I don't really like the Gen 3 Kanto games, but they are, if nothing else, easy to pick up and play. Ultra Violet is basically an extension of the Gen 3 Kanto games, adding all the Pokemon from Gens 1, 2, & 3 accessible via new areas and events and removing trade evolutions and other barriers.

Which is fine in theory, but it doesn't really amount to much. A game like this makes you realize why starters are starters - among the expanded starter pool is Larvitar, a Pokemon that doesn't reach it's final evolution stage until level 55. I love Tyranitar, but for the Kanto level curve, this is completely unreasonable as only the Elite 4 have anything near this level. You could also start with Gastly, who can't hit any of the earlygame Normal types. They aren't all terrible options, but the game isn't quite tuned for them.

The other trouble is that the vast majority of the new content in the main game is on 4 Points Isle, which, for lack of a better word is very "ROM-hacky". It doesn't fit in with the rest of the world. The map is cute, but the wild area is a bit barren. The concept of an area where battling is illegal doesn't really make sense in Pokemon, and the kid mayors and set of NPCs who won't ever talk to you are just silly, as is the labyrinth. It also takes a while to get there, inaccessible until you get to Vermilion, at which point you've probably started putting somewhat of a team together.

Honestly, it's alright, but it's very much "Gen 3 Kanto with bonus content" - not really enough is immersed in the game to make it a marked improvement. It's neat, but that's about it.

I’ll start off by saying: thank god I played the Pixel Remaster first. Unlike FFI PR, which mostly kept things the same and fixed bugs, FFIII PR changed some fundamental aspects of the NES version, keeping things largely faithful in terms of vision, but altering technicalities and tedious concepts from the original. FFIII NES is a much less flexible version of the game with a strong dependence on a single stat:

Job Level. Job Level causes tons of problems in the original FFIII and actively punishes you for trying out new classes (which cost capacity to move between) by reducing your hit rates, number of hits, spell damage, spell accuracy, and other things if you’re fresh in a class. It isn’t awful in theory: build up your skills to become competent in a class. In practice, however, moving from one class to another heavily nerfs your initial abilities. Base classes from the Earth Crystal and Eureka at least have competent bases, so becoming a Devout won’t kill your healing and becoming a Ninja won’t make you miss all the time, but jobs from the first three crystals all suffer from this, with the added bonuses that skills are non-transferable, so leveling as a Red Mage and learning both Black and White magic won’t help you if you decide to change into a Black or White Mage later on.

There are also sections where you basically need particular classes (Dragoon for Saronia, Magic Knight for Cave of Shadows, magic wielding classes for every mini dungeon), and freshly reclassing into them will hamper your ability a lot. If you want to defeat Garuda, simply reclassing to Dragoon isn’t enough – you have to grind outside Saronia Castle to make your Job Level not pitiful in order to do meaningful damage to him and not simply miss on your jump attacks. Same thing with magic, which is your only real option to get through the dungeons where you’re forced to be mini (not all classes have Run, and Run can miss a lot more in this game – I suppose you could Escape with a thief, but I don’t think that’s the intended design). Being a fresh Job Level 1 Black Mage would just render your spells completely ineffective.

Speaking of dungeons, in classic final fantasy fashion, they’re all over the place. The mini dungeons are awful, as mentioned above, but the dungeon quality collapses over the course of the game. Early (non-mini) dungeons are largely good, and several of the optional dungeons are alright, if a bit small (especially compared to the nearly 10 floor Tower of Owen at the beginning of the game, why is Bahamut’s Lair just three rooms?). The endgame dungeons are insane, and heavily dependent on invisible wall mechanics, where you just kind of meander through (read: look up a map online and follow the path). Combined with a point of no return and no external healing, this pattern of dungeons getting worse and worse concludes in the World of Darkness, where you fight four bosses (of very high difficulty) who each have a room with invisible walls to get through, and then the final boss after all of that. If you go in without grinding you are going to get bodied.

It's not good! I don’t like to hamper on old games for not having quality of life that we expect from games in the 2020s, but I think there’s a genuine difference between “oh this old thing was clunky and I had to go through more menus/solve it in an esoteric way” and just straight up questionable/bad design, and I think a lot of this game’s faults fall into the latter, in a way that the pixel remaster’s “quality of life” upgrades are actually design changes. Making the game less dependent on Job Level is obvious, but Pixel Remaster making it so that interacting with the crystals full heals your party, changes the game a lot so that you’re not screwed in World of Darkness and just have to Game Over if you can’t handle the gauntlet.

And look, it's not all terrible. Some classes are better here than in the Pixel Remaster, or at the very least different. Scholar is much less terrible, other than its low stamina stat. Geomancer was actually pretty good – the 25% backfire rate wasn’t great, but the damage output when it hit was quite good for the time you got it, with one terrain spell per area. Rangers get low level white magic instead of barrage (something that came from the DS version) and make for a good backup healer. I didn’t find arrow management that annoying honestly.

I did not hate FFIII, I just found it very frustrating and the systems it builds up kind of fall apart.

When I was playing this game, one of my friends put it best. FFII is a game of “in theory...”. The devs of FFII swung hard and built a system based around levelling up your stats and skills based on what you do and use in battles. In one sentence, that doesn’t sound terrible, but in practice it’s a bit all over the place. Your characters level fast, becoming quickly powerful with high stats, as your fourth party member rotates in and out and nearly always plays a very distant fourth fiddle to your three main party members. The later characters you get join with okay stats in theory, but their weak HP, MP, and spell lists mean they have a hell of a lot of catching up to do to the point where it’s not really practical to consider them. All spells you get also start at level 1, so spells you get later in the game take effort to bring up to speed.

And that’s fine, I don’t mind an easy game, but it’s just a bit too overtuned. The encounter rate is cranked up very high and the dungeon design is rough, with many maze-like designs and dead-end rooms in practically every dungeon designed only to waste your time. The enemy encounters and bestiary are also quite odd, with tons of repeated monsters everywhere with lots of midgame enemies far overstaying their welcome. I do quite like the Key Terms system, at the very least.

Overall, it’s fine. I didn’t really hate it, but I found it very grindy (which I suppose is kind of the point) and was far too easy to really have great payoff for what I had to put into it.