Beat FF3 today. I decided I just wanted to blitz the damn game before finals weeks, so I did.
When I started this blitz (right after Sardonia arc), I had a party of Thief/Dragoon/Geomancer/Red Mage. I realized pretty quickly that RM was a bit of a weak link on the team, even though he had shileds which is an advantage over the other mages, he was essentially being a white mage with worse charges and shields. I decided that the trade-off to WM was worth it.
So I do things and then I go jack Odin's spear from him, making my Dragoon Godlike. Really wish I had started levelling the class as soon as I got the opening, but whatever. We do more arcs, get the INCREDIBLY RETARDEDLY SLOW INVINCIBLE, and then we go through a ridiculous series of tiny mountains to get to this cave. Is there any damn reason why they had to make it only jump TINY MOUNTAINS instead of just mountains other than to make you go through this stupid tedious tiny arc of the game?
So blah blah blah, go through caves, fight my homies, get keys, get NEW CLASSES!. I decide on a party of Ninja(initially just because Thief was J-Levell 99, but he's pretty cool, better armor and such)/Dragoon/Sage/Devout. This party bores me pretty fast because I don't feel like having two useless people is very fun. So I change the Sage into a Warrior, which makes every random go a lot more smoothly, for all that I wish this character had J-Levels in Warrior at all (my dragoon did!). I go through Eureka, load up on potions, and march to fight the Cloud of Darkness. XANDE is ridiculously ugly and ridiculously easy. This is hilarious.
I had a lot of trouble with Two-Headed Dragon, mostly. He killed two (most healed) people in one round with made me cry a bit, may have critted one of them? Cerebus was scary but ultimately not that bad, my offensive output laid him to waste quickly.
I finish all this and I think that I do not want to do all this damn shit over, so I ask Meeple what I should equip. Realize I can't use Protect since my Warrior changed back to a Sage for the final. So I equip Protect Rings, throw people in the back, equip Blood Lance again, and hope for the best! First few rounds I spent killing the magic immune tentacle, hasting, and using Turtle Shell on Devout, which was pretty awesome. Devout only went after CoD once, and she killed Sage with that, but I revived and Curaga'd before she could wrought any more destruction. Sage did very little of use the entire battle, tried to kill the physically immune tentacle but it was too slow to have any real effect on the battle. The turn after Sage died was the only really scary one, and it went about the best it could have so whatever.
I think that it would have been easy to make this game a lot better with just little polish things like being able to warp to different towns, having a faster airship that can fly over mountains, and for god sakes have a save point in the final dungeon. It feels like... pretty much what it is, which is an NES game dressed up in pretty graphics. I really dig the graphical style as well as the music, so it gets points for that.
It's certainly fun enough, but the fact that it took me like three years to finally get up the desire to beat it is a little telling. I like how different jobs are useful in different places since it encourages you to use a lot of different things. Also gets points for starting the job class system which is a lot better than the system adopted in FF6/FF7/FF8 (especially the latter two) which doesn't really encourage balancing between magic and physicals, and while you could have everyone be x class, it's probably better not to, whereas in some of the other FFs I feel like it promotes conformity.
I'm not sure what rating I'd like to give it. It's a fun game but I feel like it isn't quite as good as, say, FF5 or FF9, so I think I will give it a 6/10.
