History Lesson: Part 3

It's time, again, to open up your mindholes and cram it full with gaming history. Get ready, sit back and enjoy learning something new as we get right on into Final Fantasy III.

Final Fantasy III is the third and final Final Fantasy title made for the NES console. Despite coming near the end of the NES's life cycle, Final Fantasy III was a popular title in Japan. Famitsu magazine has even listed it as the eighth greatest game of all time. Next time somebody tells you that Final Fantasy II, III and V weren't ported over to the US because they sucked, just slap them. Do it for me.

They obviously spent a lot of time with this one.

Final Fantasy III is one of the largest games in the NES's library, completely filling the cartridge's 512kb memory. In fact, this heavily contributed to why the game was the last Final Fantasy game to ever be brought over the states in 2006. Because of the incredibly detailed systems, enemies and maps, upgrading the artwork even just slightly would have gone over the size limitations that the SNES had in place at the time.

Along with being the last NES Final Fantasy game, this is also the last game that the full original team worked on. Nasir Gebelli, the programmer for the first three games, had to come back to the states halfway during production of this title and although the rest of Square's A-Team came with him, it marked the last time he would contribute to Final Fantasy, although he would go on to work on the highly acclaimed SNES title, Secret of Mana.

Along with being the largest Final Fantasy game of it's time, they also got a significantly longer development cycle to make it in. Instead of being given a year to make two, they got a year and four months to make III. I know that doesn't sound like much but hey, it's a 33% increase to their time-frame. And actually, they managed to do quite a bit with it.

Final Fantasy II

Final Fantasy III

Sure, we're all jaded now that we have games with near photo-realism but for the time, this was a pretty great upgrade. The towns look far nicer than the old games but I'll have to put those pictures up next time. While they do reuse some of the character sprites, many of them are upgraded or completely new as well.

Well, I'm going to clock some more time with Final Fantasy III. I'll let you know my thoughts on the game at a later time but just as a status update, I'm two crystals in so I'm guessing almost halfway though.

Game on!