World Map and Game Flow in FF1

Among the inspirations for my RPG - and I am making no attempt whatsoever to play this down, as the creation of my own RPG is in a way a celebration of my love and appreciation for the RPGs I have played in the past - are the original Final Fantasy games on the NES and SNES; in particular, the first, fourth, sixth, and fifth games in the series (I list the fifth last and out of order only because I did not play it at the same time as the others, but many years later), because they had the most impact on me, and because the later Final Fantasies, from VII onward - despite being good games in their own right - have a completely different feel from their 2D sprite-based ancestors which I am hoping to honor with my own game.

If I were to rate the quality of the games, I think that IV and VI (and also V, I later learned) would be the best, because they have a greater sophistication than the earliest titles in the series. At the same time, the very first Final Fantasy holds a lot of nostalgia for me, and there are qualities to it I like very much, such as the elegant simplicity of the gameplay - which is something I'm striving to imitate in my own RPG, given that this is my first attempt and I don't want to get too bogged down in complicated mechanics. There was also a feeling of danger to it - a certain challenge - that made you feel like you really had to have your wits about you to survive, and that made it feel more wild and untamed than later entries in the series.

Thinking back on, for example, the difficulty of the Ice Cave - sure, it may have been frustrating, but beating that part of the game required a concentrated effort, and so when you finally did gain the Airship, you felt a sense of accomplishment, like you had truly earned it. Of course, managing the difficulty of a game requires a delicate balance between challenging the player, but not to the point of making him want to give up on it, and I may not be up to the task of leveling those scales. Also, there is the issue of wiggle room, where the freedom you give your player to choose to either grind for levels or plow ahead will affect the difficulty of the game, particularly in instances where the flow of play is not strictly linear. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the optional Castle of Ordeals in the first Final Fantasy, which, if attempted just after the Ice Cave, is challenging as it is supposed to be, given that the reward is the unique and powerful class change. But, though the upgrade is intended to help you in the later dungeons of the game, if you linger or try some of those out beforehand, by the time you reach the Castle of Ordeals you may find it somewhat less than the ordeal it was intended to be.

The reason I am reminiscing so much about Final Fantasy (the first) is because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my own world map. I am really fond of the way that, as for example in FF1, certain areas of the world will be blocked off by certain natural obstructions (like seas and rivers and mountains), that are cleverly removed by the timely acquisition of specific vehicles or other events or items (such as the blowing of the canal to enable passage of the ship beyond the inland sea) throughout the course of the game. There may be a lot of "fetch quests" involved, but that is a hallmark of the genre, and I find it fascinating to explore the more and less linear progress of the game as different areas are unlocked. In fact, I made up a spreadsheet to chronicle all of the important locations and items in the game, and how they interact with one another in terms of the game's progress. I did it just for fun, really, because there are few things I like more than organizing ideas and information.

Now in true flow chart form!

See the clever way, for example, that, with the exception of Lich, killing the Fiends doesn't directly progress you to the next stage of the game, but is required to access the final dungeon. And also, that even though once you have the airship, you can apparently approach either of the remaining two fiends, in reality, access to the one is actually blocked by an item that can only be acquired deep in the dungeon of the other. I'm pretty sure, as well, that I once tried skipping the volcano and going straight to the ice cave, earning the airship, and beating the fiends of water and air before conquering the fiend of fire. But, instead of directly progressing the game forward, conquering the fiends actually contributes to a parallel counter that ultimately must be completed before the final dungeon can be accessed, which requires the completion of all major quests except for the optional (but very worthwhile) class change.

I know, I'm a total geek. But that's to be expected from someone trying to design their own RPG.