The Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy) Review
~by tankMage (July 2025)
Score: 7.5/10 (Decent)
It’s a legend AND a fantasy! Oh wait, it’s actually a SaGa.
I generally try to avoid starting reviews with nostalgic stories, but I think my past experiences with this game sum it up pretty well, so I’ll make an exception. My mom got Final Fantasy Legend for me when I was about nine. RPGs were new to me and this game was fairly confusing when I first started it. There are no experience levels and weapons can only be used a limited number of times before they disappear. Needless to say, I didn’t understand what was going on and I gave up on it fairly quickly.
In my teen years I set out to beat a lot of the games that were too difficult for me when I was a kid. Final Fantasy Legend was one such title. With a little guesswork I was able to get to the second or third major area, but I didn’t finish it for some reason. Maybe I got stuck somewhere or got bored, I’m really not sure why I quit. At any rate, I forgot about it until recently. My third (and final) attempt was a success and I’m glad I finally beat it, though I had a rough time getting started despite decades of RPG experience.
Hopefully this story illustrates how unusual Final Fantasy Legend really is. In fact, it turned out to be far weirder than I expected for reasons I’ll get to later. While its unusual design often hurts the gameplay, FF Legend is entertaining as a novelty. It takes a good deal of patience to slog through this RPG, because it requires players to manage a rather clunky inventory, grind almost constantly (despite a lack of exp levels), and sit through slow paced battles.
Finally, it’s only fair that I point out that this is not a true Final Fantasy title, it is actually the first game in the SaGa series, but someone at corporate decided to market it as Final Fantasy for some reason. Most likely they figured the first Final Fantasy was popular enough in the North American market to sell copies of SaGa. Regardless, the odd mechanics make more sense when you look at it as a SaGa game.
The Tower of Power
Final Fantasy Legend has an interesting story that revolves around a tower that supposedly leads to paradise. Spoiler: the tower doesn’t lead to paradise. Instead, players will explore various worlds as they move up the tower. If anything, the story is the most intriguing thing about the game. Each world has its own flavor and there are even mini-worlds that have entertaining themes.
Another interesting facet of the story is its dialog. While it suffers from translation issues, like many games, it was also surprisingly uncensored. It was common to use euphemisms like “unconscious” to refer to dead characters in the 80s and early 90s, but FF Legend unabashedly tells the truth; when someone is dead, they’re dead. They also gave the party members, which are all generic units chosen by the player, simple dialog. While having the party members talk might not seem impressive by today’s standards, it was not common in the late 80s.
The ending was also pretty special. Of course, I’m not going to say much about it, but I will say the final chapter features a good pay off. At the same time, some aspects of the ending were anticlimactic, so don’t expect too much.
Pick a character, any character!
I really like the party system. Players can choose from three basic races: Human, Mutant, and Monster, though monsters come in a wide array of flavors. Each race has its strengths as well as weaknesses, so what you choose matters from a gameplay perspective. There are a total of four party slots to fill, which makes for quite a few possible combinations. At the same time, any party combination can win, its just a matter of how difficult the journey will be as a result of the player’s choices.
Humans are arguably the most powerful race, because they have a lot of room in their inventory for weapons, armor, and items. They can also use potions that boost their stats permanently, so a human can dish out and take a lot of damage. The drawback is that humans are very expensive to maintain due to their needs and they can’t use magic.
Mutants develope stats and magical abilities as they fight, but a lot of their inventory space is reserved for their magical powers, which are often mediocre. They can also use weapons and some very powerful spell books. While mutants are really good, I found that the one I had in my party had very little HP, which resulted in her dying a lot. I’m not sure if this was a design flaw or a result of me being bad at the game, but it was an annoying quirk nonetheless.
Monsters are the most interesting race in the game. They cannot equip any weapons nor can they wear armor. They do not gain stats as they fight either. Instead, a monster can eat meat dropped by defeated enemies to transform into a different creature. This usually results in the monster becoming more powerful and learning new skills. Consequently, monsters are the cheapest party members, but they tend to be less powerful than mutants and humans. That said, monsters can learn some really great skills and a good player can do well with a monster or two.
So yeah, the party system is a really nice touch and another high mark for FF Legend.
Boring Battles
The battle engine kind of sucks and detracts from all the good things about this game. It’s one of those engines that uses a first person view where the player only sees the enemy and their party’s attack animations. In not a big fan of this style, but it’s fine I guess. The real problem is the slow pace of the battles. Text crawls across the screen at a snail’s pace unless the player holds the A Button to speed it up. Then again, the text moves kind of slowly even when sped up, but it’s tolerable.
Another thing I didn’t like was the lack of skip turn or wait commands. Characters must act every time their turn comes up, which is OK until someone’s weapon breaks. If a character’s weapon breaks, he or she has to use any items that remain in their inventory, which means they may end up having to use a super rare or expensive item on a weak monster.
Not bad looking…for a Game Boy RPG.
Final Fantasy Legend looks nice all things considered. All of the character sprites and map tiles are simplistic, but they are stylized just enough to keep the game from looking generic. The Game Boy’s tiny monochrome screen didn’t leave a lot of room for experimentation…or much of anything really, so I can’t judge this game too harshly. In many ways, I appreciate the limited capabilities of systems like the Game Boy, because the devs had to work with what they had in creative ways. While the graphics look simple, the Game Boy’s greenish background and the slight ghosting effects of its LCD screen gave the visuals quite a bit of pizzazz.
Despite its basic character designs and uninspired battle system, FF Legend boasts some really cool monster designs. A lot of the creatures I encountered were of the caliber one would expect from Square in their golden days. There was also tremendous variety to the map tiles, which kept the game from getting dull. That said, many areas lacked backgrounds or floor patterns, so don’t expect too much.
While I’m not an original hardware purist, I have to add that FF Legend looks best on an actual Game Boy, because emulators don’t even get the background color right from what I’ve seen, let alone the LCD ghosting. On the other hand, emulators do not suffer from lightning issues or terrible battery life, so they have their advantages.
Find the sphere and climb the tower, so you can find another sphere and climb more!
I talked about the battle system a bit, so it’s about time to examine the gameplay loop, which is very much a loop. Players start out on the first floor and can explore the surrounding world by visiting towns and completing small quests. Eventually you’ll find an Orb that can be used to unlock the tower and go to the next world. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I will say the process repeats itself with some variations as far as the type of world players visit and the quests they have to complete to move on.
All in all, the gameplay is decent. Exploring dungeons is interesting and often rewarding as there’s a lot of loot to find. While the battle engine isn’t exciting, you’ll need a bit a strategy to defeat many of the bosses and even regular enemies can be tough, especially later in the adventure. Plus there’s a fairly nice array of weapons, skills, and spells to use.
While I was happy with this RPG as a whole, getting started can be really choppy; and by “choppy” I mean it can be a confusing mess. You’re basically thrown into the world with little help aside from the manual, which is actually very helpful if you read it. As much as I like having to figure things out for myself, the beginning of this game can be very daunting and may require a lot of grinding.
Humans and mutants must rely on weapons, which break after about fifty uses. On top of that, humans have to buy potions to increase their max HP and combat stats. If you start with a couple of humans and a Mutant (like I did) you’re going to spend quite a bit of time fighting near the starting area just to get the things you need. On the other hand, some parties are extremely cheap to run and require little grinding, though they have their own drawbacks.
The death and guild systems can also be quite baffling (luckily the manual explains them nicely) to new players. You start with one character and have to recruit the other three party members at the guild. If someone dies you can revive them at the house of life or replace them with someone else from the guild, but they won’t leave if left alive.
Things get complicated (and expensive) when you factor in the fact that party members have limited lives, which are represented by hearts on the status screen. A heart is consumed every time a character is resurrected, run out of them and you cannot bring that character back until you buy a new heart for 10,000 GP!
Taking all these things into account, you can probably see how a new player (particularly a kid) can find this game really frustrating. Ironically, many of the systems that make Final Fantasy Legend so unique and confusing are easily exploited, which is good or bad depending on how you look at the situation.
Play your way.
One of the coolest aspects of FF Legen is the freedom it gives players when it comes to forming a party. You want a party of all humans? You can do that. You can also have a mixture of races. Players can even try to beat the game with a single character without having to kill everyone in their party unlike many other RPGs.
Characters are also somewhat customizable and can be trained in a variety of ways. Humans and mutants can use weapons based on strength or agility, which have their own benefits as well as drawbacks. Mutants can also use spells as well as innate psychic powers. Finally, there’s a plethora of creatures a monster character can turn into, which adds a huge amount of variety to party combinations.
Final Fantasy Legend deserves praise for the freedom it gives players, especially for an RPG made in 1989.
A Soothing Sound Track
The music is pretty good, as one would expect from a SaGa…er I mean Final Fantasy title. Most of the songs are very mellow with a touch of sadness, which doesn’t always suit the mood of the game. At the same time, the battle and overworld themes are sort of lively adventure tunes you’d expect from a game like this. I’ll also add that the soundtrack is laced with a hint of nostalgia, though that could be a result of my having played FF Legend long ago.
Yet another case of the inventory blues…
Depending on how you play this game, you’ll either be engaging with the inventory system a lot or very little. Since I had two humans and a mutant in my party, I had to juggle equipment almost constantly. If a character’s weapon is about to break and you want him to fight in the next battle, you better give him an extra in case the old one craps out, otherwise he’ll just stand around doing nothing while everyone else fights.
Players also have to buy tons of potions to feed to human characters if they want them to be of any use in combat. To make matters worse, mutants have really limited room for equipment, so you may have swap spell books and the like out frequently.
For good measure, the devs gave the party a tiny shared inventory which could only hold about ten items. If you account for spare weapons and the occaisional quest item, you are left with very little room for anything else. The tiny inventory can make expeditions a real headache since players need to stock up on all sorts of items for the tower.
In many ways, I appreciate how the game forces players to make choices when it comes to weapons, armor, and healing items. A lot of the challenge would vanish from this title of you could carry around everything including the kitchen sink. At the same time, I wish they had designed the stat boost system for humans a little differently to cut out the tedium of buying a handful of potions to feed to a character, then buying yet more ad infinitum, because it gets ridiculous.
Final Thoughts
So here’s the part of the review where I sum up my thoughts on the game and recommend or warn readers away from it. If you made it this far, you probably have guessed that I have mixed feelings about Final Fantasy Legend. It’s a creative and interesting Gameboy title, but it also drags ass depending on how you play it. Someone who has a party of humans will spend countless hours grinding in boring fights to power up their party, while someone with a party of monsters will not have to grind, but this comes at the cost of increased difficulty. With that in mind, it’s important to figure out how you want to experience the game before you even start, which isn’t easy if you’re new to it.
Ultimately, I have to recommend Final Fantasy Legend despite all its problems. It’s not great, but it’s hard to forget for better or worse. There’s a creative energy and even a bit of grittiness to this RPG that make it truly special. That said, it’s certainly a title for hard-core Role Playing fans who have enough patience to endure the worst aspects of its design.
Thanks for reading my review of Final Fantasy Legend!
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