Final Fantasy III (DS, 2006)

The third Final Fantasy game, the last for the Famicom, came out in 1990.  It never left Japan.  The first US incarnation, a full 3D remake for the Nintendo DS, did not appear for another sixteen years.  According to the idiosyncratic rules I set for myself when I started this crazy completionist thing, this is the version I was to play.

So, needless to say, I have only a small notion of what this game would have been like upon its original release.  But here's how I see it:

The first Final Fantasy had very little flexibility in its character classes.  If players failed to create a decently balanced party, they could screw themselves over in the later stages of the game.  Final Fantasy II tried to fix this by abandoning classes altogether, and instead having each skill and attribute level up with use.  As I explained in my post on that game, the concept itself was innovative, but there were significant problems with the execution, since some skills (magic in particular) were bizarrely difficult to level up.  With Final Fantasy III, character classes were brought back, but this time, characters could switch classes at will, and the number of classes jumped to 23. And thus the job system was born, an innovation that is Final Fantasy III's true legacy.

This system, substantially tweaked for the remake, works pretty well.  The game even gets a little puzzly, forcing you to change classes to adapt to special dungeons.  For example, a couple dungeons have tiny inch-wide openings, that only allow entry after the party casts the Mini spell on itself.  Since Mini reduces physical attack and defense to 1, the only way to survive is to change everyone to a magic class and move them to the back row.  There aren't too many examples like this, but enough to keep things fresh.  Annoyingly, the game wants to discourage experimentation as well, significantly penalizing a character's stats after changing classes for up to 10 turns.  It seems to me that if the developers wanted to prevent abuse of the system, it should just limit class changes to safe areas.

So how does the story compare?  Well, in the Famicom version, you play as four (probably male) ciphers, as in FF1.  In the remake, however, the characters have default names, and even simple backstories.  The most fun thing about FF3 for me was inverting the standard RPG archetypes.  By the end of the game, the "main" character, a white-haired vagabond named Luneth, was dressed up in white, doling out healing spells.  Meanwhile the "token female" Refia had become a badass ninja, slicing up the final boss with shurikens.

(Although the characters have been substantially cute-ified.  I guess it's understood that the characters are teenagers, but seriously, the character models look like kids playing dress-up.  Even the main villain looks a wee bit adorable.  I'm not saying that's necessarily a problem.  Just don't plan on taking the game very seriously.)

The plot itself is, in this reviewer's humble opinion, fairly decent.  It is very much the standard quest across the world (FF2 was an outlier in this regard), but there are some pretty cool settings, and I do love the idea that corresponding to the "Warriors of Light" (a returning device from FF1), there are "Warriors of Darkness" that save the world when people bring too much light into the world.  Shades of FF6 there.  All of the classic summon monsters (Shiva, Ramuh, Bahamut, et. al) make their first appearance.  There are THREE distinct airships, one of which with the ability to go underwater.  The Chocobo Theme is 500% less annoying - seriously, listen to the FF2 version, and you'll know what I mean.  Finally, moogles.

So...after playing all three 8-bit Final Fantasies (only one of which on its original system), would I recommend any of them to a general gaming audience?  RPGs today have better plots and more detailed mechanics.  What's the point of playing something that does neither of those things particularly well?

To answer this question, I'll start by saying that, before this crazy retrospective, I was in a bit of an RPG rut.  Skyrim, as great as it is, failed to inspire in me the same pleasure that I had received from games like Morrowind, Legend of Dragoon, and yes, Final Fantasies VIII and IX (for some reason, I wasn't that into VII).  These three very simple JRPGs managed to rekindle my love of RPGs, for no other reason than that they forced me to rely on my sense of adventure and strong imagination.

So for anyone out there like me who still gets a little excited about sending four under-aged warriors on a quest to save the world, yes, dust off that NES, and give Final Fantasy a try.  I really do think it's worth it.