Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

I missed the September Casual Chat, so this month is going to have a double feature of Casual Chats to make up for it! And what I decided to do is finally talk about Final Fantasy III! This has been quite a bit of time in the making and there is a lot I want to say about this game.

For the purpose of clarity and for those who haven’t read my reviews of the first two Final Fantasy games, I am playing the Pixel Remastered version of the games, which has cleaned up the graphics and streamlined the game play a bit.

Let’s get started!

Plot and Game Play

The story of Final Fantasy III follow four orphans as they stumble into a hidden cave near their home village and they find one of the Crystals of Light that gives them a piece of their power, as they are told that they need to go to the other Crystals and do the same.

The four live on top of the floating continent, and after obtaining access to a new and improved Airship, they begin to explore the rest of the world and work to save this world from a being known as Xande, who is trying to bring chaos and darkness to the world.

The story is much simpler in this game, harkening back to the first Final Fantasy, in my opinion to the game’s detriment. While I am aware that the remakes of this game give names and personality to the characters, that isn’t what happens in this game.

What this game does have going for it is a complete revamp of the job system. Rather than being stuck to one particular job in the game, you are given a variety of jobs as the game progresses and are encouraged to change your characters job as the game goes on.

If you find that being a Warrior isn’t up to your taste, then you can make that character a Knight or a Barbarian or a Black Mage or a White Mage or whatever strikes your interest or needs at the time.

Your characters have the option to learn a variety of spells and abilities that are specific to certain classes. For example, if one of your characters is a Dragoon, then they have special access to an ability called Jump, which let’s them jump into the air for a turn and come right down to deal a good bit of damage.

Other jobs have other abilities that become necessary to use as the game goes on, particularly for certain boss fights or dungeons that need you to cast certain spells to navigate the dungeon.

Another factor to the job system is that while your character does level up normally, each job also levels up individually, meaning that if you decide to dedicate a character to a job then they have a separate level track that indicates what can be done in that job, such as cast higher spells or use higher powered abilities.

In fact one of the newer aspects of the game are Summons, which is a different branch of magic that is separate to White Magic and Black Magic and tied with the Evoker job, where you collect certain Summons in the game and can use them in combat where they can do one of three random abilities that can either do damage to your opponents, provide a bonus to your party, or some powerful super move.

Game Play Experience

This is, in my personal opinion, my current least favorite Final Fantasy game.

While there are a lot of interesting aspects the game introduces, I had a real hard time with the game overall.

First off, the characters we play are unnamed generic heroes, which worked well in the first game, but the second game introduced characters and story aspects that I really enjoyed, which to have be relegated to NPC’s was disheartening.

What also didn’t make much sense, at least to me, was that there were moments where NPC’s would join your group, but they would not participate in combat at any point. We can interact with them as we travel, and they occasionally help us by giving us hints on where to go, but they otherwise are not a factor in the game play aspect.

They have moments in the story, but they don’t really do much else but act as a way for us to have a bit of a hint on where to go and have us in a glorified escort mission.

The next thing we do need to discuss is the game’s difficulty.

This is a hard game, and a punishing game for players who don’t save often. I remember I was going up a tower, under leveled and unprepared and died, with the last save point I had access to two hours previous.

This put me off the game for months, and I generally am not that salty of a gamer. However at that point in the, I had done a bit of leveling, managing some spells and job levels, and had not been as diligent in saving as I probably should have been while also not being in the best of moods at the time so I put the game down for a bit until I was in a better mood.

I picked the game up again, grinded pretty aggressively and made sure I was prepared item wise and was able to beat the tower with some difficulty, but no major losses and plenty of saving.

Not counting that, I still had a decent amount of trouble as the game went on, even after grinding to what I thought was a decent level, especially when it came to certain jobs. The enemies, as you progress in the game, do become harder and harder, which is good generally, but at a certain point, even as you obtain the better jobs in the late game, you still feel like you are on the back foot for nearly every encounter.

The last thing I do need to mention is the job system, which is one of the major aspects of the game, has some downsides that I need to talk about, and that is that certain jobs are only effective for one encounter and not that ideal in other scenarios.

For having as expansive of a job system as this game has, some jobs only being really useful for one encounters does make it seem like they wanted to have an excuse for each player to use each job at least once just so that it didn’t just sit there being unused.

What also didn’t make much sense to me was that the best two classes were locked in the end game dungeon, where their effectiveness is hampered because while they are incredibly powerful and we get the end game gear in that dungeon, we need to spend some amount of time leveling up the job in order to get the job as effective as possible before the final boss.

Positive Points

For as much as I didn’t like about the game, there are a couple of things that I did like.

While the story is pretty bare bones, there are still a couple of interesting things about it. Desch, a character who has amnesia and is revealed to have some important ancestry, was a neat side character that had some interesting development.

Cid, who has started to become an actual recurring name and character in the series, in this version is an eccentric old man who has a sick wife that he wants to help and when she is helped has some interesting story beats that we follow as well.

There are some interesting side characters and storylines that help make the story a little more entertaining and engaging when the characters we play as are blank slates.

What was also really cool in this game was that there are multiple Airships that we gain access to. The first airship we use gets destroyed pretty quickly, but the next one we get can turn from ship to Airship and that helps us off the floating continent.

Then we later gain access to a smaller but faster ship that can travel underwater and then eventually a massive ship that can act as a sort of base where we can heal as well as buy and store things and has a limited jump ability that let’s us pass through certain areas of the map.

While the game being difficult is very much a personal aspect that I wasn’t a fan of, the game play overall was smooth and the enemies were pretty varied throughout.

The final boss wasn’t too memorable, in my opinion, but there were plenty of bosses in the game that were memorable and provided an interesting challenge in terms of difficulty, especially when dealing with the bosses in the last major dungeon of the game.

Overall Score: 6/10

This is definitely not my favorite game of the series so far, and while there were aspects that I did enjoy, there are also plenty of aspects that I was not a big fan of.

Going back to generic Heroes of Light was not the best move, and I think that if I were to play the 3D Remakes I may have a better time, because from what I can tell, some of my complaints are addressed in that version of the game and there are improved upon aspects, but that is for another time.

The job system being an important aspect of the game did vary game play, though I do think that there are some issues that could be ironed out in the future.

The next game in the series is Final Fantasy IV, which I have streamed a good chunk of and will finish sometime soon (hopefully), and there is plenty I can say about that game, but that will have to wait another day.

See you all next time!

Lali-ho!

From, J.M. Casual