Back in the early 2000s, Square-Enix was set on remaking and rereleasing the classic Final Fantasy games to a newer audience onto newer consoles with Final Fantasy I + II being remade for the Gameboy Advance as well as Final Fantasy III and IV being remade later onto the Nintendo DS. However, whereas Dawn of Souls reimagined the original two with gorgeous 16-bit pixel art, the latter two were plagued with awkward 64-bit polygonal models as well as blurry textures.

Prior to the remake, Final Fantasy III had only been available in Japan with it being released solely on the Famicom in 1990. So the fact that they were localizing this classic game in English offered a fantastic opportunity to deliver a once hidden gem to a Western audience that otherwise couldn’t experience it through legal means.

Final Fantasy III truly was a milestone in the franchise, being the first to introduce the job-changing system that would influence not only its own series in the future but many JRPGs going forward. So it was definitely a shame that so many gamers missed out on it for 16 years. Luckily, the DS remake kept many of these original mechanics intact with a few quality-of-life changes particularly in the inventory management departments. But keep in mind, Final Fantasy III was still a simple, straight-forward NES era JRPG and the DS remake keeps everything under the hood the same albeit with a new 64-bit coat of paint.

It’s this new coat of paint that I have a problem with. The crude polygonal character and environmental models as well as the blurry, shaky textures don’t hold a candle up to the gorgeous original pixel art on the Famicom. This is especially noticeable when you compare the new boss models with the original boss sprites that adapt Yoshitaka Amano’s breathtaking concept art into brilliant 8-bit pixels. These bosses also tower over your small fighter sprites making these battles feel like a real undertaking. In the remake, the bosses feel like uninspired and vague recreations of the pixel art, not to mention the size difference is much less staggering. The chibi style given to the character models is a cute art decision but isn’t quite enough to make any battle feel particularly menacing apart from the actual turn-based combat that was still quite standard for that era.

The DS remake did a great service by getting Western audiences closer to a complete catalogue of FF games but trying to bust out those Nintendo DS graphics on an NES-era Final Fantasy game seemed like overkill and a disservice to the artstyle as a whole. Imagine had they focused on doing all new pixel art using the DS’s graphical power based on Amano’s original artwork in the same vein that Dawn of Souls had done, this remake wouldn’t have been such a chore to look at. The game does offer an opening cutscene in full CG which is a great touch but perhaps a few more would have helped in bringing the entire world to life especially during important scenes like breaking through the boulder in the beginning or getting shot down over Saronia. It also can’t be stressed enough, though, that the localization does a great job in breathing life into some of these side characters, adding some flavor in an otherwise standard “Four Heroes of Light must go and save the world from an Evil Darkness” kind of story.

If you want an officially translated version of Final Fantasy III to add to your collection, definitely seek out this remake. If you are looking to experience how the game was meant to be experienced, it might be worth seeking out a translated rom of the original as Final Fantasy III for the DS doesn’t offer much besides a serviceable, totally legal remake of the original.

After playing the pixel remasters of 1 and 2, I switched over to the 3d remake for 3 and it definitely had some flaws, it required a lot more grinding than 1 and 2 did for me, the very ungenerous save system cost me significant amounts of progress at some points and made the final boss terrifying since dying would have cost me an hour+ of progress, but overall I had a really good time and enjoyed the game a lot. I wish the job system had continued to be a thing regularly instead of just sporadically appearing since while it had flaws, it also had a ton of potential and along with the story and the music, was definitely the most memorable part of the game.

Going to start off strong and say FF3 is the best game in the original trilogy. An argument can be made that 1 is better if you like that the game is more simplified or you have nostalgia for the first one. But both of these clear 2 easy.

This game continues the tradition of the main party tracking down objects surrounding the 4 elements. A tradition that carries on to a majority of future titles. We are finally getting to the point where the story in FF games matter and there’s actual effort being put into it. It’s nothing astounding by any means but there’s effort being made to make you care about the story and characters. Speaking of characters they’re also fleshed out and there’s a lot of named side characters. This game even lets you talk to the guest characters after they join your party. You get a few lines of dialogue or hints about what to do next. For the first time I could also pick out a favorite character because they finally decided the characters actually have to have personalities and stuff. They don’t just exist as guideposts. For the main party I’d go with Refia and for side characters you can’t go wrong with picking Cid.

But not everything is improved with the story and characters. FF3 will still have a guest character join your party to go into the next dungeon. Then at the end of the dungeon they get killed or sacrifice themselves. It happens to almost every single person in 2 and 3. In terms of the story they probably spend days or weeks together but that doesn’t translate well to the player. You probably know them for less than 30 minutes. For this to work you need to introduce the characters earlier. When they die they play an emotional scene like you are suppose to care about this person you barely know. With it happening so often you already learn to not care about anyone that joins your party.

This game introduced the job system and I love it. It lets you make your team and play however you want. Though a downside of this being the introduction of the job system is at certain points in the game you are basically punished if you don’t have at least one member of your team a certain job. It’s like the devs wanted you to experience certain jobs so they almost force you to use them. One example is if you don’t have a dragoon during a certain boss battle the fight is basically 5x as hard. The final boss also almost requires you to have 2 certain classes. My favorite starting class was the thief. I love that they are actually useful in this game unlike FF1. Most of the time you’re better off going with another warrior but not here. The thief has a passive ability that lets you unlock certain doors. Usually you have to buy magic keys to open the doors but if you have a thief you can just do it and a lot earlier than you normally can too. In fact my strongest character was the thief who I never changed their job class until end game when I unlocked ninja. They were the first person to hit 9999 damage well before anyone else even came close to that damage. FF3 also introduced summons and there’s a lot of the classics here. They are treated like magic and a lot of them you just buy from shops, but 3 of them you actually have to track down and fight to be able to summon them.

Another first is that this was the first FF game to crash on me. It only happened once and it was after someone joined my party. I tried talking to them over and over to see all the dialogue after the 4th or 5th talk the game went to a pure white screen and froze.

The game also has unique sections that change the gameplay up a little by making you cast mini or toad on yourself to go through certain places. It help to diversify the dungeons. Though during the mini sections you have to have a magic user to do any real damage otherwise you’re better off running for every fight. Something else that’s new to 3 is that they got rid of the ability for anyone to use items that cast spells in battle like the fire rod. Now you can only use that item in battle if you can actually equip it. It does make the game more balanced and makes you use the actual items that cause magic damage instead of everyone using the infinite use stuff.

There’s a fat chocobo in the game and I love it. He acts as an item storage which is pretty useful in the original NES version but useless in the PSP game since you don’t have an item limit. You can summon it in certain places and to store items you feed him whatever you want to store. Then I guess when you want the item back he either throws it up or you just shove your hand down his throat and pull out whatever you need. Another interesting thing is the amount of airships you get. You go through them like candy. You get one it blows up, you get another one it gets shot down, etc. The final airship rocks. It has a place to rest, store items, buy anything you need. You never have to run to town to rest ever again.

There’s so many hidden pathways / items in this game it almost becomes too much at points. I mean hidden paths have hidden paths in them. I enjoy hidden things when used sparingly but this game takes it to the extreme and hides stuff / paths everywhere. In this game you can only find / rarely steal phoenix downs. You can’t buy them anywhere. So if you use all of them up early on or you don’t find them you are out of luck. You can steal some, which needs a character using the thief class and their thief level needs to be high enough to even have a chance at stealing one. Some enemies do drop them too but it’s extremely rare that happens.

Unlike FF2 I never felt overpowered in this game. I actually had to plan out my moves and use strategy instead of smashing the attack button until the fight was over. The dungeons are also fun unlike FF2. They got rid of most of the BS and made interesting dungeons…. That is until my biggest gripe with this game, the final dungeon.

The final dungeon sucks ass. It’s a 2 part dungeon, The Crystal Tower and The World of Darkness. You have to do both back to back without saving, resting, or leaving the dungeon. You have to go through the multi floor CT to fight a boss then after that you go to the WoD. Here you have 4 hard bosses to fight in opposite corners of the dungeon. You also have the 3 optional bosses you can fight. Now I say optional but they are basically mandatory. They drop ribbons that protect you from status effects. You only get 1 during the story. Without these the final boss uses Bad Breath and can turn you into a toad, sleep you, poison you, among many other things. So after all of that you can go fight the final boss. Now that’s 9 bosses in a row plus random fights with the hardest enemies without saving the game because you can’t leave the final dungeon once you start it.

My first attempt at this I lost. It was a 15 minute back and forth fight where I used every elixir I had struggling to find time to attack. That cost me 3 hours. I had to do every boss fight and both dungeons again. Before I tried again I went and grinded some exp. So far in this journey through FF history, this is the first game that I had to grind in. Everyone always talks about how grind heavy old FF / RPG games are and I always laughed because I never felt I had to grind just to beat the game. But not here. I felt if I didn’t grind some levels I would never beat the boss even though I was in the low 50s during the fight. So I ended up grinding 5 more levels and got 3 more levels while defeating all the bosses again. In total I was about 4 levels higher than the first attempt because I didn’t have as many random battles as I did during the first attempt. At this point I was around 55-56. Even then I still almost lost. The boss gets multiple attacks per round and sometimes they go before me and sometimes some of my characters go before them. Everything was going fine, it was still hard but not oppressively so. That is until near the end when the boss used a party wide attack that did over half to everyone for their first attack. If they would have done that again I would have lost and there would have been nothing I could have done. And that’s not it, if on the next turn the boss got to go first before my heal went off and used that attack it would have been game over.

This final dungeon has to be the reason why you can save in dungeons in every Final Fantasy after this one. They know what they did and how much everyone hated it.

Review de Final Fantasy III - Nota 6

Final Fantasy III, lançado originalmente em 1990 e posteriormente remasterizado, é um jogo que representa uma evolução significativa em relação aos seus predecessores. Apresentando um sistema de combate aprimorado e uma narrativa mais profunda, o jogo se destaca por suas melhorias técnicas e mecânicas atualizadas.

Uma das principais mudanças em Final Fantasy III é a introdução do sistema de classes de personagens, permitindo que os jogadores personalizem seus heróis com diferentes habilidades e estilos de combate. Essa adição é interessante, pois permite aos jogadores criar estratégias únicas e experimentar diferentes combinações de classes. Além disso, o jogo apresenta batalhas mais desafiadoras e chefes memoráveis, que exigem táticas inteligentes e um bom planejamento.

Os gráficos de Final Fantasy III são uma melhoria considerável em relação aos jogos anteriores, com sprites detalhados e cenários variados e vibrantes. A trilha sonora também é cativante e ajuda a estabelecer o clima em cada momento do jogo.

No entanto, Final Fantasy III também apresenta algumas falhas. A história, embora mais desenvolvida do que nos jogos anteriores, ainda pode parecer um pouco genérica e previsível. Além disso, a narrativa é frequentemente interrompida por longos trechos de jogo sem diálogo ou eventos significativos, o que pode deixar a experiência um pouco arrastada e monótona.

Embora Final Fantasy III seja uma melhoria em relação aos jogos anteriores da série, ele ainda enfrenta algumas limitações que afetam sua qualidade geral. A introdução do sistema de classes e os avançados gráficos e mecânicas são pontos fortes, mas a história e a execução podem parecer um pouco desanimadoras e repetitivas. Levando em consideração esses aspectos, a nota final atribuída seria 6.

İlk oyunun her konuda üstüne konulmuş daha iyi versiyonu.

Job sistemi FF5’in prototipi olduğu için onun kadar çeşitli olamasa da oldukça eğlenceli. Bazı gimmick joblar dışında her job’un kendince iyi olduğu alanlar var ve hepsini duruma göre kullanmak gerekiyor. Pixel Remaster yerine bu versiyonu öneririm, hikayeye ufak eklemeler ve QOL eklentileri oyunu çok daha keyifli hale getiriyor.

Onun dışında tek eksiği sonlara doğru zorluğun sapıtması heralde. Özellikle son dungeon kanser. Dinlenme noktası olmadan 2 saat süren dungeon ve ard arda zorlayan boss rush, ölürsen de en başa atma fikri kimindi acaba... Oraya kadar grind yapma gereği duymadım ama sonlara doğru oyun yapmaya zorladı. Autosave sağolsun, save scum yaparak bir şekilde geçtim yoksa oyunu bitirebileceğimi zannetmiyorum.

Being the remake to the first game to include interchangeable job systems, balance in this game is a concept not for the faint of heart. Yes, there will be parts where your choices will kick you in the ribs. Yes, there is a boss where it's pratically mandatory to run Dragoon full party. But the freedom and the sense of discovery I had the first time I played this game was unparalleled. Add QoL improvements and a loosely improved storytelling with some characterization, there is a game you're going to play again and again. It's a bit more streamlined compared to the original, but I don't mind the 3D look, it's not as egregiously slow as IV for DS at least.

Abandoned: Dec 22 2021
Time: 27ish Hours
Platform: DS (via 3DS)

Final Fantasy III is an interesting one. Following up Final Fantasy II’s strange leveling system (which I loved) and huge strides in storyline and emotional investment, this feels like a side-grade at best, and a downgrade more often than I’d like. FF3 feels like an attempt to course correct after FF2 (and as far as I can tell, it actually was! Even though FF2 was pretty well received, it seems like its systems weren’t liked internally at Square). On top of that, I played the DS remake of FF3, a mostly faithful remake which is infamous for being even less forgiving than the original NES game (balance tweaks and updated graphics being the main changes). Suffice to say, there’s no lack of things to talk about here.

Or is there? Honestly, this game didn’t leave a huge impression on me. I never got too invested, and more often than not was just looking up stats and strategies to min/max my team. As far as investment, I’ll easily blame the story there. FF3 is a return to FF1’s style of storytelling. The blank slate characters, the D&D-influenced “stumble around until the npc hints get you to figure out where you’re supposed to be” pacing, it all seems to draw a straight line to FF1. This wouldn’t be an issue for me if FF2 hadn’t been lightyears ahead in story? I don’t know why they decided to drop the more immediate stakes and less hint-reliant pacing style they’d done such a good job pioneering in the previous game, but I’m not happy with what’s here. Sure it’s much more straightforward than FF1 ever was, but at multiple points through the game you’ll need to go places just because some people in a town said it might be cool to see. The plot operates on rumors, and while that isn’t a bad idea in concept, you end up jetting from town to town, continent to continent, without any reasoning besides “it seems like the game wants me to go there next”.

So where’d all the dev time go? Well, FF3 is mechanically a brand new beast. At least, as far as FF games go. FF3 introduces the Job system, which allows you to switch your class anytime outside of battle. It’s a really cool system, encouraging players to change party configuration on the fly for whatever the situation might call for. In theory. While this system is robust as hell and definitely interesting to play around with, the way it interacts with the game’s other systems is… a bit rough, in my opinion. 

FF3, like its predecessors, only allows you to save outside of dungeons. That’s fine in 1 and 2, where your strategy for a boss fight only really has a couple permutations, so you’ll try only a few times before either busting through or deciding you need to grind a bit. Here though, there’s almost literally infinite strategies for each boss. Wanna take someone on as a team of four Scholars, relying on damage items and high intelligence to disintegrate an enemy by their weak point? Go ahead, most of the time there’s nothing stopping you. But say you hit a wall. Do you switch your strategy (to something besides four scholars dear god please) and try again, not knowing if you’ll need to do it all over again? What if I told you you’d need to head all the way back to town and buy new gear if you’ve sold whatever incredibly specific and very unmarked set of equipment your new classes can use? 

Granted, most of the game this isn’t a huge issue. You get an airship early on, and money is never too scarce. For the endgame though? Where you have to backtrack through a dungeon to even reach your airship? I felt stuck, stranded without a choice but to keep beating my head against the final dungeon. The party I had by this point was capable, and after a couple tries I got into a groove and started moving along. Got to the final boss aaaaaand

(SPOILERS)


well, if you know about this game, you might’ve heard about this. The final dungeon ends in a boss fight, which turns into another, which turns into four more, and then a true final boss. And the last time you’re able to save is before the dungeon starts. I managed to get a good deal into the final boss’s health supply before losing, and when I lost, I lost 3 hours of progress. If I knew exactly what I’d done wrong, I might’ve tried again, but the thing is I don’t. And I really, really, don’t want to go through that whole dungeon again, that whole boss rush again, just to lose again. Hence, why I abandoned it.
(END SPOILERS)



Now, as for the 3D remake’s changes, I’m a big fan. I love the art style, the game seems more balanced than the original version, and the biggest thing for me: The characters aren’t blank slates! Er well, not as much. They have canon names and backstories, and they’re not four identical orphans anymore. It’s cool! There’s overall a bit more direction to things too, which is much appreciated. 

That’s about it. I guess I had more I wanted to talk about than I thought haha. Basically, the job system is interesting, but much of the game’s grandfathered in mechanics don’t mesh well with it, and the story is somewhere between a small and a huge step back from FF2. Play it if you want, but if you do, I’d recommend emulating so you can use save states.
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Would've gotten a 4 easy if the Crystal Tower wasn't so unforgiving but besides that, it's a classic NES RPG with some graphical & story/character updates.

Perhaps too simple for some but personally, I found it extremely charming.

Recommended if you're up for a challenge & more than a little grinding.

The first game in the series with truly great music, and that's about the only superlative thing I can say about it. The job system is fun but not very well thought-out (allowing the player to switch jobs at any time but punishing them for doing so is nonsensical, not to mention how broken job level grinding is); the game as a whole has a very bizarre difficulty curve where it starts brutal, becomes easy around the halfway point, then becomes brutal again in the final dungeons. Making each party member a defined character in the 3D remake is borderline pointless, because nobody has much of a personality. Battles playing out in 3D with full animation slows down the pace a lot, which made the points where I had to grind even more tedious than usual.

I do have to say I begrudgingly respect the remake for not doing much to soften the final gauntlet though. It's maybe the most hatefully designed thing in the series, and something that really makes FF3 stand out, for better or worse.

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.

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.

It's tough for me to really judge how I feel about a game like this so far removed from the timeframe that it released. That being said, it's certainly impressive how much FFIII had going on. A large sprawling world map to explore in your airship, the first iteration of the job system, and tons of optional hidden content. This is also the 3D remake of the original game and no doubt a lot of QoL was implemented and things were improved or changed, but it is still a little rough around the edges.

The game can be a little obtuse at times, but you do get some direction either from talking to townspeople or a main character mentioning what your next goal should be. This being the first implementation of it, I found you also don't often have to interact with the job system. There are a couple of times where a thief or a dragoon is necessary (or ideal) to progress, but for the most part I picked the jobs I liked and used them through the whole game. It seems optimal to do so too unless you want to grind, as the higher the job level, the better off you are.

Regardless, it was still pretty cool to see where FFXIV pulled a lot of its inspiration from. The crystal tower, doga/unei, the cloud/world of darkness, and even some of the music; speaking of which, its a pretty good soundtrack that didn't get too tiring after 20 or so hours.

All in all, FFIII is a solid package that I could definitely recommend if you're curious about the roots of the franchise - just prepared for nothing too mind-blowing by today's standards.