Final Fantasy Legend

A few months ago, I got a huge craving to play an old-fashioned computer role-playing game. I ordered Final Fantasy I & II for my Nintendo DS, but while waiting for it to arrive I got impatient (and desperate) and picked up a really weird little game for the original Gameboy titled Final Fantasy Legend. According to Wikipedia, Final Fantasy Legend has absolutely nothing to do with the Final Fantasy saga, other than that they're both imports of Japanese monster-slaying games (the idea behind Legend was that, probably accurately, any game with Final Fantasy in the title would sell better in America).

Anyway, Final Fantasy Legend is interesting in a few different ways. First, your party of adventurers can be made-up of three different types: humans (who can wear the most armor and get permanently stronger and more agile through expensive potions); mutants (who have magic spells which change constantly and are of vastly different power levels); and monsters (who change their monstrous forms and abilities by eating the flesh of dead foes). Second, the game starts you off on the lowest level of a strange tower of worlds. As you progess in the usual way and defeat bosses, you climb higher and higher along this tower until eventually you meet the ultimate boss: the Creator himself! Third (and I guess this is in keeping with some of Final Fantasy), the technology level of each world gets higher and higher as you climb up--so your characters start out with swords, for example, and end up with "N-bombs" or guns.

Of course, the game also has a lot in common with other mid-80s computer RPGs: There's no way to tell in-game how effective various weapons, armors, potions, and spells are (or even what they do) other than by trial-and-error; each NPC has only one line of canned dialogue, which he or she will repeat over and over again; the plot is about as sketchy as possible.

Like I said, it's a weird little game, and its opacity in a few places made me occasionally resort to a walkthrough for guidance. But now that it's over with and I have killed the Creator (blasphemy?), I can move on to something better.