@Pandaprewmaster325 @MasterEn @Mopeybloke @Strategist
On FF3(I only played the 3d remake btw for clarification's sake), I thinks that its the worst of the mainline ff games that I have played (1-5, 13 trilogy, and 15, and I'm also gonna say that I've played the first Bravely Default as well because its relevant to this discussion)
of the Job based games, FF1 is more unique in that you are locked into your jobs for the entire playthrough and both ff5 and bravely default do a job change system better by making every job more or less unique in some way. Out of the 22 jobs in the game (23 in the remake because it adds freelancer), 8 are just upgraded versions of previous jobs making them redundant, and 2 of those eight make all other jobs redundant, and then the red mage job is rendered useless by sage as well. Finally there is scholar, which only exists because of a gimmick for one boss in the entire game. so that's 7 out of the 22 jobs that are completely useless by the end of the game, oh and sage and ninja still outclass most of the other ones except for maybe black belt.
The gameplay is very gimmicky, in this dungeon you have to shrink down which makes physically classes useless, in this dungeon you have to turn into frogs which makes it just plain awful, in this dungeon you have to fight the boss 3 times, for this boss battle you have to use scholar, for this boss battle you have to use dragoon, etc. It leaves no room for experimentation, which is in my opinion half the point of the job based final fantasy games, for example in bravely default i tried a strategy where i used the move that attacks with your defense and double equipped shields and turned my characters into ICBMs, and in FF5, I beat the final boss with a party of all red mages plus the fact that the mimic class exists in that game as well, and even in FF2 i made guy a white mage/monk hybrid and Ricard into a pseudo Dark Knight. FF3 would never let you do anything like that, you have to use what the game s wants you to, when the game wants you to, it misses the point of a job/class system: to experiment.
And lastly the story is nothing special, it just feels like a different draft of FF1's story, though I do have one good thing to say here, when you leave the floating continent for the first time and see how big the world is compared to it and that it just looks like one town on the world map, and that up to this point you were just a big fish in a small pond, is probably one of my favorite story moments in the franchise from what I have played. But, that belies the problem as well, its the only memorable moment from that game, all the other ff games have multiple memorable story scenes or moments that stick with you, where i can barely remember the general outline of ff3's story and will probably completely forget it in a couple years
Overall I would go as far to say FF3, regardless of the version you are playing, is just a worse version of FF1. I genuinely think that it could be skipped by someone wanting to playthrough all the mainline ff games and they would lose nothing overall despite the one moment where you leave the floating continent for the first time
