Good turn-based console RPG, marred by some serious flaws.
Also, in most online reviews for this game, you'll find a tendency to compare it to more modern games or standards, which obviously isn't fair. The reality is that there wasn't much, at the time, to which TFFL could be compared to, as it was a very unique game. However, even professional reviews back in 1990 criticized this game for its unusual complexity.
Ironically, many of the ideas in this game, later returned successfully in the Pokémon games (attacks with limited uses, elemental weaknesses and strengths, playable monster evolution, etc), proving that TFFL was a game ahead of its time or, at the very least, a pioneer that inspired later games.
At a time when console RPGs had little to no story, and even less character development, TFFL was surprisingly deep, although it lost something in translation when it left Japan.
The idea is that there's this tower that is said to connect your world to paradise, and many have entered said tower, never to return. Have they found paradise? Or something happened on the way? That's the premise of the whole game, finding out if paradise is real, and what happened to all the adventurers who entered the tower.
The problem is, in the english translation of the game, important pieces of text, which explain what happened to those adventurers, were changed, making the experience a bit more shallow than intended.
To give you an example, I need to provide a spoiler alert. If you plan on playing the game, and wish to be surprised, you'll want to avoid the whole paragraph that follows.
SPOILER START: In one of the later areas of the tower, you'll find a room with several bookcases. Unlike most bookcases in the game, these have text. In the japanese version, you find that these are logs of all the adventurers that entered the tower, when they died, and at which floor the death occurred. The feeling that someone is making a log of these events is, in itself, unsettling, but it becomes even more disturbing when you reach the end of the game and find who has been doing the logging, which then provides a more believable explanation why the characters pick a fight with the final boss, rather than take his reward. In the english version, the logs were changed to a single sentence which basically tells you that whoever you thought was the final boss, was created by someone else, hinting that you might find that someone, eventually. SPOILER END
In a way, TFFL is similar to the original Final Fantasy game on the NES, in the sense it lets you pick up to four characters from a selection of classes, and has you moving around in a world map, from a top-down perspective, triggering random turn-based battles, while occasionally visiting several settlements where you can heal at an inn, buy items and equipment at shops, and talk to NPCs to flesh out the story.
Things become different as soon as you have to pick said classes. You have a choice between Humans, Mutants or Monsters. While, technically, all of them have the same statistics (HP, Strength, Defense, Agility and Mana), how you raise them is the main difference, because you can't simply level up in this game.
Humans can only raise their stats by either equipping items, or buying stat-increases. What this means is that, as a Human, you're only limited by your wallet, so the more you grind for gold, the more powerful you can be. However, there's a catch. Two, actually. Humans have no Mana at all, so they can't increase that, and Defense can only be increased by equipment, so if you already bought the best armor available at that point of the game, you're pretty much done. Offensively, you have to buy weapons, which can be melee or missile - the difference being melee weapons always hit, but make you vulnerable to touch-based defenses like poison skin, while missile may miss if your stats are low. Both melee and missile weapons can be Strength-based or Agility-based. There are some Mana-based weapons in the game, but no human can use them effectively.
Monsters are the opposite of humans, as you can't buy your way to power in any way. They can't equip items at all, nor use any stat-increases. What they can do is evolve into a different monster. How this works is probably the more complex formula in the game, but the basics of it are like this: at the end of each battle, there's a chance one of the monsters will drop a piece of meat and, when that happens, you can choose to eat it or not, but the problem is that you don't just transform into the monster you ate. Instead, you have to memorize (or, better yet, take notes) what combination of monster and meat results in. Obviously, you want to evolve into the more powerful monster you can be, but there are over 150 monsters in the game (divided into 26 types), so it can get complicated. Obviously, monsters can't use weapons, since they can't equip any item, but they all have a number of abilities, some are like spells while others are physical attacks (think Pokémon).
Mutants, on the other hand, are somewhat a combination of the above. They can't use stat-increases, but they can equip items like humans do, and they don't evolve by cannibalism, but their stats randomly rise and abilities randomly change. By randomly, I mean it. After every battle, there's a chance one of your stats goes up, or you gain an ability, which means the more you fight the more powerful you'll, eventually, become. In theory, you can get a group of mutants with all stats maxed at 99 (or 999 for HP) before you face your first boss battle. There are two big problems here, though. One is that there's too much luck involved and, if you're not on a lucky day, you may fight for hours on end and not get a single change to your characters. Second, once you fill your ability list - which has four slots - gaining a new one will erase an old one without prompt, which means you have to reset the game every time you lose an ability you cared to keep.
You are free to play the game with a single character, if you want a real challenged but, throughout the game, you'll find guilds which allow you to recruit up to three companions, which are created the same way as your main character. If any of them dies, you can revive them up to three times at the House of Life, or any number of times as long as you buy obscenely expensive extra hearts. Or, you could just leave them dead, and get a replacement at the guilds again, although they all start with their stats set as starting characters.
Staying alive is key in this game, and a character with high Defense and/or special resistances (equipping Dragon armor makes your human and mutant characters immune to elements, for instance) will almost always have an easier time than one which just has a lot of HP, since those will go down fast if you're not prepared. This is mostly because inns also have a quirky way to heal you, you see, they cost 1 gold for every 1HP you lost, and if you don't have enough money to cover a full recovery, you can't heal at all, making Cure books, and monster healing abilities, some of the best things you can have.
Potions and other recovery items would be nice, but you are only allowed to carry eight items with you, and key items take slots in that list, which makes stocking up on items a problem. You can carry (equip) some items on your characters, to save space in the item list, but usually only humans can do this because they have eight personal slots themselves. Mutants only have four slots for items, as the other four are locked for abilities, and you'll need all of them to equip as much armor as possible, and one weapon, hopefully. Any item you equip can then be used in combat. Items that are not equipped can not be used at all during a battle.
Combat is simple, whether it's a random battle or a scripted one, you enter a first-person type screen and see how many enemies you have to face. These can come as single enemy, single group, or multiple groups. While physical attacks never hit more than one opponent at a time, there are several spells and abilities that can either target a whole group, or all groups, but you also have to consider if one of more of your opponents is immune to a particular attack, so a bit of strategy and item management is necessary if you want to be prepared for every situation.
Aesthetically, the game is decent. This was an early generation title, and the fact they crammed over 30 different monster designs is pretty reasonable for its time. The world you are given to explore is not very large, and is somewhat sparse, but animations can be found in pretty much every character in the game, playable or not, with the exception of bosses - which I'm guessing are too big to justify it - as well as in some backgrounds.
The best part of TFFL, however, is the sound - or, to be more precise, its music. Nobuo Uematsu, who is well known today as one of the best videogame composers out there, basically made some of the best themes you'll ever find in the whole Game Boy library. Even up to the final days of the console, there were few GB games with a better soundtrack. Sound effects are, obviously, limited by what the console can do, but there's a lot to like there too, with many spells and abilities having their distinctive sound.
The game is long, by portable console standards of the time, taking about 10 hours to complete if you have the help of a guide to explain the more obscure parts of the game, but likely more if you decide to explore by trial and error yourself, or just happen to have picked a party combination that demands a lot of grinding.
The fact it allows you to make different party combinations, up to four characters, with different Monster evolutions and random Mutant abilities, means every time you play the game it is guaranteed to be a different experience.
Overall, The Final Fantasy Legend is definitely a good game, but fails to reach greatness because It tries to do too much, and some things just aren't done as well as they should. Problems, like excessive randomness and grinding, hinder the enjoyment of the rest, but it's still very much worth playing today, if you go in with the right frame of mind.