YMMV / Final Fantasy

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin brings the question whether Sarah's rejection of Garland's feelings was genuine or a part of Garland's Zero-Approval Gambit.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yes, Agamas^note Original name for the Fire Lizard enemy exist in real life. The name is derived from the Sranan Tongo name for Lizard.
• Anti-Climax Boss: In the original version, the Final Boss, Chaos, can be dispatched in a couple rounds due to him having only 2,000 HP. The remakes beginning with Dawn of Souls avert this, where his HP has been greatly increased, though this is counterbalanced by the game being a lot easier overall. Pixel Remaster notably undoes this by using his PSP version's 20,000 HP, without any access to the game-breaking weapons and gear of the later release's bonus dungeons, finally turning him into something of a grueling battle proper if you're not prepared.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: A lot of people attribute the personalities (and in the case of the White Mage, gender) of the 8-Bit Theater cast to the characters in the game. Of course, nobody has a personality in the game, so you can add pretty much whatever you want and it still works.
• Awesome Music: Starting a series tradition.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The "Overworld" room in one of the bonus dungeons in the remake. It's the Overworld... except with treasure chests, NPCs, stairs to the next floor, and a lot of other weirdness. You can even find another airship there.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Thanks to Seanbaby ranting about it, it's commonly believed that AMUT is literally useless, in that there are no (0) enemies that can inflict Mute in the first place. In fact, there are very few such enemies, so the spell is only practically useless. ^note The rant in question doesn't even make the claim people cite it for — Seanbaby's actual words are "I played this game for at least 100 hours when I was a kid, and never once did some monster try to magically shut up my Wizard", which is entirely possible, seeing how rare the enemies that inflict Mute really are.
  • It's widely known in the fanbase that the Intelligence stat in the original release is bugged, and doesn't do anything. This is sort of true, but it's rather missing the fact of why Intelligence is useless: unlike most bugs in FFI, where a system has a clear function but fails to work correctly due to addressing the wrong variable or an error in calculation, Intelligence in FFI simply doesn't have any system tied to it. In the game's code, Intelligence doesn't factor at any point into calculating magic damage, healing, spell charges, status effect hit rate, or anything else you'd expect it to be tied to. It isn't failing to function correctly, it just serves no actual function. There do exist fanmade mods that "fix" the bug, but these add new systems from scratch rather than fixing an existing one.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • It's hard to find a guide which doesn't recommend a Warrior. Their high physical stats and the wealth of gear available to them make the class invaluable, plus they're also the only class that can wield the powerful Excalibur. Square Enix themselves even reference this, considering that the Warrior of Light is the one who represents the game in later titles — suggesting that, while the identities of the other three Light Warriors are indeterminate, there was at least one Warrior who acted as the group's leader, just like most in-game parties.
  • It's only slightly easier to find a guide that doesn't recommend the White Mage and Black Mage for full magic access. Generally speaking, most guides recommend a trio of the Warrior, White Mage, and Black Mage, with the fourth slot equally likely to be a Thief, Monk, Red Mage, or a second Warrior depending on personal preference.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Piscodemons, one of the recurring enemies you can't flee from in the game. First appearing in the Marsh Cave, where they serve as bosses in mook clothing, they will target your characters one at a time for -50 HP. An untimely encounter with them could easily kill off your mages.
  • Mindflayers and anyone with Paralyzing powers, such as Geists and Ghouls.
  • Anything which can turn you into Stone, such as Medusa. It's a rare occurrence, but the cure for the condition is both expensive and can't be used in battle.
  • Cockatrice is the one of the worst enemies you can face in the early game. Even the Peninsula of Power can't compare. At this point in the game, the player probably can't afford Gold Needles to cure Paralysis, and White Mage probably won't have Esuna, so these things can Petrify your whole party. It's not uncommon to suffer a party wipe in two turns, with everyone being petrified. Summed up by this guide maker on a screen involving four 'trices.
    "THIS is the most terrifying thing you'll see in the entire game."
  • The Cockatrice's cousin, the Pyrolisk, is usually found in Mt. Gulg. They can instantly kill your Light Warriors with Squint. Cockatrices and Pyrolisks are sometimes paired up together. Fortunately, Cockatrices are weak to Fire spells and Pyrolisks are weak to Ice spells.
  • Dark Wizards only appear in the Ice Cavern and the final dungeon, but have the power to cast Death. They also spam Firaga, Thundaga, Slowra, and Stun. If you didn't bring a White Mage, this is one place you'll probably regret it.
  • Some enemies with the power to Poison characters have high physical defense. Namely, Green Slimes and Black Flans. These guys have the highest Defense stats of anyone in the game, so they're extremely slow to die. You have a very rare chance of killing them in one hit, but the game expects you to cast Fire on them.
  • Barettas may be uncommon, but they can appear a lot sooner than a player is ready for them, are magic-resistant and incredibly durable, and hit like a truck, being liable to One-Hit Kill your mages. And they usually come in groups, so if more than one target the same character, they're probably going down. Even with strong physical fighters, they're a massive threat throughout the game despite only appearing in two overworld locations.
  • The Soldier, seen only in the Flying Fortress. High Defense ensures it won't go down without a fight, and it can carve 100-200 HP with a single swipe. They are always paired up with their lesser cousins, Guardians.
  • And then there is Rakshasa. It has a high chance of casting Fira. Getting ambushed by eight of these can spell a Game Over.
  • Mummies and King Mummies can put your party members to Sleep with their physical hits. They are especially dangerous if both attack in groups of 7-9. They sometimes are paired up with the previously-mentioned Cockatrices.
  • G-g-g-ghosts! They haunt the Sunken Shrine, appear in groups of five, and deal 100 HP damage on average. Like Ghasts and Ghouls, Ghosts can Paralyze you. One of the few recurring enemies which is impossible to flee from.
  • The Mindflayer's melee attack has a high chance of insta-killing whomever they hit. If you survive, it only damages you for -1 HP. The remakes added more enemies that can kill in one hit, and Mindflayers can multi-target the party now. Seven of these defeating the player is the trope image... for a reason.
  • White Dragons (originally Frost D) are essentially Boss in Mook Clothing when you first meet them in the Cavern of Ice. Their Icestorm attack will put a massive dent in your party if they use it. Facing two at once will likely mean a Total Party Kill if both use Icestorm on the same turn.
  • Abyss Worms in the GBA, PSP and iOS versions not only can maul your party members with their melee attacks, it's yet another enemy you can never run away from. They also have 2,500 HP, which is the highest for a regular enemy. They also can appear in pairs, which if they do, you better hope they don't decide to go after your Mages because they will likely kill both. They can drop the very valuable Megalixir, but it's not worth farming them due to the risk they pose.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Marsh Cave (and to a lesser extent, the surrounding areas outside it and Elfheim) is widely-considered to be a drastic and sudden leap in difficulty. Monsters hit harder and are often poisonous or can paralyze your party members, and many of them come in larger groups. It's made even worse by the fact that the equipment, items and spells you need from Elfheim are very expensive and random battles on average only give a few hundred gold at most. Prepare to spend a lot of time level and gold grinding if you want to survive.
  • The Ice Cavern is full of unavoidable deaths. The zombies can cause death just as easily as a Dark Wizard.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Black Mage. This shrouded, beady-eyed pipsqueak was always the most endearing of Light Warriors. That dude was the face of Final Fantasy for the longest time before Cloud showed up, and he's easily the most famous of the FF1 characters. It's for this reason that Final Fantasy IX made Black Mages an entire race, with one of them, Vivi, being a main character.
• Fan Nickname:
  • This game named the trope Peninsula of Power Leveling due to the eponymous Peninsula of Power north of Pravoka, which featured late-game enemies that could be easily dispatched with Level 2 magic.
  • The "Giants' Cave"/"Hall of Giants" is the small loop on the first floor in the Cavern of Earth where every step you take causes an encounter with one to four Giant-type enemies.
  • The large group of chests in the second level of the volcano is called the armoury, especially by players of the randomiser version of the game.
• Fanon: A few fans have come to the conclusion that the canonical Warriors of Light were a Fighter, a Thief, a White Mage and a Black Mage. This theory is helped by the remakes having this party as the default setup and the official novelization Final Fantasy: Memory of Heroes having each Warrior of Light being one of those four classes.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Why is Bahamut's Upgrade Artifact a smelly rat's tail? Because nobody would ever think to use something so weirdly random and gross to falsely present him as proof of their valor.
  • Also, the "Death" spell getting changed to "RUB", which erases you, is just more of that ol' NES-era NOA censorship, right? Well, maybe, but it could also be an informed change: in 1st edition D&D, the sixth spell level had two instant-kills. One was Death Spell. The other? Disintegrate. The spell is described in the rulebook as "causing the target to vanish"; moreover, the FF1 spell in question behaves much more like Disintegrate than Death Spell (the former is single-target attack with a hard save versus dying, i.e. what RUB is, the latter was a complex hit-dice-based area-effect spell). The only real difference is that Disintegrate explicitly works against Undead (it's an Alteration effect, not a Conjuration of negative energy) while RUB tends to be much more sketchy against Undead, which is part of why it isn't as respected as a player-usable spell. Overall, while it might still be censoring the word "death", it also really seems like someone at NOA did their homework and understood the essence of what FF1 was.
• Game-Breaker: Here.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Thanks to a big push in Nintendo Power, the game was a hit in America, selling about 700,000 units, significantly more than what it had sold in Japan. It remained the best-selling Japanese RPG in the US until Super Mario RPG in 1996.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Undead enemies can Paralyze you with a mere touch. However, due to their weak attacks, most undead are more of a nuisance then a threat.
  • The Sahagin Chief and Prince encounter in the Sea Shrine is another encounter you cannot run away from. Although they are not a threat, having to waste resources to dispatch them and the frequency they show up in that dungeon gets pretty annoying quickly.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • It's possible to land the airship directly on top of the caravan instead of fighting across the desert. The caravan was the only "unlandable" spot that could actually be landed on with the airship. However, we can't be sure whether this "bug" was intentional or not.
  • HEL2 (Healara; a 5th-level spell) has the exact same curative power as HEL3 (Healaga; a 7th-level spell) when used in battle, and when you consider that the cheapest way to heal out of battle is Potions (CURE potions in the NES version), you're better off skipping HEL3 and saving yourself the 45,000 gil. Or get both and effectively be able to cast the same spell up to eighteen times instead of the usual nine.
  • The "Peninsula of Power": A four square peninsula tip that is the closet point in the southern continent to the northern one. Due to a mapping mistake, those four squares had the enemy encounters of the continent to the north, allowing you access to much higher-level—but still kill-able if fought with full HP/MP—monsters long before you should be able to face them, allowing for some serious Level Grinding. Yet another bug that has not only been kept in virtually every remake (with the exception of the 2021 Pixel Remaster) but also gave us the Peninsula of Power Leveling trope.
  • Chaos is not immune to the White Magic spell Fear (which causes enemies to have a chance to flee, and this chance stacks with each cast). In normal play, you'd have to abuse Save Scumming in order to see it happen, but in a Tool Assisted Speedrun, where you can use luck manipulation, well... (In fact, this is how the TAS of the game using nothing but a lone living White Mage finishes the final battle.)
  • BANE will kill anything. Due to programming error, an enemy immune to instant death will has a magic threshold for that attack set at less than or equal to 0. However, it is possible for the RNG to roll a 0. Granted, it only has a 3/256 chance of happening ^Explanation the game indexes into a table of 256 entries, 3 of those entries will create the effect but a TAS will take full advantage of this by using the BANE Sword.
  • In the GBA remake, Dawn of Souls, Poison is considered to be regular damage. A Warrior can block the poison running through his veins with a shield!
  • The critical hit bug — which, for some bizarre reason, was retained in Origins, DoS, and the Pixel Remaster. Critical hits were supposed to be much less common, with the exceptions being Vorpal Blade and Sasuke's Blade, two niche weapons. Instead of being determined by a hidden weapon stat, the game erroneously uses the weapon's index number. Crits become more common as you upgrade your weapons, which is quite satisfying later on in the game.
• Good Bad Translation: In the English translation, when the party confronts Garland at the Chaos Shrine, his attempt to threaten the party sounds more silly than intimidating: "I, Garland, will knock you all down!" It's so infamous that, after the PlayStation port removed it, the Game Boy Advance port added it back, and it's been around for all releases since — up to and including the versions released on smartphones and Steam, and the Pixel Remaster. And curiously, it's actually not an inaccurate translation.^note The original word is usually translated as "defeat", but "to kick about" or "to knock over" are also apt translations. Given the translation was done in-house in Japan at Square and likely by a non-native English speaker, they probably didn't realize that this translation, while technically accurate, sounds very silly to Western audiences.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The title itself is a grand example of this for the entire series after decades of series success and a long library of series titles.
  • Those complaining about the effeminate faces of the more recent protagonists would do well to remember that White Mage's gender was also ambiguous in the original. And even in the remake, if you imagine him as male, he looks like a Bishounen.
  • Erdrick's grave could be found as a Take That! towards Enix. Now, which company did Square merge with to create Square Enix?
  • Starting with the PlayStation remake, the name on the grave changed to Link as a Take That! against Nintendo, whose relationship with Square had been rocky ever since Final Fantasy VII was made for the PlayStation rather than the Nintendo 64 over the issue of cartridges. However, when Nintendo and Square Enix started to reconcile, and Dawn of Souls was ported to the Game Boy Advance, the Link reference was kept. Nintendo was apparently able to keep a sense of humor regarding the reference.
  • The 1989 manga becomes one due to the obscurity of it contrasting with how eerily prophetic it is to the additions to the game's lore that Square would make later down the line; Things like parallel versions of the world, the Warriors of Light hailing from a different world, the Lufenians creating the device that Garland uses to go back in time, the Lufenians having interdimensional capabilities, "Garland" being the villain's last name (albeit with the first name "Red")...
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The GBA and PSP remakes, along with the Pixel Remaster. The charge system was replaced with the traditional Mana Points (GBA/PSP only), experience is gained faster, Phoenix Downs are added, you can save almost anywhere, and attacks now redirect to another enemy if the target is killed by someone else in the same turn. You can carry enough Potions to where you never have to start a fight while weakened. You can always revive with items. It's a far cry from the NES version where dragging the Levistone out of the Ice Cave with two survivors was high stakes drama!
• It Was His Sled: Garland isn't a Starter Villain, he's the Big Bad of the game and has enacted a time loop to absorb the power of the Four Fiends and transform into Chaos. This was a major plot twist when the game first came out, but after thirty years the original game is so well-known that it's discussed openly even by casual fans.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Thief can't steal like in later games, and several of their stats are buggy in the original release, leaving them with basically nothing but below-average combat skills and the unreliable ability to run away (which they will need to). After the class change comes along, they get a lot better, but even then, a Knight is tougher and does more damage, and a Red Wizard is on par in damage and has much more magic. A solo run with a Thief is considered the hardest of any class by a good margin. The class gets several buffs in the remakes, but even then, they're considered one of the more expendable characters.
  • As a result of Intelligence doing nothing in the NES and Playstation versions, Black Mage is far less powerful than sword-fighters in those versions. Black Mage is also worthless compared to the generalist Red Mage despite the better spell list, since the Red Mage also has physical prowess and White Magic and is less of a Squishy Wizard. The remakes would greatly improve Black Mage, fortunately, both by improving its stats and by fixing several bugs that made it weaker than intended.
• Memetic Mutation: "I, Garland, will knock you all down!"
• Nintendo Hard: A series of glitches severely limits the damage output of every class barring the Monk, and your sources of healing inside dungeons are severely limited. Spell use is limited, and several spells literally don't work. The abundance of One-Hit Kill attacks (and, thanks to more glitches, a lack of ways to protect yourself from them) can make certain dungeons downright miserable. Later updates to the game streamlined the inventory and equipment systems, made certain battle commands easier, and most importantly fixed the worst of the bugs. Plus, the casting system of "limit X uses per level per day" was replaced with the familiar Mana system in remakes.
  • Ironically, changing to a Mana system essentially depowered mages: in order to counter the fact that mages would be able to cast many more spells (Flare and Holy every round? HELL YEAH!), all enemies received a particularly large boost to magic defense, such that a black mage casting Flare (level 8 spell, 40 MP) is significantly less effective than a fighter smacking an enemy around with Haste (level 4 spell, 16 MP) and Temper (level 2 spell, 4 MP).
• Not-So-Cheap Imitation: This game was basically made as a video game adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons... and ended up spawning a massive video game franchise of its own.
• Obvious Beta: The list of features that work as intended is much shorter than the list of features what are bugged in some way, and always to the player's disadvantage. You will be relying on raw damage from your swords (which are also bugged) and fists for most of the game, since Intelligence does not increase spell potency as intended and several spells just flat-out don't work.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Anyone who tells you Final Fantasy only started to skew towards sci-fi after VI and VII has never played this game. The Flying Fortress, a late-game dungeon, is a giant satellite floating in space and is populated with mechanical enemies, including the infamous Warmech.
  • Almost all of the additions for the PlayStation Origins version onwards, including the new music and cutscenes, originate not with Origins, but the WonderSwan Color version.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • At the time of release, this game boasted being able to show your characters animated in battle. This was actually a selling point that they put on the sales flier, since other RPGs at the time had battles in first person view.
  • Saving the World plots in RPGs are dime-a-dozen these days, so by today's standards, this game's plot is pretty rote. But back in 1987, it was such a huge deal that what started off as a Save the Princess story like its contemporary Dragon Quest turned out to be much more.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The "Feyhome" level of Whisperwind Cove, in the remakes. Some of the faeries will feed you an X-Potion or Dry Ether. Others will set your HP to one. You will never trust a pair of wings again.
  • The final floor of the Floating Fortress. Every time you get into a random encounter, you'll most likely get one of the usual enemy waves... but may the gods help you if the RNG decides to land you on the 1-in-64 chance of tossing WarMECH/Death Machine at you, more so if it starts off by casting NUKE/Flare. Even more so if you're playing a version of the game that doesn't let you save anywhere!
  • Stepping on a tile in the Chaos Shrine will cause Lich to suddenly reappear without warning. No text box, no dialog. Followed by the crushing realization that other three are lurking around down here, too...
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Quite possibly the Trope Codifier. Players like to mix it up with solo parties, or giving more than one slot to a certain class. The most famous example of all is completing this game with a party of four White Mages. Although this arguably isn't as difficult as playing with a party of four Thieves. Or one.
  • The Switch and PS4 versions of Pixel Remaster allow the amount of experience earned to be customized, even disabling it entirely.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: This is a video game version of 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons in practically every way possible except for the title. The classes, spells, and bestiary are very clearly taken straight from D&D with only a few concessions. The game is so blatantly a ripoff that the only reason Squaresoft didn't get sued is because Nintendo of America edited the sprite of the Beholder.
• Shocking Moments: The reveal that the "floating castle" you can get to from the Mirage Tower is, in fact, a space station, when the game led you to believe that its world was just your bog-standard high-fantasy setting. Not as shocking in the remakes, which re-design the dungeon to be a mundane (relative to the game's setting) castle floating "just" a few dozen miles in the sky.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The above-mentioned 15 Puzzle is really addicting in the remakes, for obvious reasons. The Anniversary edition also has almost as many side dungeons as main ones.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It's basically a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the game itself as the GM and the plot of The Dark Crystal.^note Square has explicitly cited that movie as an inspiration for Final Fantasy IX, but the "restore the Crystals" theme can also clearly be seen here and in the other early games.
• That One Achievement: "Field Researcher - Professional" in Pixel Remaster requires you to complete the entire bestiary. This means you'll likely have to go out of your way to find Warmech.
• That One Attack:
  • Death. Once you get past Astos, players can find equipment that makes them immune to Death. The game expects you to have it equipped, so don't monkey around.
  • Chaos can cause an instant loss of hope with CUR4/Curaja, which fully heals him. If you've already lost a couple party members, you might as well reload your save. Chaos has won. (Chaos has multiple insta-kill attacks, including one which can target multiple party members.)
• That One Boss:
  • Astos's RUB (Death) will automatically kill a party member, at a point in the game when you have no defense against instant kills. Death has a 75% chance of connecting. It is entirely possible to get through the fight without losing a single party member. It is also entirely possible for Astos to Rub out three of your party members before you can kill him. He doesn't have a lot of HP (168), but his physical and magical defense is top-notch; he's got better stats than Lich, and unlike the Fiend of Earth, Astos has no weakness to exploit. Silence works on Astos and prevents him from casting Death, but that's somewhat iffy, and you can't rely too much on it.
  • Lich, who is made even more annoying by the dungeon he comes at the end of. He's the first boss to start using spells that target the entire party for massive damage, and he also has a lot of HP. Even if you can take Lich down, you might still lose to the random encounters you'll have to deal with going back to the top of the Cavern of Earth.
• That One Level:
  • The Marsh Cave, especially if you have to fight a quartet of Piscodemons. Potions and Antidotes are needed to fend off the many poisonous creatures, since it's a looong walk from the nearest town.
  • The Cavern of Earth. Constantly getting stunlocked by zombies, Cockatrice encounters, and the Lich boss. Cockatrice dictates that you stock up on Gold Needles, sold only in Elfheim for a high price.
  • The Citadel of Trials is full of Rakshasa, Horned Devil, Medusa and Mindflayer encounters. There's also a maze teleportation puzzle in one floor that take some time memorizing which teleporters go where.
  • The Cavern of Ice. Dark Wizards, White Dragons, more Piscodemons, more Mindflayers and more Cockatrice encounters. This dungeon is hard regardless of which characters you choose.
  • The top floor of the Flying Fortress, right before you square off with Tiamat. Warmech is lurking around here, of course, but now you have to deal with Mindflayers who can come in groups of seven. The lower floors are a lot easier.
  • The Chaos Shrine. Green Dragons, Water Elementals, rematches with Kraken and Tiamat, and Chaos himself.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Updated Rereleases. You'd think that rebalancing the game, making saving more convenient, and automatically redirecting hits originally intended at targets that just died would make fans happy.
  • The Floating Castle (Tiamat's lair) starting with the Wonder Swan Color remake is changed from a science fiction-esque space station to a stone & marble temple suspended above the clouds, which is more thematically-consistent with the rest of game's visual style, but it's also a lot less surprising and cool. The whole reveal was meant to be that what the rest of the world and the party can only conceive of as a "flying castle" is in fact a flat-out orbital station, complete with robots and the like, and the remakes blunt that (the castle isn't even orbital anymore).
    • This change also has the side effect of making the robots, both the friendly ones you encounter early on and the enemy ones inside the castle/station, make a lot less sense - in the original, they foreshadowed the true nature of Old Lefenia, but in the remakes they're just anachronisms.
  • The Dawn of Souls GBA remake (as well as the iOS port based on it) is criticized by some hardcore fans for greatly lowering the difficulty, most notably by ditching the spell system from the original game in favor of a more familiar MP system and adding the ability to save anywhere. However, this is averted for the most part, since saving anywhere is quite useful in a portable RPG, where one may have to put the game down on short notice. Plus, the remake also balanced out the ability to cast far more spells by making them less powerful, and added several Bonus Dungeons to make up for easing up on the difficulty.
  • The Pixel Remaster is an odd case of "They Changed It Back, Now It Sucks!". Bringing back the Vancian Spell Charge system along with removing the Soul of Chaos dungeons and the Labyrinth of Time has ired fans who liked the changes that the Dawn of Souls and 20th Anniversary remakes brought in. The fact that the iOS and Android releases based on the 20th Anniversary version were removed from stores when the Pixel Remaster version released only increased the enmity.
  • The Pixel Remaster version removed two easy ways to earn exp and gil. While they kept the 15-Puzzle, they also removed the rewards you get from playing it, thereby getting rid of the primary reason to play the mini-game in the first place. They also nixed the Peninsula of Power, meaning that expedited Level Grinding you wanted to do? Well, that's too damn bad. However it is alleviated slightly with the console release which allows you to increase or decrease how much EXP, Gil and AP you earn after a battle up to x4 making level grinding a lot easier.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Very Definitely Final Dungeon takes you 2,000 years into the past, and while it would've been interesting to see what the world and civilization were like in that time period, you're sadly restricted to exploring the Chaos Shrine, as the entrance is sealed off.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Most of the classes look too androgynous to be generally seen as male, especially the White Mage. The Monk is the exception due to his bare chest. The Fighter/Knight is also usually thought of as male, mostly thanks to that sprite being outright taken or cribbed for male characters in later FF titles (done outright for Firion in FF2's NES version, and both Cecil and Bartz take obvious visual cues from the Fighter).
  • Square apparently accepted the fan view of things (and realized the precedent of later games); the White Mage is more androgynous in the remakes, and decidedly feminine in the PSP version.
  • In the Spanish version of Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls, the White Mage is referred to as "Maga Blanca". "Maga" is a gendered noun that refers only the a female mage; and "blanca" is the female version of blanco, which means "white", so at least she is female in Spain. If foreign translations and localizations should be considered canon, that's another subject.
  • In the remakes, Square have also taken advantage of this by putting both male and female names on the preset names list for most classes.
• Viewer Name Confusion: The original NES release used different translations for many characters' names, due mainly to space restrictions. The subsequent re-releases starting with Final Fantasy Origins have changed them back, and you can generally tell how old a Final Fantasy fan is by whether they talk about "Monks" or "Black Belts".

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