Final Fantasy III (US) (Super Nintendo, 1994)

Back in 1995, I watched 2 friends struggling with this game during the Lete River and and house fire events. I first played FF6 (since this is actually the sixth in the series) under "Final Fantasy Anthology" but there were frame rate problems making it hard for me to experience the true speed of my top favorite spell effect: meteor. Wanting to see the true speed of the game, and find out what changes were made from the true original, I got this game.

Graphics (5/5):
The 3D effect while on the world map is what amazed me the most about this game. I didn't think 3D existed in games for the SNES, except isometric. The character graphics are also well-done and impressive.

Sound (4.5/5):
Sound effects are kind of weak but the music is excellent. I especially love the music for the world map during the first half of the game - it holds the record for the longest continuous play of 52 1/4 days. The battle music is also very well-done and easily fits the theme. The music is also very well-done during story events, setting the mood very well. The sound effects are also good, but they are only weak during battles. Kefka's laugh is well-done and... meteor. The meteor spell's sound effects are what made me prefer it over any other spell, even cure and life.

Game play (4/5):
At first, magic usage is limited to a select few, but after this, I love the fact that you can change espers right before a level up to boost the stats however you want. For the most part, I find strength and magic attack of greatest use (depending on the role that character will have) and speed (to strike first with meteor). The others don't seem to have any noticeable effect and HP and MP have such tiny increases that they are essentially useless. Level 99, as is, already means nearly maximum HP and MP and you can't have more than 9999 HP and 999 MP. This is where the major downside to the game play comes in - the damage limit is so easy to reach that its annoying. Fire3 on a single mantodea could very well do nearly 50,000 damage and I'd love to see a white "50000" popping out of it. The worst thing about this game's game play is that it is way too easy. It's the easiest of all the FF games and this makes the game quite boring. Normally, I'm a heavy grinder (grinding: reaching and maintaining an abnormally high level throughout the game by fighting a lot of battles; think: level 99 on disk 1 on FF7 or having meteor and ultima in the first world (from level 98 Celes and 99 Terra)), but this game is so easy that I don't even need to grind. I was surprised as to just how easy it was and why those two friends even struggled with it. The only challenge spot I ever had was figuring out how to get out of South Figaro with Locke alone. This took me 8 hours to figure out when I first played the game. This game also has the fastest leveling I've ever seen - gain 2 levels in one battle at level 45 and get level 99 from 40 in just 2 hours all without taking any damage).

Controls (5/5):
The contrains are easy to work with. For the most part, just the directional buttons, A, and B are all you really need, rarely L or R (for casting a spell on all targets of a type). Other controls are rarely used. The hardest of all is Sabin's blitz's - the right column. I have about a 1 in 20 chance of getting aura bolt (top right corner) to work and with 70 tries, I have yet to get the one below to work at all.