"What You Remember, That is the Illusion" - My Horrible Recall of Final Fantasy Storylines (Part One)

At least this quote survived the three subsequent English releases.

After playing it on and off for a few months (beginning when I realized it was still in the shrink wrap after three years of ownership), I recently played much more of Final Fantasy V Advance to the point where it can actually be considered progress.  This got me thinking about the other Final Fantasy games that I played and that despite playing many of them to completion, for the life of me I can't remember many significant plot points.  Granted, for some it has been about 10 years since I last played them, so details will indeed get fuzzy.  But on the other hand, there are other games that also have convoluted plots that I can remember despite the length of time since my last play-through.  So after the jump is what I can remember of the plots of the first five Final Fantasy games, so here's a spoiler warning! (Or not!)

Final Fantasy I - Crystals were somehow involved in the storyline.  The four characters (whose classes you choose at the start of the game and can't change) don't have any significance to the story other than being the four warriors that were foretold to save the world.  A princess was kidnapped and you save her right at the beginning of the game, so that wasn't the central goal as previously assumed.  (Because that would have made it a direct rip-off of Dragon Warrior.)  Then I remember wandering around and somehow the ending involved the Four Fiends, turning the guy who kidnapped the princess into Chaos, and somewhere there was a time loop paradox.  Oh, and in the NES version your characters became taller halfway through the game.

OK, so really their classes got upgraded.  But come on, they just made their heads smaller!

Final Fantasy II - I think this one attempted to have an actual storyline by giving the main characters names, of which I cannot remember.  You had your standard three main characters of typical male hero, girl who was a possible love interest, and the huge, powerful guy who grunts and hits things.  There was an evil emperor and the fourth character in your party kept changing, because that character usually died.  I really remember almost nothing of this game's plot, probably because I focused most of memories of this game on how much I hated the leveling up system. (Stats grew depending on how much they were used, which usually meant my characters ended up beating each other up just so their Hit Points would level up.)

In Final Fantasy III, these people were cursed to be outlines!

Final Fantasy III - I only ever played the DS remake of this one, so I don't know how much it differs the original.  Like the first game, it involved four crystals and the four Light Warriors who must, yet again, save the world.  This one featured a world map that you later found out was part of a much larger world and... Now that I think of it, I never actually finished the game, despite that I remembered enjoying it and the greatly improved job system.  At this point I would probably be better off restarting the game as I have no idea where I left off.  (Oh great, another game to add to the backlog.)

Final Fantasy IV - Yes, finally some interesting characters here!  You had the Dark Knight Cecil and his buddy the Dragoon Kain kill everyone in a village of summoners except for Rydia, a young girl with green hair and green clothes.  At this points he realizes that he's probably working for the wrong side.  There's a love triangle between himself, Rosa, and Kain.  Rydia disappears for a while and magically bypasses puberty entirely by turning into an adult.  Edward was a wimp who got beat up by an old man (Tellah) who called him a spoony bard.  Cecil has a battle with his dark side, and two kid mages sacrifice themselves for the sake of the party.  And like the games before, it involved crystals and fiends.  And towards the end it got weird and involved moon travel.  Details are a bit fuzzy, but at some point I do plan on playing the DS remake.

Final Fantasy V - It's a bit unfair as I'm playing through this one right now, but yet again it has the four crystals.  The main bad guy has a generic name (Exdeath) and apparently was at one point a tree.  And not a friendly, Tolkien-esque, Ent-like tree, but an EVIL tree that likes to say "Mwa ha ha!" a lot. While I do like the job system in place, a lot of boss battles generally require your characters knowing very specific skills.  This usually means running into a boss battle, getting annihilated almost immediately, and then completely switching your jobs around and leveling up until you find the magical combination of skills that are effective... or using Zeninage/Gil Toss to do massive damage.  (Unless they are immune to that, of course.)

Next post will cover the last SNES game and the Playstation era, where it will become ever apparent that the more complex the games' storylines become the less I remember any significant details.