Woohoo

I beat Final Fantasy 3 for the DS today!

My thoughts on the game:

The game felt very old school, which is a good thing for me. It definitely took me back to the feel of the earlier NES rpgs. The graphics were excellent, which was slightly confusing. I found myself at times wondering why there wasn't more, given the level of the graphics. It felt as though they changed nothing of the layout or feel of the original gameplay. But overall that's ok.

They added more story than the original. The characters in the NES version were faceless and nameless, but here they were given personality and actual faces (even genders). In the first half of the game this makes things interesting, but the story takes on an epic arc and the characters and their personalities are eventually lost. I won't give anything away, but I will say there's not much to not give away. It ends up being your basic save the world story. But hey, that's the way it's done in old school, so I'm not complaining per se. I just felt they gave up on adding to the story in the second half.

At first I didn't know what to make of the job class system itself. I seem to have played these job class games in reverse order from best to worst. My first experience was with Final Fantasy Tactics, which had the best Job Class system I've seen, and possibly the best overall character development system I've come across in an RPG. The second game I played was Final Fantasy 5, which was a step down in many ways, but still enjoyable. So the jump to this game, which lacked the ability to carry abilities over to other jobs, or to train your characters stats by what job they were using, was a bit of a shock. It was basically nothing but picking what job you wanted to be. I didn't really get into this system until the very end of the game, where I decided I really needed to pick my go-to team to take down the last boss. That customization is enjoyable, but not to a level I'm used to in most other games.

And as a side note on the job class sytem. Something Final Fantasy Tactics did that this game does not (nor does Final Fantasy 5 for that matter) is make it so you gained higher job classes by training in certain jobs. In this game, Final Fantasy 3, you're merely give more job classes at certain points in the game. That just doesn't sit well with me; I'd prefer to work on getting high skills myself rather than having them handed to me at alloted points.

My final point is that the last area is very long. Well, it's not too long really, but the inability to save makes it seem very long in that you're forced to press forward until the end. Luckily the Quicksave feature will save you from having to sit there for over an hour or more, but it is the only point in the game where I noticed the lack of save points. It's probably not a game who's ending I'll be seeing often...
...Oh, and Lord help you if you die at any point. It reminds me of the relentless cruelty of other old school games like Ninja Gaiden who would send you back ridiculously far if you died in the final areas.

Did I say everything I wanted? I don't know, I could probably ramble for a long time. I will say that it's good as far as remakes go, the graphics are an excellent example of what the DS can do, and I'm extremely looking forward to the upcoming 3D DS remake of Final Fantasy 4.