How to have a balanced playthrough.

[Elyenora Westknight]

Ok, so as most everybody knows the systems in this game are just completely busted. In the first hour you get Siren, and life mage refine, which gets you 100 Curagas super easily. That alone makes the first... 2-3 discs a joke. That's just the obvious way to break the game.

A friend of mine and I quite like how weirdly broken this system is, but it certainly doesn't make for any kind of challenge. So I was thinking about how to play through the game with "normal" progression. What limits would I have to limit myself to and I have come up with a couple of rules.

1. No refining spells that you wouldn't have access to outside of refining. So no refining Tents on disc 1, no refining ara or aga spells early. Etc. Basically stick to whats available locally.

I believe most areas will be designed to get through with no prior magic. Since they have to plan for that contingency. So somewhere in a dungeon there will be curative magic, etc. It's been a long while since I've played this game all the way through, so I will see how this pans out.

2. Never spend more than two rounds of having the whole party draw magic in battle. So no more than 6 draws in a row from the whole party. I do allow one member to draw while the others attack though.

This means you just deal with however many spells you end up with. Makes things a little more dynamic. Even with this rule I still ended up with 100 sleeps in the training center though, so it's not that limiting.

3. Never purposely get into fights to grind. Only fight when going from place to place.

Since enemies generally level up with you this should keep the levels to a minimum.

What do you guys think? How would you balance the game? This isn't really a "challenge run" so much as I want to see what a sort of normal progression is like. Does the system work like this? I guess I'll see.

[Beyond]

这很好, but I'm gonna have to disagree with #3.
Just try to avoid random encounters in a whole. Try to stay level 7-9 as long as you can, with Squall at least. When random encounters do come, just draw magic (if you want) and escape the battle.

[Elyenora Westknight]

That's a one way ticket to OP town though. The whole point of this is to try and play in a more balanced and normal fashion.

[chaosbringer42]

Just play the game. Draw when you feel like it or when an enemy/boss has a magic you really want. Card when you feel like it. Other than that just play, dont try to keep squall low level, dont avoid battles or aim for them (unless you need a specific item for something).

[Elyenora Westknight]

As a chronic min maxer, without setting rules, I'm bad at "just playing". lol This system is so broken it's too tempting to just not refine a bunch of level 3 spells and trivialize most of the content.

But seriously, that's kinda what the rules force one to do. Just play. Makes certain things kinda challenging actually.

Like, I just beat the brothers, and it took me a few tries to do it. At that point unless you've been abusing the system you don't have much HP and they do a LOT of damage. But the game does give you the tools to deal with it. Float is drawable outside the dungeon and from a draw point in the dungeon itself. The brothers have protect and shell, which helps a lot. You just can't abuse desperation attacks there, because the brothers are too fast to react to and if a party member dies you're kinda screwed.

[Elyenora Westknight]

In some ways I totally agree. I'm not doing this as a "challenge" run, but instead because I'm interested in design language. I'm curious if this fits with the design of the game, and how well. If you were to patch out magic refining, or limit it until Disc 3 or whatever, would the game still work? Or is it there to fix an inherently imbalanced game that they ran out of time to tune?

I think the brokenness of the junction system is fun in some ways, but does rob a lot of enjoyment from a good RPG in others. It's so abusable you rarely have to use any kind of complex strategy. It has prevented me from enjoying a full playthrough of this game since 1999. I enjoyed aspects of it on subsequent playthroughs, but not the core game.

Maybe I'm weird in that I think of games this way sometimes, but meh.

[ooognarlyooo]

I like the challenge. FFIII has some dope characters and a great story.
yeah the junction system is easy to manipulate however, BUT i have to say this can be one of the most challenging FF if you level up haha