grelb's Profile

Final Fantasy III for Nintendo DS

Background;
I was turned off the old Final Fantasy series of games many years ago when I tried one of them on a PS2. The sluggish turn based combat and the long and slow conversation were a real put off for me.

Now with the re-relase of this 17 year old game to the DS I felt that this might fill that gap I have of of a decent role-playing game on a portable console.
So I bought it hoping that I could overcome these annoyances.

Unfortunately no.
From the moment you start playing it you will find that they try to subtley simulate 'role playing' by giving you boring conversations and pretty graphics for the combat modes that you've chosen.
So be prepared for many hours of tapping X to get through conversations and repeating various combinations of X X DOWN X X DOWN X UP X X to proceed through the many combat screens.
And then when there's a battle, you find that before, during and after each battle there is an impressive and sluggish zoom-in feature that shows you who you are battling, what flashy fighting ability your party member is activating, and how much Gil (money) you received. There is no speed-up or skip capability for this, so you have to watch them all in slow and glorius detail.

The DS allows for the use of the touch pad to select your menu options, although I gave up on this pretty quickly a I found that the Dpad and the A/B buttons make selections faster and less prone to mis-selection.
The DS has two screens, but the use of the top screen is minimal and cosmetic at best (overland map and character preferences for shop items).

Positivity;
Negativity aside - though. Why would you want to buy this game?
You have 4 characters in a party, each character can chap-and-change between22 classes, and each class can advance to level 99.
So there is a huge amount of advancing that you can do in this game.
The main characters are somewhat likeable and you soon learn that they all have something in common.
The map world is relatively small, but there are numerous dungeons and boss monsters to meet up with, some of which you even have to run away from at the first opportunity.
It has 3 save slots and quicksave, that work really well on a portable console.

Sound:
There isn't much of a range of tunes. There are only about 4 tunes that play, and each of those has only a basic harmony and melody. There are minimal action clicks and a few 'whooshes' for combat actions. Nothing to write home about.

Graphics:
The cute japanese characters and their costumes are entertaining. The towns and dungeons have basic texturing. The menu system works very well, letting you use the /L/ and /R/ buttons to switch between characters.
The ingame grapics are fine for DS standards. The intro movie is actually really nice and if the rest of the game was as good as the intro movie I would rate this game really highly.
All in all - the graphics department is fine for a portable console game.

Internet Ready;
One of the reasons I purchased this game was for the little WiFi symbol on the box.
I wanted to choose a game that would let me do more then share maps (Mario vs Donkey Kong2), and I didn't want a racing car game (Didy Kong Racing/Mario Kart DS). So I was hopeful that a roleplaying game might have a good MMO opportunities.
Alas - the games WiFi capability of FF3 is limited to email that can be sent to other owners of FF3.
I tried to get this working on my Xtra broadband wifi link but without success.
However I suspect that this might be because FF3 is not currently supported in Australasia (see http://www.nintendowifi.com/).
While on the web site I found that WiFi DS games can only connect to the internet through peoples own home WiFi Connections. In Australia the EB Games Stores act as WiFi hubs but this isn't the case in NZ.

Worth getting:
The quicksave functions lets you continue on from where you were quickly, making it an excellent diversion for bus trips or supervising the kids at the pool.
The game shows its age. It has a very linear item upgrade chain. When you arrive in a town you immediately head toward the shop and buy one of everything new and then compare them in the character screen to see if they're worth equipping.
Bare bones adventuring. More of a Dungeon Crawl with 4 characters in the wilderness.
If you like this sort of thing then I would recommend this game to you.
Otherwise I would if you're looking for good adventure game, or fun on WiFi with your friends then look for an alternative.

Rating:
Overall: 6.5 /10