Traditional RPG adventure set in a fantastical world of monsters, dungeons and epic story lines.

Story

A phenomenal earthquake shook the very foundations of the lands. It is said that four crystals of light were thus swallowed into the unknown depths of earth. The darkness then rose and cast the lands in sorrow and despair. Monsters and evil powers are growing steadily in the dark hollows of the earth – but all hope is not yet lost! Prophecies tell of brave warriors of light who will come to restore the balance in the world.
And so it came to pass that a young adventurer found an underground cavern by chance, and within that cavern was one of the crystals of light. The adventurer, named Luneth, became blessed by the crystal’s power – and that makes him one of the four warriors of light.

The Game

Final Fantasy III on Nintendo DS is a complete 3D remake of the original Final Fantasy III that was released in Japan for Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1990. As such, this is a traditional fantasy roleplaying game where you’ll be fighting monsters, talking to villagers, exploring dungeons, searching for clues, completing quests and buying weapons and armor, much like many other similar adventure games. What makes this so great though, is that it finally gives us Europeans (and Americans) the chance to play the game – the original was only released in Japan.

The adventure begins when Luneth falls into the underground cave where he soon finds the crystal of light. The game quickly introduces the player to the combat system and the underlying rule set of the game. You’ll get the chance to find some basic items, learn to equip and use them and try some battles before the real adventure begins.

Controls

The Nintendo DS touch screen allows for most aspects of the game to be controlled with the stylus, even though that’s not exactly practical. For example, the inventory and character menus become a little easier to navigate. Moving around the dungeons and towns is best done with the D-pad. During combat you can select your actions and pick your targets with the stylus, which can be nice occasionally.
There’s a camera zoom feature too, which allows you to find secrets by zooming up to objects that you want to investigate. Another good feature they have added is that you can run, although this doesn’t work on the world map where it would’ve been the most useful.
There’s no way to speed up dialogue (the fast dialogue option doesn’t do much), the combat or skip cut scenes, which stands out as a weird thing to omit in this day and age.

Content

The main story line in Final Fantasy 3 is a pretty long one. It’ll take about 30-40 hours to complete, granted that you explore the dungeons thoroughly and halt your story progress every now and then to get some extra experience by fighting monsters in random encounters.

You begin play with only Luneth as the main character, but soon enough you will meet Arc, your best friend who also joins you in the quest to set things straight in the world. Finding the two other warriors of light will eventually occur soon enough too – once you have your trusted band of adventurers you’ll really feel the strategic depth this game has when it comes to fighting battles.

The battles are turn-based and occasionally require some advanced tactics, at least further into the game. You’ll encounter hard boss fights that typically need a few tries before they go down, and generally when exploring monster filled areas, your party will need to be able to stay alive, and sustain themselves with healing items and spells.

The game is set in a fantasy world with many dangers and treasures. There are numerous different monsters, bosses, items, weapons and spells though the game. As you progress through the story you’ll unlock more and more jobs your characters can assume. Each job represents a special ability, a strength and a weakness. The different jobs that you can play in the game are as follows;

• Freelancer
• Warrior
• Monk
• White Mage
• Black Mage
• Red Mage
• Thief
• Ranger
• Knight
• Scholar
• Geomancer
• Viking
• Dragoon
• Black Belt
• Dark Knight
• Evoker
• Bard
• Magus
• Devout
• Summoner
• Sage
• Ninja

As you can tell, there is a wide array of different character types you can have in your party. You can change any character’s job at any time – but when changing jobs like this, that character will need a few battles to “get into” their new job before they can start leveling up that job.

Thanks to all these different jobs you can form and shape your party pretty much as you want. What jobs you level up will determine what general strategy you use in combat. You are free to experiment with different combinations of jobs as much as you like. Much of the enjoyment in this game relies on trying different jobs, combinations and strategies. The more you experiment though, the more monsters will you need to kill to maintain your party’s level of power. The further into the story you progress the tougher the monsters are. This means that you more or less need to have a certain character and job level to stand a fair chance against the forthcoming challenges. This is not quite as intimidating as it may sound though – you’ll quickly notice if your characters aren’t strong enough. In that case you can easily backtrack and fight random monsters and level up that way until you’re ready to move on.

Not only will you be leveling up your jobs, but also your character levels. Job levels determine how good you are at doing your jobs – for instance, your chance to success at stealing as a thief increases the better your job level is. Your character level on the other hand determines your characters basic stats, such as strength, dexterity, hit points and magic points and so on. But you need not pay this much attention because you level up jobs and character levels at the same time, in the same way – by killing monsters.

The party setup that served me well through the entire game had someone who can take a lot of damage, someone who can cast healing magic and the two remaining who focus on dealing magical and physical damage. I really enjoyed experimenting with the different jobs though, as many of them have interesting abilities.

The story takes the young adventurers through many perilous and strange places. You’ll have the chance to visit the dwarves, fly an airship, explore underwater caves, fight dragons, save a kingdom and so on. Needless to say; the story has very epic themes like the other Final Fantasy titles. There are secret treasures hidden here and there that can aid you in your journey. You’ll make new friends and at the same time prepare yourself for the greater evils and challenges of the world. If you are into these kinds of things, then you’ll enjoy every second of this game.

There seems to be some minor balance issues in the game. Using two weapons with a melee fighting job seems overpowered compared to using a weapon and a shield. Dual wielding two weapons basically doubles your attack power, and it seems that you always benefit from doing this. Some of the special abilities from the jobs seem overpowered too – the warriors ability to increase attack power at the cost of defense, for example is incredibly advantageous. The defensive abilities like the knights ‘defend’ ability isn’t even close to being as useful, and that seems a bit unbalanced.

Other jobs abilities such as the scholar who can study enemies to reveal their hit point total also stands out as a bit futile. If you want the game to be harder you could choose to play with jobs that aren’t powerful – or if you want to play the game more than once you could spice things up the second time by playing with different jobs. The difference in how combat plays will be huge.

The game will need you to fight a lot of random monster encounters – and I really see no way that this can be avoided. You need to make sure that your characters are strong enough to beat the next boss at any given time, and if you aren’t, you have to level up. Much of the play time will be spent killing monsters just to gain those precious experience points. This is pretty normal for most roleplaying games in general, so the repetitive nature of these kinds of games is an accepted fact. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, then this game might not be for you.

In this DS version of Final Fantasy 3 they added a Wi-Fi functionality that allows players send messages to friends on their friend-list and some of the NPCs in the world. Through this feature you can unlock some secret content, but we found that to be overly convoluted and thus didn’t bother. This is probably something that completionists will want to take a look at.

Graphics

The DS does a great job in rendering this game in 3D. The graphics are good albeit the use of 2D sprites in the three-dimensional space. 2D sprites are used mostly in the backgrounds and as props while the figures and the rest of the area is modeled in 3D. The monsters are nicely modeled with a low polygon count, and the animations and special effects like spells and such are also looking good. It’s arguable that the game could have looked better if it was entirely made in 2D as that eliminates the somewhat grainy look of the characters, but certainly the graphics are fully satisfying as they are. One of the strengths graphics wise is that the game is fairly varied as it portrays both forests, castles, caves, temples, ruins, underwater areas, dungeons, many different monsters and so on.

Sound

The music is orchestral and beautifully composed, entirely based on the original music from the 1990’s game. It is very appropriate for the setting and story, and builds tension and immersion at every turn – it will really take you to another time and place. It has epic themes, sad themes and everything in between.
As you will be fighting thousands of monsters throughout the game there’s always the risk that you’ll grow tired of the battle music.

Summary

Final Fantasy III is a great roleplaying game. Not the best in the series, but certainly not the worst either. This is an unforgettable adventure that I have really enjoyed from start to finish, save for perhaps some of the monster grinding that typically took place before the harder bosses. If you like any of the other Final Fantasy games you’ll instantly recognize the distinct feel of epic adventure and harsh battles here. Seeing this world rendered in 3D for the first time is a novel experience, and saving the world from evil can never get old!

Developed By: Matrix Software
Published By: Square Enix
Version Reviewed: Nintendo DS
Genre: Roleplaying
Players: 1
Also Available On: Windows PC
Released: 2007-04-04