Final Fantasy I has been beaten!
First I went back to the circle of sages and, sadly, they didn't give any further advice. Luckily for impatient people like me, a neat website named GameFAQs exists. I headed to a hidden waterfall cavern to get a warp cube from a robot built by a civilization that had been destroyed by the wind fiend Tiamat. Next I went back through the sunken shrine to find a Rosetta Stone, and that led me to a whole civilization of mermaids that I'd somehow missed before. They were all very thankful that I'd fixed the water crystal... except for one who didn't have her dialogue updated and still told me where to find Kraken >_>
Anyway I found the Rosetta Stone, tracked down someone who told me how to use it, and then I headed to a city I'd somehow never found before filled with refugees from the same civilization that built the robot from before. They told me how to get into Mirage Tower, so I headed there next and climbed a long way up to Tiamat. Once that battle was won, all four crystals had been reawakened and it was time to return to the circle of sages. I also opted not to do the bonus dungeons because I have FFII to get to. Plus, at this point, I feel like I have a good sense of what FFI has to offer. Maybe I'll come back to them someday, though!
Anyway, the sages explained the time travel aspect of the plot and sent me back to where I'd fought Garland. The bats here also finally explained themselves, They were heroes sent by that old advanced civilization, only they failed and were turned into bats. That's neat! However, it isn't as neat as traveling two thousand years into the past to stop a time loop. By the end of the Chaos Shrine I had re-beaten the four fiends and reached level 54. Then it was time to face Garland again... only this time he morphed into Chaos. This was a time loop where the fiends would send him back in time and then he'd send them forward in time, but I broke that cycle here. It was a difficult fight (Ward the Warrior carried my team with some help from Beck the Black Mage and healing from Witt the White Mage. I don't know what I did wrong with Reid the Red Mage but he couldn't manage more than 100 damage per attack so I relegated him to ether duty).
That final battle took like twenty minutes but I survived, bringing down Chaos and ending the time loop. The final text crawl explained that no memory of these events would survive... except for what lives on in my heart. Hell yeah!
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Final Fantasy I was a good game, but it wasn't anywhere near my favorite in the series. For starters it felt a little generic. I know that's unfair (FFI was the reason a lot of things became RPG staples after all) but it's a new game to me and I can't help but judge it like that. That said, I still had a lot of fun with it. The encounter rate was silly but typical battles only lasted fifteen to twenty seconds so I never felt bogged down or frustrated. My only real complaint was the lack of direction on where to go at times, and I'm fairly certain most of that was me being an idiot (plus guides alleviated this anyway). The story was basic but still had its moments and the dungeons were varied. The game also had a lot of charm, like Matoya getting her sight back and saying the heroes weren't as attractive as she'd imagined (I won't rank characters but if I did, Matoya would be my favorite).
The best way to describe my feelings for FFI is that it was a solid RPG experience, and I appreciate that it was remade so I could get a sense of where the series began. However, later FFs all have aspects that I truly loved (XIII's combat system, X-2's fun tone, BD's job system, etc) whereas FFI was just overall standard fun. Because of that, my overall ranking goes like this:
XIII > X-2 > LR > VI > WoFF > IX > VIII > X > BD > I >>> XIII-2
Now the question is, where will FFII fit in? Tune in during the weekend for another adventure!