Final Fantasy III - Finished the game

At least I can say I've finished it, but the last couple of hours I put in were not very enjoyable.



It's tough to say why. I was enjoying the old school feeling and goodness in this game and then in the last section, the fun just kind of fell off a cliff. The game didn't change significantly, but I think the problem was, as I mentioned in my last entry, that there wasn't the promise of anything new to explore or any new gameplay mechanisms to unlock. I knew I would have to go through the final dungeon and beat the boss. Oh sure, I got a few new weapons and pieces of armor along the way, but it really felt like I had done all there was to do in this game and was now just going through the motions to get to its end.

One of the most interesting parts of playing this game was to examine it historically as it influenced later Final Fantasies. The job system is obviously the key innovation, but the little things like Chocobos, Summons, and Cid are there. But really, having played this, I can see how Final Fantasy IV is sort of a fan fiction of this game as all the characters in it have fixed jobs that pretty exactly map to the jobs of this game. And then Final Fantasy V came along and realized how lame it was to only be able to use on job's skills at a time and basically made the job system really fun.

Anyway, since the last portion of this game kind of ruined the interest I had in it, I'm mostly glad I finished now so I can say I've cleared one more game from my backlog. Now I can feel a little less guilty about starting new games.