DND for FFI

One thing many people may not be aware of is the significant influence Dungeons & Dragons has had on the earliest iteration of the Final Fantasy series. The first edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released in Japan in the mid-1980s, and the creators were clearly big fans, given how much they brought into their own game from D&D. The vast majority of the monsters from the first Final Fantasy, for example, come from the first edition of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual/Creature Compendium (which released in Japan in 1987, the same year FFI came out), including very specifically D&D-created creatures like otyughs, bulettes, beholders, and sahuagin. Most of these references only partially made it into the US version or didn't make it in at all; the Beholder and Death Beholder had their graphics and names changed for the US NES release (to Evil Eye and Death Eye), for example, and the other aforementioned creatures were translated as Ochu, Baretta, and Sahag.

As the Final Fantasy series has gone on to much greater things, it's come to its own translation conventions, ones that are not at all beholden to D&D's way of using things: the Ochu is a recurring beloved Final Fantasy creature, as is the Sahagin. Later releases of FFI have restored some of these references, like ochre jellies and pyrolisks, but some still have never been translated with reference to their inspiration. I wanted to create this mod so that players could see just how much FF owes to D&D, and how D&D-influenced this first game is.

The changes include restoring D&D-based enemy names, giving items that seem to have been referencing D&D-specific items their D&D name, and so on. I've restored the original Beholder graphics (jazzed up a bit to fit in with the Pixel Remaster) as well. I've also put most things that are not proper nouns in the more D&D-style sentence case rather than the more FF-style title case (e.g., "Sahuagin prince" rather than "Sahagin Prince").

For all changes, I've done my best to base them on those first edition D&D books that the creators would have had access to, but unfortunately I don't have access to the Japanese first edition, so there may be references I've missed or misidentified. I have also made a few concessions to more modern versions of D&D (for example, I made Final Fantasy's "mythril" become D&D's "mithral," both of which are clearly references to J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth metal "mithril"; IIRC those early D&D versions used Tolkien's spelling, so strictly speaking, I probably should have used that spelling as well. However, like Final Fantasy, D&D developed their own version to avoid copyright issues, so I've used that instead).

A full listing of changes is included in the readme!

This mod requires Magicite, so make sure you have that installed first!

Installation: Unzip into your FINAL FANTASY PR directory.