30 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Final Fantasy

Impress your friends and alienate prospective dates with this massive pile of trivia!

By: Jeremy Parish April 15, 2011

The Final Fantasy series has been around for more than 20 years now, and there are something like 40 different games bearing the Final Fantasy name. Unsurprisingly, a legacy that enormous brings with it a ton of minute and often overlooked factoids. We at 1UP are nothing if not accommodating, though, so we've pulled together a huge chunk of random Final Fantasy trivia for your edification and entertainment. Enjoy.

1. Final Fantasy was an utterly broken mess of a game.

The original Final Fantasy was a revelation back when it hit the U.S., in the summer of 1990. It was huge and complex, open-ended yet story-driven, featured cool enemy graphics, and players who made it to the ending were treated to a crazy mind-blowing time-travel plot twist. But Final Fantasy was also a buggy, glitchy mess, and a huge chunk of the game's features didn't even work. These hiccups range from the infamous "Peninsula of Power" (where inappropriately powerful monsters appear on a few overworld tiles) to more critical issues -- entire sets of seemingly critical battles stats never actually being applied to combat calculations, for example. If you ever look back and wonder how you possibly beat Final Fantasy as a kid, you can be even more impressed that you did so when half the game didn't even work the way it was supposed be.
2. Someone named Cid is in every game, and his name may or may not be a pun.

If you've played a Final Fantasy game, you've met a guy named Cid. He's a series mainstay, possibly a reference to historical figure El Cid, possibly a pun on the Japanese word for discipline ("shito," which is similar to "Shido," the literal reading of his Japanese name). Either way, he's never the exact same guy from title to title, but he always represents wisdom, science, and knowledge. "But wait!" you say. "There was no Cid in the original Final Fantasy! The first was in Final Fantasy II!" True enough, but the GBA and PSP remakes of that game have squeezed him into its backstory as the man responsible for inventing the airship. This unseen Cid is actually a key figure in Dissidia Final Fantasy.
3. The series has a tendency to name its characters for meteorological effects.

Celes, as in celestial; Cloud, as in those fluffy white things in the sky; Squall, as in a sudden, violent storm; Tidus, as in tide; Vaan, as in "vent," the French word for wind; Lightning, as in those flashes of electricity you see during a storm. Do you see a theme here?
4. Secret of Mana and Vagrant Story are Final Fantasy side stories; Final Fantasy Mystic Quest actually isn't.

Final Fantasy has seen plenty of spin-offs and side stories over the years, and not all of them have been called "Final Fantasy." In fact, one of the most popular spin-offs barely has a connection to Final Fantasy at all; the only hint of Secret of Mana's lineage is the way that Moogles appear as a status condition. But it's true: Secret of Mana is the sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure, the U.S. version of Seiken Densetsu, whose Japanese subtitle was "Final Fantasy Gaiden."

Vagrant Story's Final Fantasy connections are equally vague. Initially, the only hook appears to be that its story is set in Ivalice, the fantasy land where Final Fantasy Tactics (and, later, Final Fantasy XII) was set. Look a little closer, however, and you'll find items like Agrias' Balm and the Orlandu relic, references to key characters from Tactics.

Meanwhile, one of the first games to be positioned as a Final Fantasy spin-off, Mystic Quest for Super NES, had nothing whatsoever in common with the series. It did, however, bear a remarkable resemblance to Final Fantasy Legend III, which was actually the U.S. name for SaGa III (as in, the same series as SaGa Frontier); that's because Mystic Quest and SaGa III were developed by the same people.
5. The very first Final Fantasy movie was a sequel to a game that didn't even show up in the U.S. until a year after the movie did.

Everyone knows that the theatrical motion picture based on Final Fantasy, 2001's The Spirits Within, was a box-office flop that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to leave the company as its aspirations of Hollywood success imploded. But that wasn't the first Final Fantasy movie! Way back in 1994, Square greenlit Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, a direct sequel to Final Fantasy V. When Final Fantasy VII became a global blockbuster, Urban Vision snatched it up for U.S. release in 1998 in order to capitalize on the series' newfound popularity. This was much to the confusion of American fans, because the game it was based on didn't actually show up in the U.S. until the following year when Square released Final Fantasy Anthology for PlayStation. Oops!