Legend says Square was nearly out of money, so this would be their final fantasy. The truth is softer, since Hironobu Sakaguchi has said the name was partly about his own career being on the line, but the stakes were real either way. Final Fantasy (1987 in Japan, 1990 here) saved the company and named one of gaming's biggest franchises.

For many American kids it was the first true console RPG, and the thing that set it apart from Dragon Warrior was the party. You build four characters from six classes before the game starts and you live with that choice for forty hours. Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, Red Mage, White Mage, Black Mage. There's no swapping later and no recruiting, so the opening menu is the most consequential decision in the game. Halfway through, Bahamut promotes all four into upgraded versions of themselves, which is the first class-change system in the genre and still one of the cleanest.

Magic runs on charges rather than a points pool, which is closer to tabletop rules than to anything modern. Your White Mage gets a fixed number of casts per spell level, they refill at an inn, and that scarcity is why every dungeon is a supply-management problem. The party faces enemies four at a time in menu-driven battles, and the famous rough edge is that a character whose target dies before their turn simply swings at nothing.

Then the world opens. A canoe, a ship, and finally an airship, each one turning the map inside out. The plot loops back on itself in a way nobody expected from an 8-bit game, with the four Fiends and a two-thousand-year time loop at the center of it.

Nobuo Uematsu's score is the other half of the legacy. The prelude and the main theme have been in every entry since. It set the table for everything Square did next.