Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy returned on the WonderSwan Color as a completely redrawn version of the very first entry in the series. The story of the four Warriors of Light, who arrive in a world with fading crystals, stayed the same at its core, but everything around it went through a thorough modernization. At the start, the player assembles a party from six classes, from the Fighter through the Black and White Mage to the Thief, and heads out into an open world where a ship, a canoe, and eventually even an airship gradually become available. Battles are turn-based, viewed from the side, and it still holds true that the target of an attack is chosen in advance, so the way you plan out a whole round carries real weight, and a lapse in attention can send the party right back to the last save.

The overhaul touched mainly the visual side. In place of the rough eight-bit sprites came characters and enemies drawn in the style of later series entries, towns and dungeons got more detailed tiles, and battle backgrounds change depending on the environment the player is currently in. The menus were laid out more clearly, the controls account for both orientations of the console, and compared to the original, the game smoothed over some of its harshest spots, making it considerably friendlier than the repeated-death machine of the eight-bit era. Nobuo Uematsu's music appears in a new arrangement that the WonderSwan's sound chip handles surprisingly cleanly, and the famous prologue theme still carries its power even in this form.

At the time, this was more than just a remake. Square stood outside Nintendo's fold at that point, and its support for Bandai's console was the main reason the WonderSwan Color managed to establish itself in Japan at all; the return of the first Final Fantasy to a handheld machine was the flagship of that whole strategy. The WonderSwan version also became the basis for a later PlayStation compilation and, indirectly, for further ports to more modern hardware, so its influence reaches far beyond the console itself. Today it's one of the most enjoyable ways to trace the roots of the whole series: archaic enough that its era is unmistakable, yet polished enough that it doesn't play like a museum piece.