✅Music
✅Good traversal options
✅Vast job options

➖random turn order can thwart any sort of strategy
➖Toad and Mini dungeons eating spell slots
➖Cheap fights….Salamander/Garuda….
➖Jobs are very basic
➖Job requirement as “Puzzles” instead of choice
➖Simple narrative/dialog

Game World: Final Fantasy III’s (FF3) game world is very similar to FF1 and 2, you have an overworld map, battle screen, and a walking screen. Typical in that you have a bunch of towns and dungeons on the world map. Untypical is the traversal - you are given an airship nearly right at the start, and you get a submarine later. This unlocks underwater levels, and with the airship you can fly out of the world map to be in a 2nd world map. Really cranked up the vastness on the world side of things. Towns are still the same small size though.

Narrative: I found FF3’s narrative to be simple, and not in a good way. While it's not as rudimentary as FF1, it's pretty much the same as FF2 in that there are about the same type of dialog. “You need to go here and do this!” or “You must save us Warriors of Light!”. It's just very juvenile. It's clear that Square focused on different mechanics for FF1-3 than writing an enthralling story. To make it feel even less meaningful, your characters don't even have names or backstories, just a blank slate.
I will say that I love the foundations that FF3 has brought to the series. You see things like Xande and the Crystal Tower (FF14), much of the music also appears in FF14, and the huge number of classic jobs first appeared here.

Length: This is one of the shorter FF’s. For clarity, I never finished it, tapped out after 18.3 hours after deciding for the 2nd time to retire. At least 2 hours of that time was spent grinding.

Controls: Typical old school RPG. I used a controller. Controls are normal movement and selection options.

Mechanics: Aside from my frustrations with difficulty covered below, FF3’s most unique feature to the series thus far in the original NES three is the extensive job system.
FF3 reverts on FF2’s experience system and more so expands upon FF1’s core concepts. Instead of choosing a job at the beginning you instead are able to swap jobs freely. This comes with pros and cons. A positive is the freedom in being able to choose to swap to something else at will if you don’t like the job or if your current party makeup isn’t working. The negative here is the forced effects on gameplay dungeons. You should be using a white mage anyways, but now you have to use valuable spell slots to cast mini/toad for specific dungeons. Or some fights require a specific class or you’re gonna have a bad time. There are many of these cases where the dungeons themselves are puzzles to the solution of a specific job. I think it's a cool concept in practice, but to me it's never been what FF is all about, or at least the modern versions.
Other than the massive job change aspect, FF3 mostly mimics mechanics from FF1.

Difficulty: I found FF3 to be difficult, in a cheap and frustrating way. Most of the fights you do are braindead easy and require auto attacking, but as with other NES FF installments, there are always a handful of enemies that will ruin your day in the dumbest way possible. Not sure how the devs thought it was fair that enemies literally spam AoE (area of effect - essentially hits your entire party) moves that can kill your entire party within 2-4 turns, but that's how this game works.
Salamander is the first culprit that frustrated me, so I had to spend an hour grinding more until I could kill it before the AoE overwhelmed me.
Next up was Garuda which was very annoying until you had to cheese it by swapping to a party of 3 or 4 dragoons to dodge the AoE.
Next up are the basic enemy chimera mages in the sunken cave. I found up to 3 of them in a single fight, all spamming AoE lightning moves. Dead in a single turn.
They keep coming with budget Titan, real Titan, Odin, and Leviathan…..you get the point. Really unfair. I hate it when fights come down to RNG (Do they use an auto attack YAY! Or an AoE? DEATH).


Quality: For a nearly 30 year old game on the original NES, this is a good looking pixelated remaster.

UI: The UI is very reminiscent of other NES FF’s. .

Performance: No issues with performance.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | installed on SSD

Sound Effects: Sound effects are present, not really worth discussing, just typical.

Music: FF’s always have solid music, and it's no different for FF3. There are many songs that I recognized being redone in FF14, so it's nice to have the throwback.

There are achievements, but if you follow a guide you can get them all in a single playthrough. There isn’t much reason to replay this unless you love the mechanics.

I did not enjoy FF3. I wouldn’t consider it a bad game, it just has some issues with enemies being cheap. Due to this I found it hard to want to progress with the story being so dull and the mechanics being so shallow. I quit at Garuda first, but then came back a few days later, grinded for an hour as dragoons, then beat Garuda with 3x dragoons and a white mage. I then made it all the way to Leviathan before quitting a 2nd time, this time for good.
I’m just not a fan of the constant AOE spam. This is like the only difficulty the AI has is to spam a move that hits your team and kills you all in 2-3 turns. Adding to the fact that there are no active time battles and the turn orders tend to be random, this means so many times when my white mage casting Cure didn’t go before the next AoE. There were also many fights where I would literally get ambushed and immediately die from AoE spam.

Nope, not worth it for the narrative payoff. So thus far, my rankings of FF goes:

1. FF1 https://steamcommunity.com/id/Synikx/recommended/1173770?snr=1_5_9__402
2. FF3
3. FF2 https://steamcommunity.com/id/Synikx/recommended/1173780/

You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR

fun and i enjoyed more than 2, having to change up jobs for certain boss fights was cringe but it was simple and fun, enjoyed more than the previous games but difficulty kinda bumped it down for me. great time pass tho grinding for levels

I made the same mistake as the 2nd game, make sure you track all the missable chests, locations, and enemies! I liked how many classes there were but didn't like how the game forced you to utilize certain classes special abilities sometimes. Overall a good entry!