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| No, not that one... |
A long time ago, during my fan-boy phase of Final Fantasy, I
was one of the early members of a now all but defunct website known as
FFO. In those early years, FFO was
alive and abuzz with activity. Each game
had a forum that had numerous posters all sharing their respective knowledge,
posing challenges, asking questions, and in general getting into the minutia of
each game in the series. I haven’t
visited the site in years and when I left, I was one of the last few lurkers
(having long given up posting).
Despite the massive scope of each game in the Final Fantasy
series, a point was reached where pretty everything had been said. Every item, every minor secret, every npc,
every aspect of the games had been pretty adequately covered throughout the 6 or 7
year that FFO was active. And, like many
of the forum based sites that were started in the late-90s and early 00s, the
forums ultimately devolved into threads with titles like: ‘hottest video game
girl!!!!’ and ‘sexy cosplay pics!’
However, one game in the series was all but ignored or forgotten. Final Fantasy III had not been discussed with painful attention to the most minute detail. With the start of
Square’s re-release craze on the PS1, the west was finally given Final
Fantasies II and V. But, Final Fantasy
III never saw a PS1, Game Boy Advance, or other random system re-release. Whenever FFIII was discussed on the forums,
it was spoken about reverently, adored by the few people who had
gone through the extreme effort to either import it, or suffer through the game
not being able to read Japanese.
To those who played it, it was universally considered as one
of the series’ best. It was praised for
giving Final Fantasy its identity and being the stepping-off point for the franchise greats.
With FFIV, V, and VI all receiving Game Boy Advance, we had
hoped that FFIII was right around the corner.
We had quite a wait: Final
Fantasy III didn’t see a US release until 2008 on the Nintendo DS. And you know what?
It sucks.
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| At least the cover is more exciting than the game... |
I remember buying FFIII immediately on its release. I got about 20 hrs in (about the 80% mark)
and just… just stopped playing. FF III is boring.
Well, I finally picked the game back up, started over from
scratch, got about 20 hrs in... and almost nearly quit a second time due to shear boredom. But this time I persevered, not wanting to play that same 20 hours for a third time.
It’s hard to put my finger on why FFIII is so underwhelming. I accept that it has quite a bit to live up
to in my mind, given all the praise from the online community and being the
last of the ‘golden era’ of Final Fantasy games to make it across the Pacific
(apparently by Kayak considering how long it took). But, I don’t think that this is a case of not
living up to expectations.
Having spent considerable time dwelling on this, please accept
the following reasons for why FFIII is just plain boring:
1. It’s flat
out easy. Until the final dungeon, I was
never stuck, never got my ass handed to me by some brutal boss fight, never had
to work to make progress (with one minor exception, but we’ll get to that
later). The game never deviated from a ‘get
item or thing, talk to someone, go into cave to get new item or thing, talk to
someone else’ process and took exactly zero brain power to advance.
2. The job system is dull and lifeless: For the first time in a Final Fantasy game,
each character could be switched between the sixteen or so available job types. However, the system (while maybe innovative
at the time) is so basic that it encourages stagnation. One of my characters was a White Mage for
almost the entirety of the game, another a Dragoon, and another a Dark
Knight. The narrative tries to advise
you to alter job types at certain points by dropping hints that a certain boss
is vulnerable to a certain job class. But,
in reality this feels more like the game is trying to trick you into altering
your job types, as it is fairly easy to breeze through those same bosses with
your party unchanged.
To add to the blandness, three of the last
‘most powerful’ job types unlocked are just upgraded versions of the White, Black,
and Red Mages that can use the highest level of spells. So essentially, they aren’t really anything
new at all.
Finally, nothing earned from leveling up a
job type carries over when a character is switched to a different job. I really wanted some form of customization to
upgrade one job type with attributes from another. Had this singular item been incorporated, it
likely would have changed my entire view of the game.
3. The characters have no feet. Seriously, check it out… No feet…
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| Yarr, we be Pirates, walkin' on ar peglegs! |
4. The fact that it was a complete remake. I really wish that the game had been
presented in a similar fashion to the Game Boy Advanced versions of FFIV, V,
and VI, essentially the same game with some very minor and cursory graphical
upgrades. Instead, by completely
remaking the game with shitty 3-D… I mean modern… graphics, it creates an
expectation that the gameplay, story, and mechanics are also modern.
There are a few aspects that I liked.
1. Some of the job classes were creative and I wish
they had carried over to the other job-based Final Fantasies (V, Tactics,
etc). It would have been cool to see
some of the more unusual jobs expanded on in later games.
2. The easiness of the game vanishes in the Final
Dungeon and there is a pretty steep learning curve. I very much enjoyed that the four sub-bosses
prior to the final boss pose legitimate challenges and are optional. The final boss’ difficulty decreases with the
defeat of each sub-boss, which is a cool little feature that is pretty novel. The end boss herself was fairly difficult, and
with no save feature within the Final Dungeon, defeat meant losing all
progress, items, and exp gained throughout the dungeon.
This type of difficulty has long since
vanished in modern games due to the over-abundance of checkpoints and respawns.
It is really a shame that Final Fantasy III wasn’t just a
bit more engaging. I could see a whole
series of challenges players could undertake to test their gaming skill: an all-Scholar party, for example. Unfortunately, the lackluster presentation,
uninteresting plot, and mysterious absence of everyone’s feet, precludes any
replayability whatsoever.
