Final Fantasy facts that will surprise you

Calling all Final Fantasy fans, come and test your knowledge of the RPG by seeing how many of the following facts you knew.

Fighting Fantasy…what?

The game we know as Final Fantasy was actually called Fighting Fantasy at first. I am glad they changed the name, can you imagine playing Fighting Fantasy 8? That wouldn’t feel right.

Final Fantasy 8

There was only supposed to be one game

In 1986, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was given a chance to wow the world with an RPG.

His employers, Square, did not exhibit much faith in the game, and during development Sakaguchi changed the game’s title to Final Fantasy to mirror his situation in the world of gaming.

Had the title been a failure, he would have left Square and gone back to college. It was not the final entry, obviously, and the game went on to sell 400,000 copies in Japan and set the standard for the series’ future.

7 people worked on the original title

The original title had a development team of 7 people. Compare this to Final Fantasy 13, which had over 200 people working on it.

No Cid for you, you don’t even get Chocobos

It seems that every Final Fantasy title features a crazy guy that is in charge of an airship, and a a large chicken with bright yellow feathers.

Well, the original title did not feature either of these iconic Final Fantasy characters. Cid and the Chocobo were only introduced later on in the series, debuting in Final Fantasy 2 – but they’ve stuck around ever since.

Chocobo

5 minute prelude

The amazing song you hear when booting up any Final Fantasy game only took 5 minutes to compose. It has gone on to become one of the most iconic sounds in gaming.

Moogles

The Moogle has been featured in most of the Final Fantasy titles since the little critter’s introduction in Final Fantasy 2 – but did you know the iconic creatures were extinct in Final Fantasy Tactics?

That’s right, they all died. Can you imagine all those little balls of fluff just disappearing? How traumatising.

Final Fantasy 10 had no water summon

Even though Final Fantasy 10 had a huge focus on the water element – and even had a protagonist named after water (Wakka) – there was no water summon in the game. Yuna can summon many Aeons, but no water creature.

Final Fantasy 13 was an expensive game to make

The latest game in the series was pretty expensive to make, coming in at $48,000,000 (around R507,297,600) initially.

Then the delays started, and the developers decide to move to the new Crystal Shards engine, which saw the total cost for the title reach $77,000,000 (R813,212,400).