Final Fantasy III feels like scaffolding in search of a better game
For the first time, the Pixel Remasters disappointed me
(I’m currently playing through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series and tracking my thoughts on the evolution of the games. Here are my pieces on FFI and FFII.)
You know how some people are afraid to start the last chapter of a book or the last episode of a TV show, knowing that once it’s over, there won’t be any more for them to enjoy fresh? I think that’s a little bit how I felt when I opened up Final Fantasy III, which marks the end of me being able to experience a classic 2D game from my favorite series for the first time. Prior to these Pixel Remaster playthroughs, I’d never picked up II or III before — so a couple weeks ago, I stood on the precipice of beginning the last classic Final Fantasy I ever would.
But there was another feeling running through me as I began FFIII — one of foreboding. A few weeks before I started my playthrough, my friend Sebastian posted this on Bluesky:
Now, Sebastian’s not just some “random hater” (lol) — he actually wrote I think my favorite bit of criticism about the whole franchise, the Final Fantasy VI entry for Boss Fight Books, which is essential reading for anyone interested in the music of Nobuo Uematsu (and which is available at that link for just $4.95 as an ebook, come on!). I trust Sebastian’s opinion on Final Fantasy pretty hard, so if he didn’t like III, I wondered if I might stumble with it, too. And unfortunately, stumble I did.
Last week, I wrote about how much it surprised me that Final Fantasy II offers such a guided, robust player experience, especially for sporting such a strange experience system. The mechanics of the game are a little opaque, but FFII is shockingly invested in giving you the tools to succeed on your own, which is not the case for a lot of NES-era adventure games or RPGs.
In contrast to FFII, Final Fantasy III could not care less about you having any idea what to do. It’s not just that it’s difficult — although it is — it’s more that the game doesn’t give any context for anything that happens to you or almost anything that you need to be doing. It has a very manic “fuck you, here’s more” energy the whole way through that I found wildly off-putting, even while I could respect what it was trying to accomplish.
Let me unpack that.
“I have no idea what’s going on” (Towelie)
Final Fantasy III opens with a quick bit of text explaining that you’re playing four orphans (once again all named by you — we’re back to having personality-less cyphers instead of broadly sketched characters) who got lost exploring a cave near their orphanage because nature’s going crazy or whatever. Immediately FFIII has me on the back foot — wait, we’re controlling a group of little kids? Just like four little tykes who lost their parents and are wandering the countryside? Do we want to unpack that at all or… (tbh I pretty much immediately regretted naming my team after the four members of KISS and not, like, a bunch of characters from musicals or something. I should have known because the sprites look young. Impish, even). So yeah, this feels weird. Are all my characters, like, seven??
Anyway, you fight a couple enemies in this first cave and then come in contact with the Wind Crystal, which bestows on you five jobs you can outfit your characters with to bestow them with certain abilities and proficiencies: warrior, monk, white mage, black mage, red mage. Now, having played FFI, I was more or less familiar with what these jobs did, but I also knew that this game was going to end up encompassing a lot more jobs (it ends up being over 20), so I thought there’d be some kind of in-game system to explain what each one basically does. That system does not exist. You’re on your own to just cycle through them figuring out what each could be for, except for a couple NPC conversations that give you hints about a few.
You know what else FFIII doesn’t give you? Any kind of in-game tutorial in your starting town. Both prior games, and many future ones, have a room or building in your home base city where a bunch of NPCs broadly explain the mechanics of the game you’re about to play. Feels like something like that would have been helpful in the most complicated game in the series so far. But I guess part of being an orphan means you aren’t privileged enough to get access to social services like that.
You might think I’m making a lot of the fact that FFIII throws you into the deep end immediately, but the thing is, for me, there was no point when it felt like I was grounded in what was happening — I never really felt like the game began! Part of it (which could be a plus, depending on what you’re looking for) is that every mission or objective you have in the game takes like 15-20 minutes, so you’re just blowing through important events super quickly. Like the third thing you need to do, about a half hour in, is get a dang airship. What?! That’s like an end of act two thing in most Final Fantasies, but you need one immediately to get out of your starting area. In short order you get five more jobs, visit other landmasses, meet strange NPCs with issues that never fully settle in — like I said, manic. I think I beat this game in 13 hours, and I barely understood what even the overall plot was besides “crystals good, bad guy exploiting their energy.” I guess it’s impressive that a game from 1990 packed so much inside, but after the rich player experience of FFII, I was just so unsteady with this whole game.
FFIII is a sketch that other games colored in
And here’s what gets me about FFIII — there are genuinely great ideas here, the game just has no interest in giving them the space they need to flourish. Mechanically, the job system is fascinating — I wish I knew what most of those jobs did! Instead, I just picked familiar stuff that seemed powerful and went with it (and I beat the final boss in one go, so I guess I did alright1). Story-wise, there’s a nugget of something really fascinating here that only gets a few sentences of development: it seems like this game takes place in a world where both light and darkness can be tyrannical entities, and in a prior age, the forces of light got too strong and scored the land with their white hot judgment, causing four Warriors of Darkness to use their powers to restore the balance. Now darkness is having its go in the cosmic dance, and your Warriors of Light — with an assist from the dark dudes — need to set things straight.
The idea that light and dark exist in balance isn’t anything new, but those brief quips the game gives about the tyranny of light needing to be beat back by Warriors of Darkness is pretty interesting trope-inverting stuff. Lucky for us, then, that that story forms the basis of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, the third expansion of the popular MMO entry into the series, which, frankly, is awesome. Shadowbringers has rightly been celebrated for its deep and surprising plot, which it constructs by putting meat on the bones of FFIII.
Mechanically, too, FFIII feels like a trial run for a later game in the series — Final Fantasy V, another job system-focused game that just knocks this one out of the water in both complexity and comprehensibility. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I’d never played V, but with that comparison in mind, it was impossible for me to see FFIII as anything but a beta test for a better gaming experience.
Not All Bad
Okay, I have to end this with a couple things I liked about Final Fantasy III, or else I’m going to feel bad for trashing a game from a series that means a lot to me — especially the last new one of these I’m ever going to play.
1) I really liked the dungeon design here — that’s a place where I think the game’s insistence on compression works in its favor. Dungeons feel expansive, with interesting maps, and yet are largely pretty tight play experiences unified around theme and design. You’re not wandering in labyrinths getting stuck in empty trap rooms like in II. This was the first game where I felt that we were seeing the style of Final Fantasy dungeon I first came to love in the 16- and 32-bit games. (Though I will say, having so many dungeons gated by needing to cast Mini or Toad on your entire party really got old.)
2) This soundtrack kicks. FFIII has my favorite soundtrack of the series to this point and after a few more listens I could see ranking it even higher than IV or V. 😯 It just has a kinetic energy that feels especially lively after the very subdued tunes of II, and the reorchestration makes this the most rock-oriented score yet. The way the snare does this snappy little gallop at the top of the victory music — man, that’s infectious! “Last Battle” rocks hard; it’s the first truly epic final boss music in the series I think. And of course there’s “Eternal Wind” (which does not seem to be on YouTube), which apparently has been called one of the best JRPG world themes of all time — gotta agree there.
The Grades So Far
I thought I would make a little spreadsheet matrix to track my feelings about the games as I play through them. Here’s where I stand on the games I’ve played so far:
~~The Plugs Section~~
My friend Steve, the artist on my Blackmore book, just launched a delightfully exacting podcast in which a maladjusted (fictional) biographer decides, while under house arrest, to record a biography of the (also fictional, including to him) Dr. Frasier Crane. We’re only one episode in but this feels like a really insightful look at a particular brand of toxic dude who insists that a piece of fiction meets him at his horrible level (nicely fulfilling my love of media that does two things with one story). Enjoy The Frasier Files most places you get podcasts!
The Kickstarter pre-launch page for my next big TTRPG publishing adventure, Rock & Roll Greatest Hits, is live now. It would really help me with the algorithms if you “followed” it (even if you don’t want to back the thing! This is a no-commitment follow!)
Mortified Chicago, the live lit/comedy show I coproduce (in association with WBEZ!), has its next show at the historic Studebaker Theater on Saturday, September 23 and it’s gonna be cool. Tickets are available now.
Which, by the way, this final boss encounter sucked. She literally just spammed one attack over and over — a group AoE spell. Every turn was the same — she AoEs, my healer restores the party’s health, everyone else uses their strongest attacks. Snooze!