Hi and welcome to Cap'n !nc's Final Fantasy retrospectorial. In this episode we'll learn about the original Final Fantasy for the NES as broken down by Characters and random things I found funny throughout the game.

Characters

Thief - He's just a little fat guy wearing a UPS uniform. You can't actually steal anything with him, and even if you did it would be insanely easy for police to fit a description to him as he's the only person in the world with bright blue hair. He's the luckiest member of your party, and that would probably mean something if playing gas station poker machines ended up as part of your quest to save the world.

White Mage - As a blatant middle finger to Native American culture, White Mage is adorned in the robes of this nation's once proud people to show them the superiority of the Caucasian immune system. "Haha. Well you don't see me getting smallpox from their stupid mutli-colored blankets, do you," she exclaimed in an interview. She's mostly used for healing purposes, but if you and your party happen to take a side quest as meddling kids, you can cast HARM at the amusement park phantom. This spell is the magical equivalent of PNCH, but it works on the undead. So if the ghost doesn't rub its jaw then you know it's just Old Man McGruder.

Black Belt - Black Belt isn't a black belt at all. He just stands in one spot with his arms raised as though he's perfecting shadow dancing until that perfect moment comes when he steps forward to bravely make the same BONK BONK motions as everyone else. My favorite thing about Black Belt is that at the end of a battle while the other guys are throwing to their hands at the sky and shouting yays! about how they weren't killed by a group of imps, he is the only one pounding his pudgy little fists together as though smacking fuckers around with his nunchucks gets him totally pumped up.

Red Mage - Red mage is the only guy who can cast both black and white magic, but don't let his mixed mastery fool you because he can't actually do either one very well. He's the Michael Jordan of the magic world. His baseball career is white magic, and his golf career is black magic. But when it comes to cramming his oversized gut into a Vash the Stampede outfit he can slam dunk like no other. Sometimes you can equip him with a wooden cane and watch him pimp slap ogres over the head with it, but it stops being novel when you realize your geeky anime obsession combined with your geeky role-playing obsession to create something that may just be too real for you to handle.

Black Mage - Black Mage is an adorable little faceless strawman. OF DOOM! Most of his spells start off fairly weak and I almost quit using him. Then after I spent 6 days talking to a well that kept calling my face dirty and taunting me to wash my filthy visage, the waters began to swirl, and suddenly I was no longer peering at myself in the crystalline mirror. Instead my bloodshot eyes were met with a swirling reality where my little mage was a grown man launching tactical nuclear strikes from the withered extensions that once resembled fingers. His SLEP spell replaced by NUKE, ZAP!, and the spell too scary to be named - XXXX, Black Mage's cackle crackled with electricity as he unleashed devastation upon the world. My other warriors, realizing the stupidity of keeping an evil instrument of their own undoing with them, quickly deposited his stabbed body in a trash bin behind the local potion shop.

Fighter - Fighter is the strongest member of your party, and his retard-like strength is only rivaled by his retard-like intelligence. Beginning with only a 1 in this column, Fighter is often the focal point of many arguments among the other adventurers. Who will share the bed with him knowing of his inability to retain poopy? What happens when he forgets his special game-winning helmet in a fight? Who will take the place of this Hercules when he leaves the party to become a developer of stories for future Final Fantasy titles?

The Game

In Final Fantasy, four people with blackened orbs appear one day to save the world after it is plunged into darkness. They do this by travelling the world and killing lots of snakes and other crap to gain valuable snake-killing experience, gold, and merit badges for their boy scout troupe. But their quest is not all about the murder of monsters. The heart of their journey lies in travelling from town to town and talking to everyone they meet, and since everyone in every town is programmed to talk about the current social and economic woes of the region, you have to solve their problems to get them to change the subject. It sounds ridiculous, but imagine going to a club and having every girl you try to pick up loudly proclaim, "Whatever shall we do! The BAR is completely out of VODKA! Now I will never be drunk enough to wrestle in PANTIES!" You may not want to make the liquor run to another part of town, but if you're brave enough to do it you'll be considered a hero by all.

Fortunately solving all of these problems builds the story and allows you to travel even further in your quest. In order to sail the seas you have to kill a bunch of pirates and take their ship. To get a bridge built across a river you have to save a king's asshole daughter. And to get a bunch of dwarves to blow up a rock you have to return a witch's crystal so she'll give you an herb to give to a sleeping elf that had a spell placed on him by the guy who stole the crystal, but you kill him after giving him a crown hiding in a cave. The only person in the world immune to all the ills is Arylon, an adorable girl-shaped thing that will move in exactly four directions for anyone willing to speak to her. Dance, Arylon, dance and remind us that there is still hope in this hopeless world!

You have the use of several items at your disposal to aid you in your quest. You can buy swords and canes that are sometimes different colors and make bigger numbers show up when you use them on monsters. You can even go to magic stores and load up on spells ready to unleash arcane torture on your enemies. Some of these are really awesome, like ZAP!, a spell that causes a big card with that word printed on it to show up on screen, and when it disappears your characters are gogo dancing around and punching out crime throughout the little black ground area with trees or rocks or whatever else is around to be indicitive of the area you're in. Most of these spells are black magic, and they really rock. The lesser, suckier spells belong to the White Mage. Sometimes she can learn spells like FOG, a spell that causes zero visibility and causes monsters attacking your characters to be late for work. BEEP goes one angry ogre's car horn.

Final Score: 2

Final Fantasy is the least Final Fantasy of the series, but that's only because the technology to make it an RPG opera didn't exist yet. If it were retold today, Fighter would be replaced by a brooding sociopath with a heart of gold, Thief would be a misunderstood delinquint who only wants to do what's right, and White Mage would be a sass-talking heroine with a knack for magic and past she just can't confront. I would be the wise-cracking karate master with a resolve as hard as my knuckles. Together we would travel the world learning all about each others pasts, and through the strength of friendship we would kill the strongest power in the universe.