Final Fantasy 3 Beginner Club W07
| Week 07 | 2026-05-08T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | 🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 6 |
| Next week | 🧅 Final Fantasy 3 - Week 8 |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF3BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Stopping point
After you leave Salonia.
週刊完璧主義通信
Ocean monsters
In some versions of the game, some monsters found in oceans will become impossible to encounter as soon as the events in Salonia are triggered. From what I see this isn’t the case in the Pixel Remaster, but it may be true for the 3D version.
Brief gifts
At some point you’ll be joined by an NPC in Salonia. At this point some treasures become available from nearby NPCs. They must be collected immediately since they become unavailable as soon as you progress the story further.
More details
Last week we defeated Goldor but he still managed to destroy the Earth Crystal before we retrieved it. At least we got our ship back. What’s next?
In order to progress the story we have to go to Salonia, the huge city on the North-Western continent.
If you want to can first stop by ダスター, a village on an island near the center of the map populated by bards. You can get good 吟遊詩人 and 風水師 gear there and also some interesting lore.
North-East of Salonia there’s also the town of レプリト. You can buy summons there if you want to use your 幻術師.
Once you’re done shopping, fly over Salonia, in particular the central part with the castle. That will trigger a cutscene and we’ll regain control on the ground near the castle. You won’t be able to leave the city until we finish this week’s events.
Salonia
You will quickly notice that the situation in the city is a bit tense. The army won’t let you enter the castle, so you may as well explore the city to the South.
Salonia is massive compared to what we have seen so far and it’s split in 4 blocks: North-West, South-West, North-East and South-East.
I recommend exploring around. Most (but not all) are closed due to the martial law, but there are still NPCs everywhere. Note that there are encounters in the forests within the city between the various blocks. There’s an Inn on the North-East block should you need it.
So how do we get out of this predicament? Once you’re done exploring the town you can head to the 酒場 in the South-West part of town. There’s an NPC here that you can help, and he’ll open the path to enter the castle.
Before you return to the castle you may want to do two things:
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Around the 酒場 there are a few おじいさん in more or less accessible places. Talking to some of them while the NPC is with you will net you some good gear.
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In the South-East part of town, there’s a small dungeon, the ドラゴンの塔, that leads to more gear.
In general pay attention to the gear you’re getting here: the game really pushes you towards a certain job, if you don’t want to over-complicate this I recommend that you heed its hints, it will make the upcoming boss battle much easier that it would otherwise.
Location of the おじいさん:
One you’re ready, head for the castle with your new friend and trigger the rest of this week’s events. Once you’re done you can go to the various denizens of the castle, in particular the king in the throne room and the engineers in one of the towers who will set up your new ship!
Depending on how you play the game you may find this week extremely short, but that’s because I took into account all the optional dialogue in my pacing. If you talk with every NPC this actually the most Japanese-intensive week for the entire game, with almost 4.5k characters in total!
Map
Miscellaneous
募集・竜騎士
The Dragoons are back! In FF2 we met Richard, the last Dragoon of Deist. This time we can have 4 dragoons in our party if we want!
The special move of the Dragoon job is the “jump” command, and it’ll become a defining characteristic of the class in future games. When jumping, the character disappears from the field for one full turn before landing a strong physical attack on an enemy.
Jump does waste one turn but the character becomes effectively invincible while in the air (although they also can’t be healed) which can be used strategically against enemies who have strong attacks targeting the entire party (such as this week’s boss).
The FF3 Dragoons are also proficient with spears above all else (in FF2 they seemed to use mainly swords). This will also become a characteristic of the class going forward.
Dragoons will continue appearing in future games, for instance we’ll meet Freya, the anthropomorphic rat-knight in FF9:
募集・風水師
The job title translates literally as “Feng Shui Master” but the official English translations go with the less fun Geomancer. I personally tend to associate what little I know of Feng Shui with interior design, so the contrast with a fantasy RPG is amusing to me.
At any rate the Geomancer can do a lot more than reorganize your furniture, their 地形 command effectively casts a spell based on the current environment without using any MP. What actually gets cast is partially random, so you can’t fully control it, but the table for the Famicom version looks like this according to the wiki:
Overall it’s a decently powerful class in the midgame since you can effectively cast spells every turn without worrying about MP, and they deal a fair amount of damage too.
The “backfire” chance only exists on Famicom, where sometimes (especially at low job level) 地形 will end up failing and dealing fairly heavy damage to the geomancer casting it:
募集・幻術師
If you’ve played more recent Final Fantasy entries, you may have wondered when summons became a thing since they weren’t present in either FF1 or FF2. Well the answer is: right now!
The 幻術師, translated as “evoker” in the English version, is the first summoner job we have access to and this week we can purchase our first summons from the shop in レプリト. Summon magic works exactly like black and white spells but they’re a third type that’s not compatible with either black or white wizards (or red wizards, for that matter).
I was pretty excited to finally have my first summons in Final Fantasy, but unfortunately the evoker is a bit crap, at least in the original version (I think it works differently in the 3D version, maybe it’s better). I mean, it’s usable, but it feels too random to be reliable.
To summarize, we can buy 5 summons at this point:
| Spell level | Spell name | Summoned creature |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | エスケプ (Escape) | チョコボ (Chocobo) |
| 2 | アイスン (Icen) | シヴァ (Shiva) |
| 3 | スパルク (Spark) | ラムウ (Ramuh) |
| 4 | ヒートラ (Heatra) | イフリート (Ifrit) |
| 5 | ハイパ (Hyper) | タイタン (Titan) |
So what’s the issue? Well you see summon magic is a hybrid of black and white: every summon has two possible outcomes: an attack on the enemy or some kind of status effect on the enemy or party. For instance Ifrit can deal fire damage to an enemy but sometimes it can heal the party instead.
This randomness makes it a bit annoying to use in my opinion. The good news is that we’ll get other summoner jobs later and they always trigger the same attacks from summons, making them work more like fancy black magic spells.
While I’m discussing summons, it’s worth pointing out that this is the first appearance of the 3 “standard” Final Fantasy summons going forward: Shiva, Ramuh and Ifrit:
Chocobo and Titan will also return in some future games, but less prominently.
The name “Shiva” is obviously that of a blue-skinned Hindu god, but it may also be a pun based on the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “shiver”, given that Shiva is always an ice summon.
Cardboard armies
This is a very minor technical detail but it’s the type of videogame magic I enjoy.
When you land is Salonia you end up between two large armies. There are many more characters in that area than you would normally see elsewhere:
This is especially strange in the original Famicom version, given that the hardware is physically incapable of handling so many sprites at once. The fact that most of these characters are fully static gives a hint of what’s going on, and the Pixel Remaster reveals the trick in its map:
Notice that the bulk of the army appears on the map, even though normally character sprites aren’t visible there. This is because only the frontmost soldiers are “real” NPCs, which move and can be talked to, the rest of the armies are drawn directly on the background like floor tiles and are therefore completely static and remain visible on the map.
This is a clever trick to give the impression that there is a huge amount of characters on screen without stressing the capabilities of the hardware. What may be more surprising is that this exact trick will be used in more modern, 3D entries, such as Final Fantasy VIII:
Here you can see a bunch of students gathered in the quad. They all look like normal 3D models but if you actually check which one are drawn in real time on the PS1’s GPU you realize that most of them are actually just static textures drawn on the background, with only the main characters being real 3D models:
This is imperceptible in the original version (aside from the fact that those fake characters are fully static and can’t be interacted with), but becomes rather obvious in the upscaled remasters because the “fake” characters become blurry since they’re upscaled as part of the background texture instead of being redrawn at a higher resolution like the real 3D models:
This is one of the many reasons I consider the remasters of the PS1 FFs to be lazy, artless cashgrabs but I’ll save my 10-page rant for when we get there.
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
