Collection essentials #606: Final Fantasy III (DS)

This is a remake of Final Fantasy III on the Famicom (Japanese NES), which I’ve already written about. You can read my past post here.


In the late ‘90s, when Final Fantasy was more popular than it had ever been, Square got into the habit of porting or remaking the earlier games in the series to various platforms. It started with the three SNES titles getting ported to PlayStation. Then, a handheld console exclusive to Japan called the WonderSwan (released by Bandai and designed with the help of Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi) was blessed with remakes of a few retro Final Fantasy games, including enhanced versions of Final Fantasy I and II and a downgraded version of Final Fantasy IV. A remake of III was planned, but never released. The remakes of the first two games were spruced up and released on the original PlayStation in the early 2000s, but III was still left out.


As the middle of the 2000s decade drew near, Final Fantasy III oddly became somewhat of a neglected, mysterious entry in the series, especially to Western gamers. It was the only one of the first six games in the series at that point to not have any kind of port or remake, but on top of that, it had never been officially released outside Japan at all. American gamers had to settle for playing a fan translation of the Famicom original that hit the internet in 1999. 


But, thankfully, Square wouldn’t keep English-speaking fans waiting forever. They decided to give the game a full-on remake with 3D graphics and release it on Nintendo’s hot new handheld system, the DS. Finally, we got an official English version of the game in late 2006.


There’s certainly a lot new and different in this remake, the biggest and most obvious being the entirely new three-dimensional graphics. Another significant change is that the characters actually have names and proper dialogue this time around. In the original, they had no default names and the bare minimum dialogue with no real identity to speak of. There are a variety of tweaks to gameplay, too, which I won’t be listing out in detail.


But despite a number of changes, Square decided to keep the gameplay generally faithful to the original, so it really does feel like a remake and not a whole entire “reimagining”. For example, Final Fantasy III introduces a “job system” that was expanded upon (and arguably improved) in Final Fantasy V, but this remake of III generally keeps the same type of job system from the original rather than imposing the mechanics of Final Fantasy V or something else onto an older game. This does mean that Final Fantasy III on DS does still “feel” like an old game…but I’d argue that it was the right decision in this case.


As someone who was playing a lot of Final Fantasy in the early-to-mid 2000s, I was very excited when this remake of III was announced, as I was curious about the game but didn’t know much about it before. I snatched it up quickly after its release (the same copy shown in the photo). Previously, I had tried the first two Final Fantasies in remake form and didn’t care for them…but was glad to find III much more enjoyable. It was a challenging but rewarding and fun RPG to get through. 


Final Fantasy III on DS is notable in my life for being possibly the first game I ever used to connect to Wi-Fi. Back in the mid-2000s, it wasn’t customary for everyone to have a wireless router in their home yet. Final Fantasy III let you exchange messages with other players in order to unlock some bonus content, and I had a friend to correspond with but no Wi-Fi at home to connect to. So I specifically remember stopping at a McDonald’s at one time to use their free Wi-Fi to connect to the internet with Final Fantasy III and do the message exchange!


I haven’t replayed this remake since it first came out, though Final Fantasy III did receive another remake (this one in 2D) not too long ago which I just recently did play. It’s not a game that threatens the top of my list of favorites in the series, but it’s still great fun and an absolute essential to me as a fan of old school Final Fantasy.

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