Final Fantasy II was a big departure for the fledgling franchise. The game featured a stronger narrative, more choice in how you built your characters, and a handful of new mechanics. Final Fantasy III, released two years later, was in many ways a return to form. Rather than the slightly more grounded adventure of the previous game, Final Fantasy III returned to a story about crystals and Warriors of Light. The main characters have very little personality. We’re back to ‘traditional’ leveling and combat. In many ways, it should feel like a step backwards.
And yet, inexplicably, Final Fantasy III may be the single most influential game in the franchise.
Welcome back to Fantasies Revisited.
“Into the silence one of the Gulgans prophesied: ‘The Great Earthquake was only the beginning….'”
Four orphans from a remote village stumble into a cave after an earthquake. There, they discover a shrine housing a mystic crystal. The crystal imbues the four of them with power — and purpose. They must protect the other crystals. Ever since a great earthquake, something nefarious is draining the crystals. Without them, light will vanish from the world, literally.
The four set off on their quest, and find a world beset by strange monsters. In one town, a Djinn has cursed the villagers to become invisible, ghostlike creatures incapable of communicating with the outside world. Once thriving communities have been taken over by a malevolent sorcerer. And, in the background of all this, the crystals are slowly being drained and destroyed.
All this is the machinations of Xande, a powerful sorcerer raging against his own mortality. But behind Xande lay an even darker force, one manipulating him to prepare for the arrival of an ancient, cosmic evil. Can our heroes, the Warriors of Light, fight back an encroaching eternal darkness?
“The tremors tore the land asunder; the crystals — sources of the world’s light — were swallowed into the depths as monsters emerged from the chasms now scarring the earth.”
As I’ve said in the last couple write-ups: Early JRPGs were incredibly influenced by tabletop gaming, and Final Fantasy moreso than most. The class system is one of many things that has clear roots in Dungeons and Dragons. But tabletop games and video games are different things, with different strengths and weaknesses. Final Fantasy III is where the series truly realized that and began to break free of its more staid roots.
See, here, you start off making a choice about which classes your characters are: Warrior, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage. Almost the exact same list as in Final Fantasy I. And for the early section of the game, you are stuck with those choices. Intriguingly, however, you can change them almost at will. But why would you? What’s the point of going from Warrior to White Mage? You would gain a few spell slots, but you could only cast while you were a White Mage, so they wouldn’t carry over, and your stat gains from Warrior wouldn’t be much help when you couldn’t equip good weapons.
Here’s where the game starts having fun with its mechanics. Characters technically have two separate progression tracks: Level and Job Level. Level tracks things like your core stats, like your overall health and stats. But the longer you stay in any given job, the higher your job level goes. And job level enhances special ability damage, critical hit rate — your ‘second layer’ stats, the invisible ones.
Now, initially, this doesn’t really matter, because you only have 5 jobs. However, as you progress through the story, you unlock more jobs. These often come with special abilities (Dragoons have a ‘Jump’ command; Geomancers have a ‘Terrain’ command), each of which play into the core theme of the class. Many of these classes are built to tackle specific kinds of challenges in the game.
In a tabletop game, this would be insufferable. Having to track multiple ‘types’ of experience across multiple classes that you can change at will is too much paperwork. But when a computer can automate it invisibly in the background? Well, now we have a system where the game can allow players to experiment with different party compositions and try new abilities without sacrificing progress.
The game even pushes you to do this pretty early on. After you unlock your second set of classes, the game provides you with a semi-useless class called ‘Scholar’. However, the game also immediately sets you on the path of a new boss, an illusionist of some sort. If only, a couple characters comment to you not too subtly, you had a scholar who could see through what he was doing. IF. ONLY. Attentive players may swap one of their characters to be a scholar for the fight, and find that a challenging encounter becomes much easier, despite the weakness of the class.
Final Fantasy III pulls this trick more than once, though that’s the last time it’s quite so blunt about it. But still, I love this. Because you can change on the fly, the game encourages you to experiment. Your caster may have run out of spells near the end of the dungeon, but if you have the equipment, you could change them into something else and let them keep contributing to combat. None of the characters feel wasted, and some encounters feel more like puzzles than simple strength-checks.
Jobs would go on to become incredibly important for one or two more games, and then disappear. For awhile, at least. But this system, both of allowing players to change jobs without penalizing them too much and expecting these jobs to fill specific roles in certain types of encounters, would later become enormously influential in the series’ smash-hit MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. In a way, this lay the groundwork for all modern RPG party building theory, which typically rely on having a combination of tank, healer, and DPS. Final Fantasy III was an early example of a game playing around with that formula. What do those classes mean? And in what situations would you want to break that rule?
“Yet that was nothing compared to the catastrophe to come….”
In addition to the newly-highlighted Job System, FFIII also does interesting things with the map. Part of what good JRPGs need to be able to do is gate progress, guide players along a world-spanning quest. This was one of the clumsier aspects of the previous games we’ve covered here. Final Fantasy I gave you a ship early on, but limited places to take the ship. You didn’t get an airship until relatively late in the game. Final Fantasy II, on the other hand, gave you an airship quite early, but you couldn’t pilot it at first. Instead, you had to pay to go to specific locations.
Both of these methods technically worked. They gated progress to varying degrees of success. But they weren’t very satisfying. Both made it easy to go where you shouldn’t, getting terminally lost or running into enemies you couldn’t handle.
Final Fantasy III has a different strategy in mind for guiding players where they need to go, and it’s surprisingly brilliant. Final Fantasy III‘s world is designed into a series of, basically, gated communities. Your goal at each step is to open the next gate. You start in a cave; find your way out. From there, you are in a forested area that has two towns and a castle. Find a way to remove a barrier closing you in this area. Then you’re on an island, then a continent. And here’s where the trick happens: Then you realize that the continent is floating, and there’s an entire other world map waiting for you.
The sense of joy and discovery this brought was incredible. This is something I’d like more open world games to mimic. In a way, Elden Ring pulled this same trick to incredible effect earlier this year. The map was made to look relatively small at first, expanding only as you explored, opening up new layers beneath the map to keep you guessing as to how big it really was. It gives a really concrete sense of place to an explorable world.
If you go linearly from location to location, there’s little sense of a coherent space. They’re just levels. But by forcing players to engage with and then move beyond increasingly complex spaces, they contextualize the relationship these spaces have with one another. It becomes a vehicle for allowing players to develop their own stories about the world. Later Final Fantasy games will utilize this trick heavily, though they will eventually phase it out. I think it should be brought back.
“Something fathomless, ominous, and laden with sorrow looms on the horizon….”
I’ll be honest: I enjoyed Final Fantasy I and II. They’re good games, particularly in their friendlier Pixel Remaster formats. But Final Fantasy III is the first of these that I’ve actually stopped and said, “Fuck, this is good.” The dungeons are getting more complicated, but without as many of the tedious dead-ends that defined Final Fantasy II. Encounters are challenging without being frustrating. Final Fantasy III is when the series truly discovers its voice.
Of course, the JRPG landscape of 1990 was radically different than the scene just three years earlier, when Final Fantasy I came out. There were more options, and they were doing new things. 1990 also saw, for instance, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, one of the earliest tactical RPGs, which offered a radically different gameplay experience. Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II was giving the player meaningful dialogue options tied to a kind of morality system. Dragon Quest IV came out just two months before FFIII, and by now the series had more than caught up to the denser, party-based adventures Final Fantasy introduced.
As JRPGs began to flood the market, the ability to innovate and grow would become essential. So, facing an increasingly crowded landscape and without an overseas hit since the original, where does Final Fantasy go next?
“But hope is not yet gone completely.”
Thanks for checking out another installment of Fantasies Revisited. We’ll be back in a couple weeks with an unexpected early series high point: Final Fantasy IV. Stay tuned!
edit: I forgot, when I wrote this, that Final Fantasy Adventure actually came out before FFIV! Oops. Anyway, Final Fantasy Adventure is next, but we’ll get to IV soon!