🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 3

[simias]

Final Fantasy 3 Beginner Club W03

Week 02	2026-04-10T15:00:00Z
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Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

FFIII BC

Stopping point

When Desh (your current NPC companion) leaves the party.

週刊完璧主義通信

Once solved, Nepto’s Temple and its treasures is no longer accessible in the Famicom version. In the Pixel Remaster you maintain access.

I’m unclear on whether Nepto’s bestiary entry is missable in the Pixel Remaster: some people online claim that you have to trigger the fight by sailing the boat and then flee to have the entry register, others claim that the entry is automatically added once you finish the temple regardless of whether you actually encounter him.

It’s bestiary entry #198 if you want to check.

More details

Last week we met Desh while escaping from the dragon Bahamut, then we shrank to visit the land of the small people and crossed a secret passage to a new region of the map. Let’s continue our adventure!

Viking’s hideout

Our first stop will be a visit to the vikings. They’re willing to lend you their boat to progress further, but should you try to sail away you’ll quickly find that there’s a bit of an issue. We need to investigate Nepto’s Temple to the north of the cave to see what can do to solve the problem.

Before you go make sure to explore the viking’s hideout, as usual in this game there’s a bunch of hidden treasure. If you’re in need of resuscitation you can find a spring in there too.

Nepto’s Temple

If you were underwhelmed with the very short dungeons where you had to be minified, rejoice! We have another one: in order to enter the inner part of the temple you need to have a fully minified party. Ready your mages and search for the treasure.

Once you have the key item, you can use it in the very first room of the temple to pacify Nepto. In the Famicom version you can no longer enter the inner temple after doing this.

The Sea

With Nepto returned to his slumber, we can now freely sail the mediterranean sea. There are a bunch of new locations accessible, with lots of NPCs, shops, treasures and even some sidequesting!

Feel free to explore to your heart’s content, but if you want to focus on the main story and leave the other locations for later here’s the situation:

• Our objective is to get rid of the 渦巻き that blocks the gullet leading to the outer sea to the North.
• In order to do this we need to explore the オーエンの塔 which is located right next to it.
• However if you go there immediately, you’ll notice that you don’t have the skill required to access the upper floors.
• In order to get the required spell, we have to visit the Gurgan tribe in a cave located in a narrow valley to the West. From the tower just keep walking West and you should find it.

Ouen Tower

With the Gurgan spell in your possession you can explore the tower. Note that you don’t have to stay in the altered state for the entire dungeon like previously with mini, you can return to normal as soon as you’ve entered the 1st level.

If you feel stuck, don’t forget to talk to your companion, he might have some tips! I think some of that dialogue actually triggers automatically in the PR, but you have to remember to talk to him in the Famicom version.

As you reach the top a cutscene will play out, then you will be automatically warped back to the world map. Save, we’re done for this week!

Map

Miscellaneous

The Final Frontier

The viking’s boat is called the Enterprise, which is a name given to a bunch of real-world US navy ships, including “the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the United States Navy”. It’s also the name of the iconic spacecraft in Star Trek.

Big Bird

Chocobo forests become accessible this week! In the PR version they are visible in the middle of some forests in on the map, in the Famicom version they’re completely invisible. One of them is in the middle of the forest North of the Gurgan cave, the other is next to the village of the ancients on the West edge of the map.

Like in FF2, you can “talk” to one of the chocobos there to ride it out of the forest. And this time we have the full chocobo tune in the Famicom version!

If you have found Ghysal Greens already, you can also use them there to unlock something special, but more on that next week.

No donut

This week we can finally reach the edge of the map. If you decide to go there, you’ll see that this time it looks a bit different from what we had in FF1 and 2…

If you want some background lore about this, you can go to the village of the ancients on the West edge of the map.

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

[Daisoujou]

I'm not quite done cause the last dungeon is kind of obnoxious but quick spoilers for late in it

Everyone that didn’t like FF2’s music is going to come together with me and say the tower music is extremely annoying and way too short of a loop, right (at least if you’re on original version heh)? I kind of just think most things about this game are worse than 1 and 2 right now… especially the extreme disappointment I felt when I saw that mouse boss. We used to know how to make a striking mouse design!

[JupiterJesus]

FF3 PR Week 3

The ring of old exposition dudes is back! Yay! One of these weirdos even repeats the fancy prophecy talk from the intro.

I’m shocked there still isn’t a way to bring my guys back besides phoenix tails, of which I only have one. It turned out okay.

At least so far, it feels to me like the dungeons are more cinematic, and less trials of attrition. I like the change, if only because they hadn’t yet figured out how to actually make dungeons interesting yet. Their solution in the mean time to basically just make them short but memorable is way more to my taste, and much more like future entries. Eventually I think they’ll find interesting things to do in dungeons, but its still the 80s and I’d rather they did this than force me to walk through 12 endless floors of empty rooms and CONSTANT REPETITIVE ENCOUNTERS AARGH.
Heck, I think half the reason this is harder than previous entries is that I’m not forced to fight enemies every 10 steps, so I’m not grossly overleveled at all times.

The mini dungeon was charming, somewhat challenging because we were limited by spell charges and having to fight a mouse is obvious but cute. It also shot lightning bolts at me. Why?

Anyway, of course Simias put in basically everything you could find by boat into the spreadsheet at once so it took a bit longer than usual to finish. The Ancients in particular loved to talk using vocab, and even Kanji, that I’d never seen before.

WTF was up with that dragon? It looks so derpy in 2D (the 3D version is fine). Are those human teeth? Is his name Nepto (Neptune?) or is he a dragon of “Nepto” type/clan/family/etc? I think it’s his name, but the wiki also seems confused.

Finally, I actually got to like Desch before his untimely end. Lots of people died in FF2 but I didn’t give two craps about them. I at least gave 1.5 craps about Desch.

[JupiterJesus]

Can’t say I agree about the music. It feels very FF to me, in the PR version anyway. Feels like music that could have been in FF4/6.

Oh god, I found a video of the original music. It is heinous.

Maybe they should’ve given the mouse sunglasses and had him throw bombs.

[Daisoujou]

You’re definitely speaking my language with the redesign idea.

Yeah listening to PR version now, I could see it MAYBE becoming overbearing hearing it for a whole dungeon but whether it would or not that’s a pretty big improvement over hating the original within about a minute haha. Starting to think Pixel Remaster made some quality changes this time.

Oh on that note, though! I discovered switching back to my previous jobs on a couple characters, due to the levels, cost literally nothing, so I take back some complaining about the job points system considering it’s very much not getting in my way at all thus far.

[Akashelia]

Week 3

New optional bad ending unlocked: try to use the ship before giving its eye back to the water dragon and get nuked xD

Vikings > Pirates:

Rat:

[shitsurei]

Week 3

My group: H-
Boss: Oh can you very tiny children get rid of the sea dragon for us, grown ass vikings, bc we’re so scared we can’t even sail anymore. Thanks

I love final fantasy sometimes

---

So the Gurgans are born without the ability to see but instead have a sixth sense and can see the future.

… Wait..

Doesn’t that mean that they only have 5 senses but have swapped that one out for sight?

---

Honestly Deshu said about 5 things to me ever (and also ran out of some poor girl.. and it sounded like she probably wasn’t the only one) and somehow I actually felt kind bad when he sacrificed himself. I’ll be sure to pour one out for my homie next time we find a inn..

---

Chocobos!!!

[simias]

I like the music so far, there’s a lot more variety than in FF2 I think. I admit that I was listening to some podcast while doing the dungeon on Famicom though, so I didn’t pay attention to this particular track.

I struggled quite a bit with Nepto’s temple this time around. On the Famicom my spells kept missing at an alarming rate. I don’t remember that being an issue in the PR.

And yeah the “capacity points” turn out to be a non-issue, I get an ample supply of them and can switch back to already trained classes for free. We will see how it evolves later in the game…

I had an interesting gameplay moment in the tower: my white mage got muted and I didn’t have any echo herbs with me to heal her, so I decided to reclass her into a red mage on the spot to have physical attacks. Then I found herbs in a chest later and switched her back before the boss.

[VikingSchism]

@JupiterJesus

Maybe they should’ve given the mouse sunglasses and had him throw bombs.

But then they’d need a song about chasing the rats

[JupiterJesus]

Ha! Mewgenics is so freaking weird.

[JupiterJesus]

@shitsurei

So the Gurgans are born without the ability to see but instead have a sixth sense and can see the future.

… Wait..

Doesn’t that mean that they only have 5 senses but have swapped that one out for sight?

I think it would have been confusing if they said they got a fifth sense, don’t you think? A sixth sense is psychic stuff; what would a fifth sense be, echolocation?

[Daisoujou]

Final Fantasy 3 seconds spent on any story idea

I dunno, stumbling through 20 minute vignettes is already starting to feel like this game is rambling; I miss how focused and purposeful 2 was. Vikings came and went and felt like nothing at all, there’s a big dragon problem for a dungeon that has like 3 or 4 tiny hallways total, now blind people want us in a tower after sailing aimlessly.

Couldn’t we just… know that there’s this apparently existential threat with the tower, and how it’s infested with medusas, instead of learning that info 1 second before dealing with the problem and only showing up in the first place because an old blind man said destiny was up there? I thought our companion going “I just remembered! I gotta kill myself in this fire as fast as possible!” was way funnier than any of the sacrifices in 2. At least it played him a little memorial jingle.

Spell slots have yet to position the spells such that I’m actually making a choice between them the way I thought FF1 did pretty decently, it’s just a hard cap on how long my mage gets to exist, which is cut into by making you cast status on yourself a bunch. Like it’s just different flavors of damage all on the same tier so it’s all the same thing, that kinda thing.

Battle sprites are so much worse imo too. I guess medusa was kind of interesting looking.

I dunno, it just feels monotonous and grindy so far in a way that 1 didn’t (maybe PR changes that to be fair I didn’t play famicom 1) and while 2 certainly had its form of pretty serious grinding, engaging more purposefully with the systems still interested me more than how this works so far.

I might be in a worse mood because Owen Tower (waow) is one of the worst pieces of game music I’ve heard in my life, to be fair, and I had to go through the tower twice because I didn’t know the game secretly punishes you for pressing the run away button by crashing everyone’s defense to 0 on the famicom. Really should’ve muted it second time. That ringing in it on the famicom sounds exactly like a car door being left open. It’s basically the Crazy Bus Theme to my ears except I unironically think Crazy Bus is interesting and would definitely play that song over this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0cvwnG0Ik

[simias]

There’s definitely a “quantity over quality” aspect to it but it still feels fresh to me. I guess knowing that FF4 is on the horizon is motivating too, we’re about to leave these primitive Famicom games behind us.

[Daisoujou]

I should at least add that being able to fire a cannonball was cute! Highlight of the week for me.

[frequent4832]

Missable Bestiary entry

I can confirm that I got Nept’s entry in the PR after talking to him, even without ever meeting him in combat.

[Kelsyy]

Week 3 in 3D

I did a few battles before going into the cave to fight the rat just to make sure my dudes are ready. I remember having to fight a few extra fights in the 3D version periodically, no biggie.

I don’t think the PR versions let you multi target different enemies like this? I could be mistaken. Either way, it comes in handy lol.

Gotta fight the rat. Why is he purple? Purple rat.

I really appreciate Desch launching lighting bolts at the enemies. Very useful.

We won the fight with no casualties! I never changed my peoples classes because I knew Rufia would be able to solo this herself. I want that sweet job EXP on my main classes, not on some random Red Mages I’ll never use again.

It’s cute how Refia is worried about him lol.

I left the cave and got this dialogue with Desch. Sure bro, having you around is useful, join the club!

SHIP GET

This one on one dialogue with Refia is funny lol. He was so not kidding. Mad Refia is also very cute.

As I set sale, we got into our first sea battle aaaaand Arc immediately gets one shot. I don’t think his entire body is even on the ship anymore lol.

I spent some time running around to the new places we could explore. I hit up the castle and saw that there’s nobody there. I went to the town to the south and remembered what we will be doing next week lmao. I also went back to Cid’s house and gave his wife the elixir. I forgot we could already access the waterways to get the needed item. Off to the tower we go!

I think Luneth might have some trauma with airships now lol.

I forgot that I needed to go to the cave to the west to get the spell. Refia was NOT happy to hear that.

Oh no, I hope his destiny doesn’t involve machines going haywire of some kind. That would be tragic.

Off to the tower we go! Oh jeez, the white text on black background voices are talking to me again.

EUGH. Okay that is one heck of a model all right. The eyes man.

Time to fight Medusa! Everyone is level 15. She managed to take out Refia twice, but I was able to revive and heal her at the same time successfully the second time.

(I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but I have a little guide that gives the minimum-ish level you can be to fight the bosses in the 3D version. I used it my first time playing and enjoyed it a lot, so I’m using it again. I like that it gives me a good target to hit while also I know not to get over leveled to keep the boss fights engaging).

Aw nuggets. I’ll miss his electricity spam. I knew he was going to jump in the fire, but still, sad times.

We leave off with Refia being sad. Bummer

No new mail this week. I imagine there should be some next week. Maybe.

[Daisoujou]

@Kelsyy

I don’t think the PR versions let you multi target different enemies like this? I could be mistaken. Either way, it comes in handy lol.

You can on Famicom even, but it cuts into the damage so hard I haven’t been using it ever.

I’m jealous that Desch does something in combat on your version!

[Akashelia]

@Daisoujou

I’m jealous that Desch does something in combat on your version!

Yes it’s basically all the guests Princess and Cid would also jump in once in a while!

[Sisthra]

Week 3 spoilers and thoughts

I also have to admit that the segment with the Vikings felt quite random, even if short. After picking it back up this week there was a little moment of “ok … Now what? What is even our current objective, plot wise, other than the four crystals?” It did feel a bit like we were pretty much stumbling around after getting dumped off the mountain by bahamut last week. The mini dungeon was thankfully short, I also made the same mistake of trying to fight Nepto before returning the gem and getting wrecked.
A mouse that shoots thunder…?
Yeah, doesn’t remind me of anything.
(I know FF3 came out way before, just thought it was a funny coincidence).
The mouse boss not even getting a unique sprite however felt a little disappointing.
However, I really enjoyed getting access to the ship and starting to sail around. I don’t think I had opened the map the past weeks, so doing it now pretty casually and getting that little moment of realizing “wait… something’s off about this map…” and then going to the edge of the map to realize that yeah, those are clouds, the “ocean” we sail is more like a giant landlocked lake and the whole world is a floating continent! completely blind was honestly really cool. I loved that and I can imagine that it was even cooler at the time, now I understand why the map was “hidden” in the original Famicom game. I also took a Chocobo just to have a whole trip around the world.
The tower was not that bad as a dungeon. There was a moment before where all my characters except my monk were doing pitiful damage, then suddenly in the tower they started to hit for 150+. I guess the tower enemies were particularly weak to physical damage.
I also trusted the game logo and started dual wielding weapons with everyone, in contrast to FF2 where keeping a shield equipped made you stupidly OP by raising evasion or nullifying an attack completely if you happened to shield it, there doesn’t seem to be that big of an advantage to using a shield except a little bit more defense here.
(In fact, I don’t think I have seen my warrior ever use his shield at all, so it’s probably not a mechanic anymore?)
Rip Desh, I’ll make sure to go talk with that poor girl you left waiting for you to let her know what happened…

[Akashelia]

Replies

@Sisthra

ok … Now what? What is even our current objective, plot wise,

Definitely how I felt too.

@Sisthra

A mouse that shoots thunder…?
Yeah, doesn’t remind me of anything.
(I know FF3 came out way before, just thought it was a funny coincidence).
The mouse boss not even getting a unique sprite however felt a little disappointing.

Haha hadn’t thought about that reference. But had the same thought about the sprite.

@Sisthra

I also took a Chocobo just to have a whole trip around the world.

I went around the world on foot! Thought I might get nuked again at some point, a bit like in FF2 where some parts of the world are opened but really you are not supposed to go there yet. The result: I survived every fight :-o .