In 1987, a small Japanese video game company released a role-playing game inspired by the popular Dragon Quest and Dungeons & Dragons. This would become Final Fantasy, the first in the legendary game franchise that would take the world by storm. The rather simple title played much like a classic D&D campaign with several familiar monsters and even some bosses (looking at you Tiamat).

With the Magic: the Gathering - Final Fantasy set coming out, several cards in the set as well as the Through the Ages subset feature imagery and flavor based on this classic game. Today, I'm going to walk you through a couple of the more notable aspects that are in the set that represent the very first game in this long-running franchise.

Grab your crystals, it's time to dive in!

At the beginning of Final Fantasy I, before you even start to play the game proper, it offers you the opportunity to choose your job for four different characters. If you're not very familiar with Final Fantasy as a series, jobs are often referred to as classes in other games. In this first game you're able to select between one of six jobs, each represented by one of the six different "job select" equipment here.

Each job fills the role of the following:

• White Mage - Healing and protective magic duties. They can also learn special spells that damage undead monsters.
• Thief - A high agility and evasion fighter but lacks strength. As the name implies, they can also steal items from opposing enemies.
• Black Mage - Utilizes damage-dealing and status-inducing spells. Also learns a handful of support spells.
• Red Mage - An all-arounder, with modest combat abilities and the ability to use both white magic and black magic.
• Warrior - The damage dealer and tank of the party.
• Monk - Another damage dealer job that focuses on using fists instead of swords.

Later in the game, you can unlock advanced jobs, something that would become a mainstay of the series going forward. Each of these six starter jobs have also remained a staple of later titles, with the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI: Online using these same jobs as your starting options.

Each of your four characters represents the Warriors of Light, a generic representation of the player character whose appearances change depending on the job selected. Once your party is formed, you're placed in front of the town and castle of Cornelia, where the king - recognizing you as the Warriors of Light - tasks you with retrieving his daughter, Princess Sarah, from the traitorous knight Garland at the Chaos Shrine. When you leave town and cross a nearby bridge, the following image appears on screen with an informative text crawl, which is represented in the promotional version of Preordain above.

Roughly halfway through the player's quest after defeating the first two elemental fiends -Lich and Maralith - the party is tasked with finding the Levistone in the Ice Cavern. Once they defeat an Evil Eye lurking in the dungeon, they're able to go to a desert near Crescent Lake where they were set on their task in the first place. When the Warriors of Light place the Levistone in the center of the desert, a flying airship rises from the sand. The party then uses this to get around the world more easily and reach areas they could not previously access to further advance the quest.

Mentioned earlier in this article, Garland kidnaps Princess Sarah and kicks off the quest as the players take him out and rescue the princess. Garland, lying near death as the Warriors of Light return to Cornelia, is saved by the four elemental fiends and flung back in time. There he becomes Chaos, the demonic entity who is the main villain. Garland sends the fiends forward in time, thereby creating a time loop where he always exists. Slash of Light represents the Warriors of Light finally managing to break this loop and destroy Chaos - and Garland - once and for all.

Final Fantasy I was an incredible experience in the late 80s (or the 90s for those in the US and beyond). Today, it's a little hard to go back to given its primitive nature. However, for anyone out there who considers themselves a Final Fantasy fan, this one's a must. It's available on most major platforms these days, so I highly encourage you to pick it up and give it a try!

Paige Smith

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