First released in North America in 1993, and ported to numerous consoles through the years, Final Fantasy 3 is the game that truly made me fall in love with video games.
While it might be cliche to say that FF3 is one of the best games ever, there's a reason why cliches come to be. Quite simply, FF3 does nearly everything right.
The game opens up with a story about how, far in the past, a dread force known as "magic" more or less destroyed the world. Now, thousands of years later, the world has begun to rebuild, and high technology reigns. This game is laden everywhere with what I would later learn to be "steam-punk" As an 8 year old, I didn't quite appreciate it, but having gone back and played through the game again rather recently, I'm enthralled with the world you, as the player are placed in.
Keeping in mind that this game is edging in on 20 years, old, the graphics, while extremely dated, are still a joy to look at. Everywhere you turn, some stack is spewing steam or smoke, there's cogs turning in infernal machines, and great suits of steam powered armour piloted by goggle wearing soldiers. And airships. Quite literally a ship with propellers. Its impossible not to become enthralled in such a fantastical and well thought out world.
The story does start out fairly straight-forward for a Japanese style role playing game. You play as a young girl named Terra, who (surprise, surprise!) is suffering from amnesia. As per usual, there's some evil empire that is threatening the realm, and its up to Terra and a group of rebels to bring back peace. The hitch is, Terra can use Magic, something noone else can do, and as such, most of the conflicts in the game center around her abilities. Rather quickly from there, you are forced into many strange and wonderful conflicts, such as the numerous fights with a fast-talking, condescending octopus and a very evil clown.
Developed in a world before widespread voice acting in games, SquareEnix (then SquareSoft) lets the music convey the tone of the story. The score has many themes that have become classics in the gaming community, from the main antagonist, Kefka's theme to the Opera scene, to opening credits. The score is spot-on throughout, haunting and sad at times, playing and silly at others. Other sound effects, such as when casting the spell fire, to swinging swords, are nothing particularly special, again, letting the music do the work.
As this was the third North American release of a Final Fantasy game, (the sixth for Japan), the gameplay is familiar, and old-hat for long time RPG fans. Walk around in towns, talk to NPCs, leave town, fight some monsters, repeat. The battle system followed the same formula as other games in the series, which was to select the commands for each character as their action bar fills up over time, watch the commands play out on screen, then repeat. Square did try to get the player a little bit more involved, though, with special commands such as "Blitz" for the character Sabin. The truth of the matter is that Final Fantasy games are not about exciting gameplay as much as they are about an engaging story-line.
Spanning a storyline of at least 30 hours of play, not to mention the plethora of sidequests and alternate story sequences and secret weapons to search for, it is certainly feasible to spend upwards of 70 hours or more playing through this game.
Released in 1993, this game has been ported to the Playstation, Gameboy Advance, PSP, and most recently the Wii's Virtual Console service. This game is widely recognized as being one of the best games ever made, and if you have never played it, or its simply been a long time since you last picked it up, I would highly suggest immersing yourself in the world of Final Fantasy 3.
Score: 9/10
