Final Fantasy III Impressions – Grindan gaem

Yeah. Yeah. This game has been out nearly two years, and despite having it in my collection for that time I never really played it until now. Being the last Final Fantasy game of the main series that I haven’t beaten yet, I guess this makes it some kind of special occasion or maybe not. Released on the DS, Final Fantasy 3 was given quite an extensive overhaul in terms of game play and graphics making it pretty hard to compare it to the original game… I assume. I never played 1 to 3 on the original NES actually. Something I should probably do someday when I feel like pulling my hair out from all the grinding.

The story is your typical early FF plot. Some teens being asked by a crystal to save the world from some kind of evil and restore balance. Of course there are some mini stories and fetch quests thrown in as you go through the game which is pretty typical too.

The main thing that I like though is the game play. This game is actually still surprisingly hard if you’re under leveled so there is still a good amount of grinding that needs to be done but even then you can pretty much die. I like how enemies and bosses utilize status effects which is something I didn’t see very often in the later games. Like, I am in the dwarf village now and the one boss there totally destroyed me because I wasn’t expecting him to cast mini on my characters, and I didn’t have the MP to heal the effects. So I died.

It was a little annoying how in the beginning of the game when you get all the characters to join you your characters can get absolutely destroyed in the first dungeon. It’s like where else can I go to level up then if I can’t even beat the guys in the first dungeon? The enemies out on the map are giving me 1 and 2 experience too. So, yeah I found out you level up in the tower in one of the towns. A side from that there really hasn’t been too much of a large gap in my levels and the enemy’s.

I love the class system. Period. Anything to do with classes in the FF series has been neat. I loved it in 5 and Tactics and to be honest the one used in FF10-2 is hellish awesome which is all it has going for it. Personally, I think the one in 3 is the weakest of them which is understandable since it did come first after all. The problem in 3 at least from what I noticed so far is that the classes have no sort of differentiation when it comes to stats. Sure my mages have a slight boost in magic and lowered attack power, and my warriors can do some good damage, but other than that everyone is 2 to 3 points apart in stat numbers. Also annoyed that everyone has relatively the same amount of HP no matter what class they are. A monk should not have the same amount of HP as white mage.

But as I continue on and level up job classes I am noticing some changes. So I guess I just need to grind job levels to really see a difference between a black mage and a warrior. At one point my black mage was doing more damage than my warrior which is why I am concerned about no class differentiation here. Another thing I am sad about is the lack of abilities a job has. Each class seems to only have just one unique ability to them which makes me less motivated to level up a class. Like in 5, you would get like a new ability for that class every job level being able to later mix and match but in 3 there really isn’t any of that.

Least they added a female character. None of this sausage fest bullshit.

Another thing I am annoyed about is how I need the help of someone else to be able to access the side quests like the onion knight class and the extra dungeon. This is just utter bullshit. I shouldn’t have to do some kind of mailing thing to a friend to access extra content in the game. What does Square Enix think? That I have friends? Friends that own this game no less?

Other than a few of the complaints above I am enjoying Final Fantasy 3 fairly well. The graphics are great and make it look very old school like despite its lack of sprites. The music is alright but I’m not very familiar with the original soundtrack to FF3 so the music isn’t all that nostalgic, but it is typical Uematsu so nothing to complain about there. I look forward to unlocking the other classes in the game as I continue along. With over 10 classes to choose from I think battles can get pretty interesting.