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Final Fantasy I Pixel Remaster Review

This review may contain mild spoilers.
Platforms tested
Windows desktop


Pros
Cons


Music


Finding certain enemies to fill bestiary can be very time consuming.




Remodeled art
60 FPS cap with uneven frame pacing may cause stuttering.


Easy to pick up
The game is very light on the story and the story bits are easy to miss.


Quality of life improvements make this classic more accessible than ever.
Equipment from chests is mostly worthless.



Things to know?
Game has been updated with the boost options and enhancements from the console ports.
Game allows turning off encounters and to customize difficulty in the form of XP and Gil drop-rate.
Tl;dr
The classic that started it all. Final Fantasy 1 Pixel remaster has been upgraded to a more modern age by remodeling the graphics of the game and adding quality of life improvements. Many of the series staples, including Cid, Airships and iconic monsters are featured. The game’s iteration has stood against the time well and is well worth experiencing in this form. Highly recommended.

Overview
Final Fantasy, first released in 1987 to Nintendo’s NES can be said to be one of the most influential role-playing games of all time and has greatly influenced all Japanese RPG titles. It has been re-released multiple times since 1987 with different editions having different features and content. This latest, Pixel Remaster is a remaster based on the original game and thus is missing the additional content that could be found in other versions, such as the FMV sequences in Playstation Origins release or the added dungeons in some other versions.

Overview of the Story and Gameplay
Final Fantasy takes place in a fantasy world, which is held together by the 4 crystals, each representing element of earth, fire, wated and wind. The world is filled with different, dungeons & dragons inspired races, such as humans and dwarves.
The story starts as the four warriors arrive to Kingdom of Cornelia and are recruited to save Princess Sarah from the rogue knight Garland. These events start the warrior’s journey to seek out what happened to the 4 crystals and to restore them.
The player controls the four warriors on their journey. The game begins by creating the party members by naming them and choosing their classes from Warrior, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, Red Mage and Thief. The classes are permanent and cannot be changed, although later in the game it is possible to upgrade the classes to their stronger variants. For example, Black Mage becomes Black Wizard.
The game plays like any other Japanese RPG. The characters travel the world via overworld map, enter towns to talk with other characters and to do their shopping, enter dungeons from overworld and fight against monsters and bosses.
During their travels, the warriors get loot from enemies in the form of items, money and experience points and they can find numerous treasures during their travel.
The battles are menu and turn-based. The characters can act based on their classes, such as attack, use magic, defend, use items or even flee.

The Tech
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster runs mostly locked at 60. The game has poor frame pacing which may cause stutters on some displays if G-sync is enabled. The settings are as barebones as possibly can be. One can choose from different display modes and from resolution and nothing else. Upon changing display mode, the game restarts. There is no way to increase the frame rate from the in-game settings.
The game supports ultra-wide resolutions by drawing borders to the screen. This is certainly nicer than the usual black bars, but unfortunately players are given no chance to change the borders.
On audio side the players are given a master volume slider, a BGM volume slider and SFX volume slider. Other options the game features are the language, brightness and customizing key bindings.
Apart from these, the game allows to choose between the new arrangement of the background music and the original NES soundtrack and to change between modernized font and a “classical font”. The game features a separate display filter to allow for a CRT-like look if one prefers such filter.
The options are different once the player has loaded to the game, with the display options completely missing, but new options such as Cursor Memory, Continue Auto-Battle and Default movement options appearing. In addition, the configuration screen now has the Boost menu to allow for customization of your adventure.
The game is by no means resource intensive. Frankly, it can be run with no problems on pretty much anything, which makes it fantastic to play on a Steam Deck or other handheld devices.

Miscellaneous
DLC: The game has no content DLC. The game however has a wallpaper and arranged tracks DLC that can be received by purchasing all 6 pixel remaster games in a bundle.
The Wallpaper has 2 different wallpapers in different 16:9 resolutions from 1024x768 to 3840x2160. Frankly, I did not like the wallpapers for FF1.
The soundtrack DLC is 3 tracks in mp3 format at 320kbps. These are “Timelapse Remix” tracks of Main Theme, Matoya’s Cave and Battle. The mixes start as their original classical versions before evolving to their pixel remaster arrangements.
Achievements: The game has 24 achievements with no missable achievements. All achievements can be obtained in a single playthrough. The most challenging achievements are opening all chests and fighting every monster.
Pixel remaster adds a new map function that shows the entire area and location of chests. It’s also possible to open the map to check each area on how many chests you have collected during your adventure. This makes collecting all 249 chests much easier.
There are 128 different types of monsters, including bosses, to fight. However, some of them can be very rare to encounter and may require achievement hunters to fight with monsters for hours just to find that single one with 1/64 chance of appearing.
Extras: The game features a music player for all the soundtrack tracks as well as another extras menu with artworks from the game. In addition, the game has a bestiary that can be checked to see information on different monsters.

My Opinions
This game is a classic and with the modern quality of life features, it’s fun to play. It took me around 10 hours to finish the game with all the achievements and most of that time was spent on looking for one certain monster.
It is very light on the story. So light that it can be very easy to skip almost everything on the story. But one has to take into account that this was made for NES in 1987, so the technical limitations and pioneering has to be taken into account.
Almost everything from Final Fantasy can be found in one way or another in many modern roleplaying games.
While I miss some of the quality-of-life improvements found in some other re-releases, like game speed toggle or improving battle speed, I didn’t really feel like I needed them. It was clear, that this was the first try as the loot was mostly worthless.
The game is quite easy, with only few real challenges, so if you’re looking for a challenge, there are other better games to play.
I am very happy to recommend this game and think it's well worth the price and time.