On December 18, 1987, Japanese players could walk into a store, purchase a Famicom cartridge from a relatively young company called Square, and begin an adventure with four nameless heroes carrying darkened crystals. There was little reason at the time to assume that this particular role-playing game would eventually lend its name to one of the most recognizable franchises in video game history.
Final Fantasy arrived in a Japanese market that was already discovering the possibilities of the console RPG. Nintendo’s own history of the Famicom remembers 1987 as a year when nearly thirty role-playing games appeared for the system, helping establish the RPG as a recognizable genre. Dragon Quest II, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, and other titles shared store shelves with Square’s new game. Final Fantasy was not arriving in an empty field. It was entering an increasingly crowded one.
What separated Square’s game was the combination of ideas it assembled. Players selected the jobs of four heroes, traveled through a large world by foot, ship, canoe, and eventually airship, restored four elemental crystals, fought battles from a side-view perspective, and experienced a story that deliberately saved its title screen until after the opening adventure had already begun. Crystals, jobs, airships, elaborate fantasy artwork, distinctive music, and cinematic presentation were present from the beginning. Many of the things that later generations would associate with Final Fantasy were already sitting inside that first Famicom cartridge.
Square Before Final Fantasy
The history of Final Fantasy begins before anyone at Square had settled on the name.
Square had already been developing computer and Famicom games, and several members of the future Final Fantasy team had experience stretching the hardware in unusual directions. Company founder Masafumi Miyamoto encountered programmer Nasir Gebelli through the game industry, and Gebelli’s reputation was already known to Square employees who had used Apple II computers. Hiromichi Tanaka later remembered that Square personnel were familiar with Gebelli’s software before he began working with them.
Gebelli joined Square’s developers on The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner and Rad Racer. Those games were technically very different from the RPG Square would attempt next, but they established a working relationship between Gebelli, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Kazuko Shibuya, Tanaka, and others who would become important to the company’s future. Tanaka recalled that after WorldRunner and Rad Racer, Square decided to build a more substantial game around Gebelli’s programming abilities. That project became Final Fantasy.
The most important outside influence was impossible to ignore. Enix’s Dragon Quest had demonstrated that the slower rhythms of computer role-playing games could be adapted successfully to Nintendo’s console.
Sakaguchi later described the effect as transformative. Square had experience producing RPGs for Japanese computers, but members of the company had assumed the limited capacity and action-oriented image of the Famicom made a lengthy role-playing adventure difficult to accomplish. Dragon Quest showed otherwise. Its designers compressed the conventions of the genre into something understandable and manageable on a console.
Decades later, Sakaguchi still described Dragon Quest as enormously important to the creation of Final Fantasy. In a 2007 interview he called Final Fantasy one of several games attempting to follow the path that Dragon Quest had opened. In the 2023 anniversary discussion, he recalled how Dragon Quest forced Square’s developers to reconsider their assumptions about what the Famicom could do.
A Small Team With a Large Idea
The future franchise did not begin as Square’s unquestioned flagship.
Sakaguchi remembered the original development group as a team of about seven people. Elsewhere in Square, Tanaka was leading another group with roughly twenty. To Sakaguchi, the imbalance suggested that his RPG project was hardly the company’s most desirable assignment.
Even promoting the unfinished game proved difficult. Sakaguchi later remembered taking a development ROM to Family Computer Magazine and being turned away, while Famitsu was much more receptive to covering the game. The story is an important reminder of how different the reputation of Final Fantasy looked before December 1987. The title that would eventually become synonymous with Japanese RPGs first had to convince people that it deserved attention at all.
Koichi Ishii was one of the developers shaping the project during this uncertain period. His later recollections provide an unusually detailed picture of what the team was trying to create.
Ishii said Sakaguchi approached him with the idea of making an RPG in the wake of Dragon Quest and told him to handle project planning. For a time Ishii worked largely by himself while Sakaguchi and Akitoshi Kawazu were occupied with Rad Racer and Tanaka was assigned elsewhere.
During that period, Ishii assembled several of the concepts that became fundamental to the finished game. He envisioned a world organized around the elements of fire, water, earth, and wind, a map with a sense of depth, customizable player characters, dramatic side-view combat, a title card appearing only after the prologue, and a structure in which the enemy encountered at the beginning would ultimately connect to the game’s ending.
Many of those ideas survived almost intact.
The Four Warriors Of Light
The finished game begins with four travelers arriving in the kingdom of Cornelia carrying crystals that have lost their light. A prophecy promises that four Warriors of Light will appear when darkness covers the world.
Their first task seems almost self-contained. Garland, a former knight of Cornelia, has kidnapped Princess Sarah and taken her to the Chaos Shrine. The four warriors defeat him and rescue the princess. Only after they return does the king rebuild the bridge north of Cornelia and send them into the wider world.
Then comes one of the game’s most memorable decisions.
The party crosses the bridge. The screen pauses. The title appears.
The sequence makes what would normally be the first quest of an RPG feel like a prologue to something much larger. Square Enix still highlights the bridge scene when looking back on the original game, and Ishii specifically remembered the delayed title card as one of the concepts he had planned from the beginning.
From there the journey gradually expands from kidnapped princesses and local monsters into an elemental crisis threatening the entire world. Earth, fire, water, and wind have fallen out of balance as four powerful fiends draw power from the crystals. Restoring them sends the Warriors of Light through caves, ruined settlements, volcanoes, waterways, castles, a sunken shrine, and a technologically advanced flying fortress before the adventure ultimately bends back toward its own beginning.
That final circular structure was not an accidental twist added late in development. Ishii remembered specifically planning for the first major enemy and first dungeon to become important again at the end of the game. Final Fantasy was already experimenting with the kind of large structural reveals that would become increasingly important to later entries in the series.
Choosing The Party
Before players could experience any of that story, Final Fantasy asked them to build a party.
Instead of handing the player four completely defined protagonists, the original game offered six starting jobs. The NES version called them Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage. Four had to be selected, and duplicates were allowed.
That meant two players could begin the same adventure with very different groups.
A party packed with physical fighters could survive punishment but struggle with magic. A group heavy with mages possessed tremendous flexibility but required more careful management. The Red Mage occupied a middle ground, while the Black Belt developed differently from characters dependent on expensive equipment.
The system was important because it made party construction part of the player’s authorship. The Warriors of Light had a shared destiny, but their names and abilities were chosen by the person holding the controller. Academic analysis of the game has noted how strongly character abilities were tied to these class selections, while Nintendo’s own retrospective identifies job selection and party freedom as one of the defining features already present in the 1987 original.
Later in the adventure, the party could earn upgraded classes through a quest involving Bahamut. Fighters became Knights, Thieves became Ninjas, Black Belts became Masters, and the three mage classes advanced into stronger forms.
The basic concept would outlive the exact system. Jobs became one of the great recurring ideas of Final Fantasy, sometimes central to the mechanics and sometimes existing more quietly inside character roles. Its origins reach back to the first cartridge.
Battles From The Side
The combat presentation also distinguished Final Fantasy from some of its most important contemporaries.
Ishii envisioned a side-view battlefield where both heroes and monsters could be visible. Rather than placing the player entirely behind a menu while an enemy stared forward from the center of the screen, Final Fantasy presented the player’s party on one side and enemies on the other.
It seems ordinary after decades of Japanese RPGs using similar perspectives, but Ishii remembered it as part of the game’s original identity. He wanted characters to feel visible and expressive inside the combat space.
The game remained firmly turn-based. Players selected attacks, spells, items, and targets before watching the round resolve. Success depended not only on levels but on equipment, party composition, spell use, resource conservation, and preparation for long dungeon expeditions.
Its dungeons could be unforgiving. Random encounters steadily drained health and magic. Saving was limited compared with modern games. Spells were organized by levels, equipment required money, and a reckless expedition could end with the player retracing a considerable amount of progress.
That friction was part of the scale. Final Fantasy wanted its world to feel like a journey rather than a series of disconnected stages.
Nasir Gebelli And The Fastest Airship
One of the most important people behind that world did not come from the Japanese RPG tradition at all.
Nasir Gebelli had built his reputation programming on the Apple II and had specialized in technically impressive action-oriented software. When work began on Final Fantasy, Sakaguchi remembered having to explain basic RPG conventions to him, including why games needed separate fields, towns, and battle scenes.
Gebelli sometimes questioned those conventions rather than simply accepting them. That outsider perspective became part of the game’s technical character.
His most famous contribution may be the airship.
Tanaka recalled showing Gebelli the high-speed scrolling of Compile’s Zanac and asking whether something comparable could be achieved. According to Tanaka, Gebelli produced fast-scrolling code almost immediately. Sakaguchi remembered Gebelli making the airship faster almost on his own initiative. Kenji Terada and Sakaguchi were already discussing the airship’s remarkable scrolling speed in a 1988 interview, when memories of the first game’s development were still fresh.
The result was more than technical showmanship. Obtaining the airship changed the player’s relationship with the world. Mountains and oceans that had controlled movement for much of the adventure suddenly became obstacles that could be flown over. Distant areas became reachable, old locations became easier to revisit, and the scale of the map could finally be understood from a position of freedom.
Square Enix still identifies the airship, alongside crystals and jobs, as one of the series-defining elements established by the first game.
Creating The Look Of Final Fantasy
Programming alone could not give Square the visual identity it wanted.
Yoshitaka Amano brought an elaborate illustrative style that looked dramatically different from the limited sprites a Famicom could display. His character and monster artwork gave Final Fantasy a visual world larger than the cartridge itself. Detailed creatures, flowing armor, unusual anatomy, and ornate fantasy imagery helped establish a tone that was neither simply medieval European nor conventionally Japanese.
Inside the game, artists had to translate ideas like those into tiny arrangements of pixels.
Kazuko Shibuya was one of the central figures in that work. She remembered Square as a very small company when she joined and recalled working alongside Gebelli on projects even before Final Fantasy. During the first game’s production, there were few graphics personnel, and Shibuya later said development took less than a year.
She also remembered the excitement when Amano’s artwork arrived at the office. Square’s pixel artists studied his illustrations and converted their shapes and personalities into the limited visual language available to the Famicom.
Years later, Shibuya described how small Square still seemed when she entered the industry. The company needed artists capable of helping it move from computer development toward the rapidly growing Famicom market. There was no established textbook telling artists how to make expressive console pixel art. Much of the technique had to be learned by experimentation.
The visual collaboration between Amano’s illustrations and Square’s pixel artists created a pattern that continued far beyond the original game. Final Fantasy could exist simultaneously as tiny sprites on a television and as lavish fantasy paintings in manuals, packaging, advertisements, and promotional material.
Nobuo Uematsu Finds His Series
The original Final Fantasy also established a musical partnership that became inseparable from the identity of the franchise.
Nobuo Uematsu had joined Square in the mid-1980s. In 1987, Sakaguchi asked him to compose music for the company’s new RPG. Uematsu was self-taught rather than conservatory-trained, but his melodies became some of the most durable pieces of the new series.
The limitations were substantial. The Famicom could not reproduce an orchestra, yet Uematsu wrote melodies meant to carry towns, castles, battles, caves, travel, victory, danger, and reflection. Several musical ideas introduced during the early series would become recurring signatures, rearranged again and again as hardware improved.
Music helped give emotional scale to locations that might otherwise consist of a handful of tiles and short text boxes. Combined with Amano’s artwork, Shibuya’s graphics, the game’s deliberate title sequence, and the visible battlefield, Uematsu’s score strengthened Square’s growing interest in treating a role-playing game as something with theatrical and cinematic qualities.
Why Was It Called Final Fantasy?
Few stories in video game history have been repeated as often as the claim that Final Fantasy received its name because Square was failing and the game represented the company’s final chance to survive.
The real story is more complicated.
There was genuine uncertainty around the project. Sakaguchi said in 2007 that he personally viewed the game as a possible final attempt at the industry. If it failed, he was considering leaving game development and returning to university. That recollection likely helped strengthen the legend surrounding the title.
However, Sakaguchi gave a more detailed explanation during the official 35th anniversary discussion.
According to that account, the developers first wanted a title that could be abbreviated with the Roman letters “FF.” Fighting Fantasy was considered, but using that name presented difficulties because it was already associated with another property. The team eventually settled on Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi treated the choice with considerably less melodrama than the later legend does.
It is therefore safest to understand the title as the product of several overlapping circumstances. Sakaguchi really was uncertain about his future. Square really was taking a risk on a relatively small RPG team. But the familiar story that the company consciously named the project Final Fantasy because it was literally about to make its last game reduces a messier history into a convenient myth.
The irony is that the supposedly ominous title soon became anything but final.
From 200,000 Cartridges To A Hit
Even near release, expectations were not unlimited.
Sakaguchi later said Square initially planned a shipment of about 200,000 cartridges. Cartridge manufacturing required long lead times, meaning an undersized first production run could prevent the game from taking advantage of early demand.
He pushed for more.
According to his recollection, Sakaguchi asked the company to manufacture 400,000 copies because he feared that a smaller run would prevent the game from selling enough to justify a sequel. Square’s management eventually accepted the financial risk. Sakaguchi later credited that decision with helping the game become a 400,000-selling success.
Success changed the meaning of the project almost immediately. Final Fantasy II followed in Japan in 1988, and Final Fantasy III arrived in 1990. Rather than simply reproducing the original game, Square began using the name for separate worlds, characters, and systems linked by recurring ideas.
That decision made Final Fantasy something unusual. It was a series without needing to be one continuous story.
Final Fantasy Comes To North America
American players had to wait until 1990 for Nintendo to bring the original game to the NES market.
By then the Japanese series had already moved ahead, but Nintendo gave the first game unusually extensive promotional support in North America. Surviving issues of Nintendo Power document the campaign, including coverage in 1990 and an entire strategy-focused issue devoted to Final Fantasy. Volume 17, published in October 1990, is preserved by the Video Game History Foundation as part of the Nintendo Power archive.
That kind of material mattered for a game that demanded more explanation than the average action title. RPG terminology, magic systems, character statistics, dungeon navigation, weapons, monsters, and a large overworld could be intimidating to players unfamiliar with the genre. Nintendo’s guides and magazine coverage helped teach American NES owners how to approach the adventure.
The North American version therefore became more than a translated cartridge. It arrived surrounded by maps, instructions, magazine features, and strategy material designed to introduce a style of play that was still comparatively unfamiliar to much of the console audience.
The Beginning Of Something Much Larger
The first Final Fantasy can appear simple when viewed backward through decades of increasingly elaborate sequels.
Its Warriors of Light are mostly vessels for the player’s choices. Dialogue is brief. Battles are built around menus and statistics. Towns contain a handful of buildings. Much of the story exists in short conversations rather than lengthy scenes.
Yet judging the game only by what later RPGs added misses what made it historically important.
The original established a creative vocabulary.
There were crystals tied to the structure of the world. There were jobs defining how heroes fought. There was an airship that transformed exploration. There was music intended to give individual places emotional identities. There was elaborate artwork extending beyond what the hardware could display. There was an effort to make the opening feel cinematic. There was a world mixing medieval fantasy with advanced technology. There was even an expectation that each new Final Fantasy could pour its ideas into the present game rather than saving everything for a sequel.
Sakaguchi later described that mentality as treating games less like manufactured products and more like creations into which the developers emptied their available ideas.
That philosophy helps explain why the series could change so radically while retaining a recognizable identity.
Final Fantasy did not become historically important simply because its sequels became famous. Many of the ideas that sustained those sequels were already embedded in the first game. Ishii’s elemental world, Gebelli’s technical experimentation, Amano’s fantasy imagery, Shibuya’s pixels, Uematsu’s music, Sakaguchi’s direction, and the work of the rest of Square’s small development team combined into something more durable than any of them could have known in 1987.
Nintendo’s historical record now places the original alongside the games that helped establish RPGs as a major Famicom genre, while Square Enix presents its crystals, Warriors of Light, jobs, and airship as the roots of a series that continued for decades.
On December 18, 1987, however, none of that future was guaranteed.
There was simply a cartridge, a darkened set of crystals, four warriors standing outside Cornelia, and a bridge waiting to be crossed.
Only after crossing it did the title appear.
Final Fantasy had begun.
Sources & Further Reading
Square Co., Ltd. Final Fantasy. Family Computer. Tokyo: Square, 1987. Square Enix, Final Fantasy Portal Site. https://na.finalfantasy.com/titles/finalfantasy1
Nintendo of America. Final Fantasy: Explorer’s Handbook. Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1990. Official Nintendo manual scan. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/en/pdf/CLV-P-NABJE.pdf
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power, vol. 12, May/June 1990. Video Game History Foundation Library. Nintendo Power Volume 12
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power, vol. 14, July/August 1990. Video Game History Foundation Library. Nintendo Power Volume 14
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power, vol. 16, September/October 1990. Video Game History Foundation Library. Nintendo Power Volume 16
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power, vol. 17, October 1990. Video Game History Foundation Library. Nintendo Power Volume 17
VideoGames & Computer Entertainment. No. 22. November 1990. Larry Flynt Publications. Retromags archive. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment Issue 22
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY 35th Anniversary Special Site.” Final Fantasy Portal Site. 2022. Final Fantasy 35th Anniversary
Square Enix. “FF Weekly: December 18th Remember When…” Final Fantasy Portal Site. December 18, 2022. FF Weekly: December 18th Remember When…
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 1.” Interview with Hiromichi Tanaka. Final Fantasy Portal Site. Hiromichi Tanaka interview
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 2.” Interview with Koichi Ishii. Final Fantasy Portal Site. Koichi Ishii interview
Square Enix. “Talking FINAL FANTASY Pixel Remaster with the Legendary Kazuko Shibuya.” Square Enix Blog. Kazuko Shibuya interview
Iwata, Satoru. “Fate Works in Mysterious Ways.” Interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu. Iwata Asks: The Last Story. Nintendo, August 17, 2010. Iwata Asks: Sakaguchi and Uematsu
Nintendo. “Directing Again After Eighteen Years.” Interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi. Iwata Asks: The Last Story. 2010. Iwata Asks: Hironobu Sakaguchi
MCV Staff. “Sakaguchi Discusses the Development of Final Fantasy.” MCV/Develop, December 13, 2007. Sakaguchi Discusses the Development of Final Fantasy
Terada, Kenji, and Hironobu Sakaguchi. “Final Fantasy II: 1988 Developer Interview.” Translated by Shmuplations. Kenji Terada and Hironobu Sakaguchi interview
Amano, Yoshitaka. “1987 Artist Interview” and “1990 Yoshitaka Amano Interview.” Translated by Shmuplations. Yoshitaka Amano interviews
Tong, Sophia. “Q&A: Final Fantasy Bard Nobuo Uematsu.” GameSpot, January 16, 2009. Nobuo Uematsu interview
Video Game History Foundation. “A Fireside Chat with Gail Tilden.” The Video Game History Hour, episode 126. Oral-history discussion of Nintendo of America’s promotion of Final Fantasy and console RPGs. Gail Tilden oral history
Square Enix. Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive, Volume 1. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2018. Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive Volume 1
Kohler, Chris. Final Fantasy V. Los Angeles: Boss Fight Books, 2017. Includes original interviews and historical material concerning Sakaguchi, Square, and the early Final Fantasy series. Final Fantasy V by Chris Kohler