Final Fantasy III (Android)
Feb. 18th, 2020 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA youth falls into a hole and discovers that the world is both much vaster than he imagines, but is also in terrible danger from a flood of darkness. He and three others must become the Light Warriors to restore balance to the world.
A port of the DS remake of the game, with a bunch of minor changes (mostly controls and cloud saving options). I had forgotten that they kept the original difficulty, but was quickly reminded when I died multiple times trying to get the Wightslayer in the first castle’s tower. NES games were hard, and this one pulls additional dick moves by forcing you to go through a dungeon where you need to be miniaturized (and therefore can only do real damage with magic) and another where you need to be a frog (ditto) in the first few hours of play.
There’s a lot that this game doesn’t tell you. I mean, the lack of minimap in dungeon is practically to be expected, but things like “You can never buy Phoenix Downs, so save them!” or “Shields are basically useless, you always want two weapons equipped,” would be very handy on the outset. Heck, the fact that you can use spellcasting rods as infinite-use battle items (which I’m not 100% certain was in previous versions) practically feels like cheating.
I’d been feeling the urge to replay this (as I played the DS version in 2006), but I think what I really wanted was to speed play through using cheat codes so I didn’t have to grind or fear dying and losing lots of progress. And I think I’d hoped for some real improvement or addition to the Android version of the game, but the on-screen controls (and “zoom in to find secrets” gimmick) are arguably worse than actual buttons. I wonder if they made similar changes to the Steam release, or if that’s closer to the DS version?
Overall: I only played the first quarter of the game in this go-round, but I also only payed $7 for it, so that seems reasonably worthwhile. This remains one of the weaker core series FF games, but that still puts it in a high tier for jrpgs. I would have made a stronger attempt to play through it if I wasn’t replaying it.
A port of the DS remake of the game, with a bunch of minor changes (mostly controls and cloud saving options). I had forgotten that they kept the original difficulty, but was quickly reminded when I died multiple times trying to get the Wightslayer in the first castle’s tower. NES games were hard, and this one pulls additional dick moves by forcing you to go through a dungeon where you need to be miniaturized (and therefore can only do real damage with magic) and another where you need to be a frog (ditto) in the first few hours of play.
There’s a lot that this game doesn’t tell you. I mean, the lack of minimap in dungeon is practically to be expected, but things like “You can never buy Phoenix Downs, so save them!” or “Shields are basically useless, you always want two weapons equipped,” would be very handy on the outset. Heck, the fact that you can use spellcasting rods as infinite-use battle items (which I’m not 100% certain was in previous versions) practically feels like cheating.
I’d been feeling the urge to replay this (as I played the DS version in 2006), but I think what I really wanted was to speed play through using cheat codes so I didn’t have to grind or fear dying and losing lots of progress. And I think I’d hoped for some real improvement or addition to the Android version of the game, but the on-screen controls (and “zoom in to find secrets” gimmick) are arguably worse than actual buttons. I wonder if they made similar changes to the Steam release, or if that’s closer to the DS version?
Overall: I only played the first quarter of the game in this go-round, but I also only payed $7 for it, so that seems reasonably worthwhile. This remains one of the weaker core series FF games, but that still puts it in a high tier for jrpgs. I would have made a stronger attempt to play through it if I wasn’t replaying it.
