Middle era player
Newbie
I have FF3 for ipod touch, but for various reasons I never got around to playing it. Now I have an ipad, and I figured that it would look better on a bigger screen so I started playing it.
My username will tell you that I started with the middle era of the series (FF7 to be precise), and I still rate that as not just the best FF game, but one of the greatest games for any system at any time. I then played 8 which I thought was great, 9, which was good too but not as good as the others, and 10 which was superb. I quit on 12 because it was boring. Then I played 6 which is second only to 7 in my estimation.
So I figured, let's give the earlier games a spin. Boy, was that a mistake. FF3 could have been worthwhile if it wasn't so incredibly boring and incredibly hard. For the first few hours it's a blast, but then it's just level up, level up, level up and STILL get slaughtered by bosses. That's not gaming, it's masochism. I gave up on the game when I got to salamander (the dragon thing). First time around he beat me. Fair enough, I thought, he IS a boss. So I went off and fought about a trillion random battles and leveled up like mad. He killed me again. OK, I'll try this one more time, so I go and level up like mad yet again, get a ton of antarctic winds, learn blizarra, and have two of my attacking characters with ice-themed weapons.
This time I give him a good smashing with all these things, until he pulls out his fire breath attack twice in a row. Four dead characters, and one game deleted from my Ipad for good. I can't fathom how the designers believe that anyone would actually enjoy this process of losing time and time again while having to deal with it by doing incredibly repetitive stuff for hours on end...and still failing.
One of many reasons that FF7 is such a great game is beecause it avoids this. There are lots of random battles, yeah, but they're mostly manageable and the level of the opponents is fair. Think about it. An RPG should be all about the story, right? And that means making progress through the story at a reasonable rate. It doesn't mean spending ten hours fighting random battles just so you can get through to the next part. If FF3 was advertised and designed as a fighting game it would probably be quite good, but it's meant to be an involving and worthwhile story. Would you read a book which required you to take a huge and impossible test before it would let you read the next chapter?
Verdict? The FF games started getting really good around 6 and then just went from strength to strength until 12. Now it all seems to have gone downhill again. The really early games can really only be seen as research for what was to come.
My username will tell you that I started with the middle era of the series (FF7 to be precise), and I still rate that as not just the best FF game, but one of the greatest games for any system at any time. I then played 8 which I thought was great, 9, which was good too but not as good as the others, and 10 which was superb. I quit on 12 because it was boring. Then I played 6 which is second only to 7 in my estimation.
So I figured, let's give the earlier games a spin. Boy, was that a mistake. FF3 could have been worthwhile if it wasn't so incredibly boring and incredibly hard. For the first few hours it's a blast, but then it's just level up, level up, level up and STILL get slaughtered by bosses. That's not gaming, it's masochism. I gave up on the game when I got to salamander (the dragon thing). First time around he beat me. Fair enough, I thought, he IS a boss. So I went off and fought about a trillion random battles and leveled up like mad. He killed me again. OK, I'll try this one more time, so I go and level up like mad yet again, get a ton of antarctic winds, learn blizarra, and have two of my attacking characters with ice-themed weapons.
This time I give him a good smashing with all these things, until he pulls out his fire breath attack twice in a row. Four dead characters, and one game deleted from my Ipad for good. I can't fathom how the designers believe that anyone would actually enjoy this process of losing time and time again while having to deal with it by doing incredibly repetitive stuff for hours on end...and still failing.
One of many reasons that FF7 is such a great game is beecause it avoids this. There are lots of random battles, yeah, but they're mostly manageable and the level of the opponents is fair. Think about it. An RPG should be all about the story, right? And that means making progress through the story at a reasonable rate. It doesn't mean spending ten hours fighting random battles just so you can get through to the next part. If FF3 was advertised and designed as a fighting game it would probably be quite good, but it's meant to be an involving and worthwhile story. Would you read a book which required you to take a huge and impossible test before it would let you read the next chapter?
Verdict? The FF games started getting really good around 6 and then just went from strength to strength until 12. Now it all seems to have gone downhill again. The really early games can really only be seen as research for what was to come.