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Final Fantasy III Revisited: The Tao of Final Fantasy

After a very long time digging through a rather grueling final dungeon, it’s time to mark another one of these games complete. Our heroes stand victorious over the forces of darkness, showing that light will always triumph and—actually, that’s not true. Final Fantasy III doesn’t have a terribly complex story, but there’s a bit of philosophy at the heart of it that’s a little more interesting than all that.

Like much of the game, FF3’s story is largely an elaboration on the first Final Fantasy—darkness is threatening the world, so four Light Warriors appear, guided by the crystals, to venture forth and put things right. In the first game, this followed the generic fantasy trope of light as good and darkness as evil, dividing the world up nicely into moral boxes that leave no doubt about who’s right and wrong. And while FF3 doesn’t really deal in ambiguity—your heroes remain pure and just, and the enemies are little more than sneering villains—the way the concepts of light and dark play into this is a bit more nuanced.

See, the existence of darkness itself isn’t the problem, it’s that it’s out of balance—the bad guys brought too much of it into the world, threatening to overwhelm the light. The world is sustained by the two forces existing in harmony, the game will tell you, and the Light Warriors have been chosen not to eliminate this darkness, but just to return it to its normal state. Too much light would be just as bad—and in a nice touch, the typical calamity 1000 years in the past involved just this, forcing four Dark Warriors to save the day. I’d almost rather see a game starring those guys, but they do make a brief appearance toward the end, no less heroic than your own party. The Dark Knight class, too, suggests the potential of both forces working together.

I can’t claim any expertise on Taoism, but all this seems like a pretty direct reference to yin-yang—the idea that two opposite forces such as light and darkness are not enemies, but rather integral parts of a single whole. Neither is good nor evil, and neither can nor should ever triumph over the other; nature is sustained only by their balance. The game never refers to yin-yang by name, but the way it talks about light and shadow are certainly evocative of it.

This is far from the only game—especially from Japan, which has some history with Taoism—to work such concepts into its backstory, but the way Final Fantasy III builds this into the Western fantasy tropes at the fore of the story seems less common. FF1 was heavily inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, which largely draws from European folklore by way of Tolkien, so FF3 could perhaps be seen as Square taking those borrowed ideas and putting their own stamp on them with some philosophy that’s a bit more local in origin. The result is a flavor that isn’t quite like its contemporaries—including other games in the same series—and it’s something that still makes Final Fantasy III feel a bit different even in the shadow of its descendents. Because, after all, there’s nothing wrong with the shadows.

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Seriously, the final dungeon in this game is sort of ridiculous—I spent about ten hours, a third of my total playtime, slowly exploring it and gaining enough levels to complete the game. And that means it’s definitely time for another break. When I return, this series will finally catch up with my own history: I’ll be playing Final Fantasy IV, which was (almost) my introduction to the series, and is the first game I’m covering that I actually played when it was new. This one might feel a bit different than the first three, which I’ve only ever known as retro.

In the meantime, I’d like to keep a few other things going here if I have time. In particular, I’ve been planning to repost some of my older 1UP.com stuff, going way back to 2004, so keep an eye out for those. I’m pretty busy these days so I can’t make any promises, but let’s see if I can’t get that started!

Final Fantasy III Revisited: A Growing World

There are a lot of pieces that make up an RPG, but one thing I keep coming back to how each game’s world and quest are put together, and how this affects your path through it. We’ve already seen that progress in the original Final Fantasy is largely about overcoming obstacles and discovering the world one part at a time, while the second opens its world at the beginning and instead uses its story to direct you through it. Final Fantasy III is more similar to the former than the latter, but it’s also a much bigger and more complex game—so its design borrows some techniques from both of its predecessors, and at the same time invents a few new tricks of its own.

It’s significant that in FF1, nothing you do will ever give you access to less of the world. Each vehicle you acquire and every barrier you break just lets you see and do more, which is part of what makes that game feel empowering. Final Fantasy III, though, doesn’t take such a strict stance. Overall, it does reveal more of its world as the game goes on, but it isn’t afraid to surprise you with twists that may actually limit your mobility for a time—even your airship can be taken away when you reach a new area. This does serve to reduce some of your freedom, but it also allows you to move laterally through the world, reaching new areas before the game is ready to give you the vehicle or ability that would let you visit them freely. The idea of these possibly negative plot twists popping up as you progress derives from FF2, but that game didn’t tie them into gameplay as deeply as its successor does.

Even outside those bits, though, FF3 presents many more gates to your progress than the previous games. In FF1, the airship essentially unlocked the whole world—letting you take on the last half in a more or less arbitrary order—and it didn’t even take that long to get it. FF3, though, is notable for what its airships can’t do. For what I believe is the only time in the series, not one of the vehicles in this game can freely cross mountain ranges, keeping parts of the world cordoned off in ways not possible in the previous games. This means that even with an airship, you’ll have to travel specific paths through some parts of the map, each of which may have obstacles of their own (such as high winds or magic barriers) that can require a special item or an entirely new vehicle to pass. There is no single ultimate ride as in the previous two games—FF3 has four separate airships, each with its own capabilites, and acquiring each one in turn lets you gradually explore new parts of the world.

For these reasons, FF3 can definitely feel more restrictive than its predecessors, but this does have some benefits. The big one is that the game doesn’t have to dump the whole world on you halfway through—although there are more barriers, this means the game is constantly revealing new places to explore, preserving that feeling of discovery until close to the end. And the world is actually a lot more expansive than it first seems; unlike the previous games, it spans multiple maps, which you’ll uncover through the course of your journey. Like peeling the layers of an onion, this game is always showing you something new.

This design doesn’t mean the game is entirely linear, either, as it’s the first in the series to really feature sidequests and optional areas. As you open up more of the world, you’ll sometimes find towns and dungeons that you don’t need to ever visit, but that offer valuable items, magic, or information for the dedicated explorer. This lets the game retain some of the freedom found in the second half of FF1—while there’s always one real objective that will advance the main quest, you’ll often have a few choices of where to go (or not) beforehand. This can actually be quite liberating especially after FF2, whose main journey played out in a very linear fashion despite the open world.

In Final Fantasy III, we see Square building a quest out of both terrain and story. They’re still tweaking the balance, but the flow of the later games is really beginning to take shape here. If the first two games gave us the basic components of quest design, FF3 puts them together into something more complex than either one alone. From here, the rest of the series can build and experiment in all sorts of directions… but that, of course, is a subject for another time.

Final Fantasy III Revisited: Employment Issues

Final Fantasy III’s most notable feature is almost certainly its job system, which expands on the first game’s simple class selection with over twenty jobs and the ability to switch between them throughout the game. While FF1’s less flexible system contributes to its timelessness, FF3’s additions bring plenty of depth in their own way, as you need to evaluate and adjust your party throughout the game to take on new challenges.

Compared to the job systems of later games, though, FF3’s is a little weird. The biggest oddity—I’m hesitant to call it a flaw—is that although you can change jobs whenever you want, the game doesn’t exactly encourage this. This is primarily due to the concept of job levels: In addition to regular experience levels that persist across job changes, each character can gain levels in each job individually, which plays a fairly major role in determining how powerful that job will be. The more you use a particular job, the stronger it will become, which is nice… but if you switch to a new job, it starts at level 1, and the levels you gained in that previous job will no longer help you. You can’t just master a bunch of jobs and swap them at will, either—while you gain job levels faster than experience levels, it still takes most of a normal playthrough to max out any particular job. This means that if you want a job to reach its full potential, you’re going to have to stick with it, and the later you switch to your final jobs, the less time you have to improve them. At any given moment, the most powerful job is usually whichever you’ve been using the longest—which means that changing jobs is often not really a good idea.

If that weren’t enough, the job transition system in the DS version actively punishes you for switching by lowering the character’s stats for a certain number of battles, depending on the similarity and level of the two jobs. The Famicom version instead requires you to spend special points earned from battles, which is less punitive but places a hard limit on how often you can change. Either way, it’s clear that this design is intentional—the game really doesn’t want you switching jobs very often.

This can be annoying at times, but the result is not terrible—instead of actively switching jobs for each dungeon or boss, like you might in Final Fantasy V, FF3 seems to ask you to maintain a well-rounded party throughout the game. You might think of it like a few copies of FF1 strung together—you’ll want to reorganize your party a few times through the game as you gain new jobs, but each time you need to create a party that you’re willing to take through whatever the game might throw at you. It’s a more measured take on the job system, certainly, but not necessarily a worse one.

Unfortunately, there’s still a problem. Although the mechanics of the game discourage switching jobs too often, the scenario seems to do the opposite. You’ll often come across areas or battles that clearly favor certain jobs, sometimes with NPCs outright telling you which class you need to use. Some of these are fairly clever, like a mini-size dungeon that you have to shrink yourself to enter, making physical attacks useless. Others are less so, like the boss that’s cake to a party of dragoons and incredibly difficult otherwise, conveniently located near a tower that’s full of dragoon equipment. These can be heavy-handed, and sometimes practically force you to switch to a job you might not otherwise use. Not only will this job be underleveled, but you won’t be able to gain levels in your preferred job while you’re using it. Additionally, some jobs simply become obsolete later in the game, essentially requiring you to switch and start over in something new. This is much less of a problem in the DS version than in the original release, but there’s still little reason to use, say, a Monk once the Black Belt class becomes available.

Taken on their own, these parts of the game don’t seem terrible either—by providing specific reasons try different jobs, they encourage you to explore the full range of options rather than just settling into something comfortable. It’s just too bad that this is in direct conflict with the part of the game that very much wants you to stick with your choices for as long as possible. Overall, it’s a bit of a rough start to the job system, but fortunately the fundamental concept is solid enough to keep the game fun. The system doesn’t truly shine until FF5, but this isn’t a bad way to get things started.

Final Fantasy III Revisited: A Bridge to the Future

All right! We’re now caught up on the earlier posts, and I’m fairly settled in to the new blog, so it’s time to move on to the next game in the series. This time I’m playing Final Fantasy III, because I played FF2 last time and that’s how numbers work. I’ll be going through the DS remake, but I have played the Famicom version before, so I’m planning to consider both in my posts.

Like Final Fantasy II, FF3 came west rather late—it didn’t arrive on this side of the planet until 2006, a full sixteen years after its original release, and even now it’s only available in the (significantly overhauled) remake version. It doesn’t have the negative reputation of FF2, but it also doesn’t seem to have much of a reputation at all. Maybe I’m just not as tuned into this series anymore, but the only time I ever seem to see this game mentioned is when the occasional port shows up on a new platform. Between the late release, the lack of polarizing features, and the fact that its biggest distinguishing element—the job system—was easily surpassed by FF5, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to make FF3 stand out.

As with FF2, I find myself wondering how this game would be remembered if we had played it when it was new, before the rest of the series came along and exceeded it. It isn’t hard to believe that it would be held in pretty high regard, as a late NES title that really pushed the limits of the system and set the stage for the next generation. After the experimental FF2, Final Fantasy 3 brought back a lot of what made the original game work, then polished and expanded it into something seriously impressive for its era. I could imagine this game taking its place in the 8-bit canon next to other definitive number threes, like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Castlevania 3.

The connections to the original game are fairly significant, and are perhaps part of why the game works as well as it does—rather than building things up from the beginning again, it was able to take a known success and grow from there. The jobs are back, only now there are a lot more and you can change them throughout the game to take on new challenges. The plot is similar, following nameless (in the original version) Light Warriors seeking out crystals to save the world. There’s a slightly stronger focus on the story, including a few basic narrative techniques kept from FF2, but the overall flow is much closer to the original game. As in the first game, progress through FF3 is mainly driven through discovery, as you gradually open up new parts of the world and find new places to visit and problems to solve—it’s just a much bigger and more complex world this time.

This is more than just an enhanced take on the original game, though, and this is another place where FF3 perhaps doesn’t get its due. In many ways, it set the stage for the classic SNES era of the series, moving beyond its relatively simple predecessors with some ideas that would be explored more thoroughly in the games to follow. Its many jobs don’t just have different stats and spells; they often have entirely unique combat abilities. Thieves can steal, dragoons can jump, and knights can defend other party members, all of which are a first for the series. The presentation, while still restricted to an 8-bit color palette, is often much nicer than its predecessors and at times doesn’t look too far removed from Final Fantasy IV. The dungeons are generally less mazelike and have a better sense of place. The overworld, much like in the SNES games, spans multiple maps that see a few significant changes over the course of the game. And this is even the first game to represent damage with those iconic bouncing numbers, though they were red rather than white for this outing.

Final Fantasy III could perhaps best be described as a bridge—it’s the peak of the series’s early days, but it also shows the way forward to what Final Fantasy would become. It’s a vital link in the series, but this may also be why it seems so underappreciated today: Most everything that made it special is now so fundamental that it just doesn’t stand out anymore. FF3 might be a victim of its own success, but without it Final Fantasy wouldn’t be what it is today—and hey, it’s still a pretty good game.