Final Fantasy Adventure is a tough game to talk about since it’s such an old game that a lot of the problems I have with it, I want to put down to the game not aging well. Of course this would be a place where a remake would be able to improve all of the mechanic story and characters that do not quite live up over time.
But given this game has been released in the Mana Collection which relatively recently came out in America, now is the time to test this game to see if it has aged well or if it’s just a product of a bygone era.
However that does not mean that this game is bad; it’s only guilty of not aging well. While there are things that this game does that I like, there are quite a few things that show their age, how it was developed, and its mechanics belong in an age long past. After all, a game being old does not mean that it’s mechanics are no longer good, just that it’s old and, perhaps, outdated.
After all, some old games hold up. Games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy have gotten numerous compilations and re-releases over the years.
But before we go into why I feel so conflicted because of this game, let’s go into what I do like.
This game is very simple. You play a hero, there’s a girl to save, very basic story. And the game follows the hero’s hardships to save this girl and protect the Mana Tree, which this girl holds the key to. This does, however, mean that the girl is your typical damsel in distress, but once again, it’s just a byproduct of it’s time. But this simplicity is a strength, since it makes the game’s story easy to follow. And since everyone’s basically a trope, it also makes characters easy to understand, both in what they’re saying and their motivations.
The combat is also simple, but somewhat deep. Every weapon has different strengths, from range to power. Often, the most powerful weapons are very short range, while the better weapons have either more range or just hit more area. Like the axe, my favorite weapon by far, can be swung where it hits up to three steps around you, which area differs on which direction you’re facing, which allows it to hit a lot of enemies. It also hits really hard, as axes tend to be very powerful. Moreover, if you allow the Will bar to fill up, you can throw the axe across the screen to hit distant targets.
But what is the Will bar? The Will bar is a bar at the bottom of the screen that fills up when you’re not attacking or casting spells. Once full, you can use a weapon’s Will Power, which differs based on the weapon type. And there’s a lot of them. There’s swords, which have decent power and hit a few squares, axes, which I explained, spears, which hit directly in front of you but feature even more power, whips, which have less power but the most range, and flails, which hit all around you, later forms of which also hit in front of you after the initial swing and can break walls. I tend to avoid the flails since they are very slow.
Your hero also isn’t set in stone how he becomes stronger. When you level up, you can choose to level up his stats. You get four choices, Stamina, Power, Wisdom, and Will. Whatever stat you choose will increase by 2 points and two related stats will be increased by 1 point each. The final stat will not increase at all. For example, picking Power will increase Power by 2, Stamina and Will by 1, and Wisdom will not increase. Meanwhile, if you pick Will, Will goes up by 2 while Stamina and Wisdom go up by 1. It seems like the game always raises Stamina by 1 no matter what you choose, so you’re always gaining maximum health and defense.
This is because of the stats each stat influences. Stamina increases your maximum health and your innate defense, Power increases your innate attack, Wisdom increases your maximum MP and I suspect might improve the power and effectiveness of your spells, and Will affects how quickly the Will bar fills.
I tend to go for a very offensive build. This means that I went full on Power and Will at level ups, leveling them evenly to start, then got a few Wisdom levels when I got access to magic, before going heavy on Will, with the occasional Power level. When my Will bar was filling very quickly, I then went back to going almost all Power, with a few Wisdom levels here and there.
You may notice that means I completely ignored Stamina, just giving it the +1s I was getting and otherwise ignoring it. This is because you don’t really need Stamina. I never felt like I had too little HP or defense through most of the game.
Which brings me to the game’s difficulty. It can be all over the place. One moment, you’re ripping all your enemies apart in one hit and getting hit for minimal damage and the very next area or dungeon suddenly starts tearing you to pieces. And this is from someone who was technically overleveled through most of the game, because I kept getting lost and killing everything I saw.
Thankfully, this only really occured in the first few areas and dungeons. As I kept getting new weapon types and, thus, could kill enemies more easily and had more options to fight with, the stupid difficulty started to smooth out a bit, as I could handle battles my way. Which was to just throw axes at everything that moves. Problem enemies would become a complete joke when I could attack them from across the screen and kill them in one or two hits.
But that isn’t my real problem with the game. My problem is that the game often throws puzzles at you without letting you know it’s a puzzle. Some rooms are obvious, like the rooms filled with empty chests on switches, but if you destroy any of the chests, the door will close or stairs will vanish, making you re-attempt the room. And to make you attack, there’s enemies in the room. This means you need to know how your weapons work so you don’t hit the chests by accident.
But sometimes, the switches will just need to be pressed in a sequence or you’ll have to freeze enemies with the Ice spell and put them on the switches. But the switches are very finicky, so if the enemy isn’t fully on the switch, it doesn’t register. So there’d be times I’d do the puzzle correctly, but because the snowman was off the switch by a single pixel, but looked like it was on it, I’d wind up resetting rooms to try other possible solutions. I’d then wind up looking up a walkthrough for the real solution only to find out I did it right, but made a single mistake. The puzzles can be maddening.
One puzzle that stands out for me is in Davias’ Mansion. The dungeon itself has a few branching paths, but is relatively straightforward, minus a few hidden rooms that were required to be found to proceed. But where this dungeon got on my nerves was at two points, you’d enter a room only to wind up back at the beginning of the dungeon. And if you take the stairs or continue forward, the path back vanishes and you have to do the whole dungeon over again. But at the second point they do this, if you continue forward despite visiting previous rooms, you’ll eventually find a brand new room with stairs leading up to the boss. This puzzle was so out-of-nowhere that I was stuck on it for four days before I finally looked up a map with the solution on it.
This makes it really hard to recommend Final Fantasy Adventure. This is because a lot of it’s systems go unexplained. I, after all, wasn’t raising my Will stat because the game told me that it would make the Will bar fill faster. It doesn’t even tell you about Will Powers until you meet Bogard, who tells you about them, which is about half an hour into the game, at which point I was level 5 or so. And even when he explains it, he doesn’t tell you that more Will makes for a faster bar. It’s something you just have to know.
Another thing you have to know is that when you hear a plinking sound when you hit an enemy, which you’ll know the sound when you hear it, it means the enemy is immune to the damage type you’re using. You either need to change weapons or, in many cases, use magic instead to kill the enemy. This can lead to a lot of going to the equipment screen, changing weapons, only to get that same sound. It’s a ton of going in and out of menus only to find out you need to use magic or you might not even have the right weapon type yet.
In the end, this game is difficult to recommend for a lot of these reasons. But the hardest thing to overcome is the game’s age. A lot of these problems were common back when this game came out, due to design philosophies and the action RPG genre wasn’t really a thing yet. So certain levels of quality weren’t yet founded. Heck, the RPG genre itself hadn’t taken off in the west yet, so even that didn’t have certain qualities people would demand. This, however, also meant it was also an age where experimentation was rampant, as developers were free to try things to see what players liked and what they didn’t. The internet wasn’t even a thing yet, so developers could only gauge interest by putting out a product and seeing how people respond to it.
With that all in mind, I can recommend this game… if you can set your expectations accordingly. If not, hunt down the remake, Adventures of Mana, which I hear is a much more modern interpretation of the game, with modern conveniences.
Low Recommendation – General Audiences
Recommended – Mana Fans (To see how it started)
The Professional Protagonist 