I have been playing video games since I was but a wee lad. I am also unable to throw away, sell, or otherwise rid myself of any product I own. So I have a lot of video games. Actually that's kind of a lie. In 2003 I moved to Korea and took no video games with me. Sometime during my first year in Korea I got a Gameboy Advance and soon after had my mom send me all my Gameboy games, which she did, as well as games my bro had purchased (sorry bro).
Several years later I purchased a Nintendo DS when it arrived in Korea. My wife and I also purchased a lot of games. I also got my Nintendo Entertainment System shipped from America which stacks of Game Paks, and then this year for my birthday I got a Wii. So while I don't have half the game collection I did while living in America, I still have a lot of games.
Some of these games I've played and beaten multiple times over. Some I have played and abandoned at various points in time only to pick them up later, restart and abandon again, and then there are some I have no recollection of ever even playing. So I have decided to start playing through some of this backlog, starting with Final Fantasy Legend III for the Nintendo Gameboy.
Wikipedia tells me the game was released in America in 1993 but rereleased in 1998, which is probably when I purchased it. I played the hell out of the game around '93 or '94 when my friends got it, but I don't recall actually owning a copy until much later.
Final Fantasy Legend III tells the story of a group of children sent from the future to the present in order to grow up there, so they can go back to the future to destroy the Pureland Water Entity, some Cthulhu-esque being, from totally fucking up the future by flooding everything.
In order to stop this asshole, the heros of Final Fantasy Legend III need to travel through time and to other dimensions in order to get pieces for a time machine/jet type machine dubbed Talon. Having just played through this game, I couldn't tell you why exactly they needed the Talon for all of this beyond getting back to their original time, but gathering pieces for it was what needed to be done, so it was done. Ultimately your heros save the day, and in the process "save every generation that ever lived," (no small feat indeed). That's pretty much the entire plot as I remember it, and I just beat it this morning, and had been playing consistantly for two weeks. The plot beyond what I wrote is pretty weak. There is some dude named Sol (who I'm pretty sure is God) trying to stop the Water Entity too, and some other dude named Juniphar, or some such nonsense, who is appearently the main character's dad, but that plot nugget is revealed after you beat the last boss.
The plot is fairly irrealevant though, because this is an early 90's RPG before every RPG was a railroaded "playable" movie. This makes Final Fantasy Legend III fairly non-linear. I mean there is a plot, and ultimately there are things that need to be done before you go to other areas, but there are entire towns and dungeons that can totally be skipped without consequence. This is basically what I'm looking for in a RPG, and probably why Final Fantasy VI ranks as my favorite game of ever. I hate what RPGs, Final Fantasy in particular have become (or at least became when I last played one FFX for those keeping score). The railroad ride those games became was terrible.
The other thing I like about this game (and the Final Fantasy Legend Series in general) is the ability to change the race or your characters. Occassionally at the end of a battle, the enemies will leave behind meat or robotic parts which you can use on your part members to turn them into a variety of creatures. This hits a major RPG sweet-spot for me. Any game that allows you to alter your characters' classes or races has always scored big points with me. The ability to change your characters into Beasts, Monsters, Cyborgs, and Robots in Final Fantasy Legend III adds a lot of variety and allows for truly unique party make-ups (I personally rock a human, a cyborg, a robot, and a beast).
The game is not all cyborgs and optional dungeons though, there is a lot of stuff that honestly kind of sucks. Perhaps the most black hole-esque aspect in terms of pure suckitude is the translation. I honestly didn't remember it being this bad or thinking much about it in the early 90s when I played. Maybe because I did proof-reading as a job for awhile, or maybe because the quality of translations in video games has improved a ton, but the shittiness of the dialogue is very apparent now.
In most cases it doesn't matter, I mean who really cares if some random old man in a random town tells you the name of that town poorly, but the translation sometimes makes it difficult to know what you should actually be doing.
The other part of the game I thought was pretty poorly handled was the inventory menu. It's probably one of the most awkward inventory screens I've seen, and I've seen a lot of them. The thing that makes it terrible is that once equipped ever item looses it's icon that let's you know what it is, so you end up with a screen that says "Diamond" a bunch of times, which is all well and good until you find a helmet better than that Diamond Helmet and have to do trial and error until you find the proper slot so you can equip your phat new loot. Similarly weapons don't actually raise any statistics, so it's hard to know which weapons are actually upgrades for your dudes without some trial and error.
So I guess the most important thing is whether or not the game was fun. It's a pretty short game, compared to games du jour. I played for probably less than an hour a day for about two weeks (minus the weekends) when I beat it, but during those ten or twelve hours I did enjoy myself, showing that you don't need 3-D rendering, color, or even proper grammar to make a game enjoyable.
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