Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy shipped in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch swing from a studio that, by its own admission, was close to folding — hence the name. Four blank-slate heroes, the Light Warriors, set out to restore four elemental crystals stripped of their power by the fiend Garland, in a plot that folds into a 2,000-year time loop once you're deep enough to see the whole shape of it. None of that complexity was obvious on the surface, though: what players actually did was pick a party of four classes, walk into the overworld, and start fighting.

That class-based party structure — Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, Red Mage, White Mage, Black Mage, mixed and matched however you liked — became the template every JRPG after it either copied or reacted against. So did the turn-based menu battles, the airship, the class change system partway through, and the idea that a game could reward you just for exploring a coastline until it found the town you hadn't been to yet.

This page hosts the verified Final Fantasy ROM, built for Delta Emulator's NES core on iPhone — load it directly with no BIOS file or extra setup required.