line between fun and frustration.īack then, I made a friend who had every video game system known to man and then some (he was the one guy with an Atari Jaguar on his Christmas list who would actually get one!). Over the years, I’d have a chance to not just play the original game, but enough remakes to shake a Warmech at. Instead of owning the video game, all I had was a Nintendo Power Final Fantasy strategy guide jammed with well over 100 pages of maps, tactics, and so-so Western paintings of heroes, monsters, and quests. In 1991, nobody I knew had the game on the NES, and there was no internet to speak of at my house. Final Fantasy started for me as a fantasy.