Get a job! - Let's Play Final Fantasy III

Like a lot of things, I would rather have an updated 8- or 16-bit version of this game with some modern niceties than the bloated 3D version we got.

It think I prefer this pick-and-choose job system to V's mix-and-match for some reason, so it'd be nice to see a DoS version.

I have a very hard time getting behind any remake that nerfs the number of monsters you fight at once. GOD, why aren't we getting SaGa 2 yet?

And, yeah, the animation speed is pretty painful compared to the NES.

It's still fun on the DS, but no one has overstated the flaws.
It especially bears restating that there is no excuse for how long it takes to get 4 party members and the first set of jobs.

If they hadn't done that, the battle framerate would've dropped in the same PS1 gutter as Final Fantasy IV's with those (good for DS standards) 3D visuals, but yeah, those group sizes are pathetic. Another visual compromise I remember well is the 2D buildings in towns. I still swear the game's produced on a film set, with all those renders around. Zooming in to find secrets definitely wasn't Matrix's best choice there.

I've got a bigger peeve with them upping the number of attacks bosses got to make already difficult foes into mass murderers, though.

Actually, I thought doubling the number of attacks bosses got was pretty fair. Aside from a few they really weren't that hard in the original, and the fights in the DS version are still winnable, just hard.

That said I'm outside the final dungeon right now on my DS save, and the boss gauntlet there may make me think otherwise.

I tried that once and lost the confidence to try it again after losing all that progress. Didn't like that "point of no return" design, even with quicksaves available.

I say that you treat Xande as the final boss, and the World of Darkness as Postgame Content.

People always say FF3 is so hard, especially the final dungeons (and I'm not saying it's exactly easy don't get me wrong) but I've found that it's not so bad if you run in, get all the chests, run out, save, and run in again and smash the boss. This provides two pluses:

A: you don't have to re-aquire all the chests if you should die on the boss,
B: you shouldn't die on the boss, because you should gain enough exp going through that you can handle it.

This has always worked for me, although I can understand if some people don't want to go through all the dungeons twice.

P.S. I don't run from any battles. ever.

I believe that's how I took the final dungeon back in the day I played in on an NES emulator. Yeah, running through the whole friggin' thing is just setting yourself up for a loss of a LOT of time.

Yeah, that strategy doesn't work in a place you can't leave from. Sure, you can loot Zande's place, but once you're in the location with LastMinuteCloudLady and her pets, you gotta do it all in one run.

That is exactly the strategy I used to beat the final boss and I had little trouble.

That's what I did for damn near every dungeon in that game.

Final boss still proved to be nigh-unbeatable.

4/5/2010 - Cid's Folly



We rejoin our heroes in the Cave of the Seal, on their way to defeat Jinn.



Of course, two steps into the dungeon and PERCY got mauled to death by Mummies.



Thankfully, revival is always free back in town.



There's a second Cure spell in a chest, so I toss it on PERCY in case of an emergency.



There's a secret passage in this room. If you check the skeleton in the top right corner it opens up a door to continue.



So the Princess got this far past all the Mummies but can't beat all the...same monsters further in?



She forces her way into the party on account of not wanting to just hand over her Mythril Ring.



Guest characters also have a party talk feature. I'm fairly certain that this even predates its appearance in the Dragon Quest series.

So I guess I lied about there being no new monsters beyond the point where Sara joined us. They aren't any harder to defeat than those that came before them, though.



So it seems that Jinn is too powerful to be contained by the Mythril Ring alone. I guess its time for an old fashioned beat down instead.



Its essentially the same strategy here as in the previous boss fight, but with the added convenience of Ringo's Ice spell. The SouthWind that Katie threw at Jinn did about 200 damage in its single shot.



And Jinn is sealed once again. Hurray!



How convenient that the ring also serves as a transport device.

The Princess tosses the ring in the spring and the curse is lifted. I guess they'll have to fish it out of there if someone enacts the same curse again?

Sara leaves our party at this point, fearing she's just be a burden on us if she were to stick around.



Despite already having a kick-ass airship, the King gives us a canoe for saving the kingdom. You know, because he's too old to be using it any more and the only body of water anywhere near the castle is on the outskirts of the Cave of the Seal.



Heading back to Kazus, Cid joins our group and demands a ride back to his old lady in Canaan. Its the least we can do since we took his ride.

Unfortunately, though, there's a huge boulder blocking the way. I wonder what would get us past that?



That's sounds just crazy enough to work Cid!



First though I've got to upgrade my spells and gear to the newest stuff. I have just enough cash to buy everything I need for the group.

Of course the blacksmith has no problems modifying our airship in the way Cid imagined. You would too if the guy asking had just saved you from an endless purgatory.



Sure, I guess Cid's plan worked, but now we're out a damn airship. At least we saved the canoe from the burning wreckage!



So it turns out Cid isn't a great airship engineer or anything, just some old guy who happened to acquire one off of a king.



Cid returns home to his wife, who has come down with some sort of cold. Finding an Elixir in the southeast corner of town will heal her.



Oh look, a sultry dancing girl.

Giving Cid's wife the Elixir cures her ailment and unlocks Cid's treasure trove.



He hops to the right each time you talk to him after this event, so eventually you can force him to fly through the wall of his own home.



There were a few useful things down in Cid's basement, including our first FenixDown.




In one of the houses in Canaan we find a mother and daughter upset over the disappearance of a man named Desh. I have no idea who he is, but I guess we should head on up the mountain anyways; we've got no other leads.



The mountain is infested with a giant dragon, though, so at least it won't be an uneventful trip...

Next time: Bahamut Brunch

Considering DQ didn't have party talk until DQVII (maybe VI, if I'm remembering incorrectly), you are quite right.

Oh, I forgot to mention- sometime before next week's update I'm going to try and make up a post explaining the job system.

Yay!

Also, are spells locked to the player you give them too, or can you shuffle them around?

Yeah, Are spells are just items in this game?

You can not only swap them between party members, but you can also return them to item form if you didn't want to swap the entire list.

4/5/2010 Mini-Update - The Job System



How does job changing work in FFIII?

You can change your job at any point outside of battle, so long as you have the necessary Capacity Points. CP are earned at the end of every battle and cap out at I believe 99. Changing from job to job is easier (i.e. lower CP) if you're changing from similar jobs. In other words, it would be cheaper to move a Fighter to the Monk job than it would be to move the Fighter to a WhiteWiz.

Yeah, but what about leveling up? What are all theses "Skill Up" things I keep seeing?

In addition to the regular level ups, each character has a separate skill level for every job. Skilling up a job raises its attack power, amount of attacks, defense power and defense multiplier (all other stats are affected by the non-job specific level ups). In addition to that, a higher skill level will decrease the amount of Capacity Points necessary to switch back to the job if you move away from it.

That's it? I figured it'd be more complex than that.

Well, there's 22 jobs worth of stat growth to contend with, but that's the gist of it. Feel free to shoot me any additional questions.

Does this system differ any from the one in the DS version of FF3?

The DS version did away with the CP, instead you just need to contend with temporarily decreased stats when you change jobs; with the decrease proportional to how similar the jobs are.

The Stat hit lasts for 3 to 5 battles. It's like a switching sickness. It's super annoying and discourages experimentation.

Well, they:

-Rebalanced jobs and gave them new abilities, making a lot of the worthless ones feasible.
-Replaced Onion Kid with "Freelancer" as the starting job and locked Onion Knight behind a ridiculous email system where you have to send messages over wifi like 8 times.
-Removed Capacity Points and replaced them with a system where you have X battles worth of "cool down" where you fight with gimped stats when you change jobs.

It would be so nice if magic worked like FFV and you just had to buy a spell one time for your whole party. The awkwardness of reorganizing spells is just one more impediment to experimenting. It's particularly annoying when your inventory is full.

Oddly it still want's enough to discourage abuse. I used my redmage to the end game (well I am pretty biased) for the early part of dungeons, then switched when I was out of healing spells.

Beats out FFLegend / Saga / aw sheaddup II by eight months, so I think we've got a winner.