Release Date: December 18, 1987 (Japan) / July 12, 1990 (NA) | Developer: Square | Platform: Famicom / NES (8-bit cartridge) | ROM Size: 384 KiB PRG-ROM + 256 KiB CHR-ROM (640 KiB total); password save system | Playtime: Main story 17–25 hours, Main + extras 30–40 hours, Completionist 50+ hours | Sales: 1.3M+ (Japan), 700K (NA/EU), 2M+ worldwide | Critical Reception: 32/40 (Famitsu, 1988), 8/10 (EGM/GamePro), Metacritic 85/100 (Pixel Remaster)
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Nobody working on Final Fantasy knew they were making history when it released back on December 18th, 1987. They were just solving problems: prove that RPGs could work on a mass-market console. Inform Nintendo their ambitions were garbage and leave the offices so enraged, you’d think they tried to kick a dog.
It wasn’t that RPGs couldn’t work on Nintendo hardware—it’s just that RPGs were hard. Loading new areas and keeping everything in pace took memory. Memory was expensive. Game developers knew that hard-coded ASCII was the best way to make the Famicom understand what they wanted…but narratives? Characters with unique sprites? Ideas so ambitious they’d need reams of paper to sketch them all out?
Square proved you could do more with limited resources than you thought. Final Fantasy showed other developers the sale price of an SRAM cartridge and taught them there was another way.
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When Final Fantasy launched in Japan on December 18th, 1987, it built a world from the ground up. The overworld map, every dungeon, around fifty spells and items, all of the enemies and enemy animations, multiple storylines, combat stats/player growth, and music for every menu screen and battle needed to fit into…
640 kilobytes.
Not megabytes. Not kilobytes of total cartridge_size. Kilobytes.
The amount of data you can store on a floppy disk.
I want you to understand what we’re talking about here. Modern game development kits have libraries that exceed Final Fantasy‘s entire cartridge size. The operating systems on our phones are more complex. We’re talking about an entire game that includes:
* tile-based overworld map with several regions
* combat/stats
* player growth
* twenty dungeons
* fifty spells and items
* music/data for eight channels of audio
* sprite animations for characters comb
AAAAAND IT FIT INTO 640KB!! !
…and it was wonderful.
How Limitations Birthed Solid Game Design
The processor used was a 6502, running anywhere from ~1.0 to 1.79 MHz depending on the region. (Final Fantasy Fandom) This wasn’t slow; this was ancient technology. The chip had been constructed way back in 1975. By 1987, technology had surpassed it—but Nintendo was still using old tech in their hardware. Everything had to be as efficient as humanly possible.
Programmers couldn’t waste cycles on fancy garbage. Every single instruction, every bit of data, had to earn its keep.
Resultantly, entire systems had to be built around limitations. Take a look at enemy sprites. Each enemy was based off of a limited pool of spritesheets with their colours changed through mathematical commands.
As you can imagine, pixel art benefits heavily from reuse. Every enemy didn’t need thirty unique sprites. There were limited resources. So artists reused sprites to extend the library they had.
Combat stats were compressed. Every job had specific spells attached to them. Equipment was layered over them to provide additional functions. Everything in FF reused something else. Want a better weapon? Improve your character stats. Hell, entire spells served multiple functions, acting as both an attack and a heal depending on context.
If it sounds like everything was its own massively lateral thinking puzzle, you’re not wrong. Final Fantasy forced its developers to be incredible problem solvers. NPCs don’t have voice acting. The menu interface is counter-intuitive. Characters wear the same sprite animations with every encounter.
…but it works. Everything serves a purpose. Generic sprites became a tool to offset memory usage. Simplified menus ensured players never got lost in navigation and took the focus away from gameplay. Certain dungeons felt barren because sprite reuse made it hard to portray variation, but that also_trainored players into memorizing where every enemy would spawn since they always spawned in the same place.
Down to the music. Final Fantasy’s soundtrack is legendary, but that music was compressed. Composers wrote knowing specifically what sound the Famicom could produce. They weren’t slamming MIDI tracks into a programmer’s face and hoping it worked—they knew the limitation beforehand. Programmers could then convert that data into something the hardware could understand, producing music that sounds absolutely stupendous despite what you’re literally listening to.
Every aspect of this game was a compromise. And it worked.
Built To Sell, By Kellogg’s
Why should you care? “Final Fantasy sold well. It was given multiple ports, including mobile releases andHD remasters long after Nintendo had moved on.”
It’s true. Final Fantasy sold, eventually. It moved 1.3 million+ copies in Japan alone, (VGSales) launched multiple remake projects that likely introduced new players, and showed Western audiences that JRPGs could be successful in markets outside of Japan. The game launched on July 12th, 1990 in North America (Wikipedia) (nearly 3 years after FF launched in Japan on December 18th, 1987 (Wikipedia)) and still managed to sell approximately 700,000 units between North America and Europe. (ActivePlayer) Total sales account for over 2 million+ copies worldwide if you combine original cartridge sales and early ports up until 2003. (ActivePlayer)
Nintendo, at the time, was absolutely insistent that RPGs wouldn’t sell. When Square approached them about Final Fantasy, they were given 3 months to prove their game could sell at retail—if they couldn’t, Nintendo would have Squaresoft develop a Kellogg’s themed RPG instead.
Yes. You read that right.
Final Fantasy was given a window to prove Nintendo wrong. Show them there was a market for this stuff.
Now, we know RPGs can sell. But Final Fantasy was Nintendo’s wedge into the proverbial door, proving Americans would give Japanese RPGs a chance if they kept letting them in.
Reviews & Ending Spoilers
Alright, trigger warning ahead if you’ve never played this game. There will be minor spoilers beyond this point. I can’t describe everything fit into 640KB without spoiling at least a little bit of story.
Earliest reviews gave it a mixed reception, rightfully calling out Final Fantasy for ripping pretty hard off Dragon Quest. Western retrospectives scored it around 8/10 (VGSales) across EGM and GamePro, citing complaints about grinding and emphasizing it took ideas clearly made better by Dragon Quest. Famitsu reviewed it years later in 1988 for 32/40, (VGSales) though user scores on sites like GameFAQs sit around 4.2/5 (MobyGames) to account for modern users who recognise how influential it is but don’t care for outdated difficulty.
These reviews speak specifically to the Nintendo version. The Pixel Remaster hits Metacritic at 85/100 ”> (MobyGames) thanks to modern updates like revamped controls and improved sprite rendering. But the base game is still perfectly playable on original hardware. I played through it not too long ago myself.
And yes, it holds up. But you’ll hate every mage you play as.
The issue with FF on modern hardware is how dated everything feels. Some critics complained about grinding back in the day, but it is absolutely necessary now. You have to grind if you want to beat this game without cheating death.
Sure, some of that is natural design—resting at the inn to recover was a staple of early RPGs. You still technically need to grind outside of boss fights to learn strategies. But man, does this game love to kill you.
My party died insuramtely 15 times between learning the game’s mechanics and finally defeating Chaos. It’s not hard… but it’s unforgiving. Save often. Watch your cooldowns. Position your party so you can actually damage enemies without instantly wiping.
And it is sooo worth it.
That final boss fight is glorious. Even without knowing the story spoilers ahead of time, hearing the swell of Triumph dramatically play as you close in on a victory is a magical moment.
You’ll feel accomplished, even if your saving methodology bordered on clinically obsessive (Raise every character to level 40+ just to cheese the game? Yeah, I done that.)
Final Fantasy might not be Dragon Quest (and yes, it 100% stole heavily from it), but JRPG fans needed this game just as much as it needed them. Give it another shot if you’ve forgotten how good it is…and good lord, praiseSpoiler alert if you haven’t played FF before.sam your kami if you beat it without cheating.
Rating: 8/10 – The game that taught Japan could make RPGs that weren’t Dragon Quest
Return to our Final Fantasy rankings ← 0 Commentsvide game was compressed down. Musicians worked within these limits when composing music.
Marcus is a retired software engineer from Seattle who spent his career debugging games before the industry transformed beyond recognition. He writes with technical precision about the engineering elegance behind classics, from Z80 assembly language to Mode 7 scaling tricks, treating code like archaeological artifacts worthy of study. His articles are deep dives into why certain games pushed their hardware to breaking points, paired with the dry humor of someone who’s actually shipped titles and understands the impossible constraints developers faced. For readers interested in the “how” behind their favorite games, Marcus is essential reading.
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