I’ll start off by saying: thank god I played the Pixel Remaster first. Unlike FFI PR, which mostly kept things the same and fixed bugs, FFIII PR changed some fundamental aspects of the NES version, keeping things largely faithful in terms of vision, but altering technicalities and tedious concepts from the original. FFIII NES is a much less flexible version of the game with a strong dependence on a single stat:

Job Level. Job Level causes tons of problems in the original FFIII and actively punishes you for trying out new classes (which cost capacity to move between) by reducing your hit rates, number of hits, spell damage, spell accuracy, and other things if you’re fresh in a class. It isn’t awful in theory: build up your skills to become competent in a class. In practice, however, moving from one class to another heavily nerfs your initial abilities. Base classes from the Earth Crystal and Eureka at least have competent bases, so becoming a Devout won’t kill your healing and becoming a Ninja won’t make you miss all the time, but jobs from the first three crystals all suffer from this, with the added bonuses that skills are non-transferable, so leveling as a Red Mage and learning both Black and White magic won’t help you if you decide to change into a Black or White Mage later on.

There are also sections where you basically need particular classes (Dragoon for Saronia, Magic Knight for Cave of Shadows, magic wielding classes for every mini dungeon), and freshly reclassing into them will hamper your ability a lot. If you want to defeat Garuda, simply reclassing to Dragoon isn’t enough – you have to grind outside Saronia Castle to make your Job Level not pitiful in order to do meaningful damage to him and not simply miss on your jump attacks. Same thing with magic, which is your only real option to get through the dungeons where you’re forced to be mini (not all classes have Run, and Run can miss a lot more in this game – I suppose you could Escape with a thief, but I don’t think that’s the intended design). Being a fresh Job Level 1 Black Mage would just render your spells completely ineffective.

Speaking of dungeons, in classic final fantasy fashion, they’re all over the place. The mini dungeons are awful, as mentioned above, but the dungeon quality collapses over the course of the game. Early (non-mini) dungeons are largely good, and several of the optional dungeons are alright, if a bit small (especially compared to the nearly 10 floor Tower of Owen at the beginning of the game, why is Bahamut’s Lair just three rooms?). The endgame dungeons are insane, and heavily dependent on invisible wall mechanics, where you just kind of meander through (read: look up a map online and follow the path). Combined with a point of no return and no external healing, this pattern of dungeons getting worse and worse concludes in the World of Darkness, where you fight four bosses (of very high difficulty) who each have a room with invisible walls to get through, and then the final boss after all of that. If you go in without grinding you are going to get bodied.

It's not good! I don’t like to hamper on old games for not having quality of life that we expect from games in the 2020s, but I think there’s a genuine difference between “oh this old thing was clunky and I had to go through more menus/solve it in an esoteric way” and just straight up questionable/bad design, and I think a lot of this game’s faults fall into the latter, in a way that the pixel remaster’s “quality of life” upgrades are actually design changes. Making the game less dependent on Job Level is obvious, but Pixel Remaster making it so that interacting with the crystals full heals your party, changes the game a lot so that you’re not screwed in World of Darkness and just have to Game Over if you can’t handle the gauntlet.

And look, it's not all terrible. Some classes are better here than in the Pixel Remaster, or at the very least different. Scholar is much less terrible, other than its low stamina stat. Geomancer was actually pretty good – the 25% backfire rate wasn’t great, but the damage output when it hit was quite good for the time you got it, with one terrain spell per area. Rangers get low level white magic instead of barrage (something that came from the DS version) and make for a good backup healer. I didn’t find arrow management that annoying honestly.

I did not hate FFIII, I just found it very frustrating and the systems it builds up kind of fall apart.

I absolutely love the idea of the job system, but it is implemented in a way that I can't stand. You are constantly forced by the game's design to change classes making the early game more of a puzzle as to what party combination the game wants you to have for this specific section than a proper RPG like in FF1.

Couple that with the somewhat rough dungeon design, throwing hordes of spongy enemies at your face and then asking you to fight the boss with no healing or saving in between and this makes for at best a pretty boring experience, and at worse, a pretty annoying one.

I knew playing this game after playing FFV would have a negative impact, and it did to an extent, but I did end up enjoying this game, probably even a little more than I thought I would.

Clearly a prototype for FFV in almost every way (from the job system and combat/ to the story and characters) it was clear that they were starting to get on the right path but not quite there yet. Still there's plenty to enjoy here. Even though the job system can't compare with V, it's still fun and I'd take it over whatever the heck that was in II. They do attempt a story here, and while it's basic, it's an improvement over FF1. Cid is back, and is a goat as always.

The music might be the least memorable for me out of any FF game I've played yet so that's a bummer.

There are a couple of frustrating sections in the game (the splitting up enemies can eat my fucking ass), but overall it's a fun game, and I'm glad I played it.

I'm really excited to get into IV and VI next, as I hear these are the games. It'll be interesting to see how they hold up.

I played the GBA remakes of the first two games, and I tried to play the DS remake of this one, but the controls gave me a headache. So I played the original, and I enjoyed it somewhat!

For me this was the hardest one in the series so far, and I had to do hours of grinding throughout the game. I had to grind over 10 levels to prepare for the final couple of areas.

Other than that it's a lot better than it's predecessors, especially when it comes to the world. It's huge in comparison, and just a lot more fleshed out and interesting. The dungeon layouts are also just way better. They're a lot more linear, and they rely more on hidden paths for the optional stuff. The random encounters feel less annoying thanks to this. This game is alright!

Another Final Fantasy game done, and another one I'd never beaten before~. Over the course of like 27 hours, I played through this in Japanese on my Famicom Mini. I will be the first to admit, I think I abused save states in this game more than any other I think I've ever played (granted I've played very very few games with save states) because this game can be a proper mean ol' bugger at times. Between that and fighting the with crappy controller on the Famicom Mini, this is definitely a game I don't see myself ever revisiting on this hardware, but it was still one I enjoyed a lot more than I didn't.

FF3 starts out with 4 unnamed orphans stumbling into a cave to find the wind crystal that vanished in a big earthquake, and it propels them into a fateful quest to save the world. I named mine after people who voted for me to play the game on the RB Slack chat (Mr. Popo, Flake, and Marurun) as well as Gunstar, since I needed a 4th member XD. FF3 doesn't have named characters, no, but they're kind of a group character unto themselves. Your party leader will talk and the characters will refer to you as the heroes of light, but there's not a great amount of characterization present. Characters are almost entirely one-dimensional and just there to move the story along, but it's an entertaining story that does the job more than well enough. Honestly, the most interesting part was seeing just how much DNA of this overall plot is present in FFIV and V (and VI to a somewhat lesser extent) with how those two games also take the idea of world crystals being taken/controlled by some otherworldly malevolent demon thing (and V of course going as far as to also link its world crystals to jobs the party gets).

More of an evolution on FF1's job choices than FFV's full blown job system, FF3 has jobs your party can switch between to give them different base stats that effectively just stack a modifier on top of their existing level stats. The only real difference your job makes upon level up is how your max HP is affected (life-long mages will have less health than life-long fighters, for example). You can only change jobs so fast though, as it uses a capacity resource that you build up as you fight things, and the longer you used a job in the past, the cheaper it is to switch back to. However, with how small your limited inventory space and how you NEED to unequip yourself before changing jobs, it's not very practical to carry around more than one or two alternate-jobs' worth of gear at any given moment.

The game's dungeon and boss design likes throwing you into situations that FORCE you to use these jobs, like a boss who constantly changes his elemental weakness so you need an otherwise nearly useless Scholar to tell his weaknesses, or a boss who does lots of horrible AOE magic so you need a lot of dragoons to do Jumps to both avoid his attacks and do big damage to him. The game always tells you when you need to do this though if you just talk to people around towns. It occasionally really sucks, especially when they throw enemies that split upon physical strike at you before you really get the job that can deal with those (dark/mystic knights), but they're generally fairly tolerable gimmicks and never make the game outright boring. It has several dungeons that force you to be mini, so only magic attacks really do anything, but at least those are proper dungeons. The worst gimmick dungeon in FF3 is better than the single gimmick dungeon in FF4 (the atrocious magnetic dungeon). It is also really odd seeing those mechanical steps BACK FF4 has compared to FF3, as this game also does a MUCH better job of automatically stacking and sorting your inventory where FF4 does nothing of the sort.

But compared to all 3 SFC games, this game is FAR harder. The lack of inter-dungeon save points or tents/cottages to heal up in them as well as sprawling late-game dungeons that are far more numerous than any of the SFC games really makes the Famicom version of FF3 something not to be taken for granted. This game easily would've taken me at least 3 or 4 more hours of grinding and redoing large segments of dungeons if I didn't have the Famicom Mini's save states to back me up, and that's a low estimate on my part. Especially the final dungeon, whose beginning has a lot of very difficult enemy encounters, and whose later half has a point-of-no-return and a huge boss rush AND really tough enemies all with no tent heals or save points, it's quite the marathon without the ability to save state. The game's pacing is often quite brisk and didn't really require any grinding on my part, but running from battles is so difficult (and dangerous as it means you take colossal defense penalties) as well as how frequent and incredibly deadly back-attacks are in the late-game, if you wanna do this game as it was originally intended, you're gonna be dying and redoing a lot of stuff a LOT.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The game is fun, but it can just be SO unforgiving at points that it's really hard to outright recommend this game in any capacity on the original hardware. I would bump it up to a Recommended if you're using save states like I did, but for the Famicom version as it was originally played, this game is just way too brutal for anyone who doesn't really love old RPGs and isn't afraid to grind and redo areas because of that difficulty and lack of respect for the player's time.

Beim ersten Anspielen mit Teil 2 (NES-Version) noch im Gedächtnis war ich sehr überrascht, wie deutlich smoother und schneller Teil 3 in den Kämpfen läuft. Schaden läuft per Einblendung durch, nicht mehr als Textbox - Schaden gegen mehrere Gegner ist so deutlich schneller abgehandelt. Auch die Grafik im Spiel ist deutlich verbessert.

Das Kampfsystem an sich wurde insofern modernisiert als dass Attacken auf bereits besiegte Gegner nun auf noch lebende Gegner umgeleitet werden. Das Magie-System nutzt jedoch wieder das System aus Teil 1 mit den verschiedenen Zauberleveln und "Ladungspunkten" je Level - unmoderner als Teil 2, als das mittlerweile allgegenwärtige MP-System genutzt wurde, eigentlich. Die Ladungspunkte der ersten Magie-Stufe steigen anfangs recht fix an, bei höheren Stufen dauert es jedoch ziemlich lange, sodass Magie unter dem Strich auch in diesem Teil sehr schwach ist, da man deutlich mehr Ladungspunkte bräuchte als man hat, würde man die Magier wirklich als aktive Spellcaster gebrauchen wollen. Erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass Äther/Elixiere extrem selten zu finden und nicht zu kaufen sind sowie dass die Statusheilzauber speziell des Weißmagiers nicht einmal 100% Genauigkeit besitzen. Für den Versuch einen vergifteten Charakter zu heilen auch noch eine der wertvollen Ladungen umsonst auszugeben ist nervig. So ist Magie maximal eine gelegentliche Ergänzung und die Magier insgesamt deutlich schwächer als Melee-Charaktere, die eben dauerhaft ohne Beschränkung angreifen können.

Fast jedenfalls - denn das Spiel baut nette Ideen ein, wie Passagen in denen man sich in Mini- oder Frosch-Form bewegen muss und sich so aktiv mit den negativen Status-Weißmagiezaubern selbst verzaubern muss. In diesen Momenten ist Magie plötzlich überlebenswichtig. Aber auch hier macht sich die Knappheit der Punkte sehr bemerkbar - das Innere des Drachen schaffte ich mit den vorhandenen Ladungen nur mit Müh und Not.

After the Final Fantasy II disaster, it seemed wise to return to a traditional level-up system with character classes like in the first game. Only this time FF3 cranks up the latter point to never before seen levels with its new "Job" system. The main selling point of this game, instead of choosing the classes your party will be throughout the entire game, the warriors of light can now freely change between any job the player has unlocked at will, allowing for a level of customization previously unseen.

This is novel and refreshing, especially when playing the series in order, but Final Fantasy III has a habit of shoehorning the player into a specific party makeup to tackle the next challenge. The party all has to become mini to enter this dungeon? Well, everyone has to be a magic class then. This boss can only be defeated realistically by 4 Dragoons? Well, looks like the entire party is now a Dragoon. This isn't the worst thing ever since the player can just do what the game wants and get it over with, but it does bring the freedom of customization to a screeching halt.

Some of these jobs unlocked throughout the game are pure upgrades over previous jobs, Summoner is just a better Evoker for example. The 'job points' earned alongside normal experience points don't feel very impactful at all either. These issues are both understandable considering this is a trailblazing Famicom game, but certainly noticeable when compared to a later game like Final Fantasy V that improves upon the whole system massively.

The true elephant in the room with this game, however, and the real factor dragging the star rating down to the gutter, in what would otherwise be a decent game: The Crystal Tower, of course. Everything about the last ~20% of this game is a nightmare. There's no nice way to say it, the last dungeon(s) are some of the worst I've ever seen in any video game. An absolute labyrinthian slog of mind-numbing random encounters and unremarkable HP-sponge boss battles, with not a single save point throughout.

Adding insult to injury, FF3 even pulls the ol' switcheroo after supposedly defeating the main villain atop the Crystal Tower, revealing the real bad guy evil entity that was actually in control all along! The player now has to traverse yet another dungeon (still no save point), defeating 4 unnecessary bosses in each corner of the world of darkness to finally face the final boss, the infamous Cloud of Darkness. As terrible a final boss as I've ever seen, she just spams one attack, the particle beam, which hits the entire party, over and over (she'll sometimes do a weaker physical attack if you're lucky but its not to be relied on). I wish I was making this up but its seriously just a glorified stat check to see if the player has enough HP and healing to survive.

There's two secret jobs, Ninja and Sage, that are the player's best bet for defeating the Cloud of Darkness, but they're found in a separate dungeon at the bottom of the Crystal Tower, which the player could just miss completely. Even with these, the experience is still miserable, there is nothing so discouraging as dying to particle beam spam on the final boss and having to do everything all over again.

It's frustrating how badly Final Fantasy III stumbles near the finish line, because the first 75% of the game is genuinely pretty fun, there's just no getting around the ending ruining the complete package. Final dungeons are supposed to be long, supposed to be challenging, but this is an extreme I'm glad we never reached again. If you want to experience this game for yourself, play any version with quicksaving. Play the Pixel Remaster or just emulate and use save states, anything to dull the pain of The Crystal Tower. In retrospect, FF2 and FF3 are so bad its a miracle we ever made it to 4.

1.5/5.0

Amazing game and was close to being my favourite FF game but some parts did sour it.

Fun gameplay and dungeons and the class system was really fun to play with, insanely good music, a lot of fun moments.
The biggest issue is the weird difficulty spikes, generally the game is pretty solid but some parts are just weirdly stupid hard then immediately going back to fine like enemies in the splitting dungeon have higher hp than half of the enemies in the final dungeon and the final dungeon is pretty messy should have just ended the game at the Sylx tower.
still an amazing game that id recommend playing over the DS version