🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 4

[simias]

Final Fantasy 3 Beginner Club W04

Week 04	2026-04-17T15:00:00Z
Previous week	🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 3
Next week	🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 5
Home Threads	FFBC / FF3BC

Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

FFIII BC

Stopping point

After you get to celebrate with the dwarves.

More details

After defeating Medusa in the tower, Desh sacrificed himself to stabilize the floating continent. This also opens the path towards the outer sea to the North, letting us explore a good chunk of the map.

Our objective this week awaits in the dwarf cave to the North-West, but you may want to drop by the village of Gysahl to the East first. Among other things you can purchase “magic keys” there, which you can use to open locked doors in various locations. You may have encountered some in the Argus castle if you have already visited it.

There are a bunch of other optional things to discover in Gysahl, look in the miscellaneous sections below to know more.

Dwarf Cave

Something was stolen from the dwarves and they need our help to get it back! Explore the underground lake and see if you can find it.

Remember that you can use the テレポ white spell to immediately teleport out of the dungeon if you have it.

Once you’re done with this quest, a cutscene will trigger, opening the way to the 2nd part of this week’s adventure: the Fire Cave to the north of the Dwarf Cave.

Explore that cave until you find the fire Crystal. There’s a warp point right behind it, getting you back to the world map.

If you struggle with the monsters there, don’t forget that the dwarves sell ice armor that will help massively against fire attacks.

You can return to the dwarves to celebrate and collect your rewards. When you enter their cave a cutscene will trigger, setting up next week’s adventure.

EDIT: apparently the cutscene triggers after you leave the cave in the 3D version instead.

Map

Miscellaneous

A village's legacy

The village of Gysahl becomes accessible this week. Its specialty is a type of vegetable bearing the same name, ギサールの野菜, which is established as the Chocobo’s favourite food.

What’s noteworthy about this is that these ギサールの野菜 are recurring in future Final Fantasy entries, usually used to interact with Chocobos.

Here it is in Final Fantasy VIII for instance:

The チョコボくさい description text also seems to be a leftover of this message you get in the Chocobo forest in FF3:

I find it amusing that the name of this random village of FF3 managed to outlive its own game and find its way to most entries after that.

Fan club

In the Famicom version of Ghysahl’s Inn there’s a hidden room behind a fake wall where a girl tells you to write a letter to Square’s offices:

This room doesn’t exist in the Pixel Remaster. From what I read online it does exist in the 3D version but with something different in it.

Bigger Bird

So what are those Gysahl veggies good for anyway? Well if you go in a Chocobo forest and inspect the trees in the middle, you can use them to summon the でぶチョコボ！

The Fat Chocobo can store items for you in order to free space in your invertory. I think that this is effectively useless in the Pixel Remaster given that there aren’t inventory limitations as far as I know, but it’s quite nifty in the Famicom version.

The Fat Chocobo will make minor recurring appearances in future games, for instance here it is featuring in the intro of チョコボレーシング 幻界へのロード, a mediocre Final Fantasy-themed Mario Kart clone for the PS1:

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

[JupiterJesus]

FF3 PR

The text on this one was super long, but man, this is where the game gets hard. edit: Oops, it was last week with super long text. I meant to say this week is super short on text, so it was easy to get ahead.

There’s still no raise spell. We can finally buy phoenix tails, but they’re 1000 each! The nearest town with a revive spring is really freaking far. Every time I lost a guy, I had to walk back out of the dungeon, sail the ocean, revive, inn, go back and hope no one died.

Gutsco was a beast, and I barely beat him on the first try. Mainly that was because he mini-ed everyone on the first round. Everyone was in the front row, taking massive damage, and my physical characters had to throw items at him. I barely won, with half my party dead, and was wiped out on the first random encounter by some ***hole that casts bad breath on you. Without esuna, this is devastating!

The second battle with Gutsco was easy, as he didn’t cast mini. I was bad breathed again afterward, but killed the caster quickly enough that we didn’t wipe.

Finally, the last boss was a pushover. I pushed up Blizzaga in Gysahl (I think), my fighter had an ice sword and my monk was throwing antarctic wind. He went down in record time.

How did that guy teleport to all the way from Tokkul anyway? I don’t see a ship.

[simias]

dungeon crawling tips

Where do you buy Phoenix Downs? I couldn’t find them… It would have made the dungeon significantly easier.

There’s a resurrection spring in the lower level of the dwarf cave (staircase on the bottom right of the main room with the horns).

I died a few times to the boss yesterday, I ended up using a line up of warrior + warrior + black mage + white mage with both warriors in full ice gear bought from the dwarves. Have the black mage cast blizarra and the warriors either attack or use potions to heal the party. Ended up relatively easy after that.

[JupiterJesus]

Equipment

I’m pretty sure I bought Blizzaga from Gysahl. Phoenix tails are sold by the dwarves. I wish I’d known about that damn spring.

The final boss is stupid easy if you bring all your ice stuff. I just used my usual warrior-blm-whm-monk lineup. Blizzaga can be used twice (lvl 4 spell) at my level and does 1000 damage each, and the ice sword hits him for like 500. I didn’t buy any special armor, he just went down fast.

[JupiterJesus]

New Jobs

I immediately switched my monk to thief. I hadn’t used thief for a long time on the 3d version, but I randomly tried the job and found that it does great damage dual wielding daggers. I haven’t tried out the other new jobs. I don’t even know what the scholar is, other than it can supposedly peak into Hein’s weakness, but the knight just seems like a warrior upgrade and the hunter is what, straight ranged dps?

[simias]

reply

No phoenix downs in the Famicom version unfortunately:

By the way I only noticed this week that you got discount by buying by batches of 4 or 10 in shops in the Famicom version. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in the PR. You can see that a single Maiden’s Kiss costs 100gil, but 4 would be 360 (10% discount) and 10 would be only 801 gil (20% discount with some rounding error apparently).

[JupiterJesus]

Equipment and jobs, version differences

Bottom of the list for me:

I can confirm that there are discounts at 4 and 10 on PR as well! The discount does NOT apply to phoenix tails. Wait…yes it does…but it didn’t at first, then I backed out and did it again, and the discount appeared.

I also confirmed that there’s a spring where you said. It’s really small and just looks like a random water feature.

In the 3d version, my black mage can use every bow I’ve found so far. In the PR, he can only use the first couple of bows. The archer, however, can use the newer bows, like the Killer Bow.

I’ve further in PR, and yet I have better daggers available in the 3d version, making my thief really strong. Maybe its because 3d starts with the thief, so they put out good daggers earlier.

[JupiterJesus]

Wow your prices are much higher for potions and needles!

[simias]

Phoenix Downs

It must be something they have added in the PR then, there’s nothing more than what I put in the screenshot here.

It’s a good change I think, not having any revive option at this point in the game is just annoying, especially since you can easily lose a fighter if you’re just unlucky in a random fight.

[JupiterJesus]

New Job

Scholar commands: Investigate and Item Knowledge
I assume the first is like a Scan. The second one perhaps give you improved item effects?

Thief has Steal and Escape

Warrior has Protect

Hunter has … random attack?

[Daisoujou]

Man this boss sucks so bad lol

So the boss that casts an attack that wipes the party in 2 hits likes to always go at the end of one turn and then the beginning of the next, leaving me with no way to respond at all. Seems like the only thing I could possibly do is load everyone up in ice armor (I had my first attempt go badly because it turns out fire armor makes you weak to fire and ice is strong at resisting fire, which is certainly… a choice) and frankly the game is nowhere near good enough for me to spend the couple hours I would need right now to grind enough money to buy that armor, not to mention how everyone crashes to absolutely useless when you change their job to something new. I was going to make the white mage a red mage cause they can use some of the ice armor but then I saw their heal went from well over 100 to, like, 40 or so, and after fighting 4 or 5 battles they didn’t level red mage a single time.

Also the music in the village in the east was terrible and annoying again.

Maybe I actually will quit? Shrug. I felt a compulsion to keep seeing FF2 eventually even when it was annoying but this game really has nothing going for it.

[simias]

reply

If you just want to see it through, consider playing the PR version, you’ll go much faster… I definitely struggle a bit with the Famicom version, even though I already know exactly what to do. You can probably catch up in 30 minutes or so.

[Daisoujou]

Addition

I’m learning from the internet that apparently this boss actually has at least one other attack? I have only ever seen it spam the fire until we die so I thought that was literally all it could do.

Anyway we’re like level 14 or so and I’m seeing people on the internet give numbers around 21 as recommendations heh. Pretty heavy grind if that’s actually the reasonable level to be.

[simias]

boss

It does have a normal attack but you can’t really rely on that when two of his AoE attack in a row is enough to decimate your party…

[VikingSchism]

Busy this weekend so knocking this out early

Week 4

I opened up this week by sailing to ギサール and getting ブリザガ for my black mage. I also got the ギサールの野菜 and went to the chocobo forest to meet the でぶチョコボ but it seems like it just acts as item storage. Which doesn’t really matter on the Pixel Remaster given that you don’t really have a limited inventory. Maybe you can store more than a single stack of potions using it though? Not sure how useful that would be given how cheap potions are otherwise though

Anyway, I then found the dwarf cave (and immediately had flashbacks to one of my least favourite JoJo arcs when they said ラリホー to me). I got the bottom of the cave and fought ガツコー without too much trouble. In fact, it was a fun enough fight with me having to deal with my black mage getting minimised. Not too hard to deal with. I then had to trek back out because I hadn’t bought teleport at this stage

I went back to ギサール at this stage to get a level 4 spell for the white mage, and then to the village with the descendants of the ancients to pick up teleport. I then went to the fire cave and the dungeon was mostly uneventful. I don’t know why we can walk through the lava normally without taking damage though

ガツコー round 2 was harder, but ブリザガ did 1000 damage, which was cool to see. I had to revive my monk, but wasn’t able to heal enough and he got killed again by the boss’ 炎 attack. I tried to revive him again, but the boss died before that happened so I guess he isn’t getting that sweet XP

Didn’t try out any of the new jobs, though I’ve switched my fighter over to the new knight class ready for next week. I also tried switching the white mage to scholar because it looked like the scholar might be able to use magic, but it doesn’t look like it’s got any spell slots. So I might put that on the monk for now (since I’ll want a black mage for exploiting elemental weaknesses by the sounds of what the NPC said)

[Daisoujou]

Well I finished week 4. Going to write that letter to Square

Decided since I can so mindlessly grind by just mashing A against the completely harmless water enemies I’d read Robotics;Notes on my Vita for a while and mash A / wiggle the D pad. So that’s what I did. Real levels come incredibly slowly at this point but a single one gives 50 or more max HP to people who only had ~300 to start with so a single level is pretty huge for survivability. Mainly a bunch of job levels jacked up our damage output to finish the fight in 2 turns, and for the first time ever the boss didn’t use its AOE one turn, so… ok. That’s done.

@VikingSchism

ブリザガ did 1000 damage

??? What is going on in your game or mine? Using it as well I was hitting it for something in the 100s and after a ton of grinding… I’m not sure which damage value was the spell but it was somewhere 200-400 at the absolute most. That’s so far removed from any value I’ve seen anywhere yet.

On the plus side if your XP values are the same as on the famicom, the boss gave the same amount as like one random fight so I wouldn’t sweat someone missing out on it.

---

Anyway the boss aside, this week was ok? Like I said I had to pretty much hurry away from the music in that eastern village, but the dungeons were fine if a little simple. The dwarves actually look like dwarves and that’s cute. This is a significantly better setup of a problem and more or less appropriate amount of time spent on it to make it feel like an arc of the adventure and not something random happening for 20 seconds.

And then at the very end “I am here to tell you, with my last dying breath… change your class… to… the scholar…”

I hope they put that on the guy’s tombstone. This game has the funniest character deaths I’ve ever seen. Watching a conga line of people slip on banana peels to their death is probably my main driving force right now.

[JupiterJesus]

@VikingSchism

ブリザガ did 1000 damage

Yep, something like 980 for my black mage. Level 18 maybe? Decently high BLM job level since I haven’t changed him since the beginning of the game.

[Daisoujou]

Mine is 16 or 17 main level now. I think I saw it mentioned that job leveling is faster on PR, can you check the number for me when you get back to it if it’s not too much trouble? Just curious now.

[JupiterJesus]

Job Levels

My BLM is 31, which is actually the lowest of my job levels.

My understanding is that most stats are tied to whichever job you are currently using, but your permanent hp increases are tied to the current job but stay with you after changing jobs. Apparently, if you want to max out your hp to 9999, you need to a certain class with the highest hp growth before you hit 40, then grind standard levels while only using that class. If you start later than 40 you’ll never reach it. And it’s an achievement. A dumb one.

After I switched to the new jobs, all of my characters were much weaker than they were before. My fighter did maybe half normal damage when he switched to knight.

[simias]

week4

By the way I enjoy the detail of the shadow following you like an NPC after you defeat the boss the first time. If you try to talk to it it just says “？” which is silly but in a good way.

Also I decided to rest before I triggered the next cutscene and it got intimate:

By the way I really like the look of the underground lake in the Famicom version, the palette choices are really nice:

Even though it’s the same platform as FF1 you can really see the devs and artists having a lot more experience. If you compare the Sunken Shrine of FF1 for instance it looks a lot more primitive I think:

Oh and while I’m browsing my screenshots, here’s the outcome of my first attempt at the boss fight:

I like the faceplant pose they make when they die. The Onion knight is the only one I noticed so far that seems to have a different pose where they lie supine with a manga-style exhalation: