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

Oh, it gets worse, just you wait.

Until it explodes like all the other airships!

FF3 is one of those games where the developers didn't quite get what they should do with the system they'd created. So instead of making boss fights that allow for a large variety of tactics, they instead made "showcase" bosses that are virtually impossible without certain classes (notable thus far: Hein with Scholars and Garuda with Dragon Knights), and even entire dungeons that are basically impossible without a full line-up of one specific class. The DS version sometimes improves on this issue, but is usually just as bad or worse about it.

Eventually they got it right with FF5, at least...

I sure as hell hope that promise for 4 Warriors of Light about "you can beat the game with a single class" holds true.

Admittedly, Chocobo's Dungeon almost works, provided you abuse the inventory-saving features to high hell.

Whats ESPECIALLY fun is when the game throws the Gimmick Dungeons force you to use a party that is all one class that is not particularly well suited for long-term use.

Such as that one dungeon where everyone has to be a Dark Knight

And then they give you two swords for the class, hidden deep in the dungeon they're useful for, and little/no good gear otherwise! Needless to say I'll be taking some...interesting detours before tackling that section.

Honestly, I actually didn't find the monster splitting problem that bad, and I only used one Dark Knight.

Maybe I was just over-leveled, though?

Were you playing on the DS? Monster-splitting is something of a joke in that version, since there can only be 3 monsters at a time.

A fairly experienced geomancer can take the edge off with earthquake. Those stupid secret passages can go die in a fire though (cause then I'd be able to see where they go instead of bumbling in the dark).
I think I missed a decent piece of equipment in there and never looked back.
This is in the DS version though, after seeing how the four rooms in Goldors Mansion fit so neatly into single screens on the famicom I bet it's not nearly so hard to navigate.

In case you didn't notice, though, Geomancers are almost worthless in this version since they tend to hurt themselves half the time or more instead of doing their terrain effects.

Unless I missed my guess, Job Levels still have an effect in the Famicom version. Classes in the DS version were tweaked, not completely redesigned. I know for a fact that Monks and Black Belts/Masters get stronger attack-wise with every Job Level they gain even in the original. And the Job Level effect for the Geomancer is, of course, to lower the backfire frequency of their skills.

Same here. Magic also works... and I think you can also one-shot them with Buildup.

Haha... yeah, welcome to FF3! Wait until you see what the options for your final party are. Would you like 2 ninjas and 2 sages? or 2 sages and 2 ninjas?

The DS version is a lot better about this overall, but you still need a team of dragoons to beat this particular boss.

I vote to keep PERCY a dragoon.

Can I have a sage, a ninja, a sage, and a ninja?

Oh, very well.

I'm kind of curious why exactly this is such a horrible thing here, but is accepted as a key component of so many other types of games.

Probably because designing something for one specific setup is easier than designing something that can be handled with any setup the character chooses to build.

Which, of course, begs the following question: if you aren't prepared to balance the rest of the game for each possibility you offer the player, why even bother? Y'know who didn't have to choose classes to see how well he could play? Mario.

I get what they were going for, actually. They wanted a system where players could adapt to what the game threw at them. One of the biggest complaints about FF1 was that, if you picked a bad party line-up, you were pretty much screwed if you didn't grind constantly. And for FF2, people complained about how getting proficient in anything was pretty much a death sentence for being able to do anything ELSE. So they tried to balance the problem out by letting players actively change their classes whenever they wanted for a nominal CP fee, with no strings attached and no penalties.

The problem came in, of course, when they took it too far and said "why don't we make certain bosses and dungeons where you HAVE to use a specific class to survive?". That can work in a real-time game, but FF3 is turn-based and round-based. Meaning luck, not skill or tactics, determines a great deal of how battles turn out. Just look at how the Garuda battle played out several times to see how badly the concepts mesh. The Garuda fight can potentially go like this: all 4 jump, Garuda wastes his turn; Garuda wastes his turn, all 4 land; repeat, no damage. Or it can go like this (and probably will): Garuda drops a Lightning, all 4 jump; all 4 land, Garuda drops a Lightning; game over.

tl;dr version: FF3's developers wanted to give players an ultra-flexible class system, but didn't account for the fact that their battle engine wasn't designed to work with that.

No such thing.

Solo Thief.

On the other hand, he's not killing anything under water without a Fire Flower. And I seem to recall a secret exit in Super Mario World that you could only reach with the cape.

Sometimes, even when you have a large number of tools, a game will force you to use a specific one. As long as you definitely have that tool, and can go back to using whatever tool you want afterward, why is this a problem? Rather, why is this only a problem in Final Fantasy?

That's certainly true for Garuda, although that could have been alleviated simply by giving Dragoon armor lightning resistance or ensuring that you could Jump before Garuda's turn. Then it would be like most other FFs: nobody notices just how loosely the whole thing hangs together until the duct tape starts to peel.

I think they got some other things right, or at least right enough. Hyne and the Dark Knight section, for example(s).

The other big problem, of course, is that FF3 was designed with a sort of "throwaway" mentality for classes. You use one crystal's classes until you get the next crystal, then you never swap in for the earlier classes ever again since the new classes are blatantly superior to older ones. Just try and do a first-crystal-only run of FF3, I dare you. You'll be screaming bloody murder by the time you get this far in the game.

So... Legend of Zelda, Wooden Sword?

...isn't a "party". =)

You're trying to mesh two very different styles of game. Zelda is a game where upgrading through new acquisitions is the norm, and grinding is done only to get rupees to buy a handful of items (most are found or given to you). In short, Zelda is about 80% acquisition, 20% grind.

Meanwhile FF3 is an RPG, where there is a mesh of upgrading equipment via the acquisition model and upgrading your level via the grind model to become more effective. But the balance practically swings the other way: you spend far more time grinding in console RPGs than simply acquiring. The split is more like 20/80 than Zelda's 80/20 for most of those. So having a distinctly acquisition-oriented system be a key component of the battle system is distracting, especially when said acquisition-oriented system still has a grind sub-system and does not get replaced so much as put aside (ie. you can still go back to being a Warrior late-game if you're feeling suicidal in FF3, but you can never get the Wooden Sword back once you upgrade in Zelda).

four thieves? (serious question)

How about four thieves then?
I mean, assuming you don't become four awesome ninjas.
EDIT: I wuz too slow.

Anyways, it's interesting that there are such complaints about the job system considering that the next game in the series gives you no control over your lineup or abilities whatsoever.
Modern RPG players or fans of FFV are probably misinterpreting this game's system, though. There are throwaway classes which you'll experiment with and get rid of, there are classes you're "encouraged" to use at specific moments and then there are a few useful classes which are made obsolete by superclasses (equivalent to the promotions in the first game) which are made obsolete in the endgame by the two super-superclasses resulting in a progression similar to FFIV with an illusion of choice.
So it's not really about "building" your character, it's more like a series of totally different characters that no one bothered to flesh out in the plot.

Well, I have. But I'm referring to my emulated playthrough years and years ago here. Yeah, like we talked about up thread, the severe limit on the monsters in a fights is the main reason I dislike the DS version.

Monsters also don't seem to split nearly as often in the DS version, limit on the screen aside.
Yep. Did both I'm sure. Think my party was Blackbelt, Dark Knight, White Mage, Caller.

Is my memory wrong that sages generally max around 9 charges of every spell level, while warlocks/shaman/summonsers will get something like 30ish charges of low level spells? Because I remember playing though the NES version and still wanting to use the base classes going into the final dungeon, then switching to sage once I'm down to about 9 charges of each level?

Actually, some of the starting classes do get really good in the end game. Red Mages, for instance, can equip crystal gear. That makes them reasonably good, though they're not ninjas by any stretch. Oddly the crystal stuff was the first set of gear they were able to equip for ages, so getting there is an uphill battle. As above, I started with red-mages in my group once I had some crystal gear and switched 'em to Ninjas after I had drained all their spell charges. This won't work as well in the DS version thanks to switching sickness, though I still do it (just switch one party member at a time).

I don't think it is a problem there only, it's just one of the bigger examples I'm aware of.

Yes, Mario does need a Fire Flower to defeat underwater enemies. If he can't, though? He can swim past them (albeit with some difficulty) and overcome the challenge that way. As for secret exits that you can only reach with the cape or Yoshi or whatever, that's something similar, because you need to keep that powerup to get to that point. However, these are secret exits, not something mandatory to progress through the game. Now, if we're talking romhacks, where you have to do stuff like swap between the Flower and the Feather while navigating hostile areas where a single hit means failure just for the normal exit? That's still a dick move.

Let's see if I can't think of other parts where fake choices are added in. Mega Man X6, where you need one or two specific powerups to not die as X in the final area (and it is possible to miss those forever, but that's not really the bad design in question here). Iji doesn't have this problem, but it does have a threadbare workaround at times (don't have enough hacker skill for this boss? Here, let's lower the security for you). Shin Megami Tensei can be like this at times (guess who made the Solomon Ring for Strange Journey's Neutral final boss), but it's not really as blatant about it until you hit endgame or bonus bosses, and I dunno how far we are in this game.

I guess the reason I can't think of many examples is that the more egregious ones seem to be from Final Fantasy, but maybe I'm just inexperienced and there's some other examples I can't think of.

~2/3 at this point, not counting optional stuff.