Another Final Fantasy game done, and another one I'd never beaten before~. Over the course of like 27 hours, I played through this in Japanese on my Famicom Mini. I will be the first to admit, I think I abused save states in this game more than any other I think I've ever played (granted I've played very very few games with save states) because this game can be a proper mean ol' bugger at times. Between that and fighting the with crappy controller on the Famicom Mini, this is definitely a game I don't see myself ever revisiting on this hardware, but it was still one I enjoyed a lot more than I didn't.
FF3 starts out with 4 unnamed orphans stumbling into a cave to find the wind crystal that vanished in a big earthquake, and it propels them into a fateful quest to save the world. I named mine after people who voted for me to play the game on the RB Slack chat (Mr. Popo, Flake, and Marurun) as well as Gunstar, since I needed a 4th member XD. FF3 doesn't have named characters, no, but they're kind of a group character unto themselves. Your party leader will talk and the characters will refer to you as the heroes of light, but there's not a great amount of characterization present. Characters are almost entirely one-dimensional and just there to move the story along, but it's an entertaining story that does the job more than well enough. Honestly, the most interesting part was seeing just how much DNA of this overall plot is present in FFIV and V (and VI to a somewhat lesser extent) with how those two games also take the idea of world crystals being taken/controlled by some otherworldly malevolent demon thing (and V of course going as far as to also link its world crystals to jobs the party gets).
More of an evolution on FF1's job choices than FFV's full blown job system, FF3 has jobs your party can switch between to give them different base stats that effectively just stack a modifier on top of their existing level stats. The only real difference your job makes upon level up is how your max HP is affected (life-long mages will have less health than life-long fighters, for example). You can only change jobs so fast though, as it uses a capacity resource that you build up as you fight things, and the longer you used a job in the past, the cheaper it is to switch back to. However, with how small your limited inventory space and how you NEED to unequip yourself before changing jobs, it's not very practical to carry around more than one or two alternate-jobs' worth of gear at any given moment.
The game's dungeon and boss design likes throwing you into situations that FORCE you to use these jobs, like a boss who constantly changes his elemental weakness so you need an otherwise nearly useless Scholar to tell his weaknesses, or a boss who does lots of horrible AOE magic so you need a lot of dragoons to do Jumps to both avoid his attacks and do big damage to him. The game always tells you when you need to do this though if you just talk to people around towns. It occasionally really sucks, especially when they throw enemies that split upon physical strike at you before you really get the job that can deal with those (dark/mystic knights), but they're generally fairly tolerable gimmicks and never make the game outright boring. It has several dungeons that force you to be mini, so only magic attacks really do anything, but at least those are proper dungeons. The worst gimmick dungeon in FF3 is better than the single gimmick dungeon in FF4 (the atrocious magnetic dungeon). It is also really odd seeing those mechanical steps BACK FF4 has compared to FF3, as this game also does a MUCH better job of automatically stacking and sorting your inventory where FF4 does nothing of the sort.
But compared to all 3 SFC games, this game is FAR harder. The lack of inter-dungeon save points or tents/cottages to heal up in them as well as sprawling late-game dungeons that are far more numerous than any of the SFC games really makes the Famicom version of FF3 something not to be taken for granted. This game easily would've taken me at least 3 or 4 more hours of grinding and redoing large segments of dungeons if I didn't have the Famicom Mini's save states to back me up, and that's a low estimate on my part. Especially the final dungeon, whose beginning has a lot of very difficult enemy encounters, and whose later half has a point-of-no-return and a huge boss rush AND really tough enemies all with no tent heals or save points, it's quite the marathon without the ability to save state. The game's pacing is often quite brisk and didn't really require any grinding on my part, but running from battles is so difficult (and dangerous as it means you take colossal defense penalties) as well as how frequent and incredibly deadly back-attacks are in the late-game, if you wanna do this game as it was originally intended, you're gonna be dying and redoing a lot of stuff a LOT.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The game is fun, but it can just be SO unforgiving at points that it's really hard to outright recommend this game in any capacity on the original hardware. I would bump it up to a Recommended if you're using save states like I did, but for the Famicom version as it was originally played, this game is just way too brutal for anyone who doesn't really love old RPGs and isn't afraid to grind and redo areas because of that difficulty and lack of respect for the player's time.
FF3 starts out with 4 unnamed orphans stumbling into a cave to find the wind crystal that vanished in a big earthquake, and it propels them into a fateful quest to save the world. I named mine after people who voted for me to play the game on the RB Slack chat (Mr. Popo, Flake, and Marurun) as well as Gunstar, since I needed a 4th member XD. FF3 doesn't have named characters, no, but they're kind of a group character unto themselves. Your party leader will talk and the characters will refer to you as the heroes of light, but there's not a great amount of characterization present. Characters are almost entirely one-dimensional and just there to move the story along, but it's an entertaining story that does the job more than well enough. Honestly, the most interesting part was seeing just how much DNA of this overall plot is present in FFIV and V (and VI to a somewhat lesser extent) with how those two games also take the idea of world crystals being taken/controlled by some otherworldly malevolent demon thing (and V of course going as far as to also link its world crystals to jobs the party gets).
More of an evolution on FF1's job choices than FFV's full blown job system, FF3 has jobs your party can switch between to give them different base stats that effectively just stack a modifier on top of their existing level stats. The only real difference your job makes upon level up is how your max HP is affected (life-long mages will have less health than life-long fighters, for example). You can only change jobs so fast though, as it uses a capacity resource that you build up as you fight things, and the longer you used a job in the past, the cheaper it is to switch back to. However, with how small your limited inventory space and how you NEED to unequip yourself before changing jobs, it's not very practical to carry around more than one or two alternate-jobs' worth of gear at any given moment.
The game's dungeon and boss design likes throwing you into situations that FORCE you to use these jobs, like a boss who constantly changes his elemental weakness so you need an otherwise nearly useless Scholar to tell his weaknesses, or a boss who does lots of horrible AOE magic so you need a lot of dragoons to do Jumps to both avoid his attacks and do big damage to him. The game always tells you when you need to do this though if you just talk to people around towns. It occasionally really sucks, especially when they throw enemies that split upon physical strike at you before you really get the job that can deal with those (dark/mystic knights), but they're generally fairly tolerable gimmicks and never make the game outright boring. It has several dungeons that force you to be mini, so only magic attacks really do anything, but at least those are proper dungeons. The worst gimmick dungeon in FF3 is better than the single gimmick dungeon in FF4 (the atrocious magnetic dungeon). It is also really odd seeing those mechanical steps BACK FF4 has compared to FF3, as this game also does a MUCH better job of automatically stacking and sorting your inventory where FF4 does nothing of the sort.
But compared to all 3 SFC games, this game is FAR harder. The lack of inter-dungeon save points or tents/cottages to heal up in them as well as sprawling late-game dungeons that are far more numerous than any of the SFC games really makes the Famicom version of FF3 something not to be taken for granted. This game easily would've taken me at least 3 or 4 more hours of grinding and redoing large segments of dungeons if I didn't have the Famicom Mini's save states to back me up, and that's a low estimate on my part. Especially the final dungeon, whose beginning has a lot of very difficult enemy encounters, and whose later half has a point-of-no-return and a huge boss rush AND really tough enemies all with no tent heals or save points, it's quite the marathon without the ability to save state. The game's pacing is often quite brisk and didn't really require any grinding on my part, but running from battles is so difficult (and dangerous as it means you take colossal defense penalties) as well as how frequent and incredibly deadly back-attacks are in the late-game, if you wanna do this game as it was originally intended, you're gonna be dying and redoing a lot of stuff a LOT.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The game is fun, but it can just be SO unforgiving at points that it's really hard to outright recommend this game in any capacity on the original hardware. I would bump it up to a Recommended if you're using save states like I did, but for the Famicom version as it was originally played, this game is just way too brutal for anyone who doesn't really love old RPGs and isn't afraid to grind and redo areas because of that difficulty and lack of respect for the player's time.