Final Fantasy III -Famicom- 8.5

August 14, 2023

I just beat Final Fantasy 3 for Famicom, but I played it on an NES cart with an English translation. FF3 is an old school jrpg about four orphans that are destined for greatness and embark on a journey to save the world and bring balance back to the dark and light. The main characters don’t really talk much, and the many npc’s don’t have much development. This is an 8bit rpg after all, so I didn’t expect too much in the way of deep narrative. But FF2 on the Famicom was still a little stronger in this department.

Despite that, I still loved exploring the globe and leveling up my characters in FF3. This entry introduces the glorious job system that was later refined in FF5. You level up your characters’ base stats conventionally by fighting enemies, but each party member can switch between an array of different jobs that have different abilities. It’s very engrossing. There are a lot of other quality of life improvements from the previous entry, such as no more “ineffective” attacks, and towns now have revive ponds to freely bring fallen characters back to life. You can also revert learned spells into items, so you don’t have to worry about not having enough room in your magic arsenal. Summon spells also make their series debut here, and the side quests to get some of them are fun.

There are still some frustrating sections, just like FF2 had. But also like FF2, there are ways of getting around them when you learn the nuances of the gameplay. The job system gives you so much freedom to customize your characters, that you should be able to get out of any difficult spot with enough grinding and experimentation. The Ancient Ruins and the Dark World sections were particularly painful, but I think Mysidia Tower in FF2 was still harder.

The soundtrack in FF3, as you can expect from the series, has some nice tunes. My one big gripe, though, is that my two favorite tracks, “Maiden of Water” and “Boundless Ocean”, were only played for a short bit around a third of the way through the game, and never heard again. I really wanted to hear them more throughout the whole playthrough. There was a lot of good music in the last few dungeons, though, so the soundtrack ends things off on a high note anyway. I’m giving FF3 an 8.5.