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 Final Fantasy III (DS)Review by muddasheep, January 06th 2007, 22:59:08 | |||||||
| Finally another Final Fantasy hits a portable system. This time it aims for the Nintendo DS. The game is based on the previously Japan-only SNES part of Final Fantasy and it has been remaked with new graphics and combined with some of the DS's features.
---- A warm welcome. Since Final Fantasy 3 is actually of the early school of role playing games on consoles you will soon realize that games back in the days weren't kidding around. You either had the patience to get through or you didn't. The first thing to notice are the random battles in the game which sometimes occur every fifth step. At first you only have one character at your disposal but you will soon have four characters in total. The problem is that if you want to explore the first part of the map before you have aquired more party members you get killed in the random encounters. No kidding around, as I said. It's kind of like saying: "You don't belong here. Yet." Once you get more party members it is easier. But only until you get to the next area. The difficulty of the game sometimes goes up faster than you progress with your character's levels, which means sometimes you simply have to run in circles near towns to level your party. If one of the party members dies you can use the rarely found item Phoenix Down. The towns won't offer the service to resurrect dead people until later in the game. And you'll want to keep the usage of those items down for use in not much less difficult boss battles until you aquire the job White Mage's spell Raise with which you can bring members back to life. So if you happen to die in a regular fight, you shouldn't waste a Phoenix Down and simply reload the last save game. ---- Jobs for everyone. Every character can use a different Job. There are 23 available in total, slowly unlocking more and more while progressing in the story. These jobs have different abilities, for example a White Mage can use healing magic, a Black Mage can use destructive magic, a Warrior can use heavy weapons, a Red Mage is kind of like a jack of all Trades, a Summoner can call beasts to aid in battle, and so on. Although there's a variety of jobs available, some are stronger than others which makes half of them obsolete. But it's still nice to see how different the characters look with different jobs. Apart from that weapons are the only customization option that's visible in combat. Armor and helmets won't appear, so it doesn't matter if you have a Diamond Helm, you will still see whatever head wear your current job features. ---- What's to watch and listen. For a DS game the 3D models look clean and complex enough, and the enemies in combat are animated extremely smoothly - that's to be expected from Square-Enix. What's a bit weird is that the main characters in your party look chibi-like, and enemies look "realistic". The spells are minimalistic but very effective, the summoning sequences (Ifrit, Shiva, Leviathan, Bahamut, to name a few) are maybe a bit too short but impressive nonetheless, and the environments are richly detailed. All in all this game definitely is one of the best looking games on the DS. The sound is fitting, nothing too special, but nothing too shabby either. The music however is very nice and certain melodies stay in your head long after you've stopped playing. ---- Problems noticed. The battles are simply turn based. You tell your characters what actions to do and the round starts. The issue here is that you don't know the order in which all of the actions will be taken, so sometimes your characters hit first and then the enemie strikes, other times the enemy hits before you can act, and it can happen that one or two of your characters hit and then the enemy takes action. There is a spell called "Haste" which should increase attack speed, meaning it should make the character with Haste act earlier than others, but sometimes it doesn't seem to do anything. Also there is a different system for mana in this game. Nowadays in current RPGs a spell costs a certain amount of mana/magic points, say 15 and if your character has 95 total mana that one spell can be cast six times. In FF3 however every spell only costs one mana point, but the spells are divided into eight levels and every character can learn three spells per level. All mage jobs have different amount of mana for each level, mostly less for higher levels. The only ways to restore mana are either resting in an inn or drinking an elixir, but elixirs are extremely rare and usually should be saved for the very last boss or when you really can't do anything else. So this means that when you're walking through dungeons you have to be careful and can't just cast spells like there's no tomorrow. Which again means that sometimes the mage jobs are quite useless as they can only wait and defend because their melee attacks do ridiculous damage (except for Red Mage) and they need to save their mana for the dungeon boss. The game progresses in a rather linear fashion. Should you try to go somewhere you're not supposed to go in the early part of the game you might run into sudden death quicker than you'd want to. It can also occur that sometimes it's a bit unclear where to go next and back in the early days those games didn't feature quest logs or something of the like and NPCs aren't all that informative either. The story is nice enough to keep you interested though. There's no saving option other than when you're on the world map. You can't save the game any other way which means dungeons basically have to be played in one playthrough. But Square-Enix was nice enough to implement a quicksave feature which lets you save your current state and shut down the system. Or you can just close the DS for standby. Then again why couldn't they just let you save wherever you are? The new graphics engine isn't the only thing that's new in this remake. There are a few moogles (tiny flying creatures) with which you can access the Mog Net. This feature lets you send and receive message to your friends who also own a copy of FF3 over Nintendo's WiFi internet service. If you send and receive a few messages to friends and NPCs it unlocks hidden quests in the game. The touch controls are kind of neat, but fortunately Square-Enix also made it possible to control the game without the touch screen. The top screen is blank half of the time which probably hints at either lack of ideas or at a more realistic "we're running out of time"-symptom. ---- The end is nigh. Overall the difficulty and thus the challenge of this game is a very welcomed change from most modern RPGs. It can be frustrating but if you invest a bit of time in leveling your characters you can beat it - and it still remains a challenge. And the moment you think you're too powerful for your own good the next boss appears and crushes you against the wall. That's the kind of challenge you can expect. Paired with the stunning graphics and the surprisingly good story you'll have about 30 to 40 hours of pure gaming pleasure in your hands - if you're hardcore enough. |     Links:
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| How readers rate this Review: 9.25/10 (4 votes) | |||||||
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