User blog:Codebreaker 2100/Code's Game Reviews 1 - Final Fantasy 3

Welcome to Code's Game Reviews, guys. Comment your thoughts down below! Now, to the game.

Today, we've got Final Fantasy 3. Oh, you've never played Final Fantasy 3? You've only played 15, or 23, or whatever number they're on now. If you go to this website, you'll be able to play one of the best retro RPGs of all time, aside from Chrono Trigger. We'll be talking about the NES version, by the way.

The First Final Fantasy was great. The second was 'meh', at best. Now, we're talking about the third, which is, in my opinion the best 2D FF game ever made. In this game, you play as 4 heroes, whose names you can pick, who are given the title "Warriors of Light" by a crystal in a cave, which also gives them the power to switch jobs from the utterly useless 'Onion Knight', to the more useful basic Final Fantasy classes: Fighter, Black Mage, White Mage, Black Belt, Red Mage. You can change the classes around whenever you like, and the menu is easy and fun to traverse, especially for the NES controls.

Throughout the game, you fight memorable bosses and enemies that leave you thinking "Where the hell did the developers get these ideas?" The answer to that is: Dungeons and Dragons. A majority of the monsters are from D&D or inspired by it. Lots of the bosses were interesting, despite the fact that they had fairly basic stories. For example, about a quarter or so through the game, you are kidnapped by a wizard called Hyne. You must traverse through his floating tree castle, defeating undead monsters along the way, to meet him in what I took to be the Captain's quarters. I then engaged in a fight with him, a fight that took a lot of strategy. Every few turns, he changes his resistance, so you have to constantly have your Scholar check his weaknesses, and if you don't, he'll almost never take any damage. Hyne was not only a difficult and fun boss to fight, he also looked awesome.

The story, while fairly basic, made sense. You are the four Warriors of Light. Find the Crystals. Kill Xande, the sorcerer who wants to release the power of the evilz because his mentor gave his other apprentices cool powers and gave Xande the great power of.. mortality. Defeat the darkness, et cetera. I find parts of it really interesting, though.

The graphics are wonderful! Especially if you like retro graphics. Final Fantasy 1 was pixel heaven already, and 2 looked even better, but 3's art was amazing, in my opinion. Just look at Hyne! He's made of little pixels, and you can understand that he's a skeleton, he's a wizard, and he's an egotistical bastard.

The difficulty of this game.. Wow. It's easily the hardest Final Fantasy game I've ever played, if not the hardest, period. This game will have you die. A lot. There are bosses that are nearly impossible without certain items - for example, Garuda is practically impossible if you're not using Dragoons with lances and the jump ability. The game doesn't tell you that. I didn't even know when I first fought Garuda. It was.. unpleasant, to say the least. While some sections are fairly easy, some had me practically sobbing that the game was unbeatable - And in some places you didn't expect! In the sewers of Amur, you might meet some Ropers. All evidence suggests that they're fairly easy, but they one-shot my knight and two-shot my mages, leaving me with a Karateka and a broken god complex. I eventually beat them.. only to fight Goldor afterwards, the boss who I was stuck on for two weeks of constant playing, because his strategy seemed to stay exactly the same every time I loaded up from my save point.

I love the job system. Really makes you want to keep playing until all your players are the Pope Sages, the strongest magical class. At the beginning, I stuck with a Fighter, Red Mage, White Mage, Black Mage. Around a fourth of my way through, I switched my Red Mage to a Karateka because they did much more damage and didn't need highly expensive Tyrving Blades to be any good. I was not disappointed! They do upwards of 400 damage per-hit around the Goldor stage of the game, and don't actually take as much damage as I thought. I also turned my Fighter into a knight, which is mostly the same except they can shield allies and look cooler. I stuck with my White and Black Mages until I unlocked Shaman and Magus, the upgraded version of those jobs, and when I finally finished Eureka, I had unlocked Sage and Ninja. Two Ninjas, two Sages. Best possible party.

So? All in all, here's my rating:

Characters - 5/10, The PCs didn't have much personality, but some of the NPCs I became pretty attached to. And then they died. Dramatically.

Story - 6/10, for an NES game, it had quite the story. A wizard gives two of his apprentices great magic, while giving the other one mortality, driving him mad? Seems intriguing.

Gameplay - 8/10, was a little stiff, since it was on the NES, but was also very good by NES standards. The character screen was very user-friendly, and the items and means of storage worked well.

Difficulty - 8.25/10, not Dark Souls, but certainly the hardest game I've ever played. Some of the monsters were brutal, and most of the bosses were nightmares. Most can one-shot you if you're on a low level, and some of the enemies are boss-hard.

Graphics - 10/10, I'm not going by realism, since this is an NES game after all, but by how well the pixel art is done for the system. The NES was mostly pixels, and this art looks simply wonderful. It's the most beautiful 2D RPG I've ever played, to be honest, and had graphics besting Final Fantasy 4's, but only because it was in the middle of an awkward transition between FF3 and FF6.

Overall rating? One of my top five games of all time. 8.5/10. Definitely work playing, and replaying to see how some different parties work. What it lacks in story, it certainly makes up for in gameplay. Post in the comments what you think! Code out.