Yeah, the numerals are starting to get awkward.
Of the NES-era Final Fantasy games, I think I can safely say that III is my favorite, but it's not without its flaws.
Still, there are big things to recommend it: the Jobs system is, if nothing else, a cool aesthetic transformation. I think the fact that you only have four characters makes it slightly awkward. Furthermore, upon unlocking the Sage and Ninja jobs - the Ninja can equip all weapons and armor and the Sage can use all spells - has the unfortunate effect of basically rendering the rest of the jobs irrelevant in the last stretch of the game.
The other hiccup in the Jobs system is the tediousness of getting up to speed with a new job. Leveling a job requires you to take five total actions (which can include just "Defend") while in that job, but also cap at a single job level per encounter. This means that you might find yourself tempted to spend a long time in some low-level area hitting "defend" for five rounds and then wiping out the monsters, and repeating this ad nauseum.
There's a bit of push-pull I feel on the story. Unlike II, which went somewhat dark with its evil emperor conquering and massacring, this returned to four generic heroes (with the top-position character really being the "player character,") and a pretty standard "chosen one" story involving the restoration of four elemental crystals.
Still, there's definitely more here than in the first game, and some very cool concepts show up: for example, there are two world maps. You spend the first part of the game in a somewhat small world map, but when you reach the edge of it you discover that it's actually a continent floating high above the world. The world opens up a lot more after you leave here and restore the Water Crystal, which raises the sunken continents back to the surface and restores their people.
Also, crazily, you get four airships over the course of the game - the first is in a small valley that serves as the game's "kiddie pool," and you sacrifice that airship very quickly to destroy a boulder blocking the path. Then, you get another ship that is shot down over the city of Saronia (the series' first crack at a big city works by making it effectively four separate villages on the overworld map). You then can't leave the city until you deal with the evil advisor to the king, and in thanks, the crown prince gives you a speedier little ship that eventually gains the ability to convert into a submarine (though there are only a couple locations you need the sub to go to). The final ship is a big air-galleon that is my favorite, because it becomes a little mobile base, letting you resupply and rest anywhere you take it.
The final boss is a bit of a disappointment: the Cloud of Darkness just spams a giant AoE damage ability that more or less tests if your healer can spam Curaja every turn on the party (I miscalculated when I'd have to hit her with an Elixir to replenish her spell slots, which led to a kind of tempo-cycle where I could not revive and keep my top melee guy alive, so ironically I beat the game with everyone but the "face" of the party up).
One thing that shocks me is that apparently at no point until X, and then only in X, did the game use a normal freaking turn-based combat system. I through III use this thing where you have to queue up all of your characters' actions ahead of time (which sucks when you want to, say, revive someone and then heal them with a potion or buff them with Protection) whereas IV I believe introduces the "Active Time Battle" system, where you have to get fast at navigating those menus. Having gotten my start with Mario RPG, I'd always assumed that there were some Final Fantasy games that simply told you whose character's turn it was, let you select and action, and then had them immediately take that action. And given that X was my first Final Fantasy game, I assumed that that system was present in the other games (at least before XI's MMO and XII's move to their weird "gambit" system that I detested).
Anyway, I'll be curious to see how the SNES titles look and feel. The Pixel Remasters have, of course, made the old NES ones look like they were on the SNES, so I suspect there will be a less dramatic shift. I might consider going back to work on VII Rebirth's Hard Mode (I've just arrived at Cosmo Canyon in that run).
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