Yeah, FF3 FC definitely isn't hard. It feels a lot more balanced than the DS version to me because you can use CP to just change your jobs without a handicap and the enemy encounters are more balanced between your party and the enemy party (plus it teaches the player about resource management). Plus it doesn't run as slow as a snail with inane camera pans that take up way too much time.
FF3 isn't even that great. It has been outclassed by multiple games, I feel.
Its mechanics and balancing/job choices certainly have been outclassed by its brother and sister in FF5 and FFX-2 since those games have had time to build on the formula that DQ/FF3 had set. I also think FF3's soundtrack is one of the best produced with the NES's NSF format. I could only imagine how the soundtrack would've turned out if the cart had a chip of its own like CV3 or Lagrange Point. I also think the game looks incredibly good, but that's mostly because of the time it was released. I'm a weirdo and I love trying to compare tilesets of certain things in each FF up to FF6 and FF3 has some of the best tilesets I've seen in a Famicom RPG of that era. The water sets look great, the colour palette used is cohesive (even moreso than FF2's... FF4's is a generational leap in terms of colour, but there are some sets I like in FF3 than FF4 even though I'm a
huge huge fan of some of the colours and tiles used in FF4 and FF5). A lot of the shading done brings a lot of the villages to life, too. It stands to-to-toe with some of the DQ games on the platform to me, but below the likes of of something like Lagrange Point.
The game has the player putting a lot of work in for some great payoffs. The airship is one of the best in the series since you get your own Fat Chocobo, vending machines/shops, and fires its cannons at enemies. Eureka might be difficult but you get some cool weapons and cool jobs out of it. There are a ton of nooks and crannies in every town with some free goodies. Some of the towns have unique gimmicks, and while I'm not a huge fan of some gimmicks in platformers, I really really appreciate them in RPGs (so if you tell me to cast small to get into a small village, I'll take you up on that offer since it's pretty neat). There are a ton of vehicles in the game too. Through sidequests, vehicles you can access, all of those explorable pathways in towns, etc. you realize the FF3 is one of the games that ended up being incredibly exploration-heavy and it's up to the player to figure out what he or she wanted to do. It's one of the reasons why we look forward to side-content in FF games, encompassing some of the side content in FF1 and FF2 and giving us more stuff to do.
It also set a lot of precedents in the series:
- We got summons for the first time
- We got Moogles for the first time
- We got the Fat Chocobo for the first time
- We got the sub for the first time (discounting the wooden barrel in FF1 that you couldn't even control)
While the story may have been the blase "save the crystals, y'all, oh and all the characters are children not teens or young adults" sorta thing, I really like to treat it like a Suikoden game and have the towns tell their stories as opposed to trying to attribute way too much to the overarching narrative. While that's important, you realize the towns themselves have stories to tell and they're really varied in terms of what sort of races they have, or what sort of vignette they might feature, etc.
I dunno. To say that FF3 might not matter in the grand scheme of the series because other games have done a lot of things that it does much better may be a little disingenuous. That sells FF3 itself short and doesn't really give it much credit for the things it
does do uniquely in the series.
I really really liked the game. Of course, maybe I'm a little biased towards it because the order in which I had played FF games was a bit dumb:
FF1
FF4
FFMQ
FF6 (dropped after 2-3 hours returned to video store because 9-year-old me didn't like it)
FF7 (PC first, PSX a year or two after)
FFT
FF8
Chocobo's Dungeon 2
Chocobo Racing
FF9
FF10
FF2 (FC)
FF5 (SFC)
FF3 (FC)
FF10-2 (OG; played Int+LM in 2008)
FFTA
FF6 (SNES; finished)
FFCC
Dirge of Cerberus
FF11 just a bit
FF12 (IZJS was played after Rev. Wings)
Crisis Core
Dissidia
FF12 Revenant Wings
FFCC: CB
FFCC: RoF
Chocobo Tales
Hikari no 4 Senshi
Chocobo's Dungeon Wii
FFTA2
Dissidia: Duodenum
The After Years on Wii (played PSP version later on)
FF13
Crystal Defenders R1
FF14 1.0 for like an hour on someone else's account and it was awful
FF13-2
LR
still playing Final Fantasy Dimensions
I think it sucks that they never bothered to put an FC-like version of it on the Wonderswan/GBA/PSP, though. That game deserves a better chance than the DS/iOS versions that people put up with now. The version of FF1 that's coming with FF Explorers is what I have in mind for an FF3 FC-like, but that isn't going to happen.
Heck, I even like FF2 a lot, but that's mostly because I like the a lot of the narrative revolved around politics and stuff. It took a few playthroughs to appreciate it, but after a while when you figure out that you should actually play the game naturally, it's pretty good and doesn't feel like a chore since the game is balanced in such a way that facilitates natural play. I really like the soundtrack too. It sounds pretty different and more solemn out of the first three games on the hardware. Kinda stuck between the Wonderswan version and the PS1 version, but it's admittedly been a while since I've played the WSC version.
