Final Fantasy III (Android)

Final Fantasy III on smartphones is a port of the DS game that was released a while back in 2006.  You now play through the screen with virtual buttons and these touch controls are well done.  The virtual analog stick isn't fixed in one place (it appears wherever you touch on the screen), which is great.  While a virtual analog stick isn't that accurate at times, for example, you will be trying to align a character to interact with an object and you have to fiddle around or the fact that your character might run or walk when you didn't want them to.  In general, the controls are intuitive and works much better than expected.  The graphics are pretty good, although character models when zoomed in are pixelated (slightly disappointing).  I really liked how the game retained it's 2D world feel when it's in 3D.

Final Fantasy III has the classic Final Fantasy formula, which is great.  The lack of voice acting is understandable (since it'll lose the charm when the original was text based) but sometimes you feel as if it would be awesome if you can hear the character's voices.  There is too much grinding involved that you would need to do and in some areas, the encounter rates are annoyingly higher than you'd want.  Monsters also hit heavier compared to the original Final Fantasy III on the NES and in other Final Fantasy games.  This was due to the DS's limitation, the number of monsters in each battle had to be decreased so they increased the damage that monsters could do in order to compensate.  While understandable, it makes the game harder since whenever a monster hits you, it will take away 1/3 to 1/2 of your health away (unless you're grossly overleveled), and then add to that fact that monsters get to attack twice in one turn.

The battle system will be familiar to most, being turn based and menu driven.  It is easy to pick up although the order in which characters attack can be hard to determine.  Just when you think one character is faster than another, variations happen and throws that theory out the window.  The game could have explained the job system better such as how you use magic and the benefits of switching jobs.  After playing Final Fantasy V's awesomely fun job system, FF3's pales in comparison and feels much less versatile.  This pretty much kills 80% of the game's uniqueness.  The music is good, especially the battle theme.  However, it feels as if some tunes are reused too much or at the very least, sounds too familiar.  This, coupled with the generic design of each dungeon and it seems like you're retreading a lot of places, even though they are supposedly unique, location-wise.

Boss battles will cause difficulty spikes, which is fairly annoying if you're not fully prepared for that.  Thankfully, most dungeons are short so it's not too much of a pain to traverse the whole thing again (there are no save points within dungeons, you can only save on the world map).  Yet, longer dungeons would have been more fun to explore rather than these short lifeless ones.  Not being able to save anywhere feels unfair during the latter part of the game where bosses easily trump you and you need to at least fight them once to see their attack pattern and weaknesses so you can adjust accordingly (i.e. your character's jobs).  Once you die, you gotta walk through the whole dungeon, wasting twenty to thirty minutes.  Some bosses start to be able to do three attacks in one turn which is really cheap when they use a magic to reduce your HP to singe digits and then immediately kill them with another attack.

The areas where they force you to use status spells on yourself to advance was bad, especially when they happened in the beginning where MP is limited.  As touched upon lightly, the grinding involved, while generally not too bad, can get too much.  Whenever a new town comes up or you get new jobs and need to buy new armor, be prepared to grind a bit to get everything you want.  Battling every monster along the way is just not enough.  There is a huge difficulty spike in the last dungeon in which you have to grind many levels to comfortably finish the game.  Also, whoever thought it was a good idea to not put save points (as in, points where you can reload the game if you die) in the last dungeon, which takes anywhere from 1 to 3 hours is a complete idiot.  The pain that you have to go through going through that last dungeon, which is also five times larger than any before it, to fight the absurdly powerful final boss again and again will drive you insane.

Due to the many jobs and each job having a unique set of weapon and armor associated with them, often towns won't carry new gear for all jobs so have fun trying to get your party as tough as they can be.  For a game that focuses on the freedom of choosing whichever job you prefer, the weapons and armors are seriously lacking sometimes when you want to improve your character's stats but can't and you end up being at a disadvantage.  The story isn't great, while the basic premise is similar to Final Fantasy or Final Fantasy V, the characters aren't as charming or memorable due to the lack of character development.  The story is very slow paced with a lot of distractions that make it drag on far beyond it's welcome.  It feels like a chore to keep playing.  It is a very basic story in which a team of characters save the world from darkness, traversing from location to location.

It doesn't help that the main villain doesn't have that sadistic or iconic feel.  The villain only appears very late into the game where it has absolutely no impact on you at all.  What I'm trying to say is, the story doesn't draw you in and makes the game feel mediocre overall.  Final Fantasy III doesn't have too much to make it stand out.  The battle system is the same as I, the job system was done better in V and there are many other Final Fantasy games with better stories.  I found myself playing this haphazardly as I couldn't get into the game.  I kept hoping that the game will pick up but it never did.  It is not a bad game, just one that feels unremarkable.

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