Final Fantasy 3 Complete. On To Final Fantasy 4 - YAY A Good Storyline! (Day 38)

Finished Final Fantasy 3 today! Feels like it took longer then did, had about 33 game hours logged, but I died on the end boss a few times and he takes a while to get to. I'm gonna chalk that up to the endless grinding to complete the Ancient "Maze" and Crystal Temple, Tower, whatever it is. I forget already. Pretty much describes this game, very forgettable. Unappealing characters, lame, repetitive dungeons and terrible use of the Job mechanic.

I mentioned that the end of the game was an endless grind. This is because the final boss in this game "The Cloud of Darkness"!!!! SO SCARY!!!! Has an ability called "Particle Beam" and has 3 hits in 1 turn. So basically what was happening to me every time is this... I'd get my first round of attacks in, Darkness would then use Lighting, hitting all my characters for about 1400 (I had a max of 4600 on my highest character), would attack my weakest character, then use Particle Beam which would do about 1800 damage. It had to get up to level 70 or so to survive that barrage. You get to the Temple at about level 50. So I had to grind for about 20 levels. The fastest way to do this was to kill off all but my white mage (Devout at this point in the game) and another character. This will give you double the XP as you would have half as many characters to divide the XP amongst. I would then find these monsters (I don't recall their names at the moment) that would summon these spell casters named Kum Kums. I would sit in this same fight for about an hour and a half just killing these summon monsters over and over again gaining a ton of XP and gold. In a normal fight, even with only 2 characters alive I'd be getting about 6-8k XP. Using this method, I'd come out of fights with 500k XP. I'd gain about 5-7 levels a fight for both the Devout and the other alive character. Method worked pretty well.

Having played Final Fantasy 5 and more importantly Final Fantasy Tactics, I've seen how well the Job system can be used. Final Fantasy 3 is obviously the Job system in it's infancy, so I guess it's unfair to judge, but it's terrible. You can level your character and your Job...I'm not really sure what leveling your Job does if you're not a mage. If you're a caster, you can use more of each level spell...so that make sense, but you do not gain any ability to use the skill of that job when you are using any other job. So I can't use White Magic if I'm the Knight job. Kinda lame, but again, it's in it's infancy during this game.

Anyway, continuing on, Final Fantasy 4 is up next. This is in my top 3 all time favorite Final Fantasy game behind only Final Fantasy 6 and 7. I must have rented this game 100 times for SNES when I was a kid. Great music, awesome characters, sweet storyline...so awesome, I can't wait.

-Opie