Final Fantasy (NES)

FFI and the great Instruction Manual Discovery

Lindsey Dohse

Lindsey Dohse

— 6 min read
FFI and the great Instruction Manual Discovery

So, last time on my FF1 run-through, back in 2020, I managed to find a new town, meet Matoya, and find a cave. This one. But we're not going to talk about that part right now.

aw man

As I mentioned in a previous post, when I finally picked this game back up at the beginning of 2025 I had no intention of continuing this blog. Thus, I didn't keep any notes through the remainder of my playthrough. For the record, I did pick it back up on the same save file! (I was not about to restart this game for a 4th time.) However since I did not keep any notes, I'm currently finding myself going through some walkthroughs and maps to jog my memory to try to figure out what aspects I want to write about in the future. And while I do remember a lot of feelings and moments from this game, there was one moment in particular that shook me to my entire core and that's what we're going to talk about today.

I want to establish that I was really, really doing my best to not use a walkthrough on this game. I did allow myself to look up a few things about equipment and items because the game does not do a great job at giving you these details on its own. That said I did find the process a little frustrating because due to the different releases of FF1 through the years, I could never be sure if the names I were looking at were actually from the original NES release that I was playing, or from a later version. At one point one of these sources mention that they got the data from the instruction manual, and I found myself thinking "wait, I could have been looking at the instruction manual for this the whole time? That will definitely consistently have the correct names!" and promptly looked it up.

So that instruction manual? 80 pages long. This manual includes exactly what you would expect it would: game mechanics, explanations of character classes, and warning you to hold the RESET button when turning off the POWER so that you don't damage your SAVE file.

It also contains its own painstakingly detailed walkthrough that takes you all the way through obtaining the airship.

So HERE I AM, blindly wandering my way through this game thinking I'm being all cool and tough and playing it like a real gamer from the late 80s would at time of release and it turns out they basically had their own damn strategy guide that came with the game.

Did it tell you how to beat the game? No. But it doesn't leave you to your own devices until you've gotten the airship, which makes exploring nearly trivial because you aren't being constantly interrupted by random encounters. To add insult to injury, once I scrolled to the bottom of the PDF file, I found it also came with what appear to be 4 posters (I'm gonna guess they were double-sided) that provided:

  • the world map with nearly every location labeled
  • An entire bestiary with every enemy in the game up to Chaos that includes HP, weak points, ineffective attacks, their attacks, and the gold/xp obtained for defeating them
  • Maps for every major dungeon through the Ice Cave
  • All weapons, armor, and spells; including which classes can use them and important stats such as base power.

At this point, you are probably wondering at what point in my playthrough I found this information. Honestly, I am also wondering that. While I do not remember the exact moment I decided to look up the manual, I do remember getting desperately lost trying to canoe my way to Gurgu Volcano. And I remember I had not quite gotten the airship yet because, at the very least, I was able to use the guide to know where to use the FLOATER so that the airship would appear. Gurgu Volcano starts at page 70, the airship bit is located on page 73, so at most I got to use like 3 pages of the guide. (That said, my gut is telling me I discovered the instruction manual right before entering the Ice Cave.)

Looking back on this experience, I am really curious about how often folks in this day and age think to look up the instruction manuals for retro games. It does not seem to be the default; at least, not among my pool of 30-something friends. I suppose even with NES games, you don't need to know a lot in order to successfully play them. The classics we keep coming back to-- Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man-- are pretty self-evident (and are able to use the tools of level design in order to act as their own tutorials.)

That said, there is a lot going on in old RPGs that the era's technology was maybe not able to fully support. Out of curiosity, I also checked out the original manual for Dragon Quest (aka Dragon Warrior) and found the same thing: a lot of detailed information about equipment and mechanics, and its own walkthrough for a decent chunk of the game.

This has made me consider that perhaps old RPGs have a worse reputation for being obtuse than is probably deserved. Games older than the NES's generation- think Atari 2600 games- likely required the player to have read the manual or be instructed by another person before understanding how to play the game. This would not only be due to technical limitations preventing any sort of in-game tutorial, but due to the fact that video games were still a pretty new thing and a lot of conventions had not yet been developed. Heck, we hadn't really landed on a conventional controller design until about the time the NES came along; how would anyone intuitively understand how an RPG works? Additionally, these developers had no idea that their creations would become deeply influential: they probably would not have expected anyone to play their games 5 years later, let alone 40! The thought of someone playing the game without a manual would not have been a concern at that time.

I have taken a lot from this lesson (although it still took me longer than it should have to grab the manual for Final Fantasy IV when I played through it.) Last month, I tried out the NES game Rygar for the first time since I was a child. It felt a little obtuse at first, but I also found it charming. After getting confused about how equipped items work, it dawned on me to look up its original manual. Boom, there it was: explanations about the weird giant old men that I found in caves, explanations about the world, how to travel between certain locations, what the items do... and a little walkthrough for a sizable chunk of the game.

Admittedly, they may have spent a little bit less effort trying to localize Rygar than FF or DQ

I pulled up the manual for Final Fantasy VI shortly after starting my playthrough, being confused at how the "Blitz" system for one of the characters worked. Honestly, it felt a little spoiler-y, so I'm trying to look at it as little as possible. But it's nice to know it's there, just in case I need it.

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