Some Other Castle

It took a long time for me to convince myself, post-stomping, that going back to finish Final Fantasy III was a good idea. It was disheartening, to say the least, and I don’t think it was because I failed, but rather because I felt like I should have been able to succeed. There didn’t seem to be much of an indication that I was going to be in over my head until it was far too late for me to turn back, and because it is impossible to escape from that final stretch of six fights once you have begun, knowing what you’ll face at the very end basically has to be seen to be believed. It’s a sequence that is designed for you to fail it at least once, and I really don’t like that. Continue Reading →

Remember how, some time ago, I mentioned that at some point I would probably suffer a catastrophic loss in battle that would cause me to say a lot of bad words and would require a Herculean effort to recover from? Yeah, that happened this week. Specifically, it happened three days ago when I sat down to attempt the final dungeon in Final Fantasy III.

Up until I marched into that fatal labyrinth, I actually thought I was doing pretty well. Wait; let me back up, because that’s not entirely true. I didn’t KNOW if I was doing well or not, but I suspected that I was. Continue Reading →

Due to somehow drawing the work schedule from hell this week, I haven’t picked up FFIII one single time since my last update. As an apology, I bring you this crazy video of a guy beating the game in just under an hour and a half. Enjoy, and I’ll see you next week!

I’ve put enough time into FFIII this week to make it to my third block of jobs (as with many job system-based games, particularly earlier ones, the jobs to which you have access are tied to specific story points; conveniently enough, in FFIII, it’s finding the elemental crystals which serve as magical MacGuffins in most of the early titles), and I’m still finding myself with not much in the way of strong feelings for the game one way or the other.

There are things I like, for sure: as I mentioned last week, the guest characters are handled much better (even if they have, at this point, basically been on a revolving-door system into my party), and there are actual, honest-to-goodness experience points tracking your progress rather than some seemingly-arbitrary measure of how tough your characters are based on how many times they’ve gotten thwacked with pointy sticks. The further I progress, though, the more I find things that bother me *just* a bit about the game. In general, they aren’t things that make me rage, contemplate giving up the game entirely, or question my devotion to this project; they’re simply…things I don’t really like. Continue Reading →

I don’t remember particularly caring for Final Fantasy III, but I don’t remember despising it quite like I did FFII, either. It’s a game that I admittedly don’t have much past experience with, largely owing to its relative rarity in the US; although it was released in Japan in 1990, it wasn’t available anywhere else until 2006, when it received a 3D remake on the DS. (Again, as when I differentiated the Final Fantasy II I just completed from the North American FFII—which was actually FFIV—I’m referring here to the actual Final Fantasy III, and not the SNES release with the same name, which was actually FFVI. Is everyone good and confused yet? Silly Square.) Continue Reading →