Final Fantasy 3 (Pixel Remaster)

Platform: Nintendo Switch
Genre: JRPG
Developer: Square
Publisher: Square Enix
Director: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Designer: Hiromichi Tanaka, Akitoshi Kawazu, Koichi Ishii
Writer: Hironobu Sakaguchi, Kenji Terada
Composer: Nobuo Uematsu
Finished: 2024
Playtime: 15h 21m
Rating: 4/5

At first this game felt like a step back from the second. It does away with having a party of named characters and goes back to you creating a faceless party of four and selecting a job for each of them. To me this made the game feel a lot more generic than Final Fantasy II and felt a lot closer to the first game. My first encounter with the game was actually the DS remake which does address this by adding in named characters and fleshing out the story with them. That said the DS game had some... weird balancing and I had some trouble getting into it though I think I got pretty far. I loved the low poly 3D look of it so maybe I'll give it another go in the future. I had similar issues with the DS version of Final Fantasy IV.

On the other hand as soon as I started the Pixel Remaster version I was hooked. It's very fun to play and going through it felt like a breeze, I don't think any point felt like it was dragging and it certainly didn't overstay its welcome. There was a good level of challenge but I didn't really feel the need to grind a lot and any grinding needed was thankfully quick due to the experience gain tweaks the remaster has.

The big thing this game introduced was the fantastic job system which really paved the way for future Final Fantasy games. If you've ever played the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV then you've probably experienced one of the jobs from Final Fantasy III. There's a lot of versatility in the jobs and it really encourages trying out different combinations which really adds to the replayability of the game. This version of the game removes the penalty for switching jobs which makes it a lot easier to try out new things and find what works best for you. My final party was a Dark Knight named Frodo, a Ninja named Sam, a Sage called Merry and a Magus called Pippin. There's a great Twitch streamer called PJDiCesare that has been playing through the game solo with every single job and it's really fun to watch.

Like the other Pixel Remaster games this has lovely pixel art and great boss designs. The concept art for the jobs is incredibly cute as well and they've really put a lot of personality into the designs (the Summoner's horned headwear will be familiar to anyone that's played FF XIV). I've probably gushed over the music and art enough in the previous Pixel Remaster posts and it's no difference here. I think this might be the best soundtrack out of them so far, the arranged version is particularly fantastic. Maybe I should do a ranking of Final Fnatasy battle themes at some point...

What I liked

What I didn't like