What the fuck, I just got done playing the Famicom version of FF3 a few days ago. I was playing it for the first time cause I'd only played the 3D version before, and I was screenshotting every bit of dialogue in the game to help me in translating it. I'm almost done making my own English translation patch for it, but I've been procrastinating finishing the last step of pairing the dialogue down some so it fits within the cartridge space (I need to get it down like 3000 less characters).
I'm convinced Xande being gifted "mortality" is a bad translation by the way, influenced by the people they outsourced the DS version's new dialogue also not quite getting it and adding stuff about Xande wanting eternal life. No where in the Famicom script does it ever imply Xande was ever immortal or seeking to be, and the thing Noah gifted him was said to be "a human life" which Xande found boring. I'm convinced the intention was that Xande was given nothing and told to go live an ordinary life because Noah thought he needed to be humbled, and Doga and Une say it's good gift because it means Xande could've lived a life doing what he wants to do without the responsibilities that Doga and Une's force on them.
Xande’s supposed to freeze time, but the world floods? Why did he even attack the floating continent? The DS remake tries to patch this up but fails.
Nowhere in the Famicom script does it ever say that Xande froze time. If what you played says something like that, I can only assume it's because the person who made the patch was copying text from the 3D remake which I think added some weird extra bit about that. All the happened according to the original game is that a few days before the game started, Xande took control of the Earth Crystal and used it to cause a massive earthquake that sank the other crystal altars underground and caused the world to be flooded underwater. The Water Crystal protected everyone outside the floating continent by turning them to stone so they wouldn't die in the flood. And Xande sent monsters to the floating continent to cause trouble there, mainly Medusa trying to destroy the Tower of Own so the continent would crash, and Hein getting seduced with dark power so he'd start messing things up.
Xande's only known motivation for doing any of this in the original game is that he was trying to kill everyone and weaken the Light so as to cause a Flood of Darkness and destroy everything. Une implies he was manipulated by the Cloud of Darkness into doing this by taking control of his depressive thoughts over feeling betrayed by Noah. Xande is pretty much just a proto-Kuja, and Cloud of Darkness mostly represents the same thing as the Eternal Darkness (Necron) from IX. Which I guess makes sense, since as far as I know III, V, and IX are the games Sakaguchi had the most hand in the plots of (he straight up wrote half the script for V).
Spell charges are back, which means no casting except during boss fights. No ethers, no cottages, nothing. The top jobs are technically more generous with spell charges than the FF1 classes, but who cares by the time you’re in the final dungeon, where you can’t save or heal. Magic is so cooked anyway, it’s like the devs knew it sucked and had to invent little contrivances to force you to use it.
What are you talking about, magic is good. There's a section right around the Water Crystal where the Black Mage feels kind of weak, but it's mostly useful the whole game, and White Mage goes without saying. Summoner or Sage with summon magic can nuke the shit out of end game enemies and makes the final dungeon a breeze. Need more MP? You can end the game with like 15+ Elixirs if you opened every chest, that's more than enough to occassionally have your Sages chug to keep going.
Too many gimmick jobs that exist just to beat one dungeon. Multiple mini/toad dungeons.
Yeah, that's true. I didn't bother with the Scholar at all. It's actually pretty easy to just have your White Mage probe Hein's weakness with staves and then have your Black Mage unload before the next Barrier Change.
- The encounter rate is bananas. Every two steps it’s another fight, and half the time you’re ambushed from behind.
- Dark World just had me wall-humping my way through bullshit mazes with hidden holes, palette-swapped bosses, and monsters that vomit Meteor turn one. The only real strat is throwing shurikens, but good luck, if you spent that money on black magic like I did, congratulations, you just locked yourself out of beating the game.
I didn't spend any money on Shurikens (not because I couldn't, but because I forgot derp) and got through the end just fine. Okay, I'll admit it. I save-stated before the endgame bosses and I had to load state once for 2-Headed Dragon and twice for Cloud of Darkness. That might not have happened had I gone in already knowing how Protect works in III. It buffs both defenses and stacks. Have your Sages spam Protect on themselves until a boss is doing nothing to them and then have them heal up and spam Protect on the Ninjas. And don't use items while doing this because there's a bug where opening the item menu causes one of your party members to lose any buffs on them. That's how you beat the endgame bosses from Xande to CoD. Honestly, the game isn't particularly hard before Xande (exceptions maybe to Garuda (dumb gimmick fight) and Bahamut), which is why it took until I absolutely needed it to find out how Protect works.
Pretty good game. Definitely the best RPG on the Famicom.
to blame yourself or God
They show up like absentees but instantly delete late-game fights. Maria and Guy tag-teaming Lamias into the dirt with “lmao you’re a frog now.”