Final Fantasy Legend III- Retroview

A Good Game, But That's About It

By: Robust Stu

Review Breakdown
Battle System	5
Interface	6
Music/Sound	6
Originality	4
Plot	4
Localization	4
Replay Value	2
Visuals	6
Difficulty	Medium
Time to Complete	25-30 hours
Overall
Criteria

   Final Fantasy Legend III is the third game in the Saga series. While the first one was mediocre, the second one was quite good. This game had the opportunity to improve on the successful formula to make an even better game. While it had a lot of innovation, for some reason this game just wasn't very fun to me.

   The story goes that you and your three friends, as children, were sent back in time from the future, which was on the brink of destruction. Years later, you are all grown up, and the elder of your village tells you about your past, and shows you the Talon, a mystical ship with the power to travel through time. It is up to you to search the present and past to find the units that will allow you to take the Talon to the future, where you will attempt to save the world from the horrible fate that awaits it.

   The battle system, like usual, is turn based. Your party of four (or five, if you have an additional character join you) fights against the enemy party. One improvement to the battle system over previous games is that they don't just show one image for an entire party of monsters. In other words, if you're fighting three skeletons, you see three skeletons instead of one image of the skeleton with two more that you don't see on screen. This also eliminates the problem with hitting the one in front, and doing zero damage to the ones behind it.

The opening battle

   The music sounded good, but a little flat. It just kind of sounded boring, which I believe is one of the big things that took away from the experience for me. That said, there was a good variety of tunes, you didn't seem to hear the same dungeon music over and over and I thought the world map music was pretty good. The sounds were also up to the standard set by the first two games. They weren't spectacular, but they were as good as you could probably expect given the hardware.

   FFL3 made a few changes from the previous games. One was that this game had experience levels, rather than having individual stats raise separately at random intervals. This moves the game along at a better pace, but I felt it kind of took away from the identity of the series. Another good improvement was that the limited uses of weapons were done away with, which was something I'd wanted them to do since the first game. Also your use of magic was only limited by the amount of MP you had, rather than the limited uses you had before having to buy the spell again, as in the previous FFL games.

   The localization was about on par with the first two games, which basically means it was not good or bad, just average. All the lines came across loud and clear, but had no personality or feeling behind them. Everything sounded kind of bland and vanilla, which made things kind of drag because everybody sounded the same. Being a Saga game, this isn't much of a surprise, but it left the story seeming slightly flat.

   This game has no side quests or anything, and as I mentioned previously, I found it kind of boring. There wasn't much to this game to suggest anything in the way of replay value, so I'd move on to something else after finishing this one.

Sounds a bit shady to me...

   One thing that worked in this game's favor was the visuals. Even though they were limited by the Game Boy hardware, the graphics were pretty good. A lot of detail was paid to the backgrounds and monsters, which I thought were surprisingly good considering the hardware. Conversely, however, the character sprites themselves didn't look too great and seemed somewhat out of place considering how well the other visual elements in this game were done.

This is an average length game. The dungeons are short for the most part, but there's a ton of time spent on leveling up, partly because you often have to level up past the point you normally would in order to not get killed in three turns by the upcoming boss fight. You're probably looking at about 30 hours or so for this one.

This game had a lot of good elements to it, so I *should* like it, but for some reason I just didn't enjoy it too much. Maybe I was expecting more after FFL2, but it just didn't interest me very much. It all just kind of came off as bland, and I had a hard time getting through it. However, it's far from a bad game, so give it a try if you're looking for a decent RPG, but I'm just warning you it might be a little boring.

Mildly recommended.