Final Fantasy 3 Beginner Club W11
| Week 11 | 2026-06-05T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | 🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 10 |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF3BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Stopping point
Finish the game
Side-content
- 禁断の地エウレカ
More details
Last week we received the key to Sirx (the crystal tower) and Eureka. Now we can return to the Maze of the Ancients to face the ultimate challenge.
Make sure to stock up on items and spells before you enter the maze, we have a long way to go… There are a few very valuable shops ahead of us as well, so don’t worry if you’re hoarding gil, it won’t go to waste.
古代の民の迷宮
Push forward through the maze until you get to the other side. There’s some good treasure to be found on the way.
Once you reach the other side you’ll be back no the map, this time surrounded by the maze and with the tower ahead of you. This is both a blessing and a curse: you can save the game here and have a checkpoint, but you can’t heal and you have to go through the maze again to reach your ship. It also means that Teleport will bring you back to this location and not back out of the maze if you use them in the tower, you can’t completely escape the dungeon.
Enter the tower but before we explore it we want to go straight up to the first room where we can use the Eureka key to teleport to a different dungeon. It is technically optional, but the rewards are so good that there’s no point in avoiding it.
禁断の地エウレカ [side content]
This is a deep dungeon that contains some of the most powerful spells, weapons and even jobs in the game! The problem is that they’re well defended: you’ll encounter altars along the way where you can collect powerful items, but in order to do that you’ll face all sorts of bosses. And remember: there’s no good way to heal and refill spell charges without leaving and doing the Maze of the Ancients all over again! Oh and you can’t teleport out. Fun.
Fortunately, there’s a trick that makes this dungeon more manageable: ignore everything. Just keep pushing downwards, avoiding all chests and altars. At the bottom you’ll find a safe zone where you can heal (but not save!). Then do the dungeon backwards from there, returning to the bottom to heal when needed.
At some point you’ll have to cross invisible bridges and fake walls to reach the bottom. This is FF3, remember?
Note that there’s a hidden path that leads to a secret seller in the last level of the dungeon:
Once you’ve collected the rewards, you can return to the ground floor of the tower.
クリスタルトワー
This is the final climb, it’s going to be a long one, and we won’t be coming back. Don’t underestimate what’s ahead of us, it dwarfs anything we’ve seen in this game or its predecessors. In fact it might be the most grueling final dungeon in any Final Fantasy. If you want to revisit your spell loadout for our newly unlocked jobs, make your way back through the maze and return to the ship. You will not be able to teleport out once you start climbing the tower, you’ll have to walk all the way back down if you decide that you’re not ready for what’s ahead.
Other than that, it’s just a dungeon. Some levels force you to pass through fake walls (we’re still playing FF3) but they’re all marked, thankfully, even in the Famicom version. The various chests in this dungeon are generally worth your while.
Eventually you’ll reach a room with dragon statues and a mirror in the center. Approaching the mirror will trigger a cutscene and this is the point of no return: once the cutscene has triggered you have no choice but to push for the final boss, there’s no way back. There won’t be any shops or even fat chocobo after that, anything not in your inventory past this point is lost.
闇の世界
You thought we were done? You fool. The real final dungeon starts here.
If you go directly North of where you spawn, you can reach the final boss and die to it. Instead of doing that, you can first go through the 4 other doors around to reach the Dark Crystals (the dark version of our crystals) and defeat a boss for each of them. In every section there will also be a trapped chest containing a Ribbon, should you need it.
In the Pixel Remaster, after you beat one of the Crystal bosses you can then regenerate all your HP and MP by touching the Dark Crystal. In the Famicom version you have the option to cry about it instead.
What’s that, you missed the fake walls in the Crystal Tower? I gochu fam:
Once you have reclaimed the 4 Dark Crystals, you can return to the starting area and finally take the path to the North. The final boss awaits. Good luck.
Map
Miscellaneous
募集・忍者
We unlock the Ninja this week (at last on Famicom and PR, in the 3D version it was with the Earth Crystal apparently). In the 3D version it’s an upgraded version of the thief but has lower strength than a knight. In the Famicom and PR versions, it’s the strongest fighter job in the game (with the exception of the FEOK, see below) and they can use almost every weapon in the game. So on Famicom and the PR, you probably want to reclass all your fighters into ninjas when you unlock the class, unless you want to use some specific ability of one of the other classes (like the viking’s taunt for instance).
One very important feature of the Ninja is that they can throw Shurikens. Shurikens are effectively the strongest weapon in the game (tied with the Onion Sword, although shurikens are disposable while the sword isn’t). In the PR you have to equip the shuriken like a weapon to throw it when you select たたかう (and you have to re-equip them through the アイテム menu if you want to use another one within the same fight). On the PR you have to use the throw command.
The only time I managed to reach the 9,999 damage limit in this game was throwing shuriken at the final boss.
募集・賢者
The Sage is yet another mage upgrade, but this one is notable for having access to every spell in the game: white, black and summons. I guess you could argue that it’s an upgraded Red Mage, although they’re not really proficient at physical combat.
In the Famicom version it’s just the strongest spellcasting class in the game. There’s no reason to use anything else. On top of having no spell limitation, sages have more spell charges and similar-or-better stats than the 導師, 魔人 or 魔界幻士. It’s the ultimate mage. As a result 99% of engame parties on the Famicom version will be exclusively Ninjas and Sages. I found a PS1 disc that contains a bunch of “extras” for FF1 to 6, including recordings of all the final bosses, and unsurprisingly the party in that recording from 1997 looks like this:
2 ninjas and 2 sages. You’d think they’d use 4 bards with those names.
In the 3D and Pixel Remaster versions, the sages were nerfed. In those versions the sage has slightly worse stats and not as many high level spell charges as dedicated mage classes, so the additional flexibility of being able to cast any kind of magic comes with a compromise.
FEOK
The Onion Knight job is one of the worst in the game, they can’t use most weapons and equipment and have low stats. Until you pass level 90 that is, at which point the stats increase dramatically for every additional level. At level 99, an onion knight has 99 Strength, 99 Agility, 99 Vitality, 99 Intelligence and 99 mind (that’s character level, not job level, so you don’t have to grind levels while using the job).
There’s still a problem though: even if you have your level 99 OK they can’t use most of the cool endgame gear and weapons that ninjas and other warriors have access to. But there’s a very important exception: there exists one set of gear that only the OK can equip, and it’s the strongest in the game:
- Onion Sword
- Onion Shield
- Onion Helm
- Onion Mail
- Onion Gauntlets
A level 99 Onion Knight equipped with this set dwarfs any other warrior class by a long shot. The Onion Sword has the same attack rating as a shuriken, but shurikens are extremely expensive and can only be used once.
So how do you get this set? Well that’s the fun part, you probably won’t unless you’re ready to go on a massive grind. Those items are dropped by dragon enemies which have a small chance of appearing in some levels of the Crystal Tower. I only encountered one of them so far in my playthrough:
And of course the drop is not guaranteed. I found this guide that describes the strategy on Famicom: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/563415-final-fantasy-iii/faqs/24510
A Dragon is very rare, it’s a 4 in 256 battle encounter! This means about
128 battles to meet one, then 68 battles, then 9 battles and then 6
battles. After the fourth one just reset, because the next one is
approximately 175 battles away!
This guide also lists ways to exploit glitches to get the equipment on Famicom, including a way to get it at the very start of the game.
くノ一
I remember discussing this on Wanikani at some point but I don’t think it was in this club, so I want to point out the etymology of this word for those who aren’t familiar:
One of the enemies that we can encounter this week is a ninja woman called くノ一. This word comes from the fact that く, ノ and 一 are the strokes of the 女 kanji.
Participation
- I’m playing along
- I will catch up later
- I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this section yet
- I’m a filthy preplayer but I’m here for the discussion
The reward
The now traditional endgame polls are here:
polls
- I played at my own pace and didn’t attempt to stay in sync with the club
- I wanted to keep up with the club but external circumstances prevented me from doing so
- It was too fast for me, I fell behind
- It was challenging but I managed to keep up
- It was fine
- I could have gone a bit faster but I didn’t mind
- It felt slow but I still followed along
- It was too slow and I ended up filthy preplaying
- This is the first time I play a game in Japanese
- I have played a few (≤3) games in Japanese
- I have played a bunch of games in Japanese
- Very hard
- Quite hard
- Somewhat challenging
- Easy
- Trivial
- What spreadsheet? (Didn’t use it at all)
- I used it a bit but I could easily do without it
- I could have played without it, but it would have been significantly harder
- I don’t think I would have made it without the spreadsheet
- Great
- Good
- Underwhelming
- Bad
Now the fun stuff
Note that you don’t have to rank every entry every time if you don’t want to, you can just rank the top entries and ignore the others.
- Air
- Fire
- Water
- Earth
- Dark
I couldn’t put all jobs in the list due to Discourse limits, so I removed the FF1 jobs since those already have had an opportunity to shine:
- たまねぎ剣士・Onion Knight
- 狩人・Ranger
- ナイト・Knight
- 学者・Scholar
- 風水師・Geomancer
- 竜騎士・Dragoon
- バイキング・Viking
- 魔剣士・Dark Knight
- 幻術士・Evoker
- 吟遊詩人・Bard
- 空手家・Black Belt
- 導師・Devout
- 魔人・Magus
- 魔界幻士・Summoner
- 賢者・Sage
- 忍者・Ninja
- Cid’s Airship
- The Enterprise
- The Nautilus
- The Invincible
- Chocobo
- Shiva
- Ramuh
- Ifrit
- Titan
- Odin
- Leviathan
- Bahamut
- Cid
- Princess Sara
- Deshu
- Elia, the priestess of Water
- The 4 じいさん
- Prince Arus
- Doga
- Une
And since we’re not done with the Famicom trilogy, let’s see how they compare:
Famicom pollz
- Final Fantasy 1
- Final Fantasy 2
- Final Fantasy 3
I try the level 50 team again for this attempt.