Retro Achievement Mastery 124 - Final Fantasy 3

That’s just Firion again. Come on, Amano.

Final Fantasy 3 is the third game in the Final Fantasy series, as well as the last one on the NES, and the last one made by coding superstar Nasir. Final Fantasy 1 came out in the US, and then FF2 was GOING to get a US port, but by the time they were getting to the end of it, the SNES and FF4 were already out in Japan, so they decided to just… port FF4 instead. But this game, FF3, had no plans to be ported. It was skipped. And when they made the GBA ports years later, porting FF2 and FF5 for the first time over here in the US, they completely skipped 3. I’ve heard it’s cause Nasir’s programming was so hard to understand and he never left ANY notes, so they couldn’t even MAKE a GBA port, but it still means that FF3 was stranded in Japan until it FINALLY got a port on the DS in 2006, 16 years after the original game hit the NES. But that game is far more than the GBA remakes are, it changes the characters, adds more plot, and tries to modernize it. What was FF3 like waaay back when? And why is it so forgotten compared to those around it? Well, the most obvious reason for that is FF2 is a weird black sheep, and FF4 is one we got here in the US. But there’s also more to it. Let’s get into it.

I’ve noticed something about the Final Fantasy series, at least the early ones. Every even game is story-based, and every odd-game is more mechanics based, with a job system. FF1’s job system was much more simple, this is the first real “job system” as we know in the series. You’ve got your four characters, and as they progress in the game, they’ll gain vocations from the four crystals, which give them new classes they can swap to. Your characters, much like in 1, are pretty much blank slates. They DO talk, but never with any real personality, and most of the time the character you have in the lead is the only one doing the talking, and they all say the same things. This DOES mean at the end that the princess was flirting with the femboy in the catsuit, which is nice. Well, I say femboy. The genders of these characters are ambiguous. They get actual character in the DS port, but like I said, this is the original. They’re basically all genderfluid blobs for you to play with as you want.

The plot is simple. You are four orphans who were chosen as the Light Warriors to stop the encroaching darkness, lead by the dark wizard Xande. Xande’s master passed and left gifts for his three apprentices. To one, he gave ultimate magic. To the next, he gave the power of dreams. And to Xande, he gave mortality. Xande was not very happy about this. I don’t blame him lmfao. Everyone keeps talking about how it’s the greatest gift of all and they don’t know why Xande is acting up, like they’re fucking gaslighting him. Anyway, he is summoning darkness into this world. You see, it’s a cycle. Years ago, the Dark Warriors saved the world, because the ancient peoples were using Light Energy too much, and it caused an imbalance that almost tore apart the world. And now you’re the Light variant, stopping the darkness. Neither is neccesarily good or bad. It’s a nice idea, though it’s not explored here as well as it could be.

You basically travel around, helping people here and there. You get guest party members, though they don’t fight with you, it’s more like the guests from Earthbound. The best of these guests are The Old Men, four guys who think they’re the Light Warriors and you have to save them from some Goblins. They’re fucking amazing tbh. The story and plots aren’t anything to write home about, but I found the writing and characters more enjoyable than 2, and that’s not even the point of this game. It’s a bit more light hearted and silly, which helps.

The REAL star of the show is, in fact, that job system. There are 22 jobs, which you get dripfed throughout the game. You can swap at any time, though you have to unequip the character manually first, which is VERY annoying. Your stats and all that change on the fly as you swap, the only stats that grow and matter with the job are your health stat, but it’s not a big deal tbh. Like, mages gain less health, that kinda thing, but the variance was pretty small. There’s no real harm in experimentation and hot swapping, except for the Capacity system. As you beat enemies, you get points, used as a currency to switch. It was intimidating and I was always worried of running out, but tbh I never even came close.

As you level up, you have two levels: Your level, and your Job Level. Both increase your stats, so a level 99 person but level 1 warrior is gonna be about equal to a level 1 guy but a level 99 warrior, though there’s no way of that happening obviously. Job levels are a BIT less important than they’d seem, cause of this? There was no real reason to grind them, I found, but they’re not bad to have.

The real issue with the job system, that I found, was it’s a bit imbalanced. Some jobs are just kinda Bad. Like you can still win with them obviously, but you could do much better. Red Mage (tragic cause it’s my favorite), Geomancer, (my OTHER favorite little scrimblo), Bard, Black Belt, Monk, and kinda Evoker are all weaker than they could be. And there’s really only one reason to use Dragoon. And other jobs are good, but are DIRECTLY UPGRADED by other jobs, and thus become outdated and a waste. Warrior, Monk, White Mage, and Black Mage are entirely replaced by Knight, Black Belt, Devout, and Magus, for example.

Also of note, the Vancian system from FF1 is back, where you get a certain number of spell casts per level, based on your job. You can heal this by sleeping or drinking elixers, but you get way WAY more spell casts than FF1. Like, 99 max instead of 9 max.

Over all, I found the system and gameplay very enjoyable, designing teams on the fly is fun. And the achievement set gave me a bunch of job related challenges. “Beat this dungeon with only these jobs” kinda stuff. This DOES mean most of the achievements were like “use jobs that don’t interact with this mechanic”. Like, there’s a boss who’s whole gimmick is supposed to interract with the Scholar class. Don’t use Scholar. Or the many dungeons that want specific jobs…

Okay, so the main flaw of this game, IMO, is its damn dungeon design. Some of the dungeons are good and fine, and they were trying a lot of interesting ideas to spice shit up, but my god… It was bad at the start, with the Mini Dungeon. A dungeon you must play through while mini. This means that all your attacks to 1 or 2 damage. You have to use spells (and I was forced to use a useless warrior in the dungeon for an achievement). That was a bit rough, especially as the boss had REALLY high magic defense, but the real problem is the back 1/5th of the game.

There’s a dungeon in this game called the Dark Cave, or something. You go in to get the Earth Horn so you can get to Xande. All of the enemies in there have an effect where if they take any physical damage, they will split into two exact copies. So you either have to use Magic, which at that point means using Black Mage, which is EXTREMELY outclassed by this point, or the Magic Knight, who’s attacks don’t cause the split. This is basically the reason Magic Knight exists, otherwise it’s kind of a weaker Knight. Uh, guess what I couldn’t use :D

I went through the dungeon to get the items, then again without MAgic Knight, then again with ONLY Magic Knight for the “beat the boss with only water crystal vocations” achievement, then again when I realized at the end that the achievement said “DIFFERENT” vocations. All told, I went through that dungeon fully four times, five to six if you count the times I died. The dungeon is like 10 rooms long, with long, winding, hidden paths. It fucking BLOWS. Even WITH Magic Knights it was AGONY. This is, in my opinion, probably the absolute worst dungeon in the entire series.

The final dungeon isn’t really much better. Okay, picture this: You enter the dungeon, a 5-room fortress, with no way to teleport out. At the end, you exit back to the world map, so you get to save, but there’s no heals, cause this game has no tents or cabins. Then you enter the Crystal Tower, an 8 floor tower. Still no heals, still no teleport. There’s also a side dungeon hidden in this dungeon, where you get the super jobs, about 6 rooms deep, and then you have to walk back out, cause again, no teleport. There IS a heal at the end of it but like, you’re not gonna walk 6 rooms in just to heal, so you’re relying on elixers. The enemies are all strong and will stomp your ass. At the top of the tower, you fight a boss, then get sent to the Dark World, which is ANOTHER six room dungeon, still no save, still no heals. This gauntlet is infamous, and is very, VERY mean. FF3 might be the meanest Final Fantasy game of them all, I swear.

When I got to the Dark World, I thought I was kinda over leveled, I was kicking the ass of everything in Crystal Tower. I got into the Dark World, opened a box, out came Xande’s clone, who hit me with a meteor as an ambush, bringing everyone from 5000 health to 1000. Oh, I thought, that’s bad. I tried to use my strongest attacks, but Xande’s clone attacked first, with another meteor, boom, all dead. Literally could not do anything. So I grinded.

Thankfully, if you know what you’re doing, you can cheese some things. Like these Xande’s Clones, they will die to Toad. Which is very funny.

All in all, FF3 is a very interesting game, and probably my favorite of the three NES games. I had the coolest mechanics that work the best, though this idea will be greatly improved down the line. It’s a shame this was never really seen over here, because this game pushes the NES to its VERY limits. Like, you can feel the console straining against this game, it’s REALLY pushing it. Lots of ideas and QOL (though not enough lol). Oh yeah, one other thing, you remember how annoyed I was in FF2 where it kept putting people in the back row when they died? In this one, back attacks happen, and you have to directly move characters into the other row so they can actually hit, and then it doesn’t move them back, so every back attack was a “AWW FUCK I FORGOT AGAIN” moment. There’s always SOME of those in these games, I’ll never escape it.

Anyways, I put it to a vote after this if I went to FF4 or FF5… and my chat voted very hard for FF5. Which is basically FF3-2. So we’ll be talkin’ about that one soon~