Release Date: April 2, 1994
Developer: Square Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Square Co., Ltd.
This Retro Review felt like a cop-out when I decided to write this. I love this game, and it is one of my all-time favorite games. But it’s also a game many 16-bit JRPG lovers already hold in high regard.
I had to write it, though, because Final Fantasy XV stuck it in my head. Because of the newer game, I revisited the older ones and fell in love all over again.
I have mentioned my love for JRPGs before, most recently with the Retro Review for Dragon Warrior for the NES. That love was mostly for Enix and its JRPG series. I did play Square’s Final Fantasy and enjoyed it, but not as much as I enjoyed the Dragon Warrior series. Mainly, that was because I had four games from Enix, whereas Square only released one Stateside for the NES.
That all changed with the SNES. One of the 16-bit console’s near-launch titles was Final Fantasy II, Square’s North American localization of Japan’s Final Fantasy IV. That game pulled me towards Square in a huge way. To this day, I feel that Final Fantasy II has the best soundtrack on the SNES. It stands in my eyes as one of composer Nobuo Uematsu’s finest works. The only competition to that soundtrack is the one residing in the cartridge of today’s Retro Review candidate.
Final Fantasy III is Square’s North American localization of Japan’s Final Fantasy VI. In many ways, this game is superior to Final Fantasy II/IV, but I eternally go back and forth on which has the better soundtrack.
Why the big fuss over the soundtracks? Well, as I have mentioned before, I am an absolute sucker for chiptune music, especially for the NES and SNES.
During the driving portions of Final Fantasy XV, you can hear tunes on the car’s CD player. You find CDs in music shops around Eos. Those CDs contain tunes from previous Final Fantasy games. Once I found the CDs for IV and VI, I would play nothing else. Hearing it made me extremely nostalgic for the older games. I wanted to revisit them.
Of the two, I chose to delve back into Final Fantasy III. I have it for the Game Boy Advance, which made it convenient to play when away from home. Plus, I never did replace the backup battery on my SNES copy. Immediately upon lighting it up on my older DS, the smile formed on my face. I felt like I was home.
Rather than the story of a band of adventurers led by one person, players are treated to the stories and assorted baggage of up to fourteen playable characters. Beginning with Terra, an escaped “weapon” for the Empire, you embark on an epic quest to take down the Empire and free the land from its rule.
The key to the Empire’s power is their reliance on magic, something that the world had not seen since the War of the Magi ages before. The Empire gathers magic by draining magical creatures called espers and imbuing humans and machines with their power. A resistance group, called the Returners, aims to stop them.
You start off as Terra and come across many characters, both playable and NPCs, who enrich the story further. Square Soft has mostly been great at crafting compelling stories (there’s no excuse for Final Fantasy XIII), and it is in Final Fantasy III that I believe they perfected the art. Just about every character you come across feels like a vibrant, living being in this game.
The playable characters all have backstories that are exposited during key points of the game, and they’re all compelling. Terra recalls her imprisonment at the hands of the Empire; Sabin fled the kingdom of Figaro because he could not cope with the burden of being king. His brother, Edward, takes on the mantle and longs for his brother’s return. Cyan has to watch the citizens of his beloved kingdom of Doma be poisoned, including his wife and daughter. And the man responsible for the poisoning, Kefka…well, let’s say that he is the prototypical example of chaotic evil.
Gameplay is standard JRPG fare. Players guide their team to different locations in the world. The standard mode of travel at first is mere walking, but travel via airship and the series’ iconic chocobos can be found later. When traveling on land, your party randomly runs into many of the monsters that roam the land.
The combat is the normal turn-based affair with a twist: the Active Time Battle System. First introduced in Final Fantasy V, the game adds a bar to each character’s name and HP/MP. That bar slowly fills, and once full allows the player to perform an action with that character. Once the action is performed, the bar depletes and begins to fill again.
The actions the characters can perform include simple melee attacks, magic, or special attacks unique to the character. For example, Edward’s special attack involves machinery. His brother Sabin, meanwhile, has awesome martial arts attacks. Each special attack is unique to that character and can be pretty devastating.
Terra and Celes, a former Empire soldier who betrays them, can both cast magic naturally. The others have to learn magic by equipping magicite, gems that contain the essence of espers. Each esper teaches certain spells and earning MP while having the esper equipped increases the percentage of mastery in those spells for the character. Some characters, like Terra and Celes, gain percentage points quickly. Less adept characters, like Sabin and the feral child Gau, earn them less quickly.
The mechanics of the gameplay are all good and fine, but the secret to Final Fantasy III is in the way everything is presented. This game is absolutely filled with incredible moments. As the story unfolds and your party experiences everything the world offers, you will absolutely marvel in the sights and sounds. There are so many “HOLY SHIT!” moments in this game. There’s the excellent opera scene that this game is known for. There is the mid-game twist involving Kefka that really shakes up the world – literally!
My favorite part, however, is one that’s well-known to fans of the series. In this part, your party is running from a phantom train. Since Sabin is in your party, you can have him turn around and SUPLEX THE TRAIN ONTO THE GROUND!!!!! At the time, it was the most ridiculous yet amazing thing I had ever seen. It’s STILL a thing of beauty!
Moments like these are present in every nook and cranny of the game. The fourteen playable characters include three secret ones, and finding them is quite entertaining. Seeing Kefka basically enact a scorched-earth campaign while you chase after him, laughing his irritating laugh, is so immensely annoying, but in a way that makes you want to press forward. Everything about this game is just about perfect.
It even has quite a bit of content for OCD players like me. In addition to all the playable characters, there are tons of espers to equip, magic spells to learn, and special abilities to beef up. The quest to completely master Gau’s special ability, which is to learn the abilities of ALL the monsters in the game, can take WEEKS to do. I know this because I did it on the SNES back in the day. 100% spells, abilities, everything. Of course, the dead backup battery means I lost the save file. Life sucks.
In gushing about this game, I always have to qualify that this is Final Fantasy III U.S. Final Fantasy III for the Famicom in Japan wasn’t originally released here. Why all the missing titles and odd renumbering? Well, Final Fantasy II and III for the NES were not localized due to Square wanting to catch up technologically to the SNES. Final Fantasy V WAS localized and was planned to be released as Final Fantasy Extreme in the States.
Unfortunately Square, like other Japanese game publishers at the time, didn’t think their North American customers would be able to handle the difficulty of the game. Final Fantasy Extreme was canceled for that reason. In its place, we got Secret of Evermore, an action-RPG game that is not remembered fondly by most gamers.
Final Fantasy V would not be seen stateside until the release of Final Fantasy Anthology for the PlayStation in 1999, and Final Fantasy II would release as part of Final Fantasy Origins in 2003 for the same console. Poor Final Fantasy III didn’t hit our shores until they remade it for the Nintendo DS in 2006.
Does it still hold up? If you are a JRPG or Final Fantasy fan, ABSOLUTELY! Later games like Final Fantasy VII may have cranked up the graphics and the feels, but this game is still a great romp. JRPG fans that have not played this game should run out and get this game – right after they flog themselves in penance.
Fortunately, there are tons of ways to enjoy this game. In addition to the SNES, PS1, and GBA, the game can be found on the PS3, PSP, Vita, Wii, Wii U, Windows, Android, and even Fire OS. Be careful which one you get, though. Many of the later versions have renamed the game back to Final Fantasy VI. It wouldn’t be Square if they didn’t complicate things, eh?
No matter how you play it, I feel you love it. 22 years after I first played it, I still love it. I’m currently going for 100% again on the GBA. I know many may disagree with me, citing Final Fantasy VII or IX as the best, and those are great games. But I feel that this game is the best Final Fantasy entry of them all.
That is until I switch to the Final Fantasy IV CD during my road trips in Final Fantasy XV. I love that soundtrack so much…
Good: Excellent story; vibrant world; amazing soundtrack; meaningful characters
Bad: Non-JRPG fans need not apply…and that’s about it!
Final score: 10/10
