Going to start off strong and say FF3 is the best game in the original trilogy. An argument can be made that 1 is better if you like that the game is more simplified or you have nostalgia for the first one. But both of these clear 2 easy.
This game continues the tradition of the main party tracking down objects surrounding the 4 elements. A tradition that carries on to a majority of future titles. We are finally getting to the point where the story in FF games matter and there’s actual effort being put into it. It’s nothing astounding by any means but there’s effort being made to make you care about the story and characters. Speaking of characters they’re also fleshed out and there’s a lot of named side characters. This game even lets you talk to the guest characters after they join your party. You get a few lines of dialogue or hints about what to do next. For the first time I could also pick out a favorite character because they finally decided the characters actually have to have personalities and stuff. They don’t just exist as guideposts. For the main party I’d go with Refia and for side characters you can’t go wrong with picking Cid.
But not everything is improved with the story and characters. FF3 will still have a guest character join your party to go into the next dungeon. Then at the end of the dungeon they get killed or sacrifice themselves. It happens to almost every single person in 2 and 3. In terms of the story they probably spend days or weeks together but that doesn’t translate well to the player. You probably know them for less than 30 minutes. For this to work you need to introduce the characters earlier. When they die they play an emotional scene like you are suppose to care about this person you barely know. With it happening so often you already learn to not care about anyone that joins your party.
This game introduced the job system and I love it. It lets you make your team and play however you want. Though a downside of this being the introduction of the job system is at certain points in the game you are basically punished if you don’t have at least one member of your team a certain job. It’s like the devs wanted you to experience certain jobs so they almost force you to use them. One example is if you don’t have a dragoon during a certain boss battle the fight is basically 5x as hard. The final boss also almost requires you to have 2 certain classes. My favorite starting class was the thief. I love that they are actually useful in this game unlike FF1. Most of the time you’re better off going with another warrior but not here. The thief has a passive ability that lets you unlock certain doors. Usually you have to buy magic keys to open the doors but if you have a thief you can just do it and a lot earlier than you normally can too. In fact my strongest character was the thief who I never changed their job class until end game when I unlocked ninja. They were the first person to hit 9999 damage well before anyone else even came close to that damage. FF3 also introduced summons and there’s a lot of the classics here. They are treated like magic and a lot of them you just buy from shops, but 3 of them you actually have to track down and fight to be able to summon them.
Another first is that this was the first FF game to crash on me. It only happened once and it was after someone joined my party. I tried talking to them over and over to see all the dialogue after the 4th or 5th talk the game went to a pure white screen and froze.
The game also has unique sections that change the gameplay up a little by making you cast mini or toad on yourself to go through certain places. It help to diversify the dungeons. Though during the mini sections you have to have a magic user to do any real damage otherwise you’re better off running for every fight. Something else that’s new to 3 is that they got rid of the ability for anyone to use items that cast spells in battle like the fire rod. Now you can only use that item in battle if you can actually equip it. It does make the game more balanced and makes you use the actual items that cause magic damage instead of everyone using the infinite use stuff.
There’s a fat chocobo in the game and I love it. He acts as an item storage which is pretty useful in the original NES version but useless in the PSP game since you don’t have an item limit. You can summon it in certain places and to store items you feed him whatever you want to store. Then I guess when you want the item back he either throws it up or you just shove your hand down his throat and pull out whatever you need. Another interesting thing is the amount of airships you get. You go through them like candy. You get one it blows up, you get another one it gets shot down, etc. The final airship rocks. It has a place to rest, store items, buy anything you need. You never have to run to town to rest ever again.
There’s so many hidden pathways / items in this game it almost becomes too much at points. I mean hidden paths have hidden paths in them. I enjoy hidden things when used sparingly but this game takes it to the extreme and hides stuff / paths everywhere. In this game you can only find / rarely steal phoenix downs. You can’t buy them anywhere. So if you use all of them up early on or you don’t find them you are out of luck. You can steal some, which needs a character using the thief class and their thief level needs to be high enough to even have a chance at stealing one. Some enemies do drop them too but it’s extremely rare that happens.
Unlike FF2 I never felt overpowered in this game. I actually had to plan out my moves and use strategy instead of smashing the attack button until the fight was over. The dungeons are also fun unlike FF2. They got rid of most of the BS and made interesting dungeons…. That is until my biggest gripe with this game, the final dungeon.
The final dungeon sucks ass. It’s a 2 part dungeon, The Crystal Tower and The World of Darkness. You have to do both back to back without saving, resting, or leaving the dungeon. You have to go through the multi floor CT to fight a boss then after that you go to the WoD. Here you have 4 hard bosses to fight in opposite corners of the dungeon. You also have the 3 optional bosses you can fight. Now I say optional but they are basically mandatory. They drop ribbons that protect you from status effects. You only get 1 during the story. Without these the final boss uses Bad Breath and can turn you into a toad, sleep you, poison you, among many other things. So after all of that you can go fight the final boss. Now that’s 9 bosses in a row plus random fights with the hardest enemies without saving the game because you can’t leave the final dungeon once you start it.
My first attempt at this I lost. It was a 15 minute back and forth fight where I used every elixir I had struggling to find time to attack. That cost me 3 hours. I had to do every boss fight and both dungeons again. Before I tried again I went and grinded some exp. So far in this journey through FF history, this is the first game that I had to grind in. Everyone always talks about how grind heavy old FF / RPG games are and I always laughed because I never felt I had to grind just to beat the game. But not here. I felt if I didn’t grind some levels I would never beat the boss even though I was in the low 50s during the fight. So I ended up grinding 5 more levels and got 3 more levels while defeating all the bosses again. In total I was about 4 levels higher than the first attempt because I didn’t have as many random battles as I did during the first attempt. At this point I was around 55-56. Even then I still almost lost. The boss gets multiple attacks per round and sometimes they go before me and sometimes some of my characters go before them. Everything was going fine, it was still hard but not oppressively so. That is until near the end when the boss used a party wide attack that did over half to everyone for their first attack. If they would have done that again I would have lost and there would have been nothing I could have done. And that’s not it, if on the next turn the boss got to go first before my heal went off and used that attack it would have been game over.
This final dungeon has to be the reason why you can save in dungeons in every Final Fantasy after this one. They know what they did and how much everyone hated it.
This game continues the tradition of the main party tracking down objects surrounding the 4 elements. A tradition that carries on to a majority of future titles. We are finally getting to the point where the story in FF games matter and there’s actual effort being put into it. It’s nothing astounding by any means but there’s effort being made to make you care about the story and characters. Speaking of characters they’re also fleshed out and there’s a lot of named side characters. This game even lets you talk to the guest characters after they join your party. You get a few lines of dialogue or hints about what to do next. For the first time I could also pick out a favorite character because they finally decided the characters actually have to have personalities and stuff. They don’t just exist as guideposts. For the main party I’d go with Refia and for side characters you can’t go wrong with picking Cid.
But not everything is improved with the story and characters. FF3 will still have a guest character join your party to go into the next dungeon. Then at the end of the dungeon they get killed or sacrifice themselves. It happens to almost every single person in 2 and 3. In terms of the story they probably spend days or weeks together but that doesn’t translate well to the player. You probably know them for less than 30 minutes. For this to work you need to introduce the characters earlier. When they die they play an emotional scene like you are suppose to care about this person you barely know. With it happening so often you already learn to not care about anyone that joins your party.
This game introduced the job system and I love it. It lets you make your team and play however you want. Though a downside of this being the introduction of the job system is at certain points in the game you are basically punished if you don’t have at least one member of your team a certain job. It’s like the devs wanted you to experience certain jobs so they almost force you to use them. One example is if you don’t have a dragoon during a certain boss battle the fight is basically 5x as hard. The final boss also almost requires you to have 2 certain classes. My favorite starting class was the thief. I love that they are actually useful in this game unlike FF1. Most of the time you’re better off going with another warrior but not here. The thief has a passive ability that lets you unlock certain doors. Usually you have to buy magic keys to open the doors but if you have a thief you can just do it and a lot earlier than you normally can too. In fact my strongest character was the thief who I never changed their job class until end game when I unlocked ninja. They were the first person to hit 9999 damage well before anyone else even came close to that damage. FF3 also introduced summons and there’s a lot of the classics here. They are treated like magic and a lot of them you just buy from shops, but 3 of them you actually have to track down and fight to be able to summon them.
Another first is that this was the first FF game to crash on me. It only happened once and it was after someone joined my party. I tried talking to them over and over to see all the dialogue after the 4th or 5th talk the game went to a pure white screen and froze.
The game also has unique sections that change the gameplay up a little by making you cast mini or toad on yourself to go through certain places. It help to diversify the dungeons. Though during the mini sections you have to have a magic user to do any real damage otherwise you’re better off running for every fight. Something else that’s new to 3 is that they got rid of the ability for anyone to use items that cast spells in battle like the fire rod. Now you can only use that item in battle if you can actually equip it. It does make the game more balanced and makes you use the actual items that cause magic damage instead of everyone using the infinite use stuff.
There’s a fat chocobo in the game and I love it. He acts as an item storage which is pretty useful in the original NES version but useless in the PSP game since you don’t have an item limit. You can summon it in certain places and to store items you feed him whatever you want to store. Then I guess when you want the item back he either throws it up or you just shove your hand down his throat and pull out whatever you need. Another interesting thing is the amount of airships you get. You go through them like candy. You get one it blows up, you get another one it gets shot down, etc. The final airship rocks. It has a place to rest, store items, buy anything you need. You never have to run to town to rest ever again.
There’s so many hidden pathways / items in this game it almost becomes too much at points. I mean hidden paths have hidden paths in them. I enjoy hidden things when used sparingly but this game takes it to the extreme and hides stuff / paths everywhere. In this game you can only find / rarely steal phoenix downs. You can’t buy them anywhere. So if you use all of them up early on or you don’t find them you are out of luck. You can steal some, which needs a character using the thief class and their thief level needs to be high enough to even have a chance at stealing one. Some enemies do drop them too but it’s extremely rare that happens.
Unlike FF2 I never felt overpowered in this game. I actually had to plan out my moves and use strategy instead of smashing the attack button until the fight was over. The dungeons are also fun unlike FF2. They got rid of most of the BS and made interesting dungeons…. That is until my biggest gripe with this game, the final dungeon.
The final dungeon sucks ass. It’s a 2 part dungeon, The Crystal Tower and The World of Darkness. You have to do both back to back without saving, resting, or leaving the dungeon. You have to go through the multi floor CT to fight a boss then after that you go to the WoD. Here you have 4 hard bosses to fight in opposite corners of the dungeon. You also have the 3 optional bosses you can fight. Now I say optional but they are basically mandatory. They drop ribbons that protect you from status effects. You only get 1 during the story. Without these the final boss uses Bad Breath and can turn you into a toad, sleep you, poison you, among many other things. So after all of that you can go fight the final boss. Now that’s 9 bosses in a row plus random fights with the hardest enemies without saving the game because you can’t leave the final dungeon once you start it.
My first attempt at this I lost. It was a 15 minute back and forth fight where I used every elixir I had struggling to find time to attack. That cost me 3 hours. I had to do every boss fight and both dungeons again. Before I tried again I went and grinded some exp. So far in this journey through FF history, this is the first game that I had to grind in. Everyone always talks about how grind heavy old FF / RPG games are and I always laughed because I never felt I had to grind just to beat the game. But not here. I felt if I didn’t grind some levels I would never beat the boss even though I was in the low 50s during the fight. So I ended up grinding 5 more levels and got 3 more levels while defeating all the bosses again. In total I was about 4 levels higher than the first attempt because I didn’t have as many random battles as I did during the first attempt. At this point I was around 55-56. Even then I still almost lost. The boss gets multiple attacks per round and sometimes they go before me and sometimes some of my characters go before them. Everything was going fine, it was still hard but not oppressively so. That is until near the end when the boss used a party wide attack that did over half to everyone for their first attack. If they would have done that again I would have lost and there would have been nothing I could have done. And that’s not it, if on the next turn the boss got to go first before my heal went off and used that attack it would have been game over.
This final dungeon has to be the reason why you can save in dungeons in every Final Fantasy after this one. They know what they did and how much everyone hated it.