Final Fantasy III is a competent if hardly remarkable remake of an oft-forgotten Japanese role-playing game that could h
Presentation is colorful and detailed; Job classes provide plenty of customization and unique options.
Bad
Top screen is barely used to any worthwhile effect; sound effects are lackluster (and lacking); music is dull; spell animations are plain and uninspired; story is cookie cutter and drudging; characters have no development past their names; difficulty could have used some tuning.
You would think by now that Square Enix would have the art of remaking Final Fantasy games in the bag. Any iteration of the series that comes to mind has seen one form of a remake or another in recent years and more often than not, Square Enix’ internal studios handle the job. It comes as a surprise then that when faced with bringing the only Final Fantasy game never released in North America to those golden shores for the first time, that Square Enix would shirk the responsibility to a third party studio best known for Alundra and Alundra 2, two PlayStation title that were seen as a meager clones of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series at best, and overall very poor titles at worst. Given Matrix Software’s track record, it’s also no surprise then that Final Fantasy III for Nintendo DS suffers from a lot of the same problems that Alundra did – and that they’re unfortunately compounded by the fact that Final Fantasy III was never really a compelling title to begin with, even in its Nintendo Entertainment System glory days. Final Fantasy III is a competent if hardly remarkable remake of an oft-forgotten Japanese role-playing game that could have very well stayed forgotten without anyone really noticing.
In order to truly understand what Final Fantasy III is all about, one simply has to play through the original Final Fantasy and call it a day. The games are incredibly similar and at times, it seems like Square simply decided to take the basic concept of four characters and four crystals from the original Final Fantasy and add a few new features and call it a brand new game. The game starts with your first character – who you can name whatever you wish – falling through a hole and ending up a dark cave. After navigating through the cave and learning a few of the game’s most basic features, such as how to look for hidden switches by zooming in the camera and opening chests, you happen upon your first, who you must then defeat. After dispatching with the large critter, you meet your very first crystal. It’s here that you get a taste of just how basic the storyline in Final Fantasy III really is. None of the dialog in the game is complicated and more often than not, it simply serves as a method for the game to direct you from point A to point B. Sure, there are some side stories here and there involving the rest of the characters in your party, but they’re hardly developed to any real extent and it’s extremely easy to predict how all of these situations will end before you really get into them.
At certain points within the game, your party will be given a fifth character, who usually serves as yet another method for the game to either move the story along or help you along to wherever you’re supposed to be. The game gives you the option to talk to this character at any time you wish, which will trigger a small random cinematic scene between that character and chosen members of your party, but it’s entirely possible to make it through the game without watching any of these cinematic scenes, so they serve very little purpose in the long run and feel more tacked on than anything else. Other than these cinematic scenes that you can trigger, these character will from time to time, take over the very first turn of battle for you to let over a relatively powerful attack. They can be especially helpful during the game’s difficult boss fights, but they don’t happen very often so you really shouldn’t count on them. Finally, most of these characters serve some purpose in the storyline and once you get to a certain area, they will have served their purpose and the game will find some way to get rid of them.
As far as battles are concerned, they’re relatively more difficult than what most people are expecting from an early Final Fantasy game. Magic using classes have a set number of magic levels and each magic level only has a certain number of magic points available to it. Once the magic points for that level are all used up, you can no longer use any of the spells that are in that level – making things a lot more frustrating than they should be. Enemies hit hard, even in the early game so it’s not all that uncommon for a few of your characters to die off, even while fighting weak enemies like goblins or slime and it’s of no comfort that there’s absolutely no save points in dungeons at all. The only place in Final Fantasy III that you can make a solid save is on the world map and the only place you can heal are at magic water springs scattered throughout the world. Not every dungeon has these springs, so if you’re running low on pretty much everything late into a dungeon, you’re pretty well in a stuck situation. The good news is that battles and field control can be done entirely with the DS stylus, although in the end it doesn't add anything new to your abilities.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Final Fantasy III – and perhaps the only features that makes the whole experience worthwhile – is the game’s job system. While the game does feature traditional experience levels, you character must choose a specific job class in order to use more advanced spells and skills. For instance, a black mage can specialize in black magic like fire or thunder and sleep, and a white mage can specialize in a lot of healing spells. There’s a large variety of jobs in the game, making replays possible if you’ve got the patience to stomach the condition of the other features.
Presentation wise, Final Fantasy III isn’t that far off from the look of an original PlayStation game. The graphics are generally pixilated, yet colorful and there’s no real advanced look to either the graphics or the overall experience. On the audio side of things, the music is completely forgettable – it’s drab and it doesn’t help matters that you can disable it – and the sound effects are equally dull and grating. It’s of note that the game barely makes use of the top screen on the DS. The main uses are simply to display a map of the world when you’re navigation the world screen and to show the field map when you’re in the main menu. Both of these uses are forgettable and when they’re in use, the top screen is simply black while you play on the bottom screen.
It all boils down to the fact that Final Fantasy III is simply a forgettable experience, just as it was when it was first released for the Nintendo Entertainment System all those years ago. Sure, it’s a competent game, but it doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the crowd, which is what Final Fantasy games have always been known for doing. The basic story and lack of character development combined with the generally unbalanced difficulty and lackluster presentation delegate Final Fantasy III to passable bench.