The Final Fantasy Legend

Imagine Final Fantasy, but the whole thing tucked into a gray plastic box you slip into your pocket. That's exactly what The Final Fantasy Legend was, the very first Final Fantasy game to be released on a portable console. For Western players it was the first contact with this legend on the Game Boy in 1990, and few then suspected that under the „Final Fantasy“ banner actually hid the first installment of an entirely different series.

In its home Japan the game was released as SaGa, launched at the company Square by designer Akitoshi Kawazu. In the West it was given the Final Fantasy label purely for marketing reasons, to sell better on an established name. That's a favorite piece of trivia today, but it also explains why the game differs so much from the classic FF. Instead of a fixed party of heroes, you build your own team from various races, and each of them grows in a completely different way.

At the heart of the experience is precisely this unusual progression mechanic. Humans grow stronger by buying items, mutants change randomly after battles, and monsters transform by devouring the flesh of defeated enemies. No classic experience points in the traditional sense, no certainty. Turn-based combat is uncompromising, and weapons and spells have a limited number of uses, so you constantly weigh what you can afford to spend.

The narrative drives you up a giant tower connecting several worlds, from medieval kingdoms through futuristic wastelands all the way to the heavens. This structure gave the technically modest console a surprisingly large scope and imagination. The story is stark, but the finale with the confrontation of the so-called Creator became famous for its audacity and fans recall it to this day.

The game became one of the first truly extensive RPGs on a handheld console and opened the door to the whole SaGa series, which Square long cultivated as a more experimental counterpart to the main line. For many players it was proof that a thoughtful adventure could run on the Game Boy, not just simple platformers and puzzles.

Why play it: The roots of the SaGa series and an unconventional RPG where you literally raise your team from scratch, with an atmosphere no one expected on the Game Boy.