This is my first Made It Through Review, a a new regular feature of my blog. I say "regular", but the point of this feature is to review a game I've played through entirely, so I can only post them when I've completed a game. When games first come out, they get a ton of reviews, but the people reviewing them have often only played for a short period -- this is good for some games (it hides that they eventually start to drag) and bad for others (a slow start can be lethal). I'm going to try to review the game as a whole.





Short and sweet: If you like Final Fantasy, it's a lesson in FF history that isn't cripplingly hard, but it doesn't have much story. Also, prepare to do quite a bit of leveling (it's too easy to call it a grind) or waste lots of time dying and fighting dungeons you've already gotten through.


Characters and Story (spoiler free)


Time to go adventuring.

FF III has storyline only slightly more complicated than the original Final Fantasy. Your party is rapidly gathered, a little team of four, with one barely defined personality for each: Luneth is something of a main character, a bold young man; his childhood companion Arc, the physically-weak magically-strong geek; Refia, a tough blacksmith's daughter who has a fear of frogs; and Ingus, your standard chivalrous knight-type. There is no real character development, but that has its pluses. No horrible JRPG angst! And the fun of naming characters after your friends without having them act ... well, out of character. More interesting characters join your party from time to time, so the game isn't devoid of story -- it's like having four silent protagonists and a single story-support character instead of the other way around.

The storyline is standard FF fare, but simplified. To say more would spoil, but familiar terms -- crystals, shining again, floating continents, the Ancients -- are involved.


Battles / Character Classes


I was never quite brave enough for the all-dragoon party.

Each character may have one class at a time from the 24 classes available, which defines their special abilities (thieves steal, dragoons jump, summoners summon, etc). You can change this class at any time - "big" changes require you fight a few (10 or less) battles before it takes full effect. Each character has a customized outfit for each class, which I like, and weapons likewise each have their own look. If your heart desires it, you can change classes often and make use of the strengths of each -- thieves can open locked doors, so it pays to have one character that is marginally good as a thief, for instance. But you don't have to. I'm not one for analyzing stats or grinding up character skills, so my party looked like this:

Luneth: Thief -> Monk -> Ninja
Arc: Black Mage -> Dragoon
Ingus: Warrior -> Knight -> Dark Knight -> Knight
Refia: White Mage (yep -- THE ENTIRE GAME. I didn't like the White Mage upgrade, the Devout. >:| Ugly costume.)

Whatever kind of gameplay you like in your battles, you can have it. You want basically no mana-management (that's me!)? Have a melee party. Crazy abilities? Dragoons can spend more time in the air than on the ground, Knights can do maintenance-level healing, Dark Knights can hurt enemies by hurting themselves a bit. You can pay attention to classes, or mostly ignore them, and either way will work. Both approaches require leveling your ass off.


Miserable RPG Elements, or It's Level Time


A hole? Whatever shall we do?

'Made it through' is an especially apt phrase for this game - the only variation in the "walk to point A, go through a dungeon, come back out, walk to point B" story progression is that, every so often, the game finds a reason for you to shrink yourselves with the mini spell (or tiny-izing hammer). The hidden gnome village is so tiny you have to shrink to get into it. A missing gem requires the party to shrink again to find and fight the rat that stole it. Stuck in prison, our heroes note a crack in the wall -- that's a shrinkin' too.

Otherwise you just crawl your way through dungeons, though they're usually short and pretty straightforward. The only problem I had was that the bosses were often significantly more powerful than normal enemies -- if you aren't defeating random battles by just making your party autoattack, killing them without taking damage in the first round, then you probably aren't ready for the boss.

I spent a lot of time just leveling in this game. For a normal game, console or PC, this would be intolerable to me. I hate games that make me grind. But because this game is on the DS, it gave me something to do when I only had a few minutes to kill -- I tend to hold off playing games with better plot or more hardcore gameplay until I have time and a quiet place to play, but it was easy to just turn on the DS, fight a few battles, and then turn it off again. When I play puzzle games I feel like I'm just wasting time, but leveling on the go is pleasant because it gives the sense of making some sort of progress in bite-size chunks that don't require thought.


Save Points, There Are None, or Death Is Serious Business


I could show more images of battles, but I'm sick of them. Instead, here's the lovely world map, and a pair of airships.

No save points. That's right. You can save on the world map and that's it. The dungeons (save the home stretch) are pretty short, so that's not terrible, but dying and then having to go aaaalll the way back through the dungeon -- I'm glad we don't do this so much in RPGs anymore. Yeesh.

The only time I stopped having fun with this game was during the home stretch, which looks something like this (remember that post-boss you get your HP/MP back, so the direness of a lack of resources isn't as huge as it could be):

World map (I can save/rest!)
Dungeon #1

- Small not-too-tough boss
World map (I can save but can't rest: I went "through" Dungeon #1 and now I'm on the other side)

Dungeon #2, which is a lot bigger/harder than #1
- Boss
- Boss #2
- There's actually a door here that leads to:

Optional Dungeon #3
- Miniboss
- Miniboss
- Miniboss
- Miniboss

Dungeon #4:
- Miniboss
- Miniboss
- Miniboss (I almost died here. it was horrifying)
- Miniboss
Final Boss (finally!)

Okay, see the distance between the final boss and last available save point? I hiked all the way through Dungeon 3, then warped out to save, and walked through that whole madness again. Even so, look at all that space! It took me three hours to get to the final boss, and then ... I died. I can't explain how frustrated I was. I didn't even want to play anymore -- I didn't go back and finish the game for another week.


Luneth and Doga have been shrunk (natch) and are running through the undergrowth. The Fat Chocobo is, uh, being fat.

So there you have it. I'm not going to stick a number on this game because I have no idea, in the scheme of things, what score it ought to have. I enjoyed most of my time playing it, my second hike to the last boss aside. It was entertaining if you like RPGs, and it was a nice timesink for when I was stuck somewhere and had my DS.


Games waiting on the to-beat-and-review list:
Earthbound 0, Final Fantasy VI Advance

Previously made-it-throughs:
None!