PSP PC

Final Fantasy III

Role-playing (RPG)Adventure

Space needed: About 232 MB
Time to beat: about 28 hours
Plays offline: Yes

Overview

Final Fantasy III is a 1990 role-playing video game developed and published by Square for the Family Computer. The third installment in the Final Fantasy series, it follows four orphans from the village of Ur who are chosen by the world's crystals to defeat a great evil and return balance to the world. The gameplay returns to the traditional combat system of the original game, and adds a job system allowing players to switch between character classes with unique abilities.

Development of Final Fantasy III was handled by multiple series veterans including director Hironobu Sakaguchi, designers Hiromichi Tanaka and Kazuhiko Aoki, writer Kenji Terada, composer Nobuo Uematsu, and programmer Nasir Gebelli in his final contribution to the series. Production was a struggle due to data management, and new elements were added to encourage player experimentation. The artwork was a collaborative effort between Koichi Ishii as character and job designer, Yoshitaka Amano as monster designer, and Kazuko Shibuya as main sprite artist. When it completed development, it was described as one of the largest games on the system.

Upon its release in Japan, the game sold 1.4 million copies, and saw generally positive reviews, with most of the praise going to its job system. While ported to multiple platforms in later years, the original was not released outside Japan until 2021. A remake for the WonderSwan Color was planned but ultimately cancelled, while a 3D remake for the Nintendo DS was released internationally in 2006. The game saw the introduction of several recurring elements including a job system, summoned monsters and the Moogle. Terada also adapted it into a manga, and its characters and settings made appearances in later Final Fantasy titles.