Everything stated in this review is my opinion.

System: Nintendo DS
Number of Players: 1
ESRB: E10
My recommended age to play this game: 12+

Total Time spent with the game: 34:57
Review Playthrough Time: 31:16:28

This review was written on November 10, 2009.

*This review does contain spoilers.*
   
With the completion of this game I have now beaten all the core Final Fantasy games except XI! I feel so proud!

I really have to hand to Final Fantasy III - it implemented many of the things we now consider standard in the Final Fantasy series: jobs, summons, moogles, and even plot elements (crystals in danger, evil that wants to become immortal, and a final boss that wants to reduce everything to nothingness). It’s really a shame that it took until 2006 for this game to be released outside of Japan because then it might be a more fondly remembered game that really made what the Final Fantasy series what it is today. Sadly, this game fell flat in many ways for my tastes, and I really like the series! I know that this was an end of cycle Famicom game that was remade for the DS. It needed a few more tweaks in my opinion.

Story:   
This story centers around four nameless warriors. Oops! I mean four orphans named Luneth, Arc, Refia, and Ingus. They have so little dialogue and so little development that they should have just remained four nameless warriors like in the original game. If you are going to put characters in the game make them characters and not transparent, one-dimensional people. Anyway, the Light Crystals are in trouble and it is up to the four “Warriors of the Light” to recover the crystals and restore balance between the Light and Dark Worlds. The story is, at its core, a longer retelling of Final Fantasy I’s tale. There are some differences but overall it’s the same deal – save the Crystals from elemental boss monsters and confront the final boss to restore order. To be fair, the script is well written and doesn’t induce many moments of “Did I really just read that? Lame.” There are a few touching moments and they revolve around two of the better conceived characters, Desch and Aria. The other NPCs are pretty light on character, but this is a 1990 Famicom game.

Game Play:
   This is a traditional turn-based RPG. You pick your commands (Fight, Magic, Guard, Item, Etc.) and watch the turn play out. The order in which the characters and monsters move is based on speed, so if you find yourself being outmaneuvered and overpowered by the enemy, it’s probably time to experiment with different jobs and/or increase your level. The jobs that you use affect what stats increase when you level up, with the Black Belt offering the highest HP growth. Early on, I found that Red Mage is the class of choice – good equipment and can use white and black magic. Once you get to the Fire Crystal (around 8 hours in), it’s time for more specialized jobs – I used 3 Black Mages and 1 White Mage for quite awhile. After the Fire Crystal, I kept a dedicated healer in the party for the rest of the adventure and switched the other 3 characters to jobs that would be effective against the upcoming monsters. For example, in the Cave of Shadows, only Dark Blades that are wielded by Dark Knights and later Ninjas will damage the monsters without them duplicating and overpowering the party.

Jobs:
   This is the first game in the series that allows the player to switch jobs. I’m not too happy to announce that most of the twenty-three jobs are pretty useless.
Here’s a tip: many monsters are weak against the different elements, so you are going to want jobs that invoke magic or allow you to equip magic inducing items. I used the Fire Staff to cast fire for free for a long time and the best part is that a White Mage can also fight using this type of equipment! 
These are the only jobs that I used during the game: Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, Red Mage, Dark Knight, Black Belt, Dragoon, Scholar, Knight, Ninja, and Devout. Since I only used the Scholar for one boss, I only really used ten out of twenty-three jobs. The player could experiment with other jobs and might be able to get by for a while, but when the difficulty ramps up you are going to want reliable jobs that have reliable skills. I did find that Dragoon is pretty useful for most of the game, but not against the final boss. I know this because my Dragoon took much more damage than the other members and was dead most of the battle. If I ever play this game again this will be my final party: Black Belt, Ninja, Summoner/Sage/Magus, and a Devout.

Difficulty:
   This game is tough. The random encounters are easy at first but become increasingly more difficult as you progress. The best way to fight back against the random encounters is to keep your levels consistent with your enemies and don’t be afraid to run away. Elixirs and Phoenix Downs are rare and you will have to run out of dungeons and back to towns with Revive Wellsprings to bring your characters back from the dead until you able to buy the Raise spell relatively late in the game. Also, the Teleport spell becomes available after you get your first boat, the Enterprise. This spell is crucial to escape from dungeons and battles when you get into a pinch, and trust me, you will.
I found the difficulty a bit unbalanced. The game is not frustrating until you go to the Temple of Time – cool name, cool music, but the encounter rate dramatically increases and the enemies’ power becomes too much for level 33. Once you train up to about level 37 or so it becomes a decent place to train, but before that, you will fall in battle if you don’t fight wisely and are at least on level 32.
There are also a couple of bosses that cleaned my clock; the first being Salamander, the boss before the Fire Crystal. Just about all the bosses can attack twice per turn and possess super attacks that can wipe out your party. They tend to fight relatively fair but there were times when I was wiped out because my healer didn’t move before the boss used his super attack again.
What makes that even more annoying is that the game has no save points at all. You save your progress on the world map and only the world map. I found the best way to do things is to run through the dungeon and collect treasure while battling to level up, warp out, heal, and save, and then go through the dungeon while running away from monsters to preserve your health (and time!) and then fight the boss. If you lose, adjust your jobs, gain a level and try again. It does help the dungeons are small, usually between 4-7 rooms in length.
What really irks me is the final area! I beat the fifth boss from the end on level 52 rather easily, but that is also the point of no return. I used the player’s guide and I knew that the final boss is on level 60 but the book failed to tell me that is the point of no return. I had to reset, train for nearly four and half hours to push myself to level 60, and then I go to beat the game. Cloud of Darkness is the final boss and it looked bleak for me on level 61. I was able to use my wits (and my Elixirs) to keep myself alive and finally beat the game. It took me nearly an hour and half to beat the four bosses in the Dark World, defeat the Cloud of Darkness, and watch the credits. It would have been a massive pain to spend an hour defeating the four bosses, losing to the Cloud of Darkness, and having to start over again. Not to mention it takes 7-10 minutes just to reach the top of Crystal Tower, which leads to the door to Dark World, when you run away from random enemies.
The difficulty is inherited from the 8-bit original and in some ways the DS version is even harder! You know the World of Darkness I was just ranting about? The Famicom version has a save point! It’s probably a double-edged sword; if the save point was there, the player could never leave to buy more supplies and it would probably take even longer to level up the party to level 60. Still, not being able to save in any dungeon and not being able to escape from the World of Darkness just leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it produces a lot of unnecessary backtracking! If you are looking for an old-school challenge, you found one.

Controls:
   The controls are simple. When not in battle the X and R buttons open the menu. A confirms an action and B cancels. When walking around hold the B button to dash and push the L button to zoom in the camera. When zoomed in you can see hidden items and switches to open paths and doors. In battle, use the control pad to cycle through your options and confirm with the A button. If you made a mistake, push the B button to cancel your command and try again. After the selecting the fourth party member’s command the turn is over, so be extra careful with whomever you put in the fourth position.

Graphics:
The opening cinematic is on par with a Square-Enix PS2 game with great animation and beautifully drawn characters and locales. The in-game graphics aren’t quite as clean. It looks a little blockier than it should.
What disappoints me is that several of the dungeons have the same color scheme and the same background set pieces. There are a variety of locations that run the Final Fantasy gamut: forests, fields, caves, volcanoes, oceans, and waters temples. My favorite location in the game is when you first arrive on the surface world. The world is covered in what looks like a deep mist and I found it relaxing for some reason (probably the music). The characters are done in chibi style – oversized heads with cute faces. Even some of the more imposing boss monsters look harmless on the world map. I’m thinking, “Can this doll even hurt me?” The monster designs in battle are much more dynamic. The colors are sharp and magic animations are pretty nice as well.
I would be amiss if I didn’t talk about the jobs – every character looks the same, yet different, for each of 23 different jobs. Luneth always has his three belts, for example. I did not feel the compulsive urge to see what every character looked like in every single job; there was just no point. The differences are minuscule at best, but the look is consistent. 

Music:
   The music is not bad by any means but after listening to every other game in the core series, this is game with the weakest soundtrack, in my opinion. There are a few tracks that stand out in my mind: Eureka, Temple of Time, Surface World when it is covered in darkness, Crystal Tower, and The World of Darkness. The tracks seem shorter than in previous two games and loop endlessly. It also hurts that same tracks are used constantly! Just about every dungeon calls upon the same theme and so do the towns. The random battle music isn’t bad, but I found myself wanting to hear something else before the game was over. The MIDI quality is also a mixed bag; most of themes sound “meh,” and the few standouts, well standout. When I first made it to the Surface World I thought, “Why doesn’t the rest of the music sound like this?”
I know I praised the opening cinematic for its great graphics, but the orchestra recording was not put on the DS card perfectly. It sounds degraded – plain and simple. Square fixed the audio problems for later games, but the opening orchestral gave the game an early strike against the music category.

SFX:
   Most of SFX are pretty generic. The basic sword swings and punching sounds are accounted for. The airship and boat sounds sound authentic but most of the rest of them are forgettable. When the monsters actually make sound (which is rare), it sounds like Pokémon. The magic sounds are ok but nothing special. Basically, the sound works but isn’t stellar.

Moments in the Adventure that I Enjoy:
   Even though I have been pretty down on this game, it does have a few memorable moments. After the demise of the Salamander, the Dwarves will give you their treasure. The dwarf guarding the treasure says something to the effect of: “Thank you! You can have our treasure now. Follow me as I do the Dwaven Moonwalk!” I don’t know if that was in script in 1990 (it could have been – Michael Jackson was very popular in Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s) or just the translators having a little fun with the dwarf walking backwards, but that was enjoyable. Another moment occurs when you play in the piano in Amur. First off, it sounds like a guitar band and not a piano but it is fun to watch the NPCs dance and then say, “Great job. Fantabulous!” This is the only Final Fantasy game I have played that has the word fantabulous in the script.

Moment in the Adventure that I Think is Odd:   
Near the end of game, the party gets trapped by a magic mirror. It is the curse of the Five Wyrms or something like that. Anyway, only five people who are pure of heart can hold back curse. It becomes a very strange situation – the party is trapped and one of NPCs shows up and says that he is going to find the five to break the curse. So, he embarks on a five minute cut scene to find these people. The chosen five all go with this total stranger blindly, which is strange enough, but two people are stranger than the rest and they are Cid’s wife and some random old guy called Gramps. Cid’s wife has no reaction as Cid leaves, and Gramps is not even a good NPC. It’s like they just ran out of NPCs to use. It was surreal moment and in a game where strange moments are expected, that took me by surprise. Why didn’t the boss just blast me while I was trapped by the curse? I would have if I was the big, bad guy. Oh well.

Problems:
   I’ve already hit on some of the problems. What I really despise about this game is all the Wi-Fi and Friend Code stuff. If you want to do everything there is to do, get ready to get onto websites and forums and begging for people to put in your friend code and asking them for theirs. The best equipment is only available after you unlock the sidequests by sending seven messages to other game owners. It would have been cool if you could unlock the stuff early by doing the friend code messaging but it all should have been unlocked automatically after you find the last crystal. I spent twenty-five minutes looking for the Master Smith and I was royally ticked off after I looked on GameFAQS and discovered that she wouldn’t appear unless I had sent seven messages over Wi-Fi.
   I spent five hours just level-grinding. I could have been a quarter of the way through Final Fantasy IV Advance in the time I spent fighting the same monsters again and again!
   When the enemy party has a group of three the graphics will slow down. It isn’t absolutely terrible, but it slows down enough for you to notice.

Parting Shots:
   You might think I hate this game but that’s not true. I try my best not to bring other games into my reviews and judge each game based on what it is, but that is really hard in this case. Final Fantasy V could just as easily be called Final Fantasy III-2. Final Fantasy V has better characters, more of the jobs have practical uses, the script and plot are more fleshed out, and less grinding is needed to win. That being said, I really don’t like FFV much either but given the choice, I would chose FFV over FFIII.

Pros: Simple adventure with clear objectives, classic Final Fantasy game play and challenge, a few good musical themes, and a happy ending

Cons: Woefully underdeveloped characters, extra stuff Wi-Fi only, overall bland music and sound, level-grinding, no save points that require the player to backtrack, and a few reused set pieces   

Score: 7/10

   I really wanted to give this game a lower score. But it isn’t broken; it’s just dated by Final Fantasy standards. This could have been an amazing game. The basic foundation is there, but I found myself more enthralled with the story the game was not telling. A thousand years before the events of the game, the people in the Light World attempted to harness the power of Light for their own purposes and it was up to the four “Warriors of the Dark” to restore order. I hope that story is eventually told one day by the Final Fantasy team. Anyway, this game could have used a few innovations that were introduced after 1990: save points, being able to buy Phoenix Downs, putting in Ethers to restore MP, and longer musical tracks. Still, it is an authentic Famicom experience and it stays true to the original game’s roots. This game is for the dedicated turn-based RPG player only and even then it may miss the mark.

Buy/Rent/Skip: Final Fantasy Fan: Buy. Everyone else: Skip.
   
Even though I personally don’t care for this game, it was interesting to see the origins of many of the Final Fantasy mainstays. The game play isn’t broken and like they say in the sports world, “It is what it is.” It is a solid title from the Famicom days that will test your nerves. Oh save points, I’m so glad you exist from now on!

Date Completed: November 10, 2009

Dated Edited: May 28, 2011