The player has the ability to dash and jump, and certain buttons execute high, medium, and low attacks for each character.

[8] The player must advance down a number of floors, contend with traps, and engage in fights with a variety of enemies including the game's playable characters.

1 takes place in the year 2048 on a fictional planet called Tobal, which has large deposits of Molmoran, an ore that can be used as an energy source.

The game's immediately playable characters include Chuji Wu, Oliems, Epon, Hom, Fei Pusu, Mary Ivonskaya, Ill Goga, and Gren Kutz.

1 was developed by Japanese studio DreamFactory, which was established as a subsidiary of publisher Square to create that company's first fighting game and its first release for the PlayStation.

1, Seiichi Ishii, had himself helped pioneer 3D arcade fighting games as a designer on Virtua Fighter for Sega and the first two Tekken titles for Namco.

[17] The project was conceived by DreamFactory staff as a result of their dissatisfaction with the state of the fighting games and they wished to make their own with the features that they always wanted.

[12] Ishii felt that 3D fighting games at the time had not reached the caliber of their 2D counterparts and that additional features like a Quest Mode were needed to evolve the genre.

More experienced players could utilize the 3D arenas to perform grapples and throws from the side of or behind an opponent, something that was not seen in previous fighting games.

1 was intended to increase its appeal in foreign markets while its lack of texture mapping and subsequent use of Gouraud shading yielded superior display resolution, lighting, and frame rates over its competitors.

[10] Square's relationship with Toriyama was one in which the two parties had a single, initial meeting to discuss a game project and then the artist would submit his designs to the company sometime later.

[19] Prior to DreamFactory opening, Ishii desired to collaborate with Toriyama in order to utilize popular characters such as Trunks from Dragon Ball.

The team even proposed a fighting game using the cast of Chrono Trigger, but Toriyama offered to create an original roster instead.

[12][21] Toriyama illustrated the fighters so that they could be easily expressed in 3D and gave them body proportions so that their movements appeared natural.

[22] They were additionally given distinct physical attributes to account for a variety of situations like smaller characters defeating larger ones and matches against non-human opponents.

[23] The boss Nork was not considered for being playable as his massive size ruined the game's balance, so a small version (Snork) was used instead.

Although much of the data was taken from action film actors and martial artists, the robotic animation of Hom was captured directly from motion designer Hitoshi Matsuda.

[18] Onoguchi explained that the team preferred the slower, more predictable attack movements of the actors over the martial artists, which were too fast to translate well to the game's mechanics.

The disc also had video previews of other upcoming Square releases for the console including Final Fantasy Tactics, Bushido Blade, and SaGa Frontier.

[45] The strong sales have been attributed to the inclusion of the Final Fantasy VII demo disc, a highly anticipated title at the time.

He concluded the game is outclassed by competition such as Tekken 2 and Virtua Fighter 2, but is still worth trying due to its unique style of animation and quest mode.