Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster (2021) [Steam]

The place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise.

-Robert A. Johnson

Final Fantasy III, that’s Roman numerals for 3, not Final Fantasy VI, Roman for 6, which was eventually released in NA as Final Fantasy III, Roman 3, remember, has now seen the light of day in the West. Though previously released on Japan’s Famicom only, canceled for Wonderswan, remade in 3D for the DS worldwide, Final Fantasy III has been finally been re-released in a fairly authentic albeit pixely remastered form. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Fans of the series and gaming archaeology already know the story.

The tale you may not know is actually FFIII‘s, although it bears all the usual hallmarks of the high fantasy RPG norms. Destiny, fate, a group of youthful orphans, duality of light and darkness, the end of the world, chosen ones, forsaking kith and kin for a globetrotting adventure whilst helping innocents with their personal plights along the way. Even airships are here again. There’s a great emphasis on characters and storytelling here, certainly almost night and day compared to the first Final Fantasy. III does however share player avatar type leads with the progenitor of its series, unlike FFII which offered up a playable cast with unique names and even personalities. In that regard, FFIII seems like a slight step or stagger backward.

FFIII’s novelty of interchangeable and not merely upgradeable job classes is perhaps its greatest gift to the games that were yet to come, although narrative-heads may also appreciate the subversion of “darkness = evil” with the game’s concept of light and darkness needing to exist in balance. Nothingness or the void, non-existence, is the real enemy, despite the final boss being called Cloud of Darkness. While relying heavily on now familiar archetypes and tropes, FFIII places greater emphasis on world-building, lore, and characters than the first game in its series, and beyond that, it’s nice to see some fresher ideas.

The One, The Four, The Second, The Third

But let me inject a thought into the yarn of the chosen ones, these Warriors of Light who remain nameless until the DS remake–I named them Jason, Billy, Tommy, and Kimberly instead of the cumbersome Luneth, Arc, Refia, and Ingus.

Here’s the injection: if, as with so many other games, Japanese developers thought the game wouldn’t be well-received in the West because it was too much or too hard… they might’ve been right. Sure, there’s something to be said about that perspective that poor yanks and Brits and everybody else might be too preoccupied, too distracted, or too dumb to stomach the rough and tough stuff coming out of Japan. However, I’m convinced Final Fantasy III is the Super Mario Bros. 2 of the series (aka The Lost Levels), despite the fact that it’s the 3rd entry… We’re not going down the road of regional numeration again.

Lost Levels is too hard to be enjoyable for most players and coming on the heels of a more accessible mascot platformer, that’s significant. Final Fantasy III courts that idea with relish, and that’s considering that the only version of Final Fantasy III that I’ve played is one where they added features that are clearly beneficial to the player for overcoming difficulty. Quick saves go a long way. If a player loses a fight, they can start over at the nearest entrance. Maps provide an eagle eye for navigating mazes. QOL and conveniences abound. What’s particularly impressive, then, is just how much of a struggle Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster is. And that’s in direct comparison to Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II remasters I played immediately before it.

Difficulty spike or difficulty cliff

Beginning around Saronia, a sprawling city-state I flew over in my airship, unknowingly triggering the next major event of the game, my party members struggled to learn their job classes while quickly being outclassed by the game’s increasingly adamant enemies. I had been fairly breezing through the game up to that point so I chalked it up to a difficulty spike. You know the like. It’s when a video game suddenly gets dramatically harder out of nowhere rather than presenting the player with a smooth, gradual ramp toward higher difficulty that encourages learning the right skills, testing the waters, and forgoing the grind.

One spike isn’t out of the ordinary, especially in a game of this sort from this era. Except the spike never went back down. The game stayed tough and got tougher. I started feeling like instead of being a few levels under-leveled that I was ten or more levels under. Bosses started slamming me into game over screens, particularly when I couldn’t figure out the specific job class exploit a fight demanded. A wealth of jobs are available but certain fights demand using certain classes or losing.

By the time I reached the end of the game, my characters leveled into the upper thirties, I knew I’d have to stop and do some grinding or experiment with different classes. Even then, the final leg of Final Fantasy III is not a sprint. It’s a marathon.

Four hours

I streamed the ending of this game in one go, from Doga’s Manor for the Eureka and Syrcus keys through the labyrinth and into the lands beyond. It clocked in at over four hours and twenty minutes. The final dungeons represented a set of four, back to back, stuffed to the brim with enemies that could occasionally one-shot my characters with a dismissive wave of their hands, nevermind bosses that acted like regular bullet sponges. Further complicating matters was one of the more unforgiving traits of the first three Final Fantasy games… no, not empty rooms in dungeons. There are no ethers in FFIII.

Magic-based jobs come with spell charges rather than MP, a throwback to the magic system of Final Fantasy 1. Each spell lands within a tier of spells and each tier of spells has a number of charges defining the number of times a character can cast spells in that tier. Once you run out of charges, that’s it. You’ll have to rely on other tiers until they run out. Normally, an ether item would recover MP or in this case spell charges as in the first game, but FFIII curiously has no such item. There aren’t even camps, tents, or the like for recovering HP and MP on the world map. Elixirs are a reliable way to recover spell charges, but these are far from common and can’t be purchased at item shops. This further exacerbates the difficulty of marathon dungeons.

An airship that can only “hop” over small mountains was just insult to injury.

No ethers, either

Final Fantasy III becomes about managing magical resources, particularly if you want to do any significant healing. Hi-Potions are about as good as it gets for easily attainable, non-magical heals. Just ensure you don’t change a character’s job from one with spell charges to one without and back again, or the game wipes all your charges to zero, which as I’ve said is virtually unrecoverable within a dungeon. Sure, a friendly cleansing pool for recovering HP and MP can be found now and then, but they’re not exactly commonplace, either.

That meant that the final gauntlet of dungeons, an endurance test of random battles, dead ends, rabbit trails leading to treasure chests, and ferocious boss battles, taxed my magical abilities and my butt-in-chair to their limits. I brought all the healing items and phoenix downs I could carry and prayed my spell charges would last from pool to pool. An already tough game all but ensured it sapped my ability to heal as quickly as possible. Only the final jobs, Ninja and Sage, shifted the tides in my favor. They’re game-breakingly powerful up until the very last area when the monsters catch up to you again.

What seems even more masochistic are the claims I heard and the things I read indicating that the DS version of Final Fantasy III was made even harder. What?

The 8-bit Review

 Visuals: 7/10

I ensured that each of the Pixel Remasters so far received the same score for me for visuals, given their emphasis on visual consistency. In that regard, everything resembles what we’ve already seen from this series of remakes, for better or worse. Visual inconsistency is still an issue but overall it’s a game that looks best in motion. There are large enemy sprites to gawk at, a host of settings to explore from the skies to under the seas, and it’s particularly wonderful seeing the iconic job system sprites.

 Audio: 8/10

As with the other early Final Fantasy games, Uematsu demonstrated a wealth of skill of composition and a grip on thematic music. Overall less sorrowful than the 2nd Final Fantasy’s score, I was somewhat surprised by a soundtrack that was a little more upbeat. Perky? Is that mariachi in the battle theme? I’m not sure, but all the expected beats are still here. The final dungeons featured some excellent music. This is a soundtrack I’d like to spend more time with!

 Narrative: 6/10

While FF1 is dedicatedly a fairy tale and FFII represents a darker drama, FFIII is somewhat in between. Going back to faceless avatars is an odd choice when they talk and bicker amongst themselves. Color-coded dialogue might’ve been helpful, but full-blown personhood for each of the playable cast members wouldn’t arrive until the DS version. The world of FFIII seems bigger, broader, and deeper than ever before, with a history that’s more than hinted at, with cities and towns that seem more alive and varied than ever, and with NPCs more capable of charm and personality than any in the series previously (generally speaking).

Yeah, but which one of you is talking?

What’s disappointing about the narrative then is its lack of focus and drive, its division into two very different parts, and the absence of any personal antagonist. This is a story without many personal stakes, only metaphysical or cosmic ones.

NPCs join the party now and then as in FFII but unlike FFII, there’s no personal face to place on the enemy. There’s no motivation to find and redeem a Leon. There’s just being chosen by the crystals leading up to a villain that has less presence than any empire and more relevance to ancient slumbering wizards rather than the game’s heroes. Attempting to straddle the differences between FF1 and FFII was perhaps too big of an ask, but there are still several memorable settings and moments highlighted by fleeting drama (notably carried by characters with actual names), such as fleeing Bahamut, watching the prince nearly stabbed in his bed, or seeing the crystal tower for the first time.

 Gameplay: 6/10

It cannot be overstated: Fantasy Final III makes a huge contribution to the series by establishing an interchangeable job system. No longer would characters need to be defined by a single role for the entirety of the game and this level of role-oriented strategy would play out with literal classes in later games, as well as others where the interchangeability was shifted toward equipment, spells, or abilities. In FFIII, players can switch their four characters between any number of jobs whenever they want simply by opening the menu. Are there too many jobs? Definitely. While they’re a cool idea in a large group, several of them are clearly less useful than others, especially in the long run. Several of them are far more powerful than others, thanks to weird stat mechanics (Thief with a particular knife). Certain jobs have only one or two uses for the entirety of the game. At times, they can be underwhelming, like the Dragoons, unless you’re facing a tough aerial boss. I mostly kept to specific ideas of roles shared between jobs, rather than individual jobs, and that was two physical combatants and two magic users. As with light and dark, my party attempted balance, though the concept of the job system awaited to be refined in coming sequels.

FFIII has other great ideas. Summons are present for the first time, as are playable summoners, allowing players to call powerful allies into battle. Familiar faces such as Bahamut and Odin, Shiva and Leviathan are all here, laying the groundwork for the espers, aeons, and others making significant appearances throughout the series. There are also secrets to dig up, gimmick dungeons requiring a player enter in mini or frog form, and multiple modes of transportation, as well as a wider world outside the world you’re first introduced to.

Good thing I naturally had 4 Dragoons ready for this battle!

 Challenge: 3/10

Shouldn’t a harder game get a higher score for challenge and difficulty? No, not necessarily. Higher difficulty isn’t automatically better. A game can be brutally difficult because of busted controls, broken mechanics, or awful cameras. A game can be difficult to play for all the wrong reasons: being literally unable to see what’s going on, being released unfinished, being deliberately abstruse to the point of having to consult guides to proceed. What is frustrating in FFIII is the uneven usefulness of the jobs plus the unchecked brutality of the second part of the game, even with a lower random encounter rate than the games before it

Simple ethers would’ve gone a long way and did the final dungeon really need zero save points or quick exits? Once you settle upon the jobs that are truly game-breaking, you’ll wonder why you bothered with any of the others at all. FFIII, even as a Pixel Remaster, is anything but a smooth experience.

Accessibility: 6/10

An area where FFIII measures up better than its two prequels: characters sometimes actually tell you where you need to go next. What a concept! That was one of the more challenging aspects of the previous games, particularly when it meant wandering around until you stumbled onto the next portion of the story. Here, there’s thankfully less of that. There’s also less emphasis on abusing the way equipment or stats affect your party, though that’s still present. Jobs are a little more transparent, even though there’s still plenty of guesswork as to who is useful and when. Doesn’t matter once you get Ninja and Sage, anyway.

 Uniqueness: 6/10

As we’ve seen, FFIII has some great ideas of its own. A lot of these still stem from previous ideas and/or seem like the natural progression of ideas presented in its predecessors, but credit where credit’s due. The innovation of a full-blown job system in FFIII is humungous. Beyond that, there are summons and a few other notables, though FFIII will also seem immensely familiar.

Personal: 5/10

I remember when I first learned about Final Fantasy III. The real III. Not the renamed FFVI that we got for Super Nintendo here in the US. I was bummed that an entire game in a series I enjoyed was never translated into the language I spoke. I even saw it in the window of an imports store growing up… but I couldn’t play it. Now, having played it myself? I don’t know that this one could’ve even been beatable by my childhood self. I cannot imagine reaching the final dungeon in a long series of dungeons and dying to one of the many bosses only to have to do it all over again because there were no save points, not to mention having to put up with the glitches that were undoubtedly present in the original and therefore least refined version of the game.

That being said, it seems like the pixel remaster is again the definitive way to play Final Fantasy III. The QOL features and little fixes here and there, not to mention the audio and visual facelift, help make it more accessible. But the game still comes off as more mean-spirited, stubborn, calcified, and inexorable than its immediate two predecessors. What surprises me is that when I first started FFIII, I was saying it seemed like the best, the strongest of the original three games. By the second half, I was eating my words. As it stands now, though I’m happy to fill the missing piece in the grand jigsaw of the series, I never wish to play this prototypical entry again though I look forward to the brilliance of Final Fantasy IV (originally Final Fantasy II in NA). I can say I personally enjoyed FF1 and FFII Pixel Remasters much more. They weren’t such an uneven slog.

Aggregated Score: 5.9

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage or Mage Cast.