I kept meaning to point out that in the PR you got a different version of the battle theme when your characters were minified. Love that little touch.
It is done
Week 11
Man the ending of this game is a mess. You come to a mirror and you get paralysed but all the beloved NPC characters who you definitely remember are here to save you, including one of the four old guys for some unknown reason. Then you fight the guy who you were told was the big villain orchestrating everything at the top of the magic tower but psych, actually there’s a super evil green cloud who had no buildup and mega-murders you, but you actually get brought back with the power of friendship. Then you go to the dark world and you have to go and find the darkness crystals which are all conveniently in walking distance of each other. And then finally you can fight the green cloud who it turns out has boobs for some reason
I will say I found the final boss quite boring, if not frustrating. There were no real interesting decisions to be made during the fight, it was just keeping my devout spamming ケアラガ, and praying that the turn order shakes out in my favour. Then sighing when it doesn’t and reviving everyone one by one. Meanwhile anyone who can attack does, and if spell slots run low then pop an elixir. It just took ages to get through. And the first time I did it I made the stupid mistake of thinking the laserbeam was a magic attack that レフレク would reflect, but no turns out it’s not. But レフレク does reflect healing magic… So I had to restart the fight when I was already like 10 minutes deep
I think by the time I finished the party were all somewhere about level 47~49. Maybe I just needed to grind more to make the final boss a bit easier? Still, I don’t think spamming a single attack is fun or good design
The ending sequence was also a lot of time spent on these NPCs who I cared not a whit for. It’s nice that they had some epilogue scenes, but I could’ve done without most of it. It was fun to get to see the interior of the Nautilus though?
Talking about the Famicom trilogy
I think in the end, FF2 came out as my favourite of the 3 Famicom titles. I think it handled its narrative and general world the best. FF3 gets points for some cool ideas with stuff like the second overworld (and having that also change over time too with the world initially being covered in water. I also did like that it had some actual bonus content, and the job system did provide some fun in giving more flexibility in how you build your party while avoiding FF2’s pitfalls. However, the handling of the narrative absolutely lets it down in a big way. Your party lurches from place to place with little rhyme or reason, and things just happen. It feels crazy how much of a regression it felt like from FF2 which was always motivating your next objective. FF1 probably falls in the middle, it feels more like a prototype for the latter two games, it didn’t have a great narrative but it also didn’t feel like it was going for that? FF3 felt like it had some ambition in that department, it was just bungled.
In terms of overworld themes, my ranking is probably FF2 > FF3 Water World > FF3 Regular > FF1. I enjoy darker/more melancholic music I guess. I also did like FF2’s battle theme the best. FF3’s was pretty good. In terms of final dungeon themes I think FF1 edges it, but it was a close race
Looking forward to playing 4
It’s interesting that the vote is so split. And I get it too, every game does some things very well and others very poorly. I think it’s true for upcoming games too and overall a strength of Final Fantasy as a whole in my opinion. Unlike Dragon Quest or Pokemon for instance, Square won’t hesitate to experiment wildly with every entry. You never know what to expect.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the vote ends up very split for 4/5/6 and 7/8/9 as well.
Deshu
One thing we haven’t discussed is Deshu actually not being dead but chilling in the Ouen furnace for most of the game.
I wonder if it’s partly a way to lampoon the fact that those games love to randomly kill NPCs. “Wait you really thought I was dead? Why would you think that? That’s messed up, dude.”
The water priestess didn’t get so lucky…
The Final Week of FF3 In 3D!
Prepping for the final dungeon
Titan? Unei? Doga? Bahamut?? What are you talking about, it’s time for the final dungeon!
I immediantly switched Lunneth from a knight to a ninja and bought 20 shurikens. I am not messing around with this. I have actually never used ninja in the 3D version, but I know shurikens are really good, so I’m hoping this is the only change I need to win.
I ran all the way through Eureka again for this. Speaking of, I still had muscle memory from traversing the Labyrinth over and over 3 years ago which is… kind of crazy if you ask me.
I climbed the tower of which I kind of remembered where to go. Xande was a push over for me, I didn’t even need shurikens. I got to this first boss in the World of Darkness and I just kept dying over and over because Arc couldn’t keep up with the healing. I honestly didn’t think I was going to survive the Cloud of Darkness at this point, but once I won I decided to keep on going anyways just to see how I’d fare.
The final boss
A major difference from the 2D version is that she has these two tentacles. One of them does lightening magic (and is immune to magic damage) while the other one uses bad breath and casts haste (and is immune to physical attacks). On my first attempt I tried just DPSing down the Cloud of Darkness herself, but I found that I couldn’t keep up with the healing once she was using particle beam and the tentacle was using lightening each turn. I reset and decided to shuriken the thunder tentacle into oblivion. My summoner after awhile was able to take down the other tentacle with party wide Bahamut and Leviathan.
Then only the Cloud of Darkness was left. I was SWEATING. Just one unlucky double particle beam would wipe my whole run out. Luckily, I was able to DPS her down and win the fight!! I yelled to my husband that I won as loud as possible 
Thoughts on the game
So this was my second time playing the 3D version, third time playing FF3 overall. I still really enjoy the 3D version. I totally see the issues a lot of people have with the narrative and can kind of agree, but my first time playing the 3D version I actually didn’t notice them much. I definitely think the 3D version does a better job at making the characters more likeable, even if they don’t have that much more personality. I also just really enjoy the gameplay. The bosses do require more planning and strategy than the PR and I really enjoy that. I also like seeing my levels go up lol. My favorite FF is 5 and my favorite DQ is 9, I absolutely have a bias twoards these type of job/class games lol.
While losing my save file sucked, I’m actually pretty happy that I was able to get revenge on the CoD with my original team prior to me grinding to level 60. I feel like I proved that my OG level 50’s team could win.
I didn’t realize there was a vote so I just went and voted. I did 3>1>2, but in actuality since I feel like 3D and 2D are different games, I really mean 3 3D>1>3 2D=>2. I think the biggest change this club had for me (besides helping my Japanese to grow!!!) was that I feel a bit softer about 2. I still think its at the bottom of my list, but it might be equal to 3 2D at least!
I’m curious to see if the club will make any more changes to my current full ranking list of 5>7>14 up to Endwalker>8>4 3D>16>10>3 3D>12>15>6>1>3 2D>=2. The NES trilogy is relatively at the bottom, we’ve still got some great games to get to!
FF3D
Thanks to your and Akashelia’s posts I can believe that the 3D version is the best way to experience the content. The additional characterization seems to go a long way towards making the world feel more cohesive, which is a week point of the original.
You didn’t play 9?
I don’t think many people would put the first 3 games high on the rankings, they’re mostly interesting for “historical” reasons at this point. FF4 is going to be a massive step up in overall quality, at least I think so.
Yeah I considered trying to do a more “holistic” ranking but decided it only makes sense to rate the versions of the games that I actually played. 3 PR smooths out the most rough edges so it ended up being my favorite.
It’s interesting how different the experience can be with this first trilogy depending on which version you play. FF2 particularly, with the completely retooled progression system used by the various remakes, but even the dungeon crawling experience of 3 is pretty drastically different between Famicom and PR.
I think it’s going to be less of an issue going forward, I filthy preplayed the start of FF4 SNES and PR and while there are a few tweaks here and there it’s a lot more similar, both visually and in terms of gameplay. The biggest difference is that the PR script uses kanji…
There is a 3D version of FF4 though, not sure how it compares.
It’s apparently hard as crap, and has a hard mode on top of that, and adds new mechanics (basically FF6 relics) so there’s at least one decision you have to make about your characters and strategy instead of zero.
I’m trying to get my husband to play with me in English and I have not been successful 
Speaking of, SNES FF4 also has that cool select characters per controller feature. Would be a cool experience for the club.
I have also heard it’s harder lol. It’s the only version of 4 I’ve played so I can’t confirm yet though. But it also has some voice acting! A 3D exclusive feature with augments that gives more customization! It’s in 3D! I think that’s it lol.
It occurred to me that I didn’t really talk about the story developments this week.
Week 11 story
Doga going around to collect 5 friends to release us was delightful, even though his choices were a bit questionable - I don’t think anyone expected (or wanted) to see the おじいさん from Amur again.
The “balance between light and dark” stuff feels like the kind of story I would’ve really liked as a kid, but now it just seems underdeveloped. If light and dark don’t really have any differences beyond their aesthetics, we might as well be the warriors of blue and red. It’s also a pretty weird oversight that the big bad is still the Cloud of Darkness… I know a popular fan theory is that there was an equivalent Cloud of Light in the previous age, but it would’ve been nice to have that addressed somewhere in canon.
The sudden text scroll after beating Cloud of Darkness had me worried that it’d be another FF1-style text-only conclusion, so I was relieved to see another scene after that. It was nice to get a little resolution for Desch, though none of the other characters really had any loose ends to tie up. Princess Sara suddenly being romantically interested in… someone was completely out of left field. I really hate the storytelling cheat of just treating the entire party as one singular person. Hopefully it dies for good with the move between console generations.
Overall it was definitely my favorite ending of the Famicom trilogy. I had my complaints but there was nothing as egregious as FF1’s handwavey time travel or FF2’s complete lack of resolution for the Leonheart story.
サラ姫
Not entirely, she says this after destroying the ring with the Djinn:
本当はついていきたい⋯。
でも、きっと足手まといに
なってしまいますね。
旅が終わったら、必ず帰ってきてくださいね。
私、待っています。いつまでも⋯。
間違った
Wow, that’s actually pretty direct. Guess that’s the downside to playing the game over the course of 3 months - some things get forgotten.
FFIII and FFXIV spoilers
The game repeatedly brings up a ‘flood’ of light that was “held back” by the warriors of darkness. While they speak metaphorically, I have no doubt that the “flood of light” was akin to the cloud of darkness, especially since they occasionally refer to the coming power of darkness as “covering” the world (instead of “flooding/overflowing”, as the light did), which brings to mind imagery of clouds or fog. I doubt these WoD held hands and chanted - they likely punched an a-hole cloud of light until it evaporated.
It definitely isn’t an oversight that the boss is the Cloud of Darkness. It’s supposed to be a cyclical event that’s happened for a long time. Light and darkness are supposed to be in balance, but we idiots keep disrupting that balance. The ancients fucked up last time, unleashing the light, and now Xande is disrupting the balance for his own benefit. We just happen to be in the “darkness is bad” phase. Since FF14 Shadowbringers is like a pseudosequel to this game, it is Light’s turn to flood the world. You call yourselves the warrior of darkness (you’ve always been called the WoL since the beginning), and you fight against twisted monsters borne from Light.
Whether the light/dark balance concept is interesting is another matter, but the game is decades old, so I’ll cut it some slack. If anything, it was less cliche than most of its peers.
Sara
I thought it was extremely strange that she vows to wait for you as long as it takes, after having followed you around for 15 minutes or so.
At least in the 3D version she falls in love with Ingus, who has been a guard in her castle for quite some time. Presumably, she had a bit of a crush on him to begin with…
Sera and Sara
I may be overthinking this but I wonder if FF3’s Princess Sara is not lampooning FF1’s Princess Sera.
- The names are obviously similar
- They’re both princesses
- They both appear very early in the game, functionally within the intro
- They both seem to hit on the 光の戦士. I pasted Sara’s line above, in FF1 Sera says:
よければ⋯ずっとコーネリアで⋯
いえ⋯なんでもありません。さ、旅の用意を⋯。クリスタルに輝きを⋯！
I admit that I never fully understood these lines, I even checked out the English version back then, and it’s equally as ambiguous if I recall correctly, but I take it as Sera making a pass at my white mage (you can find my yuri fanfic in the spreadsheet).
It’s however also possible that these lines have nothing to do with Sera trying to get some hot and steamy Arise action going on but simply showcase that she’s uneasy because she can feel that there’s still evil looming in the Chaos Shrine, foreshadowing the endgame. That’s a lot less fun though.
But of course in other ways Sara is the exact opposite of Sera:
- Sera is the prototypical damsel in distress. Sara is literally the only person not affected by the curse and she’s about to solo the Djinn when we meet her. Did she swim across the lake btw? Probably.
- Sera effectively vanishes as a character after the exchange I copied above, Sara has a crucial role in the endgame and gets closure in the outro.
- Sera seems coy and sheepish, Sara is girlboss slay brat coded.
I appreciate your passionate yet utterly unnecessary overanalysis. That’s what I come to book clubs for. No sarcasm. Keep it up, I’m here for it.
Taking things too seriously
I do think a lot of FFIII was made as a reaction to FFI, while FFII was…whatever the hell that was. I’ve said a lot about how the “odd numbered”
entries rhyme, but III very much feels like it has a ton of similarities to the first one, but either expanded on or parodied. You start with four random dudes, but this time you choose the class AFTER the game starts, and they mysteriously showed up as babies instead of coming from (somewhere else? they never answered that, did they?). Either way, mysterious, unnamed weirdos. You’re grabbing the same crystals, being jerked around from town to town with little rhyme or reason. Then suddenly AH THE PLOT IS HERE AND IT IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL. Given that Sera and Garland were the only characters in the first game, there aren’t too many to parody in this one… Honestly, Xande might as well be Garland - a useless whiner who tries to grasp cosmic power he doesn’t understand. I’m surprised you fight Xande. With his characterization, I’d have expected him to be killed mid-fight and replaced by the Cloud he was trying to exploit!
セラが惚れた？
So, it is super vague. She uses で, though, right? Isn’t that typically used when you are temporarily in a place to perform an action? I want to also read this as “If you like, you could stay in Cornelia forever”, but wouldn’t most words that imply “staying in a place/living there” use に?
Bringin’ it back to grammar, yeaaah!
If the implied/omitted verb is 待つ, I think で makes more sense than に. Searching around ＜どこか＞に待つ doesn’t seem to be very common.
Sure, but that’s kinda what I meant by “temporarily”. Like, I “wait” in a room with で, but I “live” in a place with に. And ずっと does not sound temporary.
Is it the case that ずっと is commonly used for something that happened already? Or do people use it for things that could happen in the future?