Final Fantasy 3 - Exercises in grinding

[Dracos]

2006, the year Square-Enix finally unveils the latest in it's flagship Final Fantasy series, hailed by all as an experience worth having...or something.  Less importantly to most, they also finally finished porting all their games to their new system and released Final Fantasy 3 DS, a remake of the original Final Fantasy 3 never before seen in the states.  Featuring fancy 3d graphics, eight bit design sensibilities, and more grinding than the original ever had, it was a breath of ...fresh air from innovation?  Or something.  More seriously though, it did honestly have a pretty strong start if you enjoy old school games, which I do, which was a breath of fresh air from several of the 'we'll give you two hours before you do anything relevant' designs I'd been playing recently.  Unfortunately, overall it's a mediocre remake at its core, despite the remarkably pretty coat of paint.

Graphically, the game is impressive, managing pretty nice 3d graphics on the DS and generally keeping a solid aesthetic throughout.  S-E's art team did a good job on it and generally made pretty solid use  of every bit of the gpu while while keeping load times relatively small (could be smaller, but I'm greedy there).  Despite a lack of controllable camera, they more often than not designed  it so it wasn't a problem and at least I can give them the kudos that nothing truly important was in an area invisible to camera.  They even put in a 'look closely' feature to help notice things that had become less visible with the move to 3d by using a little yellow glow.  Sure, it wasn't that elegant, but it was nice, up until they totally stopped using it sometime around halfway through the game, which left this slightly awkward transition period where a relied upon tool didn't really show anything, even if there was a secret right around there.  Anyhow, imperfect, but they did a really nice job and I won't really hold it against them here.  The graphics were nice and cute and did their job well for the experience.

The sound was also quite nice, generally resulting in my volume being left on the entire time.  Particularly the end had some really nice tracks but that's not to smite on any of the good tracks early on either.  So kudos there too, good job on that remake.

The storyline deserves some strange commentary.  It feels weird, like they started  to remake it...and then decided to stop.  Then start again.  Then stop.  This leads to all kinds of awkward down the line, but did, to their credit, make a very nice start.  The start was sudden, little explanation, barely any tutorial, and right into a beginner dungeon.  Fresh off XS3's long intro sequence, this was music to my gaming ears, and starting with only one character made it very easy to get into the swing of things.  A change from the original narratively and gameplay wise  is that the first segment ends up being a few quests and storyline sequences meeting and collecting your party.  It goes by fairly quick but it means you're not overwhelmed with new folks, have time to adapt with each one, and get them as people a bit more than just a bunch of onion knights.  A good step to take for a remake.  The writing there is light, but it gives  it a sort of lighter tone that I liked and am unsure would've been captured with a more serious rewrite.  The early segments though really are the highlight as the writing quality doesn't ever really go up and less and less effort is taken to make the game world feel alive after the first three towns or make sure that narratively you understand where you should go next.  The map at these times often isn't a big help either, since usually the bigger and closer target on the map (whether island or city or whatnot) is the wrong place to go.  One of the lowest points to me was one where they got telling me what I should go to right without telling me where it might be, suddenly having the entire city begin talking about Saranoia on a dime.  Yes, I knew I was in eight bit land again, and the lack of illusion wasn't too pleasant.  The writing was pretty mediocre from that point on with the exception of the weakly written (but better than they'd been) ending segment.  It's a pity, overall, they could've done better and this isn't a remake that will stand well longterm with such.

The game design, more notably than the writing, isn't something that stands the test of time.  They revised it, but I can't help but think they made it worse and their additions are awkward indeed.  Versus the previous game, job levels have been added and made relevant.  How relevant?  Well, besides the reward items for maxing them, job levels increase the damage capabilities of classes extensively, to the point where having one job level 99 character early in the game can allow one to clean sweep through most of it until the end by sheer difference in damage dealing.  It's entirely fesiable in fact to get a fighter dishing out 16-20 hits per attack before leaving the opening set of towns.  Level 20ish characters can trump level 40ish characters through abuse of this system and it makes the question of whether it's more worthwhile to use a new class more vague when all of them have both a transition period and a job level up time needed to catch up to what the old class was doing.  This is made more awkward as the game goes on by the sheer number of classes.  I felt like I was going through DQ7 again, only instead of there being 10 levels, there was 99 per class.  This was made worse by the optimal job gaining technique being to camp 1 xp goblins.  Through a mere 99 of them, a black belt could move from dishing out a thousand damage a blow to dishing out eight thousand damage a blow without gaining.  And they give five or six new ones right at the doorway to the final level too.  These are just a mountain placed there to grind and in no way superior to the more simple class system of the original.  The game didn't have good indirect control with terrain and things, often making it fairly unclear what was the actual next place you should go or worse, making the obvious place to go wrong, thus meaning rather than a feeling of natural direction, the game gave a disorganized 'search to find which hole the peg goes in'.  Enemy difficulty was increased in the remake, somewhat to account for less enemies, more towards the end to up for the grinding, which at points got significantly irritating.  The strength level necessary to get  to the last level seemed to be incomparable to the strength level needed to go through it and beat it.  

Particularly without any save points.  

Did I mention that, on it's own line?  Because that was really asinine and the fact that you lost everything any time you died encouraged me at least to start being massively conservative.  Having to redo any level meant  I eventually stopped experimenting at all (and they did have  a system that would've been kind of fun to experiment with) and instead just built an uber tank squad that rolled over almost everything (and still nearly had folks die at the last boss, joy).   Combine this with sudden and unpredictable increases in enemy and boss  difficulty, sometimes with the two not proportionate to each other at all, made for an experience designed well to frustrate the experimenter and reward the grinding twink.  

Finally, their added content was simply designed in a way to maximize jackassery and  minimize long term usability.  For starters, to access any of it, you need to use the tacked  on (poorly tacked on) wifi services to both message npcs and other players.  Key note being other players, as you have  to send at  least  seven messages and if you don't send any, the npcs will flat  out stop sending mail.  I spent a good deal of the game wondering if I was doing something wrong as npc after npc would only reply to one mail and then stop.  I'd heard rumors you needed to send mail to other people, but I didn't realize how much it was keyed on that  until I started getting clumps of mail from the npcs with each poorly typed message I sent out after the convoluted friends  codes were worked out.  What a shitty way to utilize the wifi, and more the pity as it was clear that the concept wasn't bad and could've been utilized without the issues as a way to add more flavor to the world in a cute letter writing system.  The quests started trivial and nice, such as the save the kids one that was very cute and moved to the obnoxious 'how exactly are we supposed to get this without a faq' level.  The legendary smith, for example, requires finding her to help the princess and then finding the legendary metal from helping cid.  Fine, both reasonable, but then they have the smith vanish.  Why?  Because they're jackasses.   In fact, the smith is set to vanish until you've entered the last level and left it, in which case she appears inside one of the more annoying cities to fly to on the other side of the map in the middle of mountains, without fanfare.  If you go there beforehand, she's not there and the setup requires you to spend 5-10 minutes walking back to your airship before you do so.  But hey, the weapon is uber, so I suppose they found it fine to hide in such a manner.  Then, they have the blacksmith vanish again and begin randomly traveling, giving you special rewards if you find her with a job level 99 class.  I did this a few times but I couldn't help but wonder: "Was it really necessary?  Isn't getting a job level 99 class enough of a grind to make finding her to get the reward a pain?"  Anyhow though, most of these rewards aren't worth the bother, so I hardily suggest squelching any completionist notions and not getting them.  It's really not worth the time.  Neither is the par for the course  hidden boss: Iron Golem.  This monster appears only after certain letters somewhere  in the middle of the empty sea where you've little reason to fly at this point being that it's not along any route to anything you might want to do.  This also ends up being a lame 'walk in, giant boss appears' affair that exists solely to reward those willing to climb the mountain to level 99 with something remotely challenging to fight.  I also don't recommend bothering with it.  By and large, their additions were shoddy, even by the standards they'd set in previous ports and remakes  of their old games.  It's almost like they did it just to see if they could put it in there then any solid design plan.  Overall, the game design was very disappointing, especially given how inviting the opening sections were.

It's this in the end that really ends  up defining the experience I think as a poor remake.  Despite the beautiful work on the art and sound and the nice work reopening the story, the lackluster writing and downright grind centric game design renders something I wouldn't recommend to folks.

Dracos