Final Fantasy III

Title: Final Fantasy III
Type: Videogame
Platform: Famicom
Release Date: April 27th, 1990
Genre: RPG
Total Playtime: 34:48:29

at last, we are at Final Fantasy III. this is easily the most mixed game for me, it has some really high highs, but some INSANELY low lows. now, i want to preface this review with an important note: i like Final Fantasy III! it might be one of my new favorites in the series next to FFV, even! the reason i want to clarify this is because good lord, am i going to rip into this game later, but i just want people to know that i did overall have a great time with this one. it's just that, well... i'm not doing it justice by just dancing around things, so allow me to discuss my feelings about this one.

Final Fantasy III is notable for a lot of things. it was an INSANELY ambitious game for the time and hardware it was created for, and blew pretty much every other RPG of the time out of the water in terms of world size, mechanical depth, and presentation. this meant that, when it came to the task of giving it a full remake like Square had done with Final Fantasy I and II, things didn't go quite as smoothly. pretty famously, Final Fantasy had a really large presense on the GBA, with either remakes or ports of all six of the classic games getting put on the handheld with additional bonus features, quality of life changes, graphical upgrades, new dungeons, etc. however, the only one of these six to get skipped was FF3, because it was just too much of an undertaking to remake it. there were plans to create a remake for the Wonderswan Color, but it fell through due to development complications. in an interview, designer Hiromichi Tanaka put it like this: the game was already bursting at the seams on the Famicom, so trying to remake it while giving it additional content would simply be too much for any console of the time. now, is that entirely truthful? probably not, im sure something like the PS1 could've handled it like it did with FFI and II, but i get what he's saying.

it took until the next generation of handhelds with the DS and PSP where we would finally get a remake of FFIII, but not quite in the same way as the games that came before it. Dawn of Souls on GBA was a remake from the ground up of the original two Final Fantasy games, yes, but it kept most of the basic structure intact. things looked a lot fancier and some minor gameplay changes were made, but it was still the same game overall. the same cannot be said about the Final Fantasy III remake, in my opinion. most notably, it's been remade entirely in 3D, which does lose some of the visual identity of the original game, which is a part about it that i really love. it also changed some story beats, as well as giving your characters names, personalities, and set-in-stone designs, which was not the case for the original. one of the things that i absolutely loved about Final Fantasy I was that you could sort of shape your party to be whoever and whatever you wanted, since they were all blank slates. i liked coming up with designs, names, and personalities for them over the course of the game, and i was really excited to see that make a comeback after Final Fantasy II omitted it was really cool. so then hearing that FFIII takes it back out again in the remake just... didn't sit well with me. and so, with that in mind, i set myself on a path. i was going to play and beat the Famicom version of Final Fantasy III.

with all that preamble out of the way, now we can talk about the game itself. FFIII is notable for being the first FF game to have the iconic job system, a feature that would occasionally return throughout the series. if you've read my FFV review, you'll know i'm a big fan of this feature, and i was really excited to see it present here. unfortunately, it comes with the drawbacks of being the first iteration of the mechanic. my biggest issue was that switching jobs requires you to use a resource, that being Capacity Points. one thing i loved about FFV was that you could switch jobs anywhere, any time, no drawbacks. this gave you a lot of freedom to experiment however you wish with different jobs and their abilities, to see if it could help with an area you're having trouble with. FFIII, however, has you spending Capacity Points to switch to a new job, which are points you get for defeating enemies. as you increase a job's level more and more you do reduce its Capacity cost, and at a certain point it does become free to switch to, but it was still kind of annoying in certain spots. now, that isn't to say that the job system is bad in this game, not at all! once you get past the whole Capacity Points thing, it does become really fun getting to switch out your job from time to time, and some of these can be REALLY powerful. for most of the game my team was Irene, a Warrior/Knight, Hank, a Monk, Sydney, a Black Mage/Bard (who i changed to be a Devout in the endgame) and Gordon, a White Mage/Thief (who became my summoner in the endgame). and yes, i will be referring to my party by these names, not by the DS ones. sorry Luneth, Arc, Refia and Ingus fans. and speaking of the jobs, i'd like to draw your attention to one aspect of this game i really do love...

the presentation. Final Fantasy III is a beautiful game with excellent music, and one of the most impressive aspects of it is that every job has a unique set of overworld and battle sprites to correspond to it. now, FFV does one-up it with it doing this for five different characters, each getting unique battle sprites for every job, but it's still super impressive for a Famicom game. i think my favorite character sprite has to be the Devout, i love the little cat-eared hood paired with the red raincoat underneath, i think it's probably the only version of this design that i actually like. i feel like later iterations maybe dip their toes a little too far into the fanservice territory, while FFIII's Devout feels super cute and sweet in comparison. honorable mentions to Krile's White Mage sprites in FFV, but i feel like they just don't stick the landing the same way. this game's spritework is the culmination of everything Famicom FF has been leading up to though, it simply gets every aspect spot on. one detail i really love is how whenever you have an additional companion "party member" (the ones that follow you on the overworld and don't fight in battle) they have a unique sprite in the pause menu. Famicom games often have a hard time being able to portray exactly what a character is intended to look like through the sprites alone, (i mean, just compare Amano's artwork of Firion to his Famicom sprite...) but this helps to fill in a lot of the blanks and really adds a lot to the experience for me. oh, another thing FFIII absolutely nails: the music. Famicom games are not meant to sound like this. (well, they kind of are, but you rarely hear it in games from the time...) something a lot of people don't know is that it took a LOT of programming knowledge to compose for the Famicom and NES. because of this, you either had to be really good at composing AND programming, get two different people to work together, or just make something halfbaked and call it a day. that's why dudes like Tim Follin and David Wise are so well regarded for their work on game OSTs, they were both composers and programmers and knew how to push the hardware to its limits. Square knew what they had going with Final Fantasy, so it feels like they went all out for this final Famicom game. if you want an example of what i'm talking about, check out the music for Altar Cave, the Overworld, and the Cloud of Darkness.

now, what you've all been waiting for... what issues did i have with Final Fantasy III? well, it's one simple answer:

HOLY SHIT SOME OF THESE DUNGEONS ARE ASS

now allow me to elaborate.

so, for a Famicom RPG, FFIII generally holds its punches pretty well. there's a little bit of grinding here and there, but for the most part it's not that bad. and then you reach Tozus, the town of Gnomes. FFII had a spell called Mini, but it was so rare to see it used that i never even saw it in my first playthrough. i guess the team over at Square wanted you to know it was there, because to access Tozus, you have to inflict your entire party with Mini. well whatever, you're not fighting any enemies, it's fine. and then there's a cave you have to trudge through. with enemies. did i mention what the Mini status does to your stats, by the way? IT LOWERS YOUR ATTACK AND DEFENSE TO 1. there is no way to increase these with equipment, and the intended strategy for the Tozus Cave is to use magic to defeat enemies. but do you remember earlier when i said it costs Capacity to switch jobs? that, along side the fact that buying new spells can be pretty expensive early game, means that if you weren't already investing in a black mage, you might as well just give up here. sure, you can run away from these fights (which TRUST ME, is not something you can always do) but i felt like the run rate was so low that i might as well have not even tried. so here i was, spending an hour ramming my face into this stupid ass cave so i could go back to having fun, and i finally get through it, great. i play a little further into the game, and then i get to the Nepto Temple. which has the same fucking gimmick, and this time there's a boss at the end, meaning you can't just run away from every combat interaction. around this point in my playthrough my save also got nuked by RetroArch on Steam, so i gave up and went back to playing other stuff for the time being. now, to be fair, when i came back recently with all of my knowledge i got from beating FFII, IV, and V, these weren't quite as bad. or maybe i just had more resolve and patience, i dunno. either way, they're pretty short parts of the game.

fast forward to about 20 hours of playtime later, and i reach the Ancient Ruins, a dungeon that's about 75% of the way through the game. i didn't think anything of it at first, it seemed pretty easy for the first four floors. and then you hit floor 5, which decides that its been too long since the game introduced an unfun gimmick. floors 5 and onward of the Ancient Ruins have random encounters with enemies with a pretty rancid combination of properties: they deal assfuck numbers of damage, don't allow you to run from the fight, and multiply whenever you hit them with a physical attack. i should mention, magic is not the best in FFIII with the exceptions of the early and late game, so at this point you've probably been stacking into physical damage like i was. now with that said, these enemies do have a pretty glaring weakness that makes them a cakewalk if you know it: they don't split when hit by (and are especially weak to) the Dark Knight's Dark Swords. so the solution is obvious: just get a Dark Sword, right? well no DUMBASS, why would you ever suggest such an idea? what are you, stupid? because no matter where you look, you won't be able to find a Dark Sword before this dungeon. there is no place where you can get one until you get the Invincible airship, which is exactly what you unlock for completing the Ancient Ruins. this is such a boneheaded design concept, why create an enemy with a defined weakness when you cannot access said weakness until after the dungeon they appear in?? now, to be fair, they do also appear later on in the Cave of Shadows, the dungeon that immediately follows the Ancient Ruins, and by then you'll have plenty of opportunities to equip yourself for these encounters. but if you get stuck in the Ancient Ruins for several hours like i did, tough luck dipshit, guess you'll have to grind. which is exactly what i did.

in fact, i'd like to say something now. you might recall that in previous reviews, such as the ones for SMT1 and SMT if..., i played the game on emulator with RetroAchievements enabled and with Hardcore Mode on, as i do for most emulated games that i play. Hardcore mode, if you recall, disables things such as rewind, cheats, save states, etc., to make you play the game the way it would have been played on console, save for graciously allowing fast-forward. i played Final Fantasy III like this, and on top of that, i didn't use any glitches like i did with FFV. (at least, not on purpose... we'll get to that later.) additionally, i mentioned in the FFV review that a lot of people say that that's the hardest one, but i'd beg to differ. i think FFIII Famicom is easily the most difficult of the games i've played so far, it clears FFV by a landslide. but the best part about that is, i get to say that i beat it legit. no save states, no "oh i beat SMT if... but i did it with Charlie" or "oh i beat FFV but i had to use a glitch to beat the final boss", i did this shit RAW. i can say i beat Final Fantasy III and mean it. additionally, i got every summon in the game, including the ones for Odin, Leviathan and Bahamut, which are all locked behind some optional dungeons with some pretty difficult boss fights at the end. as expected, Bahamut was probably the hardest one, but i did do all of them first try, if i recall. unfortunately, i forgot to save after beating Bahamut, and i died on the way out of his cave, leading to me having to redo his fight three more times after that. oops.

also, if you're waiting for me to talk about the final dungeon, it wasn't that bad. sure, no save points is a little annoying and i got Ahriman'd a couple times and had to redo the whole thing, but it doesn't take that long to get back to where you were. unlike something like FFV's Void, the dungeon isn't too long, and by this point in the game you're probably beefy enough to take out any random encounters with just your physical attacks, or even run away from them using the Thief's Flee ability. additionally, i did get the Retro Achievement for beating all of the final dungeon without using the Onion Knight, Sage or Ninja, so there's that for my extra Gamer Points. check it out, i've even got photographic evidence of my claim.

now that i think about it, i don't think i ever even saw any of the Onion Armor, which was supposed to be in the Crystal Tower i think... which brings me to another point. i said earlier that i did this all legit, but that doesn't mean i didn't try to cheese it at one point. when i was still struggling hard in the Ancient Ruins, i decided to look and see if there were any glitches that i could use to my advantage, and it turns out there was! kind of. not really. y'see, the Famicom version of FFIII has a glitch in it (supposedly) that allows you to convert some of the weakest armor in the game to the Onion set, the strongest stuff in the game. this sounded exactly like what i needed, so i tried to do it. i'm not sure on the specifics, but from what i can tell it has to do with having 99 of an item, and then receiving another one of that item as a reward from defeating an enemy. it then messes with the item in the 22nd slot in your inventory, changing its index to that of item next in line. at least, that's what it was SUPPOSED to do. i couldn't get this shit to work no matter how hard i tried, so i just gave up eventually. then, while randomly grinding later, i noticed that i suddenly had 99 Kaiser Knuckles in my inventory.

huh.

so, i think the glitch was doing something, just not what i was expecting it to do. my guess is that it had to do with the version of the fan translation i was using, every mention of the glitch i could find online was pretty old, and i was using the most recent patch of the fan translation, v1.3 from 2019. so in the end, i kept getting 99 Kaiser Knuckles, and i ended up selling them for boatloads of money. now, does this sound like cheating? i mean, the game gave them to me, and it wasn't what i was intending to happen, so... i guess it's up to you? realistically all this did for me was give me the money to buy all of the spells in the game, as well as buying as many hi-potions as i wanted, but by the endgame white magic was FAR outclassing items in terms of efficiency and healing, so i rarely used these hi-potions anyways. and to be fair, yes, getting the Quake and Aeroga spells WERE what got me through the Ancient Ruins, but i'm pretty sure i already had the money i needed to get those anyways, so i don't think this cash injection helped me "cheat" at the game. i think the thing it affected most was making buying all the spells in Eureka basically free, but that's about it.

so, now i wanna talk about more stuff that i like. the locales! man, this game gets me. if you know me well, you know i love a good flying city, and FFIII actually has two floating areas that really spoke to me. first, the Floating Continent you play the first third of the game on is really awesome, it's one of the very rare self-contained overworld maps in the series that doesn't loop back around once you reach the end of one side, and i think that's really cool. it sort of lures you into thinking the whole game is gonna take place on a tiny little patch of land, before hitting you with a rugpull when you reach the surface world in the airship. i can't imagine how mindblowing that reveal must have been back in 1990 to the people who played this, especially considering the hardware. second, Castle Hein is fucking awesome. you first see it ominously floating around in the desert, looking like some sort of tumbleweed flying around overhead. it had a very spooky and foreboding appearance to me when i first saw it, since i didn't know what it was, and i couldn't seem to interact with it. then, later in the game, you get captured and taken prisoner in Hein, and you get to see that on the inside it's this huge, all-natural tree castle with overgrown roots holding everything together, it's awesome! another place on the Floating Continent i really loved was the Tower of Owen, it reminds me a little of FFIV's Tower of Zot, though with a more "clock tower" kind of vibe to it. it has metal gratings to walk on, gears in the walls, and is actually the structure powering the continent to hold it in the air. god, i love shit like this, it's my absolute favorite. Nepto Temple, despite my bellyaching about its gimmick earlier, is another place that looks really awesome, i love the sprite of the dragon head in the first room. oh, speaking of dragons, Dragon Peak is another great locale. when you approach the path from the overworld, you get a cutscene of a huge dragon flying towards the top before you enter, and it makes the place feel very threatening and dangerous. then, once you reach the peak, you end up in a giant dragon's nest! it's really killer stuff. i could go on and on about all the cool places you visit, including the sea floor, which appeared here on the Famicom well before its appearance in FFV on SFC. it's not as rich with places to visit as it is in that game, but it's still cool to see all the same. oh hey, speaking of stuff that appeared here first, Moogles! yeah, i didn't know this until i actually saw them in game, but Moogles made their first appearance in FFIII, NOT in FFV like i previously thought. it's so funny that they went on to become as iconic as they did, because in FFIII they only appear in one room in the whole game, as Doga's pets (servants?) and that's it. seeing them here feels like if Mr. Saturns actually were in Mother 1 before Mother 2, y'know what i mean?

alright, let's wrap this up. i know i brought up a lot of problems with FFIII during this review, but even with that being the case i think i still absolutely love this game. i can't put it any other way than it's just... cool. again, they made this massive, mindblowing RPG with so much room for customization and creative party freedom, on the Famicom in 1990. now, i've heard that the FFIII Pixel Remaster stays more faithful to the original compared to the 3D remake, but i haven't played it yet. i do really want to, though! it seems like it fixes my issue with the Capacity Points thing by just completely omitting them, which i do appreciate, but also at the same time i can't help but feel like that's losing a little bit of the identity of the game? maybe that's a stupid fucking take considering how much i was bitching and moaning about it earlier, but i dunno. either way, i recommend giving this game a shot if you're interested, there's an excellent fan translation that does a good job fitting all of the English text into the monospace format of an NES game and doesn't have any bugs from what i saw. though i will say, information for the FC version isn't as readily available as it is for the 3D remake, which caused some issues for me. that isn't a problem with the game itself of course, it's just an interesting issue i wasn't expecting to run into. there's a lot of inconsistency on what is named what when it comes to the FC version online, but you can usually figure it out using context clues.