Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Final Fantasy

Hold on to your asses, gentlemen. It's Final freaking Fantasy, right here, one of the most beloved series in all of gamertastic. Y'know, back when it didn't suck pretty damn bad, as it's been doing of late (let's be frank, XIII was all kinds of a ballache). Today, we're going way back to its roots, to the very first release.

Let's party like it's 1987 and take a look.

This was the year Final Fantasy hit the Famicom (like the NES, but much more Asian). It's the simple nutty-ass story of four heroes, four magical orbs of magical effing magic and a whole damn lot of random battles.

The aforementioned heroes are the Light Warriors. They appeared from nowhere to save our asses, like these guys tend to do. Right on time, too, as the world languishes in darkness; the power of the elemental orbs dimmed. The good ol' classic balance between earth, air, fire and water governs everything in this fantasy world, and what happens when this is lost? Raging fires, tempestuous winds and a general shitstorm, that's what.

Now, the inhabitants would probably rather not be burnt, earthquake-ed and wind-ed to death. Given the damn choice. One of them has the whole of Breaking Bad recorded, after all, and eff dying before they've seen the season finale. As such, they cajole the Light Warriors into cruising around the world in an epic quest to restore the balance and quell the great threat.

The stage is set for a town visitin', equipment buyin', random-encounters-every-four-bastard-steps-in' good time. There are dungeons to toil through, bosses to battle and some pretty damn craptastic dialogue. It's quite remarkable how many of these RPG staples were established here, and remain the norm.

Case in point: Final Fantasy was the game that introduced so many of us to the great pain in the man-sack that is grinding. How much time did we spend running in damn circles, triggering random battle after random battle for experience? Nuts to it.

Retroheads and more decrepit gamers alike will know this one well. Choosing between those job classes at the start, that journey from the mangled Temple of Fiends, the showdown with time-traveling wizard bastard Garland... this was the game that set the tone for so many ambitiously huge Final Fantasy adventures to come.

Final Fantasy IX was four freaking PS1 disks long, for crying out loud. That, in the year 2000, was lofty scope at its finest. And it all began here. Who'd have thought it? Not the creator, who had no hope for the game at all. As Develop reports, Sakaguchi named it thus as ‘...a display of my feeling that if this didn't sell, I was going to quit the games industry and go back to university. I'd have had to repeat a year, so I wouldn't have had any friends – it really was a ‘final' situation.'

Funny how things turn out. How big ol' ballbusting blockbuster things turn out.