Here’s a theory: Final Fantasy is defined by how it sounds.

No, I don’t mean the music—although Nobuo Uematsu’s stirring soundtrack is as pivotal to Final Fantasy’s success as anything else—I’m talking about how it sounds. The chime of a menu cursor. The squeal of an NPC’s dialogue box. The thunderous jolt of a random encounter. That stylish sound design has become a defining aspect of the series, and it’s been there from the very start.

Just watch a few minutes of the first Final Fantasy and you’ll notice it right away. In fact, if you’ve got some time, here’s 20 minutes of me playing: Buy FFXIV gil on www.igxe.com

In just a few months, Square Enix will release Final Fantasy XV, a game that’s been in development for over ten years (give or take a few reboots). More so than with any past numbered Final Fantasy, the future of the series rests in this, Square’s stab at defeating the HD giant that has hounded them for so long. If this game fails, it will have a cataclysmic impact on both the series and the company behind it.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that FFXV is going back to its roots. The first Final Fantasy, released in 1987, was a last-ditch effort to save the company through a big RPG with high-end graphics, a fantastical world, and a massive marketing blitz. Now we’ve come full circle.

To prepare for FFXV, I’m starting a new project here at Kotaku. For the next five months, I’ll be digging into every mainline Final Fantasy game, in order, and taking a look at how the series has evolved over the past 30 years. Why has Final Fantasy resonated with so many people? What makes it so special? What exactly does it mean for a game to feel like a Final Fantasy?

Answering those questions calls for a trip back to the late 80s, when a company called Squaresoft was floundering, unable to find much commercial success with its slate of interactive adventure games and space shooters. As the myth goes, Squaresoft was facing bankruptcy when their top designer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, decided to make a role-playing game that would be heavily inspired by Dragon Quest and Lord of the Rings. He thought it’d be the company’s last game ever, so he called it Final Fantasy.

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With the opening arpeggio of Final Fantasy’s prelude, which started playing as soon as you blew on the cartridge enough times, it became clear that this was a special game. Few of the ideas were unusual—Sakaguchi had clearly played a lot of Wizardry—but everything felt polished in a way that other games of the time had never quite managed. The music, the art, the sprites, the graphics, the combat backgrounds, the NPCs, the massive world, and yes, the sounds: they all blended together to create something that felt truly great. If Dragon Quest was a hamburger, Final Fantasy was filet mignon.