JRPG Canon - Final Fantasy III (Famicom 1990)

so i was uh playing through that one and i got to uh there's one debt of dungeon that's like mostly flooded i don't remember how long in the game that is but it all of the monsters that can turn you into frogs and it's very very toad heavy and uh i got lost and couldn't complete it past that and so i played a good hefty amount of it back on the ds and i have uh kept in my brain i think one of the character names that they added for the characters in 3ds was luneth and we'll see if i'm right in about an hour and a half but first let's talk about the history of this game so in the eternal tug of war that is dragon quest and final fantasy yuji hori threw down the gauntlet starting with dragon quest 3 he had something that would change the jrpg landscape forever he had a plan hiromichi uh the uh part of one in the thing last week you weren't uh here for it but they one of the things that they said of how three came together so good is because they planned everything out and they had all the developers actually play all of the video game because dragon quest two famously is kind of shitty once you get the boat and it's because no one played past that it's completely unplay tested and that's dragon quest two so they didn't want to do that with dragon quest three and uh final fantasy was jealous So Hiramichi Tanaka, who had been involved in Final Fantasy one and two, was stepping up into a much larger role as the designer of the game for Final Fantasy three.

And he was head of the, quote, battle team where Hironobu Sakaguchi was in charge of the, quote, adventure team.

And after seeing Yuji Horii's choice of having physical paper documentation for his game, he decided to plan out the systems of the game as much as Sakaguchi would plan out the story of his game.

one of the first things that they decided on the battles team was that final fantasy one and twos battle screen being divided into a bunch of windows was done they didn't want that anymore they really wanted to make the players and the monsters appear to be on the same plane so koichi ishii who had designed the in-game graphics for final fantasy one was brought back to the character graphics for final fantasy three even though he had moved over to the saga team at this point he was joined by kasuhiko aoki who did uh all of the monster art in the game but as a cool side effect of the battles and adventure teams being separate tanaka's team created the stats and powers and all of that stuff of the jobs and monsters before ishii and aoki did any designing so they would see something like high speed low attack fire damage and have to come up with a monster that would believably have that uh speaking of ishii three of his ocs that he had designed for a potential edutainment tv show made it into the game though one of them got cut and was never heard from again and he didn't describe it very much in the interview i found but this show would revolve around chocobo an animated bird type character with a lot of physicality who would communicate only by emoting and it involved moogle who is a chill basically stoner koala bear bat hybrid that would be the relaxed deadpan one and the butt of the other two's jokes the third one was going to be loud and talk a lot but since he got cut moogle instead took on the speaking parts in final fantasy three and so ishii's childhood ocs became the face of final fantasy forever

incredible

i love this for him but the symbiosis between the adventure team and the battles team wasn't one directional while drawing the art for all of the jobs ishii wanted them to stand out more than just in color or silhouette or whatever but also in action too so he suggested that each job have a unique fourth ability like black magic steel jump etc which the battles team loved and that made it into the game Like one of the running themes of all of the interviews I could find about the creation of final fantasy three is so much of this game was done at a breakneck speed with everyone contributing ideas back and forth.

Kind of like the jam band attitude that on our episode about moon remix RPG adventure.

He talked about how the studio that made moon was like riffing off of each other like a jam band.

But in that one they didn't actually make any progress on their game until the director came back.

he had quit video games he came back to check on them and saw they hadn't done anything was like okay i guess i'm not quitting i want to come back and make you guys actually do some work but here they actually made final fantasy 3 and they've made it on on time and on schedule uh tanaka says when we made final fantasy 3 we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants that's why when i look at the game now there's all these puzzling choices like why did we call them onion knights and why do dragoons jump And so much of what makes final fantasy, final fantasy came from this game.

And so much of that was just either made up on the spot on a whim to fit an arbitrary game design decision, uh, or something like that.

Like dragoons had cool spears, but they didn't have a special ability.

They were just a spearman.

So now they jumped and now jump is their signature move.

And even more so than spears, which I had to Google to make sure was actually their signature weapon when I was writing my notes.

you would forget the dragoons classic spear you call yourself a final fantasy fan

i i would have to remember it harder than i would have to remember the fact that they jump so there's an age-old problem in game development where the limitations by the hardware eventually get lessened and so that causes the team to want to push those boundaries which makes the new game balloon in size and complexity until they are similarly bumping up against the new limitations Like they're always like, if we just had one extra megabyte of memory, so they get 64 megabytes of memory and they're like, if only we just had 65 more megabytes of memory and it repeat that ad nauseum until Call of Duty is now 100 gigs.