Final Fantasy was released on the NES in 1986. It’s a role playing video game (simply abbreviated as RPG or, if you want to delineate American games vs. Japanese games, JRPG). In the game, the player is tasked with first creating a party (from a pre-set collection of six available members) and then taking that party out into the world. It’s a world on the brink of ruin, terrorized by four fiends, each in possession of the power of one of the elements. The heroes have to go out, defeat the fiends, light the magical orbs in the possession of the party, and then use that magic to go and defeat the end boss, who just so happens to be hiding out in a time-displaced version of very first dungeon the heroes ever explored (and might also be a version of the very first boss they battled).
Its plot is, frankly, kind of silly. But then, so were the plots of most NES games of the era. What’s important is to know those basics: heroes, off to fight big monsters, all so they can unlock access to the final monster, which then they fight, too.
Before randomizing the game, FFR first fixes a number of bugs in the base, “vanilla” (i.e. “original”) NES game. The NES game was the first of its series, and one of the first RPGs of its kind on the NES. The programmers at Square, led by NASIR, didn’t have a code base they could work from so they had to, essentially, create their game from the ground up. While they did a wonderful job, they did make a few coding mistakes along the way. Spells don’t always work as intended, weapons don’t always have the functionality expected, basic character abilities referenced the wrong bits of data. The randomizer fixes all known issues with the vanilla game and creates an experience as close to “as intended” as possible. If you play the “Improved Vanilla” preset on the site you’ll get that base game, with bug fixes and improvements, even if you don’t randomize anything.
Then, when using the flags on the site, the randomizer takes that basic game and “randomizes” it. Some elements of the game can be shuffled (as in, “moving these elements around but not otherwise changing their stats) while others can be randomized (actually changing the core ideas and/or mechanics of something within the game). This can create entirely new experiences within the bounds of the vanilla game’s framework.
This is the point where someone can then ask, “so what can actually be randomized within FFR?” And the answer to that is “yes”. FFR is one of the deepest, and broadest, randomizers around, and our devs have yet to find a feature that can’t be added, a function of the base game that can’t be randomized. If there’s something that can be altered or changed, it’s all but certain that a flag for that exists within FFR. So before you go into the randomizer, we want to make sure you understand the game and know how to play. That way, when you see all the cool extra things that the randomizer can do, you’re set and ready to play as you like.