The Best Final Fantasy Even Today!
From there you meet and gain many characters, including Locke (a Thief), Celes (a Magitek Knight and former General), Edgar (King and Machinist) Sabin (the estranged brother of the king and Monk), Cyan (a Samurai), Shadow (a Ninja/Assassin), Gau (a Feral Child), Setzer (a Gambler), Strago/Stragus (a Blue Mage), Relm (a Pictomancer), Mog (a Moogle), plus 2 Hidden Characters. As you can tell, there's a lot of characters, all with an deep storyline behind them and interesting and (mostly) unique abilities.
The game uses a sprite system for the graphics, but the characters are still fairly well defined with various expressions and movements, and there are no instances of look-alikes. Also, Mog is the only playable Moogle featured in any Final Fantasy game giving it yet another unique point.
The game also uses Mode 7 rather extensively, and actually features a psuedo-3D world map. Leading to advanced graphics for the time of release.
On a side note, this game was also released on the Playstation as part of an Anthology which featured 2 new FMVs and a few extra features. Some of the bugs present in the original were also fixed in this version. There were some negatives to this version though, it's been said that the sound suffered in this version, and there were loading times not present in the cartridge.
The other version is a GBA version has 4 new Espers, 2 new areas, 3 new spells, and fixed a few bugs that were present in previous versions. It also keeps the Beastiary and Music Player from the PS port. This version is not without problems, either. The FMVs from the PS version were not included and scene involving Ceres was cut out of this version.
I'm a Final Fantasy fan and I've played the rest of the series, bar a few offshoot games, and I simply cannot think of a better game in the series.
It's still one of my favorite games ever made even 15 years later.
Preference in version, is just that, preference, but no matter what version you choose to play, do not miss this game.