In my run-through of the entire Final Fantasy franchise, this was the first one that was frustratingly disappointing. The original version was annoying enough by keeping resting places super limited until way later in the game, meaning you had to backtrack halfway across the map just to restore your HP/MP, then spend the replenished characters getting back to where you were to begin with. This remake makes that more frustrating by seemingly amping up the random encounters (one literally occurred three steps after another one while playing on PC).

This remake tries to put a bandage on the dull story by inserting actual characters into it, but they are not interesting enough to care about and tend to fall back on stereotypical tropes that were old even in 2006.

The introduction of the now-classic "Jobs System" was a cool concept, but it feels like a creative step backwards from FFII's awesome "build-your-own" characters. In this game's predecessor, you could make any character fit any role you could imagine by focusing on weapon/magic types instead of being forced to restrict your character to a singular purpose in combat.

I'd recommend the Pixel Remaster of the original FFIII over this choppy DS port.

3d remake of ff3

The combat is really slow and not balanced.

They decided to add some characters to the game which wasn't that bad, normal Ff3 is preferred.

A complete remake of the NES original, this has a slightly expanded story, new 3D graphics, and a more balanced gameplay system. And all of it is on the DS, a portable system. I have to give credit to the team behind this because they made Final Fantasy 3 much easier to jump into and play. With that said, the game is still very difficult and quite grind heavy at times. Also, the story doesn't really get interesting until the back half of the game which is a very long time to wait. This is still a good game, and an easy recommendation to any old-school JRPG enthusiasts who want a fresh take on an old classic.

I bounced off this version hard, but eventually clicked with a fan translation of the original NES game after playing 1 & 2. To me the this version turns an incredibly slick NES game into an incredibly clunky DS game, burying the charm of the original. It feels slow in ways the original does not.

Bizarre balance changes are made that undermine the game - instead of storing up capacity to switch jobs, your characters just become pathetically ill and weak when you change jobs, making new jobs seem uniformly awful and punishing you for trying to experiment. I can only imagine how bad this is in the game's many forced job switch sequences I didn't reach on the DS.

Jobs have been rebalanced; Onion Knight, the iconic starter job is removed and gated behind an online connectivity feature and functionally inaccessible for anyone playing now; Ninja & Sage the capstone jobs of the original game have been nerfed to preserve the endgame viability of other jobs, spoiling their function as super jobs.

My personal recommendation is to avoid this and try the original, unless you absolutely cannot stand pixel art.