Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster
Mar. 6th, 2024 06:33 pm
There was a small trend on the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese equivalent, the Famicom) where the second installment of a game would alter the first game's formula only to return to and improve upon the first game's base. This could be seen with Castlevania, Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, and of course Final Fantasy. In this case, the level-up system of the second game has returned to something similar to the first game, along with being able to choose a definitive class for each of your characters. The twist in Final Fantasy III is that now you could change those classes on a whim with the introduction of the job system. This, coupled with a map fully three times the size of the previous games, makes this a far more robust experience than Final Fantasy I and II and makes the fact that those two games were released on a single cartridge while Final Fantasy III was given a 3DS remake make more sense.
There were aspects of this game I enjoyed a lot more than the previous games, with more to explore and NPCs which were more fully realized. There's even brief cinematics littered throughout the game. This did seem to come at a cost to your protagonists and their personalities, and since the game could never be sure who you were bringing to a fight a lot of the bosses were fairly easy. There were only two instances where a certain job would be beneficial, both times heavily hinted at in the game itself. The protagonists, a group of four orphans initially called Onion Knights (and whom are given names and whatnot in the 3DS remake), also lack any motivation other than being chosen to go on this mission though the game's still enjoyable despite this. It's certainly a fuller game experience than the first two, and if you do choose to fully explore the world you'll find a lot to like and things to help you in your quest to stop the darkness from taking over the land. There was also a moment when I flew off the initial map and discovered another full map beneath it which would have blown my mind as a kid though I doubt I ever would have gotten that far.
If I had gotten that far, then there is a point when I would have just completely given up, and that's the last area of the game which is called the Dark World. The most powerful enemies in the game dwell here, and not just as one of the five bosses you have to face, but just wandering around the map. In fact, the man the game had thus far claimed was the ultimate evil and provided one of the more difficult boss fights in the game is just wandering around. You might have to fight him at any point in the Dark World, and you better hope you stocked up on whatever items you needed before you came here because once you're in the Dark World there's no escape. It's a treacherous slog of grinding and trying vainly to make some progress, any progress at all, and the only mercy is that you can save at any time in the Pixel Remaster. You couldn't do that in the original version of the game, so anyone who beat that is not someone you should mess with.
To be fair, the Dark World does get easier once you've defeated one of the four sub-bosses, as you can then use the crystal they were guarding to heal yourself indefinitely. This, coupled with the ability to turn off encounters and boost the experience you get from winning fights, gradually makes the Dark World less of a terror. You still have to contend with several enemies who can completely kill your party with one attack if you're not careful or strong enough, including the final boss who just keeps shooting your entire party with a particle beam that'll kill your entire party in three shots if you're not lucky.
In short, outside of a lack of protagonist personality and a punishing ultimate area, this game defintiely represented a step in a positive direction and showed the world what a Final Fantasy could be. Now, if they hadn't decided that part of this was an absolutely brutal final area, that would have been great but there's not a lot we can do about that now.