Final Fantasy 3 Pixel Remaster
In the beginning there was the void...
Developer: SquareEnix
Publisher: SquareEnix
Genres: JRPG, Adventure
I’ll be honest, I expected very little from this game. I had, earlier in the year, made a pledge to play through all the mainline numbered Final Fantasy games up to 12, excluding 11 because I already play the other MMO, 14, but that’s beside the point.
You are an orphan. Your three best friends are orphans. Are they related to you? Nobody knows. What you do know is that cave exploration is fun and now the adults have to take you seriously.
I don’t actually know how old your little basket of Onion Knights start as, but I imagine it’s pretty young, considering that a few of the npcs in your hometown treat you like kids, and it just mentions you being an orphan under the care of the town elders, and I would guess people don’t really mention someone being an orphan when someone is an adult unless they’re trying to be a jerk. But later on it vaguely hints at a possible romance with the Princess and the Red Onion Knight. Well…we aren’t there yet, but we’ll get there soon.
Despite just being given super powers by a talking crystal in a moldy cave, the start is low stakes, and no one but the town elders believe you, with some npcs even saying you need to grow up and stop playing games.
So I change our party set up around, now that the crystal has unlocked our hidden potential, and it is here that Mikey begins his journey as a Redmage, Naf becomes a Monk, Mitchi becomes a White Mage (yay!) and Aenaes remains an Onion Knight for the foreseeable future.
This game’s Cid is a tiny little old man who lost his airship in the desert and is so grateful for your help that he continues being an awesome little old dude for the rest of the game. Its also incredibly cute how temporary party members follow behind you while you have them around.
The first point where the game starts to get a little tough is as you scale the tower of Sasune Castle to get the (optional) Wightslayer, a very powerful anti undead Red mage sword. It’s also the first point where the game makes me laugh out loud.
And then it actually shows all four sprites converge on the bed and do the little lights out jingle.
Amazing.
It didn’t really take all that much grinding early in the game, since I was doing a lot of exploration in an attempt to fill out my bestiary and get all the hidden items (which I did, by the way). The sprite changes when you get status effects are amazing, though.
The game seemed so small, and was going at such a fast pace. I had heard it was short, but this was shaping up to be shorter than I realized.
Then, the time came for Cid to upgrade our airship, allowing us to take to the skies once more, but this time we could pass over more obstacles. I decided to see what happened if I just flew east off the edge of the map, and came to my first real Wow moment in the game.
As it turns out, this tiny little world map you’ve been running around on is actually just one single floating continent hovering high above the rest of the world, which as it happens, is completely covered in a nice layer of seawater.
The game is way bigger than it originally looked, and while it gave some nice hints if you took the time to talk to the NPCs, then you’d get some clues on what you might be able to do next, like, for example, taking you submersible capable airship down below the surface near some cliffs by the city...
I wasn’t prepared for Odin. I was underleveled and struggling, and not using Dragoons, and barely, by the skin of my teeth, managed to finally beat him on the third or fourth try, severely underleveled and just too stubborn to go grind or something.
But I got him eventually. I don’t even remember if I used summoner very much at all, but I certainly didn’t use Odin much.
I massively enjoyed the Job system in the game, playing around with compositions and seeing what worked where. Bard, after getting a few levels, was actually amazing for low level easy grinds, as their Paeon is a decent little party heal that costs no MP, thus saving you a white mage’s need for mana. Viking was a fantastic tank, and against most enemies would take something like 1 damage while using provoke.
Monk, and later Black Belt, were stellar damage dealers, and with Naf and Aenaes focused on tanking and melee, it let me mess around with support classes with Mitchi and Mikey to see what they did and what kinds of skills they got.
Eventually I had done all there was to do except enter the last dungeon left, the Crystal Tower, so I spent some time exploring to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and went to go collect my last few summons, which at that point I think were just Leviathan and Bahamut.
After the struggle Odin put up (we weren’t underleveled shhhhh), I was expecting a lot from Bahamut. I mean...he’s bahamut.
One Focus, one smack from Naf (along with minimal other damage from the rest of the party but let’s be real here, we were being carried)…down he goes. Out like a light in two rounds.
Oh and Leviathan was similarly pretty easy to deal with. Nothing to write home about, really.
I was very excited to get to Crystal Tower. I wanted to see all the stuff that the FFXIV raid was based on. FFXIV has the Crystal Tower series of 24-man raids that are based very loosely on FFIII. Think teenager-writing-fanfic levels of taking parts you liked from canon and pasting them into your story. It does it quite well though! I actually very much enjoyed those raids, and were, in fact, what inspired me to play 3 in the first place!
But first! I had to check out the basement!
It was time for Eureka!
It was a fun dungeon concept. You go through and in order to get the legendary weapons being kept there, you need to defeat a boss, some of which also unlock classes, such as Scylla unlocking the absolute wrecker of anything with a pulse, Ninja. I am not exaggerating with how ungodly strong Ninja is. I spent a little time grinding down here to level up Aenaes and Naf’s ninja levels before heading up the tower proper.
It wouldn’t have taken me as long as it did if not for trying to get the bestiary and the Yellow Dragon just refusing to spawn for a long time.
Finally, it was time for Xande. Of course the big man isn’t going to just let us waltz right into his throne room, so we get trapped, and its up to an ancient wizard and our friends and loved ones we met along the way to save us from peril.
The girl is smitten.
The whole “And there was another final villain behind the other final villain the ENTIRE TIME” is such a massive Final Fantasy trope that I don’t even know which game it originated from.
But we do get that here, of course. Despite not having played the game, that little twist has been spoiled for me for a very long time because of aforementioned FFXIV raids.
Overall, was it a hard game? Aside from that Odin fight, no. No it was not. After a certain point, every battle outside of the crystal tower was a complete joke. Then once you descend Eureka, it becomes even more of a huge joke, especially once you’ve got ninja. Ninja is just far and above the single most overpowered class in this entire game, and it’s no wonder that you don’t get it until the very bottom of Eureka.
While not the deepest story out there, it’s serviceable, and leads to a very relaxed but satisfying little classic JRPG for a rainy autumn day.
I managed to 100% the game, steam achievement wise, and I’m proud of that. It was an enjoyable experience that I’ll remember for a very long time.
Review posted 2023/10/31