A full remake of Final Fantasy III. Other than the full visual overhaul, one of the main draws to this release of III is the massively expanded story and writing compared to the Famicom original. Originally starring a quartet of lowly onion knights on a journey to defend the world against the destruction of magical crystals, in this version our party now have names, unique designs, and actual personalities and as such get far more chances to react and chatter about events as they happen. This is nice but not crucial, especially as the cast are largely shallow archetypes rather than actual characters - but perhaps that's fitting for a game that also fails to characterise its supporting cast or villains beyond bland tropes.

If Final Fantasy II was Square experimenting with narrative, III is the team doing the same with the gameplay. III is the first game in the franchise to feature a fully realised job system, allowing players to flip each member of the party between different classes in order to deal with changing situations and to ensure maximum tactical flexibility. I love job systems, and III's is a wonderfully solid take on the format. However, it's frustrating that some dungeons force you into or away from specific classes, robbing the player of agency. While that might be ok for some players, this combined with the dreadful storytelling is a deathblow for III to me; it works but it's hardly a shining jewel of the NES-era FInal Fantasy games.

In my run-through of the entire Final Fantasy franchise, this was the first one that was frustratingly disappointing. The original version was annoying enough by keeping resting places super limited until way later in the game, meaning you had to backtrack halfway across the map just to restore your HP/MP, then spend the replenished characters getting back to where you were to begin with. This remake makes that more frustrating by seemingly amping up the random encounters (one literally occurred three steps after another one while playing on PC).

This remake tries to put a bandage on the dull story by inserting actual characters into it, but they are not interesting enough to care about and tend to fall back on stereotypical tropes that were old even in 2006.

The introduction of the now-classic "Jobs System" was a cool concept, but it feels like a creative step backwards from FFII's awesome "build-your-own" characters. In this game's predecessor, you could make any character fit any role you could imagine by focusing on weapon/magic types instead of being forced to restrict your character to a singular purpose in combat.

I'd recommend the Pixel Remaster of the original FFIII over this choppy DS port.