In 1987 Hironobu Sakaguchi promised himself that if his new fantasy RPG flopped he would quit the industry and go back to university, and Square was barely keeping the lights on. This episode explains how that mood, plus a need for a catchy title abbreviating to FF after Fighting Fantasy was already trademarked, produced the name Final Fantasy, and how an unexpected hit with a completely closed ending forced Square to invent the anthology format.

The hosts dissect the shared DNA that holds the series together without a recurring protagonist: sci-fi blended with fantasy, crystals as ecological batteries, color-coded magic, Cid, Biggs and Wedge, Yoshitaka Amano's logos, and Nobuo Uematsu's Prelude and victory fanfare. They then follow the risks those anchors enabled, from the cartridge-versus-CD-ROM split with Nintendo that sent Final Fantasy ...