One of the greatest JRPGs of all time. Perfect level of difficulty but nothing unfair, intense final dungeon with no save points all with memorable bosses, fun jobs and the first in the series to introduce the job system, also the first to introduce summons like bahamut and odin. This game is just great from start to end, no clue where all the hatred for it comes from besides a bunch of faggots getting filtered by the crystal tower.
It's one of the best NES RPGs alongside DQ3. That being said, it does have a lot of flaws and poor design choices.The big draw, the job system, is so poorly balanced that you have no real reason to use most of the classes unless you want to challenge yourself. The game also sticks you with the starting white mage and black mage classes until end-game, when you finally get access to the higher-tier spells, then it immediately gives you the end-game classes. Which is a common theme in FF3, namely everything being half-baked. You can explore underwater on the main world, but there's barely anything to find. They bothered to put two places on the floating island where you can use the final airship, but they didn't bother to give the floating island underwater to explore. Instead the airship just can't dive on the floating island for no apparent reason. The entire job system is made meaningless in the end-game when you get Ninja and Sage since they are that much superior to every other option. I personally thought using Mini and Toad to access small holes and water entrances was pretty fucking cool, but outside of the few parts you are required to use them to progress, the game never takes advantage of the mechanic to have some hidden treasure rooms. Any time you need to use either, you'll know about it, you'll never be rewarded for exploring around for small holes or water entrances.Honestly, FF3 really needs the FF6 T-Edition treatment, some hardcore fan to come along and flesh it out some. Improve balance, give the non-standard jobs more equipment to make them actually viable, some stuff to actually find to make exploration worthwhile, ect.
>>12720623All these complaints come from the lense of a modern player who has access to games that are more refined, you gotta appreciate this game for what it was on release. It might be unbalanced but the amount of jobs and how big the world is just blew me away, even now it is still insane how they managed to fit all this onto a tiny famicom cartridge.
>>12720675I clearly said it's one of the best RPGs on the NES alongside DQ3. It was actually the first sentence of my post. But I'm not going to pretend it was flawless on release just because I didn't play it until around 2005 or so.DQ3 had a huge world, and even did the world-within-the-world thing too, and it didn't have as nearly many as half-baked ideas as FF3 had. At worst you could say the day/night system was underused, since it was only important when the game story needed it to be so, like the Mini/Frog passageways in FF3. The rest of the time it was just an annoyance making you spend the night at an inn before you could go shopping when you reach a new town.
I think FF3 is notable for 3 things:- being able to switch class / character build up at will at any time through the menusOther games like DQ3 had class change but not like this; DQ3's class change is like an extension of the Wizardry style. Something you'll probably only do once per character as an upgrade. Being able to change your character's entire setup at will, allowing for different strategies when needed, was something different and something that would become a staple later on (for instance I consider the systems FF6-7-8 to be the next step of that design philosophy)- numbers for damage popping up on the screen next to the characters; probably the single most influential thing in the entire series- underwater explorationThat's why it may be hard to appreciate these days since its greatest strengths are things taken for granted by everyone for decades. The bane of influencial games. Though it could be worse, by comparison FF2's greatest influence on the series and on the genre was in the storytelling department; and that even fewer people realize.
>>12720603I’m a zoomer and have only played the Nintendo DS remake version of it.The sublime and verdant atmosphere of the game is so comfy and is something missing in current Square Enix games.The four Heroes of Light are very well written characters in terms of dynamic interactions/bents between them, at least better than all of the casts in FFXIII,XV, and XVI and this is coming from someone who didn’t grow up with the PS1 era games, which I have tried and hate all of them because of the obvious Nomura’s influences that had his hands on them. I dislike his hodgepodge of ideal designs into games so much.An example of this is how he created the physiognomy of that overrated female character called Tifa Whatshername, is because he loves that talentless bitch Jennifer Connelly so much.It’s no wonder he’s the director of that clustered mess of a series called Kingdom Hearts.Anyway, back to Final Fantasy, something that I noticed proliferating especially among the fans is the incorrectly theoretical assumption that the series is somehow anti-Christianity in terms of thematic narratives, which is wrong and not true all, at least not until the series switched to PlayStation brands.What I mean is that the classic pixelated Final Fantasy games on Nintendo consoles(despite all the censorship) are full of religious motifs and sanctified stories, is just that they’re not surface levels and shoveled onto your face like other RPGs.I could post all of the hidden religious thematic details that I noticed in the classic series, but then I’ll be here all day.
>>12720919How is the DS remake? I've only played the NES version and that is the only version I've stuck with, I heard the Pixel Remaster gives you way more variety with your jobs now so maybe it's worth a try.
>>12721316>pixel remasters
FF3 is fun as fuck and I like it more than FF5 in many ways in spite of FF5 technically fleshing out the job system more, its worst crime is that as this thread notes the jobs are horribly unbalanced, especially in the original release. But the adventure itself, the floating continent leading into the true world map covered in water and you discovering there's a whole other chunk to the game left, gaining the Invincible and discovering that it has an entire interior deck to it you can run around in and use for resources, and the dungeons and locations are all awesome. The entire last stretch from the Ancient's Maze to venturing to Eureka to build up your strength before finally conquering the Crystal Tower gauntlet is so fucking good.It just oozes pure classic JRPG and has none of the modern downsides to go with that which even the SNES titles would eventually introduce. I should run through it again.
>>12721359I don't know why japs make such a huge fucking deal about Aria. You have her with you for less than a fucking hour. You have Desh for like 3 and they don't give a fuck about him.
>>12720603>Perfect level of difficultyThere is unironically creatures on this planet that find jrpgs challenging. That's really something.
>>12721330Only played the FF1, 4 through 6 Pixel Remasters and they were fine, still prefer the originals.
>>12720603If this were /jrpg/, I'd trash these boring, crappy games. I like JRPGs from the 5th generation onward. Most pre-5th generation games are boring, poorly designed, and buggy.
>>12721472It's because Aria is part of such a mystical part of the game, if I had to guess. You're in uncharted enemy territory and she's your only ally who sacrifices herself to make sure the surface can be saved.Also Desh doesn't actually die, you just think he has for most of the game.
>>12721532Nobody gives a fuck about your shit tastes or your circlejerk generals, zoomshit
>>12721359I don't see the depth in the mechanics, when over half of them simply don't work.
>>12721981Literally half the spells in this game either don't work or intentionally fuck you over yet this game is still rightfully seen as a masterpiece, so I don't get this argument.
>>12720603Monster closets were aids, but the game other than that was great
FF3 is great so long as you don't go into it expecting it to be FF5FF3's jobs are more like equipment than party customization. You equip the strongest you have and stop using ones that are obsolete. In some situations you temporarily equip jobs with specialty uses.
>>12724289I saw this argument before but it doesn't justify the dogshit jobs. Also, it doesn't work on the earth crystal since you have those jobs for maybe an hour at most before you grab Sage and Ninja in Eureka. Using the "equipment" argument, it's like making an effort to get something slightly better, but the next dungeon immediately after gives you something far better.
>>12720603Absolutely none of this is true.
>>12725086You have shit tastes.>>12724289FFV made people so retarded when it comes to the Job system, they expect every game with one to function identically to it which FF3 doesn't but it actually serves in making the game more unique. Jobs in 3 are like keys to a puzzle, dungeons and bosses are most of the time a puzzle that can be solved through NPC hints or experimentation. 5 just lets you assblast everything with no real effort, even the "well 3 has bad jobs" argument falls flat because the dragoon in 5 gets molested by the dragoon in 3.
>>12724525"b-but sage and ninja!!" literally an optional dungeon that gives you strong end game jobs to make the final trek just a bit easier but even with that, people still got butthurt over the no save points in the crystal tower. You literally cannot win with these people, you can beat the final dungeon of the game in the low 50s with just the jobs from the final crystal alone, done it many times.
